"guilty robots"

check this out-- scroll down to "guilty robots" on time magazine's "year in ideas"

"This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective...but being an ethical robot involves more than just following rules. These machines will have something akin to emotions - in particular, guilt."

the chunk on "gourmet dirt" is pretty good too.

a small anecdote of utter unimportance

figure A: toward a theory of soap (1)

personally, i find foam much less intimidating than soap. perhaps not quite spiritual, but certainly pleasing. on the other hand, i have some concept that it is altogether fake and therefore not to be trusted. when i have encountered foamy things in nature, i tend to also think that they are unnatural--faux-mold and faux-mushrooms, cheaply made, placed by the invisible armies of civilization to make the forest experience more photo-friendly. (the same armies who are responsible for mobilizing bird to move from tree to tree and slowly plucking leaves from trees to preserve the illusion of autumn.)

i suppose there's something in the idea that people relate to their own dirtiness differently based on the soap they choose (or avoid).

mostly i would like
to fill your mouth
with my foam
and your foamy saliva
inject with my lips-o-suction
until we are dry
and curseless
and all of the jargon is gone,
replaced by oooooooooooze.
(say it say it do it do it)

and preemptively, expectantly i will add: corey where are you? are you here yet?

oh and also, i hope ev's last post can create some reallife conversations here at the bao...i'd rather tackle feelings in realtime sometimes rather than commenting on posts, but i think we can collectively agree that we are all in the habit of seeing/reading/consuming more than we can acknowledge or are expected to/expect ourselves to engage with. the blog is perhaps the closest place i've seen on the web to some kind of reciprocity. and i like how it weaves in and out of conversation and life. so i'm glad you posted ev and i hope it can be a bridge between webworld and the living room to have some kind of further conversation or something.
< / meta-mediation-of-mediatedness >

back to the paperbox, bye!

1. internet, the. "useful knowledge for useful people or psychoanalytic queries into banality or !!!???)0()(;;;;!!!." baohaus living room: "roland barthes on dirt," google search engine, MILK TIME and republished at the end of the world. link to full exploration of the luxuriousness of foam here.

2. at right, figure B. "foam or shit?" from "the abbreviated index of poor materials for sharpening giant pencils" (2)

This is how I heard it.

I spent a lot of time thinking last night.

It's the little things, it's always the little things.

Is it a big deal for one of us to ask another person to stop doing something if it bothers them? No. Of course not, but for the record, I felt like I was talked to last night for a split second like a dog or a stupid child. Even if it wasn't intentional, even if maybe Eliot or Tamara or Eli don't "see" it that way, I felt humiliated and angry because I felt like someone had said, "BAD DOG" to me.

I know I have a short fuse, I know that as a result, I "ruined" the rest of the game, which I had been thoroughly excited about, and I'm sorry about that, sincerely. I know that my anger was perhaps disproportionate to the offense, but I felt belittled and disrespected. The room felt tense immediately after I was yelled at.

BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG

and yet no one said anything until I had made a fool of myself. So I felt doubly stupid. Stupid child feels humiliated because teacher yells, "STUPID CHILD" but none of the other children say a word.

"Hey, Evelyn, could you stop doing that, it's bothering me."
"Sure."

I spent a really long time trying to figure out how I felt about this, and I don't like that when I tried to explain it this afternoon, I was told that how I felt wasn't valid. That only reaffirmed that I was being treated as lesser, invalid, and like a stupid child or dog. It doesn't matter if you didn't mean to make me feel that way, you succeeded, triumphantly.

insights from the world of cultural studies

weed + acid =
postmodernism

deep deep deep in an underground vault with no walls: a short essay on essays

figure 1. extending boundaries to enable depth

alack, alack!
the hail earlier today hit my face sharply, a welcome relief from the nebulous cloud of nonsense (see fig.2) that i breathe in when i try hard to focus on the cloud without thinking about its units of nonsense. (but what is a unit of nonsense? and would not the cloud bring me greater nourishment than a tiny unit thereof?)

