I haven’t posted anything for a while. Partly because I have been busy and also because I have been slacking on quite a lot of things.

The semester has ended like a month ago, this means I’ll start writing my dissertation in the coming academic year.  For the first time in my university career, I received a GPA of 4, which is great news. Also, I started to take intensive French courses from the summer school but I think I have made a mistake, as I don’t have much energy left to study at home after 5 hours of French everyday.  And the other stuff that I have to do and the hot weather doesn’t really help. C’est difficile!

Other than that, I quit smoking last Saturday. So, it has been a week. I have handled it quite well with few nicotine deficiency attacks (or whatever they are called), and I’m pretty well at the moment.

Anyway, off to studying French now so that I can go out tonight.

My room is a mess. I’ve found a small screwdriver somewhere near my desktop computer, and I put it between the pages of A Thousand Plateaus.

It was only after I put the screwdriver, I realized the significance. I shouldn’t do think of significances though.

• BIGGEST DRAWING IN THE WORLD
  (tags: visualization gps drawing interesting art)

• THE SOUND OF EBAY - UBERMORGEN.COM - GENERATIVE MUSIC - DOWNLOAD SONGS - SEE VISUALS
  (tags: ebay music sound art generative)
• Free Online text to speech (TTS) converter SpokenText
  (tags: podcast mp3 ipod)
• 20 Unusually Brilliant Bookcase and Bookshelf Designs: Creative, Modular and Unique Furniture | WebUrbanist
  (tags: design interesting storage)

No, not the Weird Al Yankovic song. Some folks have made a generative music project called Sound of Ebay.

Whatever algorithm they are using and however they are doing this, the idea is very interesting indeed. The project basically fetches the information on your Ebay account to generate music.
Anyway, listen to my Ebay account’s music here:
[SEE POST TO LISTEN TO AUDIO]

A relatively similar project made using Lily and recorded into a video titled “Finally found a use for the NY times” can be viewed at Vimeo. This project basically turns the data available on the web page into music. Apparently Lily has other uses as well but I am too lazy to read the pages.

• Hitler Video Remix Meme Über Alles | Laughing Squid
  (tags: video hitler)
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  (tags: funny SecondLife video)
• ASUS wants you to know that women and children are strong enough for an Eee PC - Engadget
  (tags: eec funny gender)
• YouTube’u yetki belgesi kurtaracak
  youtube plans to open an office in turkey. it is said that with the help of this, they won’t be getting banned from now on
  (tags: youtube censorship)

• Sinematik: Yeşilçamdaki yardımcı Kötüler : Anket için tanıtım
  the evil in turkish cinema
  (tags: turkish cinema)

• information aesthetics - data visualization & visual design
  information aesthetics, data visualization
  (tags: visualization data art)
• The Monstrous Feminine in Literature and Art
  (tags: literature feminism art monstrous gender reference body)

Last night, while I was in bed, I remembered this short story titled “Scene” from the collection Suburban Sketches by William Dean Howells. I am not really a fan of realist writing but for some reason I had the imagery of this little short story in my mind, for some reason. I don’t do this and I actually try not to associate words with images - can images ever substitute words? Anyway, this collection of short stories depict the suburban life of people in Old Charlesbridge, and “Scene” is about a young women who drowns herself. She is found dead by the community, who are pretty curious to see what had happened. One of the townspeople says “It was the best thing she cuold do,” creating a story in his mind. The narrator responds: “Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to patching himself up a romantic story for the suicide, after the pitiful fashion of this fiction-ridden age, when we must relate everything we see to something we have read. He was the less to blame for it, because he could not help it; but certainly he is not to be praised for his associations with the tragic fact brought to his notice.”

Anyway, after this brief introduction, I’d like to quote what I really like about this piece:

The vehicle was a grocer’s cart which had perhaps been pressed into the service; and inevitably the contributor thought of Zenobia, and of Miles Coverdale’s belief that if she could have foreboded all the post-mortem ugliness and grotesqueness of suicide, she never would have drowned herself. This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas of the effect that her death was to make, her conviction that it was to wring one heart, at least, and to strike awe and pity to every other; and her woman’s soul must have been shocked from death could she have known in what a ghastly comedy the body she put off was to play a part.

In the bottom of the cart lay something long and straight and terrible, covered with a red shawl that drooped over the end of the wagon; and on this thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had delivered their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee and tea. As the cart jolted through their lines, the boys could no longer be restrained; they broke out with wild yells, and danced madly about it, while the red shawl hanging from the rigid feet nodded to their frantic mirth; and the sun dropped its light through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded date.

Isn’t this harsh? And beautifully written? It’s a little “things won’t work that way.”  And some attack on pathetic fallacy and romanticism of course - realist authors use pathetic fallacy too but apparently Howells is more close to the naturalist side - the sun is indifferent to the death of the young woman, who is carried in a grocer’s cart, face grotesque and has the ugliness of death - it doesn’t work like that you know - you don’t have the sad and sentimentalist attitude towards death.  And, why would the sun care anyway? Does anyone care?

sarapci and cahil peri, you are memed.  Write about and quote from a short story, poem or novel (plays? ok…) that you like or find interesting or perplexing or whatever.  Leave a trackback here, then meme two other people - two, because three is overused.

• Power Tool Drag Races 2008 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  bondage barbie :)
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• Sichuan Earthquake: Sichuan Quake Shakes Up Chinese Censorship Policy
  censorship, earthquake and citizenmedia in china
  (tags: china internet censorship)
• antisocial_notworking
  (tags: networking hacktivism Web2.0 art)
• YouTomb
  videos removed for copyright complaint
  (tags: youtube video copyright censorship internet)
• Finally found a use for the NY Times on Vimeo
  web site data into sound
  (tags: video music lily)
• Lily: Demo Archives
  (tags: programming visual visualization)
• The Get Out Clause, Manchester’s stars of CCTV cameras - Telegraph
  music video made from surveillance camera recordings. there has been many plays performed in front of surveillance cameras, but i guess this is the first of its kind.
  (tags: surveillance music video)