the pipe is leaking
Thinking about the arts today.
I just rewatched Hertzfeldt's EVERYTHING WILL BE OK for the first time in a few years (not certain how long, but I know I first saw it in 2015-6 and have only watched it a couple times). I know I've found it impactful in the past, but I viscerally get it a lot more now than I did four years ago. Like, I'm a little floored. It's a very visceral depiction of psychosis and chronic illness, and beyond that is just incredibly pretty. (The backing music is well-picked: Vivaldi, and excerpts of Les Pecheurs de Perles, including "Au fond du temple saint," which I still play back in my head sometimes.)
I also remembered that it's the first of three parts, and that the other two are on Netflix (or at least were five years ago--thank you, Youtube commenter). Annoyingly there are torrents for the latter parts, but neither has seeds, and I don't have access to Netflix. I could find the DVD(s) if I really really wanted to... someday. I do really hope I'll remember to come back to it.
Not the same kinda thing exactly, but I'm also thinking of the music video for "Profane Bong Sue" by Odd Nosdam.
Didn't do much today. I was up 'til 05:30 doing not a lot, and I think it was 2:30pm by the time I actually got up.
Below the break: the death of FLOSS, and righteous indignation.
I got a chance to read boringcactus' "Post-Open Source," and it was really fucking good. I have no critique of it yet (I gotta reread it once or twice) but I think it's a good breakdown of the parallel failings of the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement, using, among other things, a framework built on the labor theory of value. The latter half is a roundup of a few of the post-open source camps that have arisen in the last 10 or so years, which she explains a lot better than I can summarize. The whole thing is recommended reading.
Yesterday I wound up chatting briefly with someone in #volatile who was a philosophy major or something like that, and had read Capitalism and Schizophrenia at one point. We talked a bit about poststructuralism, but mostly about how the barrier to entry for postmodern and contemporary phil is generally a lot higher than the works of a hundred or two years ago (he specifically mentioned Hobbes). There was also a comment about how "angry" postmodern phil is, and what I wanted to say, but didn't, is that this is just a civility trap constructed to defang postmodernism, and of course they're angry, they're confronting the obvious and catastrophic contradictions of capitalism. I think that's part of where the "inaccessibility" comes from, and it's something Deleuze talks about explicitly: like many other social constructions, arborescent models of knowledge/being are a cop inside one's brain that's very hard to kill, and confronting those cops can be quite painful. (Psychoanalysts have a term/framework for it that I don't remember the details of, not transference exactly but it's in that ballpark, and I think it relates to that.)
As a very vague corollary to the aforementioned: I've been poking around at the corpse of the FLOSS controversy over Codes of Conduct, and specifically some of the conversations Coraline Ada involved herself in a couple years ago (specifically thinking of the issue she started on the Opal github about one of their core contributors, emil I think, being a shitstain). Cat and I somewhat disagreed over what to think about it. For what it's worth: neither of us thinks her CCCoC is perfect, but I, at least, think its existence and use is a net positive. Cat says her behavior (in the broadest sense) was neither tactically nor strategically sound, and that she was inadvertently contributing to the spectre of the radical anti-freezepeach SJW moid. As much as I wanna call this victim-blaming, I think she's essentially right. That said, I also believe that even if Ada and others had hobbled themselves by complying to civility, they would have fallen under equally vicious attack, the same slurs and false-equivalencies would have been slung, and fundamentally the same battle would have been fought. So in all honesty, I don't think it's productive to pick apart any of their poor tactics in the face of project contributors who think of them as subhuman and want them dead. You'd be flaming pissed, too.
(None of that last paragraph should be news to anyone, it's just something that's been on my mind.)
Tags: personal, philosophy-and-english