Archive for August, 2008

username: punkassjim

Monday, August 11th, 2008

It’s getting pretty late in life to still be calling myself a punkass in mixed company, and I’ll likely want to try to re-name myself in the digital arena before A) I have kids, and B) they learn to read. But, for right now, it’s a name with which I still identify, a name by which I’m widely known.

You can currently contact me, under the name punkassjim, on all these sites:
Last.fm
Twitter
Flickr
del.icio.us
YouTube
LiveJournal

Several months ago, I took a Saturday afternoon to port over all my blog entries from Myspace to LiveJournal. It seemed like the right thing to do, given that I already had the LJ account, and well, that’s kinda what an online journaling site is for. As much as I just wasn’t a fan of MySpace’s interface, user experience and overall design, it was really silly of me to be “blogging” on that platform in the first place.

Now, I’m kinda going through the same thing all over again. For several months, I’ve been uploading all of my “mobile photos” directly to Facebook, basically with the hope that my friends would be notified when I snapped something new. The problem is, Facebook isn’t really the platform for that. I mean, it handled it well, but it doesn’t make my photos/data/whatever portable.

Honestly, I don’t care which social networking site is the current darling…I just want a way to A) re-connect with old friends, B) keep up with new/old friends, and C) show people my thoughts, images, interesting links, and other stuff. And the best way to make it work for everyone is if it all goes modular. Facebook does a great job of this right now, and so does Flock. The key, to me, is to use a damn good photography site for your photos, a damn good blogging site for your blog, and a damn good whatever site for your whatever. The whole point of all this “Web 2.0″ crap is to make communication easier without forcing anyone to adopt proprietary software. That’s why, on my Facebook profile, the only “apps” I actually care about are the ones that aggregate the updates from my LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr feeds. Eventually, I’ll get into shooting quick videos (once the bastards update my iPhone to do so), but until then I’m not likely to care about YouTube too much.

Anyway, the whole thing that got me thinking about this:
http://punkassjim.soup.io/

It’s a pretty sweet site, probably the best user-signup experience I’ve ever had. The whole point of this site is to give you a “river of news” taken from all your social sites. Unlike Facebook, the news feed doesn’t miss anything, and also unlike facebook, it doesn’t subject you to any BS vampire or lil’ green patch invites.

Thank fucking god.

I may end up moving over to Soup for all my blogging needs, but I haven’t decided yet. Plus, it’s still a young site. But I really like how standards-based their coding is, and how clean the whole user experience is. I’ll be playing with it for a bit, but I’m still gonna rely on LJ for my blogging needs.

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Fascinating legs

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

While riding home last night, I was listening to Studio 360, and they had a bit about Olympic-level athletes who have artificial limbs. The current media darling for this topic is Oscar Pistorius, but I found Aimee Mullins’ contributions to the story to be more poignant, more insightful.

The story goes, that each of these athletes had lost their lower legs as a result of birth defects. And, with the use of their specially-designed prosthetic limbs, they are able to run like the fucking wind. Many of their able-bodied competitors like to cry foul because they think the carbon-fibre legs give the amputees an unfair advantage. When people accused Aimee Mullins of using the appliances to lengthen her stride, she had them shortened. And she got faster. That shut ‘em up.

Fascinated as I was with this story, I got home and started looking up photos and YouTube videos to learn more. I was surprised to learn that Mullins was not only an accomplished athlete, but also a model and an actress. The bits about her being a model were interesting for a lot of reasons, but I was amused by the fact that she looks crazy-tall when she’s wearing her “model legs.” Unfair advantage, indeed…but it’s hard to call it “unfair” when the fact is I’m cheering for her. Last I checked, overcoming a handicap was a good thing.

But it’s when I looked up her acting experience that I started to wander into another territory that’s perplexed me in the past. One of the movies she has starred in is called Cremaster 3, an extremely abstract art film, part of a series by Björk’s partner Matthew Barney. I mean, extremely abstract. Go ahead, click the link, and make sure you watch the trailer.

The thing I can’t quite figure out is how, exactly, funding is procured for such a project. The mind reels. Clearly, Barney had a really detailed vision for the creation of this project, but what’s the audience? Who do you pitch it to, in terms of funding? Who buys this stuff?

My friend Peter, from high school, is an actor, and he has starred in a slew of artfilms like this. I recently re-connected with him through MySpace, and he has links to trailer videos for the projects he’s been in. And dude…it scares me. They’re abstract, like the Cremaster Cycle is, but they’re far-lower-budget. Hand-held cameras, scraped-together wardrobe, lots of gratuitous nudity that crosses the line into the obscene (one man’s opinion—a man with no problem with nudity), and generally the type of stuff that only gets shown in small, deviant circles. Don’t get me wrong: more power to ‘em.

