07/04 A critical review of 8 days of anarchy
I have ambivalence about blogging events that I have had a direct hand in organizing. Partially this is because I prefer hearing other people's perspectives on these things, especially when they are big things, and partially I have a little bit of trepidation about creating a reality distortion field where my own high hopes are writ large and return to me as echoes. Since I've heard so little outside of the comments of a small group of (non)organizers and (anti)participants I guess I'll at least make a few comments about this years 8 days of anarchy.If you are not familiar with 8 days of anarchy I'll give you a little bit of back story. After the SF Anarchist Bookfair went on for a couple of years and was generally seen as a success by everyone involved it was natural for other events to pop up over the weekend of the Bookfair. The first of these (to my recollection) was the Anarchist Cafe Night that was thrown by a group of people loosely connected to the Martin de Porres House of Hospitality (Catholic Workers). This event can best be described as leftist chaos. It's a benefit (usually for some acronym laden group doing vaguely-defined-but-generally-accepted-to-be good work), it is a meal (of what can best be described as mass-produced vegan food units), it's a dance party (imagine many young sweaty bodies dancing to the hits of five years ago), and it's a performance space(read: spoken word poetry) all in one. At the very least it is a spectacle and for people who are turned on by such things it's great but it really isn't for me. Perhaps one quarter of it would be for me but I don't need to pressed together with hundreds of my closest frenemies to be annoyed, entertained, "fed", and shouted at.
03/03 do you vi?
I was confronted recently with the task of having to find a free (as in cost) day-to-day editor for Windows and was quite frustrated with the options. It is a pet peeve of mine (re: Windows) to have to use the fucking mouse.This is one of the reasons that I have moved my primary workstation to Linux (and been happy with the result), but I often suffer under constraints that are not my own so here we are. Windows, text editor, free. There are quite a few options out there for this sort of thing that are basically VB (or is that V#) wrappers around Notepad but that is exactly what I don't want. Notepad is epic fail.
I want simple but not stupid. In the end I started using a Windows version of vi and while it was ok, it was not quite right (for instance it defaulted to non-shortcut mode where you had to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around)... So here I am typing everything in a terminal window in vi. C'est le vie
13/02 Staring into mirrors
The next chapter of my life looks to be a boring one. It reminds me that there are times to be "out" in the world and other times where it makes sense to chop wood, plant your wiigiwaam, and prepare for a kind of winter. The past few years I have been lucky enough to be able to wander around and spend time with good people, sow some provocation and harvest no small amount of good will. For a time I need to bunker down and heal.I am not sure this is actually going to happen but I am going to try to work on writing more consistently. To write you must write and I rarely make time for it. More often I wait until a deadline approaches and in the heightened state of mind that I gain through deadline awareness gargle something out. This works for many things but not the things I'd like to be working on.
