Day T minus 31: That thing about my hair
Someone asked for me to explain that thing about my hair. Ok, self-gazing time! Have o cup of tea, let’s reminisce…
Day T minus 39: This Far East so much read of, so long dreamed of, yet, as the eyes bear witness, heretofore all unknown
Everyone knows of the Tragedy of the Otaku. It goes like this. Nerdy McNerd is unpopular in school. He doesn’t know it, but some of his people elsewhere are fated to discover fantasy, or sci-fi, or RPG games, and take refuge in them; but Nerdy, by chance, discovers Japanese pop culture instead. It speaks to him. It takes him to worlds where everyone has true friends; the bookworm and the jock, weird people who speak in outrageous ways, samurai who fail to bathe, black people and gay people, aliens and robots and Frankenstein experiments gone wrong—no matter how abnormal and flawed they are, everyone can drink from the same oasis of camaderie; in these worlds, all you gotta do is to work hard and sincerely (, and you’ll have the support of comrades and together achieve success.
So Nerdy, dreamily, starts calling himself Nerudo Otakumoto, buys anything with an anime character painted on it, majors in Japanese, and eventually goes to Japan.
Ungamify reddit (a bit)
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Find out how to set custom CSS on your browser. There are extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and I think all modern browsers have this feature.
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Edit the CSS for reddit.com, adding a rule like this:
.score, .karma, .userkarma, .rank, .upvotes, .downvotes { display: none; }
Here’s how it will look like:
Jottings
I find it baffling that research and teaching are bundled in the same profession. So much of what’s wrong with academia seems to come from forcing researchers who just want to research to deal with undergrads (and this is even worse for the undergrads).
But I’m still attracted to teaching, not out of altruism but because I seem to learn better when I try to teach (so the students are just excuses or foils). I wonder if this weird bundling of research to teaching started as a way of exploing this cognitive mind hack.
One curious thing about child behavior is the need to share knowledge. Sei Shōnagon writes of the toddler who, finding a speck of dirt, just has to show it to adults. I’m always impressed at their pride & enthusiasm when they to this. Whenever I tell the kids some bit of trivia, and even more so when they themselves find something, they have to run and tell it to Mom & their sibling, or they get restless. Of course, children just do what we do, & the same social-animal need still burns in adults. Pratchett once described this energy as the peculiar electricity of someone who has just finished a very interesting book, and now have to talk about it; I wonder if this energy might explain some of the efficacy of learn-by-teaching.
Kinds of logic:
Inveja de Shigesato Itoi
(English translation pending)
O Felipe me convidou a colaborar com a revista livre que estava organizando, a Rosa. Abaixo, minha resposta.
Dae,
Antes eu tinha dito que sua proposta de ajudar com uma revista/fanzine/ezine era tentadora, mas devido ao tipo de vida que ando levando, tinha medo de não conseguir manter os compromissos. Também me comprometi a dar uma resposta decente depois. Passaram-se dois meses; esta é a resposta decente. Pra começar, gostaria de falar de Shigesato Itoi, sobre quem eu estava pesquisando precisamente no dia em que você fez a pergunta.
The future of this blog, or: Why Tumblr is the Worst Thing that Ever Happened to the Internet, or: Down with the Inverted Pyramid, or: The best defense against Dark Psychology is Antisocial Networking
From September to December 2012, I had a tumblr.
It’s no use preaching to the choir, & I figure everyone already knows what’s wrong with the Social Web. The Last Psychiatrist: “The problem is the cycle of wanting outsiders to tell you who you are”.
Ovid’s Narcissus:
Credule, quid frusta simulacra fugacia captas?
quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes.
Ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est:
nil habet ista sui; tecum venitque manetque,
tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis.