archive for out of context
Its own autonomous, self-contained world
18 September 2011 • 1 comment out of context
tags: books, games, quotes, religion
“Pre-modern concepts of computation typically relied on an equivalence of macrocosm and microcosm and so conceived of algorithms as demiurgic creation, metaphysically. The game by contast is a central model of 20th century computation, both in the arts and in technology. The main ontological difference between theosophic and game computing is that games can do without a reference to higher powers—which is why religions declared many games, dice and card games for example, sinful—and may impose arbitrary restrictions that do not logically follow from a higher natural order. A game, in other words, can be its own autonomous, self-contained world.”
Memories stop… like the rain
18 September 2011 • out of context
tags: comics, memory, rain
Lenore #2, Roman Dirge
Me complace escuchar una lluvia suave y regular
4 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, hearing, poetry, quotes, rain, sound
“Cuando me encuentro en dicho lugar me complace escuchar una lluvia suave y regular. Esto me sucede, en particular, en aquellas construcciones características de las provincias orientales donde han colocado a ras del suelo unas aberturas estrechas y largas para echar los desperdicios, de manera que se puede oír, muy cerca, el apaciguante ruido de las gotas que, al caer del alero o de las hojas de los árboles, salpican el pie de las linternas de piedra y empapa el musgo de las losas antes de que las esponje el suelo. En verdad, tales lugares armonizan con el canto de los insectos, el gorjeo de los pájaros y las noches de luna; es el mejor lugar para gozar la punzante melancolía de las cosas en cada una de las cuatro estaciones y los antiguos poetas de haiku han debido de encontrar en ellos innumerables temas. Por lo tanto no parece descabellado pretender que es en la construcción de los retretes donde la arquitectura japonesa ha alcanzado el colmo del refinamiento”.
El elogio de la sombra, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
I get up in the morning to the beat of the drum
25 August 2011 • out of context
tags: dreams, music, sound
“I get up in the morning to the beat of the drum. I get up to this feeling, keeps me on the run. I get up in the morning, put my dreams away. I get up, I get up, I get up again.”
Lose Your Soul, Dead Man’s Bones
So loudly in my ears
21 August 2011 • out of context
tags: hearing, noise, quotes
“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say.”
Retroactive continuity
18 August 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cinema, fiction, quotes, television
Retroactive continuity (often shortened to retcon) is an oxymoron that refers to the alteration of previously established facts in a fictional work.
A haunted apparatus
4 August 2011 • out of context
tags: death, hauntology, life, machines, quotes, waves
“The telephone, it turns out, owes its invention to more than simply hearing-aid experiments. Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus.”
Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard
Tom McCarthy
The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
Another thing to learn about tears
24 July 2011 • out of context
tags: cinema, death, love, quotes, religion
“I’m supposed to cry and all that junk, but I’m pretty sure I’ve cried all the tears I had out of me by now. The last time I cried was at grandma’s funeral (…) and that’s when I figured out that tears couldn’t make someone who was dead alive again. There’s another thing to learn about tears: they can’t make somebody who doesn’t love you anymore love you again. It’s the same thing with prayers, I wonder how much of their lives people waste crying and praying to God, trying to make things that happened unhappen. If you ask me, the devil makes more sense than God does, I can at least see why people would want him around: It’s good to have somebody to blame for the bad stuff they do.”
Urawaza
12 July 2011 • out of context
tags: economy, language, meaning, quotes
“An urawaza (Japanese for “secret trick”) is a quirky, ingenious technique that optimizes an everyday activity like cleaning up spills, preventing odors, or folding laundry. In Japan, urawaza have been shared by word of mouth and passed down to descendants for centuries. In the aftermath of World War II, urawaza helped the population make best use of scarce resources, like using alcohol instead of more expensive household solvents for cleaning. Lifestyle urawaza were popularized in the Japanese television series Ito-ke no Shokutaku (The Ito Family Dinner Table), incorporating many viewer-submitted tips. The term itself became globally popularized when video gamers in the 1980s began sharing their game-related urawaza online.”