Bananablog

Thoughtfully Planned Communities

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:40:50 GMT

Today I got a little lost on the way home, and ended up walking through/around a place called The Domain. Added 45 minutes to my journey, but that's not the point. The Point is The Domain. It was a... development, a complex - a "mall" made up of a simulated "downtown" (sidewalks extending only between shops, of course); a restaurant district (upscale chains and CIT graduates, of course); low-rise apartment buildings (far too expensive for anyone who works there to live there, of course); supermarkets with tinted windows.. a true revolution in unaffordability.

This place was big. It existed big, and larger areas were still under construction (some of which I went through). It was a maze of sweltering roads and carparks, crawling with security and valets - because the whole place was valet parking only. Even if you lived there (though anyone who lives there deserves it). It being even slightly after 5 PM, the retail district was abandoned, as its employees had fled with what remained of their souls. There were jewellery stores, fashionable clothing stores, jewellery stores, neiman marcus, badcoffee shops, jewellery/clothing/shoe stores and bookshops so big that the tiny extent of their selection was a true marvel.

I didn't see a single shop selling anything that would be either useful or entertaining.

I was walking through this place, weary and morbidly fascinated by the clientele in their dress shirts and Wednesday shoes and valet-parked SUVs, and naturally I could hardly stop the contempt from boiling over. Sure, the smells coming from the several identical upscale-branded franchisee-owned grill restaurants were appealing, but something about the architecture superbly patterned to fit the Vision of The Domain and fit into its pseudo-olde streets and pseudo-arty lanes and pseudo-downtown ambience and pseudo-Austin creativity didn't appeal to me. They had slogans, actually, everywhere - "The Domain: North Austin". "The Domain: The continuation of Austin". I suspect Austinites disagree.

That was the frame of mind I was in when out the front, between the Expressway and the irrigated dusk-lit minimum-wage-maintained turf, I came across the rules sign. It reiterated the valet parking policy, that The Domain was private property, and that it was illegal to bring or possess blah blah truancy code dress policies.. which you would be expelled for not following, and which included the following:
"Antisocial appearance or clothing deemed gang-related are prohibited, and will be dealt with by private security."

I did see a black guy there, though, one out of the thousands. He was unloading a truck, round the back of Macy's.

everyone's an expert

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:49:07 GMT

Come on, listen to yourselves! "Oh, the Iranian election seems dodgy to me"?? You didn't know there was an election until a week ago. You don't know how the Iranian system of government works, the historical reasons behind it, or any of the positions of the candidates!

You - and I mean you - are completely uninformed. You're parroting what you hear in the media, which is itself an incestuous writhe of fifth-hand reporting from primary sources which literally consist of rumours and propaganda. For God's sake don't go and form a foreign policy opinion based on this and if you do then do NOT bloody vote it into power.

NABIADD

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:00:11 GMT

Thu, 28 May 2009 08:38:06 GMT

RIPLEY

Writer's Block: Space Wars

Wed, 20 May 2009 05:52:19 GMT

Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, Alien, 2001—there is a long list of movies and TV shows that take place in space. Which is your favorite?

View 501 Answers

Dark City is very good, Forbidden Planet, Dune; Starship Troopers is good except that everyone misinterprets it. I used to like 2001 but it seems kind of pathetic compared to Solaris, now that I've seen/read that.
in TV, Babylon 5 was ok, so was Star Trek: The Next Generation at times, Blake's Seven is a better version of it, and like the first half a season of the new Battlestar Galactica (which then proceeds to get worse and worse)

is this posting it to my journal or what. what the heck? oh well, read this if you like.

why is docky part of gnome-do?

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:23:41 GMT

they're both good pieces of software, but they just aren't related ;_;
they benefit from common functions for dynamic process and file discovery, but that's what libraries and system caches like Tracker are for. in terms of user interface, being integrated into each other hurts both (mostly Docky, which is the better of the two).

