Built like an angel, six feet tall.

[reddragdiva]

• WANT!

• Driving with Salvia.

• Educational experience of the year.

• Literary criticism is snake oil because it's alchemy chasing its tail. It needs to develop into chemistry.

Thursday we had a visit from a_carnal_mink and kits_the_dm, on their world tour. Dom and arkady had an animated discussion of the skills learnt as trained killers and killer trainers. (Is it wrong to sort of hope for a breakin so you can set your girlfriend on them?)

For Father's Day, I got cake! A ginger cake and a very sugary vanilla "coffee" cake. secretlondon came over to test data transfer efficiency between 500GB USB hard disks.

I have found my MP3 player after Freda lost it, being the miniature evil genius she is. I am most pleased to discover that it plays Oggs (despite this not being mentioned in the manual or on the box — if I want to hack firmware I could get it playing AAC as well) and I also successfully repaired said unrepairable throwaway device when the headphone socket broke away from the circuit board. Fixing the disposable is just the thing for that warm hacky glow.

I am very pleased with the new Rocknerd. I'm managing a story a day so far, though CONTRIBUTIONS ARE MOST WELCOME. The category icons and submitting stories now work as well. All I need now is how to make the header display the logo instead of the WordPress Kubrick theme default. (And damn getting stuff out of Slash is gonna be evil.)

Comments

[snowspinner.livejournal.com]

Literary criticism seems to me less comparable to alchemy than to, well, literature. That is, I don't think literary criticism is particularly useful if it's about coming up with solid truths, especially since I don't think literature is really about solid truths. I mean, Macbeth is not a fable about the morality of murder. What's interesting about Macbeth is that, actually, the issues are hard to resolve and resist easy summaries.

Good literary criticism doesn't provide clear answers - it provides interesting and useful confusions - things that require more thought and complexity.

As for alchemy, yes, alchemy got it right when it became chemistry and embraced falsifiability. But it also hit its stride when it became chaos magic and threw away the idea of measurable effects on the real world. Both approaches work.

[reddragdiva]

Next question: the value of rock criticism in a world where music doesn't cost money or effort.

[snowspinner.livejournal.com]

Seems to me similar to the value of masturbation for the captain of the football team.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Sorting.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

I need to get back on the creato-wagon. Will be sending you articles forthwith. Local Melb live reviews ok, as well as album and/or film ones? General stories if music relevant?

[reddragdiva]

Yes, yes, yes and YES please!

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Seen a few live acts lately and have the lad's new album to push (hah, ulterior motive ahoy! ;)) so yeah, I should be able to ping some shiz at you soon :)

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Just came back a while ago from dinner with a_carnal_mink and kits_the_dm. :)

[gths.livejournal.com]

With Wordpress it shouldn't be too hard to look for header.php in the template and find where it outputs the title and substitute the logo.

You can un-Kubrick the look by messing around with the style sheet a bit.

It's all piss-easy!

[reddragdiva]

Oh yeah, I could mess it around :-)

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Initially the idea of making lit crit more scientific made me worry a bit that he wanted it to end up like academic musicology, full of sound theoretical ideas about how to make art that is fascinating in theory but often well night unlistenable in practice. But literary theory that had a conception of the human mind that actually took in psychology and anthropology and cognitive science, and occasionally chose to test its assertions scientifically , might actually be interesting, and have the effect of grounding out the fields more masturbatory flights of theory.
And at least get the last few remaining believers in Freudian psychoanalysis run out of the field with horsewhips, should any remain.

[mr-e-cat.livejournal.com]

apra music awards have just been done
silverchair is again ruining australian music

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Literary criticism is about new ways to look at things. Well, the good stuff is. Plenty of the rest is circle-jerking.

That article seems to be suggesting switching to bean-counting instead. Statistical analysis and stylometry aren't bad tools, but they're not the sort of thing that should drive criticism.

[vatine]

Doesn't look much more evil to do a once-only extraction from the slashdb than what I had to perpetrate to merge the database from a somewhat unfortunate vBulletin installation (hosted on, in sequence, A, then B, then A (server crashes, essentially, B being a "hot spare" that met an unfortunate end of serviceable life). That meant up until the first A/B transtition, the DB was in sync, then there was a chunk of users and posts created on B, then no sync-up on the failback to A.

That was... not entirely nice. Not entirely nice, at all, in fact. At least I only needed to faff around with the SQL data and play mix-and-match with the data.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Help Wanted: Haters (http://also-huey.livejournal.com/192064.html)