Let's Hack Reality

One phrase really stuck out for me in this week’s reading. Mr. Amerika (is that his real name?) said something about the writing on the net and its “opportunity to hack reality”. Hmmm…

I suppose there are many instances of internet stuff where the simulation becomes more real than the real – like paying real money to acquire WoW stuff, or feeling more at home in your game (whatever game it might be) than in the “real” world.
Baudrillard would have a field day!

Reflection

I found it really hard to come up with something for the hyperlink exercise because I wanted the links to be an integral part of the writing, instead of optional extras. This way, the reader has to click on the link if they want to keep reading the text. The writing itself is unlikely to get any creativity awards, but I was concentrating on the links instead. It would be fun to do a really big one of these, if you had the time and the inclination. It would be even easier if I could set up a web page, instead of creating a new blog for each choice, but this was too technical for me. At one stage I did wonder if I ought to feel guilty for having so many blogs, but I guess this is an old fashioned point of view. Like when your Mum doesn’t want to ring on a mobile because it will use up all the credit, even though you have a plan anyway :)

Choose Your Own Adventure

The day starts like any other. You wake up, eat breakfast, kiss your Mum goodbye and head to uni. Your brother sometimes drives you to uni in his van, but this morning he is still out delivering newspapers. So you walk. As you are walking down your street you notice an old suitcase on the ground. It looks strangely familiar, like something you would've owned as a kid, or like a generic suticase you would've seen on a TV show at some point. You open it up and are amazed to find it's full of money!! You've never seen this much money before and you are unsure what to do.
You know you should probably hand it in to the police
though part of you is tempted to keep it. After all, you found it.

Hey!

zsx6y7,l. op0 yhg4e3 "Hey! Off the keyboard, cat!!"


Discovery #3 - Pets cannot type.

I wonder whether a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years really would produce the works of shakespeare. Methinks not.

Who Am I?

My task for today was to find out this: Who Am I?

To answer it I did what I always do first when I need an answer… Google has about 134,000,000 answers, while Wikipedia only had one which seemed to be about a film with Jackie Chan in. I’m pretty sure I’m not a film and I’m quite sure I’ve never had Jackie Chan in.

My next thought was that I could somehow correlate the answers from every magazine and Facebook quiz I have ever done and come up with an identity. So I did “Are you hard work or just high maintenance?” off the Cleo website, then “how vein are you?” and then “what type of drink are you?” and “which planeteer are you?” in Facebook. Apparently I’m “Linka, the moderately vein beer who is not quite high maintenance”. Not quite what I was hoping for.

Correlating quiz answers isn’t working for me – I’ve decided to choose my own answers. I figure labels are never going to be able to describe a person completely, and I figure that identity is never stable anyway.

Quote: “You cannot step into the same river twice. When I step into the river for the second time, neither I nor the river are the same.

Also: “People are like teabags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.”

As well: “Eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines”

The quote about stepping in the river shows that each new experience changes you a bit, and that you can’t un-experience or non-experience something. If our identity is the sum of our experiences, then it is always changing, adapting, shifting.

The quote about teabags shows that we probably don’t know ourselves and our identity completely anyway. Who can say how they would react for certain in an extreme situation, and who knows how that situation would change them.

The quote about eagles really just illustrates that sometimes it’s good not to fly.

Writing on the Internet

Discovery #2 – Writing on the Internet

They’re is no spill chequer on this html composer ting. I have discofered that I have comme to relie on the spell chicken in Wurd.

Reading on the Internet

Discovery #1 - Reading on the Internet

Reading on the internet is completely different to reading a book. I very rarely read blocks of text off a webpage. Instead, I find that my eyes are somehow drawn to the more interesting or appealing looking text. When I read a web page, my eyes will scan the screen quickly and located what seems to be the more important text – the words that are highlighted or bold. It seems only logical that my eyes – and therefore my brain – are drawn to these more appealing words in the same way that moths are attracted to a flame at night time. I suppose that because writing on the internet offers so many interesting ways to emphasis certain words, so many more options with regards to making the text and the reading experience more exciting and eye-catching (what an appropriate phrase!) that I come to expect writing on the internet to play with the text a bit and make the important ideas stand out.

Thoughts on Suburbs

I once read a book, I’m not sure what it was called, and in this book the main character is walking down the streets of some suburb or other in the day time. And this character says something like, “during the day, you can feel souls rotting in the suburbs.” I’m not sure exactly what the quote was, or even what the rest of the book was about, but that quote really stuck in my mind.

I think about it a lot, especially when I find myself walking in my suburb in the daytime, which I do almost everyday.

There are a few reasons for this

I am a uni student

I work at night time

I own a dog which is half a kelpie (which half? ha ha ha) and needs to be taken out everyday

So anyway, I walk down the streets and see noone, and when even when I get to the dog park I am normally the only one there. If I do see other people they easily fit the daytime demographic - old people or Mum’s with young kids. I think that it must be pretty soul-rotting to be a Mum-with-young-kids living in the suburbs in the daytime, after all - noone actually LIVES in the suburbs in the daytime. The word that I think of when I walk my dog is lifelessness.

Weekends are a different story