So I gave it a go. Ended up devouring the whole tome in 2 or 3 hours. It was good for me in an echo chamber sort of way — reading obvious things in all-caps like, “CRAZY PEOPLE ARE THE LAST PEOPLE TO KNOW THEY ARE CRAZY” kinda hits the spot — but with a few “oh really?” sorts of things sprinkled in too.

But this passage from the chapter entitled “Pregnancy Insanity” has special significance and verisimilitude:

“Here is another bit of Girlfriend advice: if your friends who have been pregnant tell you that it was the most emotionally fulfilling and happiest time of their life, don’t believe them. Those kinds of comments invariably make you feel that something is wrong with you if you don’t feel equally ecstatic, and they are undoubtedly inaccurate. Some strange biological force gives women amnesia about pregnancy, so that they forget the less savory details and see the whole thing in a sort of rosy glow. This is just nature’s way of making sure that women get pregnant more than once; if you remembered too much, you might never voluntarily repeat the experience.”

Yes, it does seem that way. Of course, it would also seem to me that there are some much better neurological reasons for this to happen, such as the fact that everything progresses on such a tiny timeframe compared to the rest of human life, and also that when we are faced with a happy outcome (such as a healthy child), we are apt to “correct” our prior memories to match.

But no matter. The point is, start writing more. And so I shall. Because pregnancy, while interesting, has not been the glowy happy-go-lucky time you always hear about. Or when it was/is, it’s because I’ve WORKED FOR IT, dammit. (Which reminds me to polish off the pending blog post about Relaxation, which I based a 5-minute talk on recently.)

I’m not going to do a full auto-expose here — there’s quite a bit I don’t really want to share with just anyone, and probably shouldn’t. But I might post a few sensitive things in passworded posts which will show up as Protected. If you want access, let me know. The qualifications are that you are female (or if male, be related to me by blood or marriage), that the post is tagged “pregnancy” or “post-partum”, and that “TMI” is not in your active vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: amnesia, neurology, post-partum, pregnancy

The powerful thing about STYLE is that when it’s approached consciously by the style leaders — i.e. with the understanding that it can and will be co-opted by corporatism at any opporunity — it can become a powerful tool for subversion. (In fact that’s how corporations do it, but I’m not going into that specifically.)

Style is not just SEEMING; it is also DOING. Humans have this interesting capacity for deciphering fakes and phonies from doers and believers. Something “feels wrong”, and it’s in that moment — a micromoment that happens all over the world a hundred times a second — that a choice is made: is part of this style an irony that encompasses NOT-doing (and so is fair-game for collection into the vast consumptive morass), or is this style one that must necessarily contain DOING?

The answer to this question comes from exemplars.

Why do we exhort our teenagers to be better examples for their younger siblings? Why do we chide fathers for not practicing what they preach? Why do we consider it the ultimate punk rock betrayal to “sell out” — i.e. to apparently give in to the commercialism that punk-ism alleged to intend to short-circuit?

Because the way you protect a style that incorporates a sort of DOING that you want to encourage is to make sure there are enough enviable persons being visible in that style and incorporating that DOING.

To bring it back to ground level, the point I’m making here is that Punk’s Not Dead, not fully dead, unless you proclaim that it’s dead and there’s no way you can be an exemplar of true punk.

So if punkness is to embody a certain DOING and not simply an ironic sort of SEEMING: take back the style.

In other words: I want to see librarians wearing spikes and sporting mohawks.

…Or flannel and ripped jeans. Or cat-eye glasses and leopard print dresses.

…Or none of the above. Because just saying “fuck off I’m a librarian” is pretty punk too.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, corporatism, culture, libraries, philosophy, punk rock, style, theory

Along comes Fox News to assert that there were people offended by this, then gets Mike Huckabee — a consummate Southern Baptist whose 2008 campaign ads quote him as saying “Faith doesn’t just influence me; it really defines me” — to commentate on behalf of Obama.

Now that’s a humorous anticlimax to their invented non-issue if I’ve ever heard one.

This video on YouTube does a great job of dissecting the tactic that clever opinion-shapers can use to invent an imaginary issue: basically, run a news story from the point of view that the issue already exists and everybody knows about it already.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twoXZE9U0Io]

I stop short at speculating on motives for that kind of “reporting”.  It’s just not worth the brain cells, which could be better spent on coming up with clever lolcatz captions.

Invented controversy annoys me enough to just turn the TV off, and it’s a huge reason why I eventually stopped tuning in at all.  The last time I voluntarily turned on American news television and watched for more than 10 seconds was when the World Trade Towers fell in 2001.

Im in ur newz, distortin ur factz.