figure 2. the possibility of borders

fuck time, i will refuse to disintegrate and somehow forge forward.

figure 3. a question of borders

it is hard to remember to take pleasure
in contradictions
when they begin
to melt
all over
my
glasses

figure 4. on the edge of concern, there is just one more thing

enough, i say! enough!
i demand more!
it's too much! do you really need to--
totally overlooked.

figure 5. the desire to draw boundaries induces dilemma

now is the time.
(how can the time be now? i'm not ready yet!)
the world is as it is because it is as it should be and
all is how it should be because it is how it is
(***reference proof for "why giraffes go up in lifts," car cemetery 12(4):2009)

figure 6. the recent discovery of additional dimensions to the problem has dire implications for the accessibility of shimmering intergalactic portals to contemporary youth culture

and of all possibilities
we are left with the comfort that:
all things are possible
which we can conceive of as possible!

figure 7. a statistical abnormality suggests the need for new methods of analysis



comment!, e.g. with your favorite little screenshot of brain2.0?
(these invisible mediators, these quiet prompts)

film updates

i cant believe i havent shared any of my film experiences (of which there aren't many).

here's one:

I was in a dance class this quarter where I learned some stuff, first we learned one minute of choreography to a song "Hadippa!" from the movie Dil Bole Hadippa. Preeti (our teacher) told us the movie was bad and we shouldn't see it, but samantha bought it anyway and we all got pretty obsessed. it's a bollywood version of "she's the man" featuring the beloved amanda bynes, which was based loosely off of twelfth night. with rani mukherjee alternately as Veera and Veer. oh and playing opposite shahid kapoor, sigh. anyway the music is awesome, especially "discowale khisko." we told Preeti that we liked the film, and asked why she said it was bad and she said "that's not believable that she could be Veer, how could he not notice she has the same face?"

anyway, if you can get your hands on it, it's lovely mindless entertainment and good music.

ALSO

try to watch "Aladin"... with amitabh bachchan as the genie. hilarious.

ALSO

twilight and new moon just came out here but i didn't see it

ALSO

amitabh's movie coming out this weekend is "Paa"-- he plays a 13 year old boy who has Progeria, so he is dressed up to be an octegenarian, and his son, Abishek Bachchan, plays his father. the tagline for the film is "a unique father-son-son-father story"... only here are off-screen relations actually interwoven into the plot of a film; i don't think you'd ever see this done so explicitly in the states.

ALSO

this weekend a movie Kurbaan came out, where kareena kapoor and saif ali khan apparently have sex (!!!!!!). i read the plot and it looked way to complicated to understand without subtitulos. the tag line is "some love stories have blood on them" because the twist is that he's a terrorist. and her dad warned her not to marry a muslim.

okay। that's all; just doing my share.

boarding a train in 4 hours (at 3am) to head to chennai. goodbye pune, hello leave of absence!

ക്യാ ആപ് വ്ഹോയ ഐ അം വ്രിതിംഗ് ഇന്‍ തമിള്‍

வெயிட் தட் இஸ் மலையாளம்

థిస్ ఇస్ తెలుగు

ದಿಸ್ ಇಸ್ ಕನ್ನಡ -- ವ್ಹಿಚ್ ಇ ಸವ್ ಅ ಲೋಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಇನ್ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ

चेविंग गम है जा पि जा, हैण्ड पुमप है जा पि जा, लाइफ सा जूस है करती जा, फिकरे करे फिकरे , हरिप्पा!

wow. i didn't know i could do that. first is malayalam, then tamil, then kannada, telugu, then hindi. i wrote mostly in english and it transliterates it... shit that's cool. okay good night. or good morning.

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on

• borders
• edges of bodies
• skin and cell membranes
• tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  
• spacing in text
• silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
• line breaks
• the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
• lines, queues, waiting
• age

Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions

hop over here
and here

and over there
because
well
the thing is

there isn't enough time to stay the same.