Pinchy: Scourge of the Fauborg Saint-Germain - II

 Argh! I've been an absentee with crap going on and such, I'm doing a bad job of maintaining this blog the way I thought I would be able to :\.

So a few things. 3DS lineup woooooo~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dh8tu0mrEk&feature=player_embedded

Kudos to Capcom for 3rd party support. We'll see how long it lasts. Oh who am I kidding, it will still print money. I hope the wireless support is good, I'll want to get my Mercenaries on with friends.

Has anyone been watching the TV lately? There's a Bank of America ad on that I swear uses some light version of Fat Old Sun in the Sky. God damn it BoA, first you take Fleet Bank away, then Jack Bauer, and now Syd Barrett (and somehow managed to to crash the economy into the ground along the way. Read The Big Short for details). Roger Waters is playing in Boston tomorrow night, sort of want but I've got no one to go with and no place to stay and I sure as shit am not going to try and find parking. Maybe if the T ran at sensible hours on weekdays we wouldn't have this problem :( . Also I'm poor [/bitching].

Touhoufriend aside, skip if you so desire. I tried Shoot the Bullet a long time ago, but seriously tried to get into it last year. I fucking sucked at it (KEEEEEIIINNNNEEE!!!!) and gave up halfway through very disappointed in myself. I started playing Double Spoiler after avoiding it all this time this afternoon a little wary but liking it a lot more. On the final scenario of Level 4 atm.


For those of you who did not understand the above paragraph, imagine Pokemon Snap, now imagine instead of pokemon there are level 20 wizard lolis trying to kill you. Fuck yeah.


Oh yeah and how could I forget until now, fucking Berserk animu, fuck year!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsrdpq9A2tk

Oh man I hope the duel in the snow means they're going to start there and fix that whole arc with Wyld and the assassins and just keep going until Idolm@ster Boat. Maybe by then Miura will have done something with it.

More serious stuff tomorrow, I'll try. Now if you'll excuse me, having a cup of coffee and getting ready for SVU premiere/new L&O premiere. excited_link.jpg.

Pinchy: Scourge of the Fauborg Saint-Germain - I

Astute folks will no doubt see where this is eventually leading. 

I had a bunch of crap today and may not get to important posts tomorrow either but for now I'll just share an update on the whole The Social Network dealy from an article I read in the Globe this morning (note it'll only be free for a week or so unless you're going to a super cool bro college in Boston and have a free subscription): http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/09/26/aaron_sorkin_reaches_out_to_web_surfers_and_sources_to_fill_in_the_blanks_of_the_social_network/

The bits about anonymity, the "dark Internet spirit", smacks of someone who no doubt has run across certain imageboards of ill repute that reject the notion of facebook. Also it's so fucking true about people adopting artificial personae and attaching artificial importance to their actually meaningless lives. At some point I'll try to track down Jon Stewart's interview of Arianna Huffington where he tears apart blogging and facebooking and tweeting as tools in the gradual dumbing down of American society. There's also a piece out there somewhere about how PowerPoint caused the Iraq War by appealing to the dumbest parts of those responsible. Ugh, that's a lot of work though.


I started reading Against the Day last night, so don't be surprised if I suddenly start gushing like a fangirl at some point for Thomas Pynchon. I try to hold it in. I really do.


Seriously you guys :| .

Foundation - II

Let me just get it out of the way. I really would have like to start with Proust as the historical foundation for this blog. Unfortunately, he's not really responsible for the namesake, nor was he the first of his kind. He will be in here soon though, forever searching the Champs-Élysées for Gerard's lobster.

Isaac Casaubon was a French scholar who live in late 16th and early 17th century. A Huguenot by birth, Casaubon struggled all his life beset by Calvinists, Protestants, Catholics, and Anglicans to try and advance the knowledge of western Europe. A model of religious tolerance in his day, he traveled between Switzerland, France, and finally England afraid of violence simply for the way he was brought up. While his specific accomplishments are important, he was perhaps the last man to be considered the most learned man in the entire world. Now, this is an awful Euro-centric view. Civilizations in Asia and the Middle East certainly had their share of scholars during the Renaissance, but none searched among their number to find a Most Intelligent Man in the World. When Casaubon died, western Europe was on the cusp of the age of the Rosicrucians, the rebirth of the Cult of Isis from the ashes of ancient Rome, the murders of Elizabeth Bathory, and obsession with the Terra Icognita that would last until this very day.