But it still perplexes me, and leads my brain to make up wild theories, bordering on Eyes Wide Shut territory. I’m not implying secret-society-type stuff, so let me explain: My impression is, the people responsible for creating these types of movies are independently wealthy, whether by inheritance or by wild success (or marriage to Björk). And they’ve got artistic aspirations and/or outside-the-mainstream sexual proclivities which they would like to express through a group artistic effort. It’s kinda like…a really scaled-down, much more tame/artistic version of the “themed orgies” we’ve all heard about but never actually seen. Small societies of people who somehow have the time and money to invest in ambitious/large projects that aren’t intended for a wide audience, but more intended to scratch an individual (or small group) itch. It’s freakin’ fascinating.

Clearly, I’ve pigeon-holed myself as a complete prude, misanthrope and art-ignorant snob. But that’s totally not the case. I’m just taking a different tack — after deciding that the art itself isn’t my cup of tea, I’m still fascinated and curious about the scene-behind-the-scenes. That may not be my cup of tea either, but, on the face of it, I just don’t get how it’s being done.

Anyway, even though the sum-of-its-parts vision of the Cremaster Cycle doesn’t tickle my fancy, I must admit I am very impressed by the imagery of Aimee Mullins wearing the lucite lower legs. It’s one of those things you might’ve seen in a Hellraiser movie, and you don’t even need computers to make the image!

Alright, I’ve led you down a meandering path for long enough. Sorry about that.

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Rascal

Monday, August 4th, 2008

A few years ago, my brother made a couple of blog posts about his dogs. They were more like eulogies, as each post was made after the dog in question had died. Having known each of these dogs, having welcomed them into our family, and having played my part in raising them, I was deeply touched by my brother’s words. He loved Lotus and Ludwig very much, and it’s clear that our family has a bond with our pets that transcends the usual pet/owner relationship.

click to view largerI’ve been living with Liz for several years now, and we started dating in late 2002. She’s always had Rascal. And she’s another example of someone who looks at her dog and sees her small, furry child. A child she’s helped to nurture, to teach, to heal, to be happy. Rascal is now 13.5 years old, and her age has been weighing heavily on Liz’s mind for several years.

Rascal was about a year and a half old when Liz adopted her from the SPCA, and had already given birth to a litter of puppies. She was in poor health, most of her hair had fallen out, and it turns out she had a serious birth defect in her kidney plumbing. So, pretty much right away, Liz needed to invest a great deal of money, care, and time into surgeries and medications to get Rascal into a better state of health.

That was almost a dozen years ago.

Since then, Rascal has been there for Liz through trying times, through new boyfriends and breakups, through frustrations in school, trials and tribulations in her career path, and through moves all over the place.

Rascal has traveled across this country three times.

While my family has always (for better or worse) taken a laissez-faire approach to our pets’ health, Liz has always been right on top of Rascal’s shots, vet appointments, and other important health tasks. This has rubbed off on me quite a bit, and it makes me even sadder to think back to my family’s hands-off methods. On the one hand, maybe we didn’t have the ability to dump all that money into our pets. But, on the other hand, our little furry kids likely would have been happier and lived longer. If there’s one upshot, it’s becoming clearer to me now: at least we weren’t always thinking about the impending death of our little loved ones.

See, Rascal’s sick. She’s got a small growth on her upper jaw, and we just got confirmation that it’s melanoma. Research suggests that, in long-haired retrievers with dark fur, melanoma (especially when found in the mouth) is a Very Bad Thing. I don’t remember the exact statistic, but it’s highly unlikely she’ll be with us a year from now, and six months might even be a stretch. And, given that serious treatment would likely mean removing a large portion of her jaw, neither of us want to put Rascal through it. We just went to a consultation with a doggie oncologist, but we’re both of the mind that decreasing her quality of life for the sake of longevity is not right.

click to view largerIt’s just really hard to look at someone you love, and know that they are dying. And she has no clue.

But I’ve got to give Liz serious credit for her thoughtfulness. She noticed, even before I did, that I might have a hard time of it, since I basically had to watch my mom decline into cancer. It’s something I’ve long since faced and grown to understand, but it’s still an old wound that gets itchy when our fur-kids get sick, and you’ve got to make the choice of whether or not to treat it.

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