Archive | Thoughts & Musings RSS feed for this section

Concepts Of Self In Different Cultures.

Posted on February 23, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

In traditional Haitian culture, there is no direct equivalent of the mind. The self is made up of a three components. The corps cadavre is the physical body; the ti-bon anj or ‘little good angel’ loosely represents what we would consider as agency, awareness and memory; while the gwo bon anj or the ‘big good angel’ is the animating principle that manages motivation and movement.

“The mind is a guess” via mindhack

Cultured Bias is in the oddest places.

I have to freely admit,  I’ve never thought about the fact that our body-mind dichtomy is actually a cultural artefact, I just took it as given. I mean, intellectually I knew that there must’ve been differences, but still… It’s very interesting to see how different the answers to the age old question of “what is self” actually is and that those answers greatly influence a culture.

I’ve covered the self-soul dichtomy1 in my worldbuilding for ToC, but I didn’t even think about questioning what definition of “self” the Trarr have.

Gotta fix that. Can’t let such a juicy bit of worldbuilding just laying around.

Anyway, “The mind is a guess” is a short column, but worth a read.

Footnotes:

  1. Trarr don’t believe in an incorruptable soul, but in an “ahma”, the echo their lives leave in the halls ↩
Permalink · Comments { 0 }

The saddest little kitty in Germany

Posted on February 9, 2012 in Random Photos? Yes Please!, Thoughts & Musings

20120209-202323.jpgThis is either the face of resignation or of annoyance, don’t know which.

Long story short… Nimitz is ill again. Those spots on his face? Open sores. A scratch got infected and the infection was spreading, apperantly that’s pretty common in cats and the treatment is easy… Antibiotica, twice daily, for at least two weeks.

…

Yeah.

Last time it only took him three days to figure out that cheese good, pills bad and how to eat one without the other, so I hat to fall back onto the cat-taco method. This time the vet gave me flavoured pills, and he seems to like them as much as his usual treats. Hope that keeps up, though, there’s still fourteen days to go.

All in all Nimitz is doing not too bad. I mean, he’s still a grumpy as hell – I’d be, too, with open sores in the face! – but he’s running around and throwing books off the shelves again, so he can’t be doing to badly.

In “unrelated” news, a weeks worth of my food budget has evapourated somehow, so I can see a lot of Ramen in my future.

Well, at least they’re tasty.

Permalink · Comments { 2 }

So, the internet can teach you things…

Posted on February 6, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

and not all of them are related to deviant sex-acts, kittens with captions and candy-coloured ponies.

Apperantly the art of choosing the framing, the pose, the body language and the expression of a comic character in order to communicate the relevant bits of story is called “acting”. Who knew?

There are books about it, but preciously few posts and stuff, and it’s such an important part – acting will make or break the beliviability of your story, afterall.

Permalink · Comments { 0 }

Most useful advice for dealing with abusive criticism I’ve ever read

Posted on February 3, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Maybe an unconstructive crit has a few constructive nuggets in it, and you worry you’ll miss out on those if you throw the whole thing out. Man, if it’s truly valid critique, other people will tell you the same thing without being assholes about it and you can listen to them instead.

I guess a metaphor would be, someone offers you a bucket of shit and says there’s a chunk of gold buried in the bottom. Dude, don’t go sifting through that bucket. For one thing, if it is gold, it isn’t worth it, especially when there are other people willing to give you a chunk of gold without feces all over it. More likely than not, you get to the bottom of that bucket and find out it was just bits of corn anyway.

By Megan Rosalarian on tumblr

She’s right, yoh!

Just because somebody is talking about your work, doesn’t mean they’re right. Most of them are blowing hot air eitherway, especially when it’s faceless people on the internet.

Permalink · Comments { 2 }

A thing to ponder… The future of computers.

Posted on January 11, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

 

Go check out the full article “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing” , it’s a pretty important read. If you agree or not, at least this is something we should think about.

In my case, it made me think about the fact that the future could look VERY different from what I expected as student. I always assumed people would end up having at least one, if not multiple general purpose computer in every home, which they can use freely how ever they intend.

But you know, it could be just happen in 10, 20 years that general purpose devices are actually either prohibited, severly regulated or just plain not accessible for Joe Schmoe and email, chat and stuff would happen about the government-approved (or, even more likely, COMPANY-approved – it’s not the governments that runs our world these days) applications/devices against which facebook  or the iPhone is the very model of free, unregulated, unfettered and individual information distribution.

And the majority of people (including me?) would be happy with this state, because, well, as long as it’s convient and doesn’t get into the future-angry-birds, why complain? I know I usually don’t give a flying fuck about consequences of gating, at least as long as my toy does what I bought it for and I can look at my cat pictures.

You know, I never thought about how fragile the internet actually is.

A book needs to be found to be burned; but in order to get rid of the internet you just need gain control the phonelines (including wlan), as the unrests in England and the arab spring have shown. The whole freely accessible internet thing might just be a bubble about to burst, something that will die and wither, just like the hippie movement.

Welp.

At least this gives me some nice ideas how the people in my science fiction stories handle things like this.

Permalink · Comments { 3 }