duck, duck goose

Search engine dominance, with or without ancillary services or clutter, is generally a matter of reflex and preference and in microseconds reliably deliver search results.

Popularity and one’s own trail of breadcrumbs can skew or unearth obscure items but interpretation and adaptive scouring cannot serve up (yet) one’s made-to-order request or fabricate it on the spot. We probably wouldn’t like that sort of high-fidelity, wrinkle-free environment, where tangents and the unexpected become less and less likely and we’re only presented with exactly what we asked for. In any case, all pretty much have the same abilities and handicaps and progress as a block. One’s personal footprints and history can facilitate with retrieving information for private use, but one individual’s interrogative profile does not strengthen the integrity and usefulness of the internet as a whole. A lot of coalescing data is gleaned which may not form a very accurate or flattering picture in the end. One emerging search engine, basic and free from a lot of the common entanglements of others, called Duck-Duck-Go out of Pennsylvania with MIT minds behind it, makes the resolute pledge not to be nosy or mob its users. When something’s in the language, force of habit can be hard to change or break, but the choice to do so may prove worthwhile.

pseudoscience or bulls and bears

Unlike Math Bear here, being a numbers’ man in the bourses does not demand poise, genius or meditation. Solutions probably are not gained via reason or sudden intuition. King Consumer’s sentiment that underpins larger economic models is not rocket science either, and the thresholds and triggers that influence commerce cannot be rung up and down the totem pole to in a show of correspondence, neatness, predictability.

Investing is a calculated gamble but has as much to do with recklessness and risk than any de-natured economic principles or discipline. Yet the luck and hubris that is far from savant knowledge of the fundamental commodities for which money and monetary instruments is only an ethereal medium continues to be accorded with a level of respect and awe, assuredly with self-promotion and carefully crafted perception. The guesswork and gloss are even perpetuated against strong evidence to the contrary, put on horrid display over the past four years. The same dangerous configurations and unscrupulous behaviours are being vetted to continue the game, unbesmirched. All art and practice demand clarity and discipline and, regardless how particular and idiosyncratic and a framework of rules. Flexibility and responsiveness has created a drain on necessity, replaced with a codex of economic-relativism that allows one to dictate the rules as one goes along. While it is equally limiting to rely on false constructs, imagine what can still be done according to traditional arithmetic.

infinitive and aorist

Oxford American Dictionary recently announced its word of the year for those English-speakers across the pond, honouring the decades old graphics format developed by CompuServe yet seemingly reinvented, rediscovered GIF as a very superlative verb. A curious coincidentally too, I thought, having really just discovered the format myself. The internet has created a ready forum for such looping animation, and I’m thinking not just as illustrative but also as wish-fulfillment of three-dimensional newspapers and holographic emissaries as seen on film. Meanwhile, the UK Oxford Direction and German linguistic authorities went a different route with their (Un)words, demonstrating like-mindedness: crowning as the words of the year omnishambles and shit-storm, respectively.

spasmenagaliaphobia

Industrial designer and accomplished illustrator John Vassos, whose family immigrated from Greece to Istanbul before the outbreak of World War I and eventually came to Madison Avenue as an esteemed public-relations man, had a keen sense for fully limning a caption and left a visual legacy of concepts told in pictures. One series of sketches covers the abstract topic of clinical phobia, which was not a new designer-ailment, certainly, invented for the bourgeois and nouveau riche of the Roaring Twenties, but I think Vassos portrayed such insecurities in a thoroughly modern way, not shrill and gory but ominous and oppressive, slow and quietly suspicious fears, which started out as very useful reflexes in terms of survival and self-preservation, but viewed from the wrong end of the telescope, becoming abysmal contagions—a sort of hexing thinking that no one wants to catch.

There are new niches for phobias to occupy, wearing old grooves that are not easily to extract one’s thoughts from, but I think, nothing novel in the way of irrational fear. We’ve had the same old companions for a long time, like the basic inventory of seasonal ailments that accept treatment, prevention but no cure. Neo-Luddites and paranoia with the computer screen are not really new things, but I think maybe some manias over material have come and gone—possibly with the germ of sensitivities to come.

Though glass was already a ubiquitous substance for urbanites of the late Victorian Era and was not being used in new ways, a peculiar phobia spread like a virus especial in gentlemanly circles, whose sufferers were convinced that they had suddenly become fragile, like spun glass, and were in near constant vigilance against being handled too roughly or stumbling.

It was a very strange episode and inarticulate for a cause—perhaps it was never owing to the glass or brittleness but the rise of alternatives to the medium, rubber, gum and synthetics and the fear was subsumed, for the most part, with bodily harm or explanation.

I wonder if there might be yet undescribed crises of grace and dexterity when it comes to preferred methods of input and output.

To be paralyzed with terror is always a handicap but it seems even worse and more abstract (and hard to communicate through drawing) when phobias come out of environment, preference and personal comforts. That is beginning to sound more like a dozing dream or a nightmare rather than a primal fear.

nifty thrifty or crowded house

The culture of second-hand and charity shops is a rather bizarre and complicated phenomenon that maybe highlights differences of more moment and circumstance. I fully realize that where ever they’re located, the stores are not there primarily for my benefit and are intended for practicality with the occasional work of art, antique or incredible find and not the other way around (though I’ve been a patron in both regards and hope that I haven’t taken away anything truly wanted or utilitarian from someone who it needs it more than I and instead contributed to the cause).
In the States, however, there seems to be a thrift shop in every community, regardless of size and specializing in all the cast-offs of mass-production, fads and fashion with showrooms that can span decades. In Germany at least, opportunities are fewer and more disperse, saving perhaps the odd tailor and alteration shop that takes consignments, draping some once-worn frock in the show-windows. The difference shows, I think, not that Germans are any more as a whole forward-thinking about their consumption—what’s really needed and what will go unused—and perhaps less so, knowing that there’s comprehensive recycling system in place to haul away all the excess. Aside from the social-hour of flea-markets, there’s also the institution of bulk-trash days (having its own informed sub-culture of scavengers, I’m sure), because above all, there is, I suspect, a premium on living space, which cannot be in most cases secondary to the need to warehouse.
This is the prevalent mindset, despite all the hoarders that one sees on reality television shows—interventions against people who weathered the Nachkriegszeit of deprivation and uncertainty and developed a sort of disposophobia, called pejoratively “Messys” that pathologically refuse to throw anything away. There are some fine and fun second-hand stores with a serendipitous rolling-stock to be found, but one can only give a good home to a limited amount of vases and souvenirs and knickknacks before risking the whole enterprise.

sledge hammer or as the world turns

I was curious how those animated image files were produced, so I did a little research and took a series of photographs to try for a similar effect. The open source image editing program GIMP to make a .gif and a few tutorials made it a fairly straightforward process. This might be the opening sequence for PfRC nightly news—cueing dramatic news music, but I like balky way it came out, like that classic Peter Gabriel video. With more practice and polish, I can certainly see a lot of creative possibilities for a bit of stop motion animation.