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Last November my 11 year old cat, Crowley, passed away due to renal failure. He was a wonderful cat. Almost immediately, I started making a book for him and I got it back from the printers a few weeks ago. As requested by my boyfriend, I am posting it here.
 Labels: life Sunday, December 20, 2009 // 0 Comments
For most of the morning, I've been reading about Phil Agre; partially because a potentially tragic mystery (shamefully) raises my rubbernecking senses, but also because some of his publications are tangentially relevant to my thesis. They are excellent reads.
What has me personally invested in this Agre narrative* is the fact that he's been missing for over a year and his family just filed a missing persons report in October; he used to have a mailing list of 5,000 subscribers and nobody noticed he was gone; he abandoned his job and apartment sometime last year and still nobody realized he was not there anymore. I would say I don't know how someone so seemingly connected could phase out so easily. But that's not true, I totally know. I'm sure it's quite easy.
I originally wanted to do my thesis project on the replace-ability of people. That is, people increasingly have the ability to exist independently. This diminishes the functional need for community and connection. It becomes easier to move in and out of communities and interpersonal relationships without making any kind of commitment because those communities and relationships can simply be replaced with new communities and new relationships. That entire system tends to devalues human life. This vague phenomenon is still somewhat of an obsession for me.
So when I read about Agre, I think that whatever role he must've played in peoples' lives–as distant as it may have been–was easily replaceable with another person. His disappearance went unnoticed for quite some time. In my mind, he planned it that way. It seems like a large amount of work to stay in touch with people but it also seems like a large amount of work to keep people away.
It is strange to me that not too too long ago, you could move across the world and your family would never expect to hear from you again. There are few places one can go now and achieve that level of silence. If that is what Agre was seeking, I hope he found it. For me, for now, I am definitely using his papers in my thesis project. Thanks Phil!
*I would just say Agre but I don't know this person and have only been vaguely aware of his existence until the announcement of his disappearance, a funny thing in itself.Labels: life Wednesday, December 16, 2009 // 0 Comments
Can't believe I said "summer sandwich"? Me neither. The summer is officially over (according to me anyway) and it's time to start settling into thesis thoughts. But before I do that, I made a new website. See? It is probably half broken but will become less broken over the next week or so. I took a lot of my previous work down because it's just getting too old to show. I added a new blog for my thesis and updated my interactive work with some of the stuff I did at Stamen over the summer.
(I made another emergency trip to Seattle... check out all those protuberances of planet Earth!)
I've also been playing a tad with Processing.js, a Javascript port of Processing. It took all of two seconds to make one of my seizure-inducing sketches from first semester (only works in a super current browser). And I also did some basic Wikipedia sketches in Processing.js.Labels: life, processing Friday, August 28, 2009 // 0 Comments
The meat of my summer sandwich is my internship–where I'm doing fun things but I can't really discuss it much at the moment–along with the various condiments: freelance work, volunteer work and at least one personal project. Plus, while my apartment has been set up for months, I am still finding places to put plants–South facing windows and all. Lately I've had a thing for succulents but I probably have more than enough plants to take care of going into the winter months.
I am also working on a new website that I hope to launch before school starts and I hope to have something to post from the personal project that I got materials for but haven't had any time to dig into, despite how easy it would be to get something ready if I only had an extra day or two. Sigh. Just an extra day!Labels: life Tuesday, August 4, 2009 // 0 Comments
Smoke illuminated by a green laser. Wandering around Golden Gate park at night a few weeks ago. Labels: life, photography Wednesday, January 28, 2009 // 0 Comments
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The quote at the top of this page is from the March 25, 1893 Newark Daily Advocate via Nick de la Mare..
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