Life During Wartime

What is your browser's default home page set to?
Submitted by Kelev T. Cat.

I have my own custom portal page that I made way back in the old days. So old that it steals code from Randomwalks and Brainlog, and the layout is still done with bazillions of nested tables. There are also still links on there to lots of legacy early indie web stuff. I need to go through the whole thing and see what still exists someday, and cull a lot of stuff. For now, I only really use the top half of the page, which I do update once in awhile. I still pretty much use this as my gateway to the web, and eschew RSS readers and such. I just could never get used to the impersonal nature of RSS, nor to the neurosis of watching the unread posts pile up in the reader.

What books are on your nightstand?

Just finished up Conrad's The Secret Agent, and am starting on Nostromo next. Also distractedly nibbling at some Kierkegaard, William James, and Tolstoy nonfic, and the last couple of issues of the Economist. I'm evidently back on a rather serious kick after a lot of fairly light stuff in the spring/summer.

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

Christ, how do you people have time to read so many magazines?! Between reading the web, and reading actual books, magazines pretty much get the short shrift with me. I currently get The Economist, but I think I'm letting it lapse. It's great in that you can find out what's happening everywhere in the world in a given week in one sitting, but I almost never get through it before the next one comes, and their (neoliberal-verging-on-neoconservative) editorial line is intruding more and more snottily and dismissively into their (generally solid) reportage.

I also get The Washington Monthly and The American Prospect, just to keep my ear to the ground on liberal politics. I don't read more than a few articles in them a month, and often read them online before I even get to the magazine. Subscribing is more of a way of supporting the continued existence of their websites and of a liberal press than anything else for me.

Finally, I usually buy n+1 when it comes out. I wish it was more than biannual. The world needs more literary mags that also care about politics and pop culture and just engaging the real world in general. I find McSweeney's to be too clever by half, and The Believer to be too fey, so I've never really subscribed to them, though I'll pick either one up if I hear something good or interesting is going to be in there.

This weekend it was too hot to live.

Friday night, I had planned on bumming around with the roomies, watching some movies or Tivo backlog, and catching up on email and web project stuff. Not to be. It turns out that our longtime low-level moth infestation in the kitchen had blown up into a full-on Moth Apocalyspe. I don't know whether the heat triggered a massive hatching or what, but suddenly we had gross moth larvae crawling all over(and occasionally falling from) the kitchen ceiling. So, friday night consisted of cleaning all that up, throwing out all of our dry goods, and trying to figure out what to do in terms of hiring an exterminator and dealing with our landlord.

The rest of the weekend, I had planned on getting a lot of household chores and cleaning and stuff done, in anticipation of my parents and sister arriving for a visit later this week. Instead, I ended up lying around like a blob all day saturday, watching baseball and frittering time away on the web. It was too hot to even read.

On sunday I finally gave in and installed an old window AC we had lying around in the basement in my bedroom, because I realized that I just wasn't going to get anything done for the next week or more without it. I hate filling my one window with an AC unit, using the extra energy for both financial and environmental reasons, and so on, but with an attic room and the rest of the apartment being on the second story and still quite hot in its own right, it just got to be too much.

That at least allowed me to get a few things done before the dreaded Sunday Night Neurosis(in which dread of another workweek makes it impossible for me to get anything done with the last few hours of my precious weekend time) started to set in.

I met Carl Sagan and Edward Teller at a recruiting weekend at IMSA in 7th grade. This was before I had really read much of Sagan's stuff, so I didn't really look up to him at the time, but he seemed much like how he comes off in his books, IE, kind, humanitarian, passionate about teaching and promoting science. Teller scared the bejesus out of me, which, knowing what I do now, was probably an appropriate reaction.

I've met quite a few people who are celebrities to me, but probably not to the world at large; in other words, microcelebrities in the worlds of indie rock, the internet, etc. I was often pretty disappointed in meeting musicians whose work I admired. I expected them to be smart / geeky / cool / more like me and my friends who were in bands, but often they just drank and womanized and did a lot of coke, and were otherwise assholes, and I didn't feel that we had much to say to each other since I don't actually make music and don't feel like I can speak with any sort of confidence about it with people who do. I've had better luck with internet celebrities, mainly because they usually are smart / geeky / cool, and I don't much view them as celebrities anyway since I've been doing the same thing they do all along, and just didn't happen to get famous within our small (but rapidly growing) sphere.