Sat, 16 May 2009 17:07:44 GMT

the telltale Wallace & Gromit games are fun :)

fair enough

Sun, 10 May 2009 01:57:02 GMT

what was ON tonight

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:25:09 GMT

I just caught the most amazing train, like: it wasn't a train it was a gropemobile. Fremantle to Perth, it was so retardedly full that literally everyone could not get on. At the station I got on there was LITERALLY not enough room for people to squeeze in, so we did anyway. Then it turned into a party. There was music, there was no dancing because you could only move your arms but there was shuffling, everyone was singing and happy, it was crazy, and when they opened the doors at Perth station we just Fell Out.

A MEMBER OF THE JUJU NATION, DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:45:10 GMT

I was asked in New York City,
do you like my clothes?

I'm talking to my tape recorder,
walking down the road.

But on-
Friday night I'm-
purified,
and my feet don't touch the floor
where the number meets the road, inbetween my toes.

Every day is fucking perfect,
it's a paradise!
Watch my life like it's a movie,
have to watch it twice!
A boy looks at a girl, and a girl looks like a pony..
she gallops all day long, inbetween my toes.

And:
Every night she's-
purified,
she don't do that dance no more.
Where the rubber meets the road: inbetween my toes.

For some reason I still get emails from the Rudd campaign

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:38:48 GMT

So I guess if anyone wants to read that essay there's so much controversy over, here's a mirror:
http://forthehor.de/files/rudd_feb09_monthly.pdf

It has some good points - the rejection of neoliberalism (or, I prefer to think, neoclassicalism) is very sound, and directly put in a way that reassures me. It feels nice to have a prime minister with this point of view during this time - compared to the opposition where last week, while losing her job as shadow treasurer, Julie Bishop gave a speech to a business club extolling Hayek and Murray "child slavery" Rothbard.

The essay is a bit shallow, though. Rudd describes social democracy as existing partly to resist leftism(!), saving capitalism from itself - he's right about the mechanics, but he doesn't venture why. It's also a pity how much of it is about America.. it makes sense, because America is at the heart of all of this and is the place where the worst of the worst was born, but it diminishes the relevance of the piece and, I think, has emboldened Turnbull in declaring him irrelevant. (It's also lead to bizarre claims like "socialism", and general imitations of U.S. Republicans, but I don't mind that because it's such a losing strategy for the Coalition!)

I like the strategy and future he lays out. He takes the demise of quasi-libertarian extremism for granted, and talks about how to combine social justice and social democracy. I think he idolises Keynes too much, though.. a few bits read like "told you so"s in the wrong way. In general, though, the internationalist economic programme he sets out is excellent given his ideological constraints.

The last section of the essay is just "fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you" to the Liberal Party over and over, so I can finally see why News Ltd. columnists have been so angry about it. My favourite line is actually a quote from Stiglitz - "the invisible hand appears invisible because it isn't there" - but the best part of Rudd's conclusion is when he describes his ideal: "a system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate."

charts

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:47:25 GMT

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=1233867600000&chddm=1160097&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI&ntsp=0

Now verb, at the first he verbed into a adjective lion, and thereafter into a snake, and a pard, and

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:00:34 GMT

Click this link. Seriously. Click it. This is crazy.

ugh

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:17:50 GMT

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:45:49 GMT

the government of israel is so evil that it's actually irritating on an ontological level

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:57:31 GMT

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:31:23 GMT

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:54:07 GMT

link to funny cat video

Forming a worldview is a long-term process

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:17:01 GMT

I am a non-cognitivist Rawlsian semi-Marxist secular humanistic democratic-internationalist experimental socialist. It's more coherent than it sounds!

I THINK YOU'LL FIND THAT I

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:14:51 GMT

scope

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:16:28 GMT

The older I get, the bigger the world becomes.

quotes from the stock exchange

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:33:10 GMT

Take it then which way you please, it is an awful revelation--to die in your sins; to go away into a furnace of fire--to be among those, the smoke of whose torment ascendeth up forever and ever! How strikingly is this doom symbolized in the smoke of those doomed cities of the plain, "set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire!" Their "smoke ascended as the smoke of a great furnace."

velopersvelopersAAAaA

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:24:48 GMT

GÖTTERDAMMERÜNG

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:52:21 GMT