Technorati Tags: atheist, news, obama, video

February 25th, 2009 at 3:30 am

whether it’s a fad or not, Twitter’s an interesting development in communication.

i consider it micro performance art. thoughts in 140 characters or less, a restriction which lends well to haiku.

and if one is engaged in a duel of @ replies and re-tweets, then one is more or less doing conversation as performance art.

i suggest NOT managing your tweets. don’t try to drink from a firehose. just dip your feet in the stream.

–Naomi, who subconsciously wrote each of these paragraphs to Twitter post specifications.

(Belated thanks to Kevin Cheng’s brilliant Twitter manifesto, from whom I wantonly stole the firehose / stream thing.)

Technorati Tags: communication, conversation, performance art, twitter

I didn’t say so in my response, but I absolutely agree.  I dislike the way I myself sound, and I try to protect my housemates from it as best I can.  It begs the question of why I play it at all, which turns out to be perfectly apropos to this topic. 

Simply put, it’s a challenge!  Can I get a great score and sound cool?  Some songs work great for me, and some songs are horribly unforgiving, score-wise, when I attempt to inject some style and tone.  I’ve started recording myself when singing a wide variety of songs both in- and out-of-game, and in many cases I’m amazed at the dull flat drowning-cat noises that have won me perfect scores in certain songs.

But WHY is it a challenge to sound good AND score good?  From this point on I have pasted what I posted in the Rock Band forum.

This topic is essentially all about what makes a “good singer”. As intuitive creatures we have a sense of what’s attractive and beautiful (“good singing”) versus what is robotic and off-putting (“monotone singing”).

So, what makes someone a “good singer” as opposed to someone who simply sings the pitches required to get good scores in a karaoke game but somehow manages to sound like a dying cat? 

Here are my thoughts on this, in a somewhat-but-not-completely organized fashion.

I actually don’t think this is a hard problem. Obviously songs consist of logically arranged melodies (and that’s a huge topic, so I won’t get into it). But they also consist of “challenges” to what we expect to happen — twists in the plot, so to speak.

In terms of singing, those challenges come in the form of unexpected tiny delays, choosing thirds instead of fifths for the second time through a melody, using slides to get from one note to the next, and injecting spots of emotion into words that may affect the pitch slightly (even throw it “off”). Some of these things are captured in the Rock Band charting, but if they don’t “come from” the person singing them, they sound just as robotic as any other parts. (Sorry to be so imprecise, but we’re talking Aesthetics here.)

Good singing is pretty much characterized by flaws, because humans are flawed beings, and hearing someone perform “perfectly on-pitch” throughout an entire song feels alien to us. We call that singer robotic and monotone, whereas we call someone like Eddie Vedder an amazing vocalist even though he never sings his songs the same way twice (and arguably he cannot). And why should he? He should challenge our expectations and inject slightly different emotions to stay interesting (which he does) — not recite the melody like a playback machine.

My other main observation is that when you’re singing for the joy of singing and/or to produce something aesthetically pleasing, you are necessarily producing sounds that sound completely different from the vocalizations that occur when you are staring a screen with your thoughts bound up in the effort of getting that little arrow to match with that line. Just an attitudinal thing.
In other words, my opinion is that singing for the purposes of FCing songs in this game produces vocalization that is the antithesis of what our brains want to process as aesthetically pleasing.

Tangentially, I would love to see more original singers of songs in Rock Band playing their songs in the game.

Just to wrap up, clearly it’s possible to sound really good AND appease the game algorithms enough to get 100%. I’m just providing explanations as to why (it seems) these conditions only rarely coincide.

–Naomi

* platinum RB2 vocals
* trained choral singer
* real-life rock band vocalist

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, brain, rock band, singing, theory

It’s no secret that I was a single-issue voter this year, and that issue was "Are You a Tech Noob or Not".  I’m pleased that our new president is Not.

I listened to our new president’s inaugural address delivered live via radio as I walked the 2 miles to my dentist appointment today.  It quite honestly brought tears to my eyes.

Obama is a great orator, and I heard echoes of other great speakers such as JFK and Bill Clinton in his style.  He obviously has great writing ability and/or the help of some excellent writers, too.

His speech was criticized as "lacking in poetry", especially in comparison to his campaign speeches.

But statements like, "We will restore science to its rightful place" — totally bold-faced and lacking in metaphor — are, to me, the gold nuggets, the true virtues of our new leader shown off in uncomplicated prose.  Interpretation: we as a nation WERE great in science and technology, UNTIL [implication regarding former administration], but NOW…

Now.  I have so much hope.

This is a new thing for me, being psychically and emotionally involved in politics.  Leave it to crappy leadership to inspire revolutions of the mind; I have to wonder what sort of mediocrity we might be stuck with for the next 4 years, had George W. Bush’s regime been merely lame rather than truly awful.