I don't often go to readings by authors, both because I think the whole process is kind of degrading to everyone involved and because, like with the musicians, I have a hard time speaking with any confidence to them about their work, beyond the cliched and surely tiresome "I'm such a fan," or "your book/song really affected my life" sorts of things. I don't really feel like I or they get much of anything worthwhile out of such interactions. I'd love to be friends and be able to talk shop and life with someone whose work I admire(and I am, they're just not famous, ^yet^) but short of that, it seems kinda pointless and bad for the dignity of both sides. But maybe I'm just old fashioned about art. I know that art and artists are commodities, and that's the reality we live in, but that doesn't mean that I have to treat them that way myself. Anyway, I digress.

Finally, I don't think I've met anyone from the TV/Movie/Sports sphere, IE, the real celebrities. Edit: Oh, cripes, I forgot about Michel Gondry visiting our lab as part of his background research for The Science of Sleep(and seeing the film when he screened it here, I have no idea where the hell the background research came in, but he was very genuinely interested in and curious about what we do. Maybe he just used the movie as an excuse to learn about something he was interested in? If so, that's cool.) He seemed like a really down-to-earth guy, a punk rock kid made good. A little spacey and ADD-ish, just like his work sometimes is.

This took some digging around, but it looks like it's probably one of two old almanacs I claimed when we cleaned out the old family homestead in Kentucky when the last of my great aunts and uncles died a few years ago. One is a Blaine's Manual, the other a Conklin's Handy Manual. Both are pocket-sized books brimming with interestingly obsolete information. Neither has an exact date, but from context you can tell they date to sometime in the 1890's. I also have a very old but undated copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin that was in the same cache of books.

I think the oldest non-book object I have is an FDR campaign button(looks like it's probably from the '32 campaign based on his picture), which came from there as well.

There have been a whole lot of disappointing apologias for the refereeing in the day-after analysis of USA-Italy. A lot of that analysis basically says that the US was naive tactically, and they went out over-agressively, were unskilled, fouled a lot, and were appropriately punished. I didn't see that. They had the balance of possession when everyone was at full strength and were taking the attack to Italy. The USA did pile up some fouls; it was chippy, but not out of control. Both styles of play(USA's disruptive tackling/chasing plus quick short attacks off of turnovers in the midfield vs. Italy's more deliberate possession/shape-oriented and disciplined approach) are perfectly valid, and each team should be allowed to play to their strengths within reason.

If the ref felt that it was getting out of hand, and if he was actually a good official with tact and discretion, he could have defused it easily by simply taking players aside and warning them pointedly after fouls that began to cross the line, and then following up with yellow cards if they didn't rein it in. Even if I hadn't had a dog in the fight, I would have been really disappointed to see an official insinuate himself into what was a really good/entertaining contest, and basically reduce it to a farce. It was done as a real game within 15 mins of Pope being sent off because both teams were too exhausted to come up with much of anything positive.

As for the specific calls in question, I still don't see how Mastroeni's tackle was a straight red. I've played and watched a lot of games, and seen few direct red cards for similar tackles that aren't part of an escalating pattern of reckless play. It was a late and dangerous tackle, and it looked bad, but he got a piece of the ball and the studs weren't up. That screams yellow card to me. Straight reds should be reserved for deliberate intent to injure or takedowns on breakaways that prevent an almost certain goal. Pope's first card was ticky-tack too(he got tangled up with one of Italy's strikers marking him on an open field run and they both went down in a heap), which makes it suprising that they gave him a second so easily. Usually the ref uses discretion in those cases and withholds the yellow unless it's really egregious. There's speculation that Larrionda forgot he had already carded Pope and just flashed the yellow instantly without thinking of the context, which is terribly incompetent if true.

That such discretion is generally used was evident from the rest of the game, where several cardable offenses were ignored(Beasley had an intentional handball, Bocanegra a challenge every bit as nasty as Mastroeni's, and Conrad grabbed an awful lot of jersey in the box on one late play), because calling them would have rendered the game unplayable. Still, Arena should have taken Pope off at the half, which would have avoided the risk altogether. He was getting burned constantly, and Conrad played a lot better than him after he came in anyway. His failures to substitute there, and in the last 15 minutes when Eddie Johnson's speed could have made a big difference up top against exhausted opponents are both puzzling.

As for the other calls, the disallowed goal call was correct. I doubt it would have gone in without McBride obscuring the keeper's view of the ball until the last second, and as he was in an offside position when he did it, them's the breaks. And the red card to Italy was obviously correct, just a nasty cheap shot out of frustration that will probably result in an additional suspension for De Rossi. On the other side, there were several pretty badly blown offsides calls that hurt Italy as well, possibly costing them a chance to pull the win out of the fire.

I've always felt like the measure of a good official in any sport is unotrusiveness. The official's job is to facilitate and arbitrate, not dictate. After watching a game, do you not remember anything much regarding the officials? If they did happen to be brought to the forefront thanks to being presented with a tough decision in the course of the game, did they make every effort to get it right, and then melt back into the background when it was over? If so, they probably did an excellent and even-handed job and allowed the players to decide the game, as is appropriate.