Do we have a smartest man alive today? Some would certainly say Stephen Hawking. But does Stephen Hawking know everything about everything? Perhaps the scope of what can be considered knowledge has expanded so far that no one man can know it. Either way, Casaubon struck his own blow against superstition and mysticism before his death by compiling evidence proving that the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of texts by Hermes Trismegistus that were supposed to reveal ancient truths from the time of Moses, was written sometime in the 3rd century A.D. While not everyone believed him, his efforts to promote rationalism in the face of both religious intolerance and the search for (not always true) esoteric knowledge. Pretty cool guy, eh fights the superstition and doesnt afraid of anything.

Casaubon is probably the most relevant to people today by virtue of sharing the same name as the narrator in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum. There too Eco's character seeks to overturn the tide of new age craziness and Denver International Airport plots of the modern day. Rather than the Corpus Hermeticum, the characters of the novel also handle the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, piecing together historical evidence that it was written by agents of the Russian Czar rather than an ancient cabal of Rabbis. The whole book in general is a great web of conspiracies and historical urban myths, really.

Either way, Casaubon and the Corpus as a whole are two of my personal touchstones for how knowledge can turn back the tides of ignorance, and how history can change the present, and vice versa.

Foundation - I

The basic format, that I'm sure I'll break often is to throw in a few musings for the day and later, if I'm feeling like it, post a little bit about my thoughts and the sources thereof.

It's interesting how acceptable the sort of offensive irony you see on certain image boards of ill repute are becoming more and more acceptable. Case in point, this story from HuffPo:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/24/al-qaeda-twitter_n_738150.html

There's been an ongoing debate from Charlie Chaplin all the way up to the "Hitler Meme" (which most of us know better as the "Downfall Meme", but, eh, the media goes for simplicity) about whether or not it's okay to treat Hitler and, subsequently, the Holocaust with humor. Comparatively, it seems like with the more rapid spread of information, being funny with Al Qaeda seems much more acceptable.

My feelings on Facebook are mixed. My account is "deleted" but can always be reactivated with a simple entry of my password. I read this article from the LA Times this morning about the upcoming Sorkin/Fincher joint about Mark Zuckerberg: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/24/business/la-fi-zuckerberg-20100924 

I wonder how much this will indirectly benefit Facebook. Do you think they've hit a peak and can only go down from here? I love Dave Fincher, I'm the only person I know who'll defend Alien3, so I feel like I can't avoid this movie. Maybe it'll make more people wake up and smell the coffee about identity overexposure in our modern age. There are plenty of great articles leading up to it about how, "We're the most responsible for identity overexposure and Facebook addiction.", like this is really news.

Greetings Interwebs!

A simple word, interwebs. It seems like not that long ago, in black '04, that I first accepted the fact that internet culture was important, had some place as not just an inside joke for my generation, but as a creative force that would affect the entire world. It's also when I eschewed my blogs, Facebook, forums resplendent with dozens of banners and a several meg animated dancing cat girl avatar. Six years later I would hear Jon Stewart address this word to King Abdullah II of Jordan, and think to myself, What happened?

The purpose of this blog, my first since that year in which I finished high school, is to try and chronicle both the soaring development and gradual crumbling of our civilization. This will not be an easy task, I will inevitably be sidetracked by cats or garlic or something, but, I shall try.

This blog is a place for people of all interests, religions, schools of thought, and varying degrees of hipsterism, nerdiness, or weaboocity. Everything can be connected to something else, this I firmly believe and will endeavor to show.

For now though, I hope at the end of it all I can have the same attitude as our greatest worst American, Gore Vidal.