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Yes I realized that, and figured I'd clarify what I mean. Sorry to be curt. It'd be easier for me to give you an example, like when I was reading about slave-politics in pre-civil war Boston and about how common people didn't want to end slavery because local industry relied on raw material harvested by slaves down south, shipped north to be manufactured into goods to be sold and the intellectual climate surrounding that (in Boston). I found this very interesting, how politics/social issues intersect with philosophical/moral/sociological ones. Or when reading on a classical poet, how his poesy was limited by material considerations and their affect on one another, which also is very interesting and something that rarely comes up when reading criticism.

Perhaps I'm asking for the impossible here, but I just feel that there is something that could be attainable but I currently don't have. I'm going to experiment a bit more and try working with some of your suggestions.

Well, son, you have an idea on your hands. Congratulations! Not only that but you've written it down. My own notebook entry for a similar idea would probably be something like…

NORTHERN REALPOLITIK ARGUED FOR SLAVERY: common people didn't want to end slavery because local industry relied on raw material harvested by slaves down south, shipped north to be manufactured into goods to be sold and the intellectual climate surrounding that (in Boston). Intersection of politics/social issues with philosophical/moral/sociological ones.

BAM! Now the real question is what do you do with this? This is where that conversation between the creator and the creation I described before starts. This might end up being the overall arch or a theme of a narrative or whatever. It boils down to what skills you possess that could help you turn this into a thing.

The other idea—about poetry being affected by material considerations—is kindof DUH in my case as I am an artist and this shit NEVER LEAVES my consciousness. It helps that I have a job and do art on the side, so that I don't have to feel constantly compromised by the hustle of art. That said, I would be a lot more productive as an artist if I could free myself from having to sell my time to someone.

P. S. What do you create?

⬇⬇⬇

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I get your point, I'm just not sure if it's applicable to what I'm interested in. When I think of pre-war Boston I think of Emerson, Boston Brahmins, industry, harbor, and the Blue Hills. It is more than just an interesting socio-economic climate, and it's more than what I described above. It's a palimpsest and locus where so many things converge.

In the other case (Economy of the Unlost) I'll refer you to the extended blurb:

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.

The book is damn amazing, read it and weep. I know I do.

Well. I'll just stop shitting up the thread now, thanks for your input!

Eeee: I'm not sure I want to "turn this into a thing", I just want to capture what's going on in my head as it might be useful in the future.

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Another day, another rejection e-mail. I suppose it builds character.

At least you are getting rejection letters. I just hear...nothing.

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I received literally no responses for like half a year. Then, out of nowhere, I got a whole bunch at once, including actual, "Yeah let's hear more from you". And then none of those went anywhere and it all died for a few months. And then finally I was contacted by a company I didn't even know existed, went through the entire process, and am now working there. And it's been pretty awesome, these first couple months at my first real job. Pretty awesome. U:

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):

I keep worrying I'm coming off like a douchebag. I can't help it if for the first time in a long time I'm feeling genuinely satisfied with my life! Maybe I'll just stop posting in here until I'm sad again.

):

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Yesterday I moved into my new home. A home I will eventually own. \o/

Spend most of the day with my friends carrying my crap from my old place to me new place. Now I'm broken. Almost all the furniture is reassembled, I only have to reassemble my desk. But I still have to reassemble my TV,HTPC,etc. setup; my PC, internet (and figure out how to lay the LAN through my new place). And unpack a shit load of boxes.

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Kudos, elmuerte. Where in the Dutchlands have you settled?

I just returned from a week of vacation in southern Brittany. What a stupidly gorgeous environment there, with thundering cliffs and wild forests and cathedrals and supreme bakeries and a positive dearth of fastfood chains. Instead of which there are creperies on every corner. Any way you shake it, I always love being in France. On a cultural note, I purchased a French copy of The Count of Monte Christo. It's probably a tad above my mastery of the language, but I reason that I'll only improve by a challenge.

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I'm still in Gouda. I physically moved about 2 kilometers. About 1 kilometer closer to the ocean.

My phone line appears to be dead, so no ADSL for now. Guess I'll have to stick to 3G for a while longer. Assholes had 4 weeks to get this in order. Yes, they're assholes because the charged me 25 euros for administration costs and another 15 euros because my 3 year old modem would not work at this location (neither modem works here as there's no signal).

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With regards LAN you should look into the ethernet over power adapters. Saves a lot of mess and bother. They work perfectly.

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How reliable are those powerline products? I want a 1Gbps network because my NAS is downstairs and my workstation is upstairs. 100Mbps isn't going to cut it. I see some powerline products that have 1000Base-T, but only transmit at 500 Mbps. And iirc powerline is half duplex, so effectively it's 250 Mbps with increased latency. It's rather expensive to just give it a try.

Right now there's a phone cable patched from the main socket to the sleeping rooms. I'm not sure how they travel upstairs. But I wanted to pull cat5e right next to it. It never hurts to try.

So I think I will first mess around with getting cat5e to the right locations. Cleaning up the cable in the living room might be a bit more complicated. Specially considering my ADSL access point is at the worst possible location:on the wall between 2 openings, there's not even a power socket right next to it.

I have a bunch of long cat5e cables that I can use for a makeshift network. Pulling the nice cable has no rush.

