Adventures in Engineering

It is yet another day in which, if you haven't already, you should get outside for however long you can before the sun goes down. Even if it's just a ten minute walk around the block. I went for a run earlier, and the temperature is just perfect. The guys at the Abos Pizza shop below my apartment are sitting outside in short sleeves.

Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal, but a condition. "We blog," as Kline and Bernstein say. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: "Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago." To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. [...] Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html


I think I have to agree with someone's comment at Mefi: the academic blowhards are just jealous that we bloggers have proven ourselves far more capable than them at producing enourmous amounts of boring, meaningless, pretentious, psuedo-intellectual bullshit. So no, sorry, I'm not going to get off his lawn. ;]

That said, to interpret this as an attack on bloggers is probably incorrect. He doesn't seem to be saying that blogging being inherently nihilistic is a bad thing. In fact he seems to think it's a natural reaction to a world where more centralized media is slowing losing power. However, I still say this guy wouldn't know the difference between nihilism and postmodernism if both of them walked up and bit huge chunks out of his ass.

[Dean Kamen] calls the place Westwind, and he stuffed it with a collection of toys and antiques that includes a jukebox, a slot machine, and a 25-ton steam engine once owned by Henry Ford. In Westwind's basement, there's a foundry, a machine shop, and a computer room, where Kamen often toils late into the night. He keeps a Porsche 928 and a black Humvee in one garage, two Enstrom helicopters in the other. The smaller, piston-driven chopper takes him to and from work at his offices in downtown Manchester; the larger, turbine-driven version is reserved for longer hops, like to his private island off the coast of Connecticut. For trips more than a few hundred miles, he flies his twin-turbofan CitationJet.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.09/kamen_pr.html

On one tour, Andre’s Japanese sponsors rewarded him with a case of expensive plum wine. Andre settled down in the back of the bus and started drinking. Four hours later, the bus arrived at the next venue, and Andre was polishing off the last bottle of wine.

Sixteen bottles of wine in four hours is a considerable feat, but it gets better. Andre proceeded straight to the ring and wrestled three matches, including a twenty-man battle royal. The 16 bottles of plum wine had no discernible effect on Andre’s in-ring ability. By the end of the evening, Andre had sweated off the wine and found himself growing cranky. He dispatched Hogan for a few cases of beer. Hogan hurried to do as Andre asked, knowing from painful experience that a drunken Giant was a happy Giant, and a happy Giant was less likely to fracture some vital part of an opponent’s anatomy in a fit of grumpiness.

http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/10_06/10_06_andre_giant.html