By that measure, Larrionda was terrible. He let the game get out of control (by his standards anyway,) then mangled it in the course of trying to force it back within the bounds he had set, and finally gave up altogether and didn't even do his job at all in the final 30 minutes. A disgraceful waste of one of the best and most valiant efforts ever by the US National team, and a waste of what could have been a classic if it had been allowed to go on as it began.

So, it looks like lots of people are kicking off their postings here with a "Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? OMG?! WTF?!" sort of post. And that strikes me as a good way to start off, because I don't think I've ever laid it down in full, and there lots of you whom I have met  much later on(or not at all) who don't know the backstory.

I got my first taste of the internet way back in the Gopher/Lynx days, I would guess in 1992 or so. I took computer classes with a retired professor, and he would let us log in on his university account. I don't remember being particularly thrilled by it at the time, though it was cool to be able to look up all of those REM lyrics I had heretofore been mangling.

After I quit the computer classes near the end of junior high, I sort of lost track for a few years. I lived in a small, rural town, and the options for getting online were few. I remember getting online at the community college library and seeing a very early version of Yahoo!, but that's about it. I think we finally got dialup access at home towards the end of my junior year of high school, which would have been early 1996. (My high school, mind you, didn't get internet or even modern computers with hard drives until a year after I graduated.) I used our home connection to do research on colleges and music, and, more surreptitiously, for the sorts of nefarious purposes you might expect a teenage boy to use it for, but I didn't really view the net as more than an occasionally-useful curiosity until I got to college.Upon moving into the dorms, I suddenly had a T-1 connection. I had also bought a brand new, top-of-the-line Dell Optiplex GX 200, with a 40GB hard drive. It seemed excessive. How could I ever fill that much space?!

The answer was; very quickly, with W4r3z and mp3s, neither of which I had any inkling of before then. The dorm LAN was totally unpoliced. Everyone was sharing tons of music and pirated software right out in the open over the network. Soon  Quake 2 deathmatches started happening, ICQ blew up, and people started putting up info about themselves on their network shares. This was the impetus for my first webpage, a (terribly embarassing) brief bio and an explanation of the stuff I was sharing, which I made in Microsoft Word. *sigh*

The next semester(spring 1998), I had to learn html and how to use my shell account for a 100-level CS class. That led to my first (also terribly embarassing) public web page, on my tilde account on the students.uiuc.edu server. I also started getting more and more active on various indie-rock-related BBSs and mailing lists around this time, and through friends met in that world, I began writing reviews and features for a couple of now-defunct webzines. This led me to start writing episodically about music, going to shows, and other scenester ephemera on my tilde site. So, in that way, I had a sort of proto-weblog going by the fall of '98, though it still had most of the characteristics of the classic sprawling personal site. Around that time, in doing research on how to code, and trying to find out whether other people were doing what I was, I became aware of things like 0sil8 , the Fray , Links.net , Glassdog , Newdream , and so on, all of which became early influences and sources of inspiration / expertise.

By spring of '99, I had fully differentiated a portion of my larger personal site into a chronological, post-based format which mixed music writing and personal stuff, and christened it "Entropy". I was archiving it periodically by hand, and coming up with new seizure-inducing designs for it every month or two. And I was participating in a larger conversation with other early music-focused blogs like Bring the Rock, Western Homes, Apathy , Catherine's Pita , and several others whom I have surely forgotten. My post-based archives go back to around March of '99, so I  guess that's when I officially had a weblog. I heard about Blogger by late spring, but I think I held out on joining until the next fall because I prided myself on being DIY and handcoding everything. Man, was I stupid.

I slowly drifted away from the music scene over the next couple of years, and my writing grew more personal and political. I eventually ended up as part of a loose grouping of 20 or so sites by people roughly my age who were all writing more generally about their lives in college, their ideas and interests, and so on. This was probably the golden age of blogging for me, as we had a really stimulating running conversation going on over 20 different sites. It was a really cool intellectual community, which would eventually turn into a great, long-running group of friends, most of whom I still hang around with or correspond with to this day. This vague coalition led to a group blog called Gangbang, which I joined along with Ryan of sixfoot6 , Alison of bluishorange , Rabi of wockerjabby , Raza of highindustrial , Shaun of fidius.org , and a few other folks who no longer have web presences. I also got really into Metafilter around this time. And other new, exciting things were popping up on an almost weekly basis.

And so things went on like that for quite awhile, until I started to outgrow both Blogger and my limited university hosting, which didn't allow scripting of any kind. Shortly before my first SXSW trip in 2001, I sprang for hosting and a domain name(suspensionofdisbelief.org... I don't really remember why I chose that at the time. I needed a name and we had covered it in a class recently most likely) and upgraded to Greymatter and lots of other php/perl-based goodness. At SXSW, I met a lot of the people who I had been reading for a long time, and they turned out almost uniformly to be even cooler than they had seemed online. For the first time, this all seemed real, and thereafter the web truly became an integral part of my life.

My life on the web went on as college progressed, with some bumps in the road in terms of figuring out where to draw lines in terms of privacy, how to deal with relationships that had both offline and online components, what to do about the fact that my parents had discovered my site and could read it(and freak out commensurately about it) and so on and so forth. The halcyon days when I felt like I could write openly, bravely, sincerely, and without worry about the potential audience were definitely over, and the spectre of having to live in the Real World  of jobs and resumes and permanent records began to haunt me quite a bit.

Then 9/11 happened, and blew everything completely to hell. I did some of my best work right around then, thinking aloud with my friends and trying to collectively grasp and cope with what had happened. But, that was the beginning of the end for me. The Rise of the Warbloggers happened in quick succession, the respectful, creative, sincere, community-based atmosphere that I had so loved degenerated into armed ideological camps shouting past each other. And, of course, problems of scale began to make themselves heard, as the exponential growth that we are still trying to deal with today began to kick in.

In the aftermath of that, I still sporadically did some worthwhile stuff, but my heart just wasn't in it anymore, and I began to write less and less. Eventually I just got bored with the speed, ephemerality, and impersonality of the medium when it came to intellectual matters, and retreated to writing lengthy, hyper-footnoted essays that nobody read. And I got scared off enough by the mounting horror stories and my own bad experiences to refrain from writing much of anything personal out in public.

So, I was largely finished as a blogger right as the medium was really heating up. Which feels like a shame to me... I was in on the ground floor, had every opportunity to make my name early when it was still a small world, and now tons of people are making careers and reputations at it and I'm on the sidelines. C'est la vie, I guess.

However, I didn't give up on the web by any means. I was too invested socially and intellectually and owed too many of the good things in my life to it to just quit. What ended up happening is that my presence on the web fragmented like crazy, and went largely underground. The domain name was still there for the occasional essay or one-off. There was LJ for private personal stuff. Conversations that used to happen in public over blogs moved there or to email or IM. And I found my way to password-protected online communities with many other fellow refugees from the good old days.

Then came aggregation, web2.0, allconsuming, flickr, del.icio, upcoming, last.fm, wikipedia, social networking sites, and on and on. I'm probably creating more content than ever between all of those places, it's just not on my own site anymore, though I do make an effort to aggregate as much of it as possible to jareddunn.org.   I find myself as more of a curator and recombiner than a writer/thinker at this stage. And there are a lot of interesting emergent properties of that, but it's also deeply dissatisfying on some levels. It's fundamentally impersonal, superficial, ephemeral. I miss the sense of public community on a manageable scale. I miss the feedback and criticism on my ideas and prose from a bevy of awesome people who are way smarter than me. I miss the valued and varied advice on personal and career dilemmas and that I used be able to get in a public forum. I miss serious, non-ephemeral writing and thinking in general.

So, in hopes of rebuilding some of what I've lost, I've got a few projects in the cooker right now. First there's thealeph.org , which will be my main place for serious writing and ideas. It's a wiki, because I'm still just as sick of the constraints of the weblog format as I've ever been, though I'm working to get it to publish new content in a chronological blog or feedlike format for reading by others. I'm hoping to get what's worth saving of my old archives up there and cross-referenced / categorized, and then build off of that, mixing long with short, curation with original content, basically tearing down all of the artificial distinctions between content types, with the object of generally seeing if I can build a long term interlinked map of what my brain is up to.

Secondly, there's localprogress.org , which is intended to be a volunteer-matching site that will help small, local, underfunded activist and civic groups get online with minimal expense and difficulty, and then use the web to best effect for organizing, fundraising, networking, and brainstorming. I want to work to rebuild some of the community I lament the loss of, both IRL and online, and this is the best way to do that I've thought of so far. I'll probably be bugging some of you about volunteering once it's ready.

And I'd like to get back to writing about personal issues in some forum, whether it be here or on LJ, though I'm still hesitant, since the complexity of the various social networks I'm enmeshed in, and the commensurate need to keep certain things hidden from certain groups or individuals has gotten to the point of being unmanageable. It's halfway doable with LJ's filtering, but it still requires the mentality of a dedicated paranoiac to sustain it. But, maybe I'll throw caution to the wind and take another shot someday.

Wow, that got long. Well, that should get us caught up to the present day. From here on, it's into the great unknown.