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Woohoo... I have the internets. It was connected to the other pairs, so I had to rewire the socket. And it's better than I expected. When I did research the estimated connectivity would be around 12Mbps via ADSL. But apparently VDSL is available, even though a lot of computers said "no". So now I have 20/2, which is the max according to my contract (I think). Eitherway, it's better than the 16/1 I had before.

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Good stuff. Always connect your modem into the 'master socket' and network the rest using Cat5/6. In the UK at least, phone extension wire is not data quality, so you will get slower speeds plugging your modem into the extension socket. Sounds like you're going ethernet anyway.

I use the DLAN homeplugs, they're quite old, but they give me around 280/300 mbps, which is plenty, considering I live in the country and my ADSL is only 8mb. All other internal networking is done via wireless N, which is the bottle neck.

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I was very proud of my dad when i used to help him electrician. Despite not knowing how to even turn on a computer at the time, he used to string cat5 all over the houses he was wiring! Future proof.

He can now use google and send text messages.

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Unpacked my main workstation today and made a preliminary LAN. Sure the cable are taped to the wall and floors, but it'll suffice for now. At least I can play games again (and that's what I did, a nice session of Torchlight 2). So I'm in to rush to get a nice network set up.

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With regards LAN you should look into the ethernet over power adapters. Saves a lot of mess and bother. They work perfectly.

Neat little thing about Powerline Adapters that few people seem know about... you know who ELSE is on the same power grid as you? The rest of your neighborhood. It's possible sniff and capture traffic from nearby houses in a lot of suburban areas. Generally I'd say only use it as a last resort.

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Don't they use AES to encrypt traffic between nodes (which also increases latency)?

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Neat little thing about Powerline Adapters that few people seem know about... you know who ELSE is on the same power grid as you? The rest of your neighborhood. It's possible sniff and capture traffic from nearby houses in a lot of suburban areas. Generally I'd say only use it as a last resort.

This is a good thought, and not something that I'd ever really thought about. As soon as I plugged them in, I configured 128bit AES on them - think it was default actually, so it was pretty much plug and play. If it comes as default, I can't imagine many people being caught out by this, but worth looking into, thanks :)

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The unholy activity of alphabetizing my 150+ (actually, I have no idea how many) physical PC game collection has begun

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The unholy activity of alphabetizing my 150+ (actually, I have no idea how many) physical PC game collection has begun

I've got a similar amount, but they just sit in a bin I need to get rid of. If I want to play them again I pirate them, as I already bought them anyway.

You can argue about the "morality" of this a lot, but what you really need to think about is economic incentive created in total, a complex mess involving researching the current state of the publisher with the rights, the developers of the original game and their current rights visa vis royalties, the impact this may or may not have the future development of games and economic incentives therein, and etc.

In other words, the actual issue of piracy is far more complex than any argument so far made and has to do with products that are partially governed by post scarcity economics, an idea not even addressed by current economics research and something I someday hope to win an Nobel prize for in my dreams. Of course I'm also riding around on a unicorn in other dreams, but hey genetic engineering will get to be pretty damned cool in thirty plus years.

For now I just take the view that the piracy of truly old games will ultimately result in an atomistic consumer approach. As in if the game is old enough most publishers aren't going to consider its profits (of say, the original Fallout) as having any impact on games they currently greenlight, and so it wont have any real impact. Of course they may, at an annoying discount rate, consider the longtail profits of newer games. But newer games are things I've bought digitally and can download at any rate, and so don't need to pirate.

Of course this is just my view. If you feel different about really old games that's a perfectly cromulent part of your own equation.

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I've got a question for all of you who create; how do you "get creative?"

Right now I'm struggling with my inspiration, while in rare moments I get flashes from reading or watching to something brilliant it quickly fades away and I can rarely capture it. On the occasion I think of something novel or interesting it is gone by the time I'm trying to write it down or capture it.

It isn't connected to any practical inconvenience, notebook and such is readily available, it's something else more ephemeral that I can't get a handle on and it's annoying the hell out of me.

You simply have build it up, like you would a muscle. Tim Shafer talks about his technique in the DFA forums: He simple writes for several hours in the morning. It doesn't matter what he writes... he just writes. Whatever is on his mind. Gobbledegook. Ideas. Whatever. This completely ties in with other so-called experts on the subject, too. You have to let yourself be creative, and learn to nurture that part of yourself.

The more you do exercises like non-stop writing, the more you strengthen the connection to the creative side of you. William Gibson talks about his struggles to start writing in one of his essays. He finally found himself with a sentence, "Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Graham gradually came to see the targeted numerals of the leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film". He had absolutely no idea what any of it meant, but that sentence opened a door into a world which he began to explore as a writer.

Basically your sub-conscious mind is the creative part, and the noisy part often gets so big and powerful, we lose touch with that creative part. It's simple: The more you do creative things the better you get being creative. The problem is taking the time to do it. Don't wait for that "perfect moment", because it will never come. Just go for it.

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Yeah, that Cleese clip really drives home that you have to give it a ton of time. Go somewhere with seclusion and peace and just think or write for quite a long time.

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I am visiting SF! Even though Scott had the day off he happily took me to TTG. We managed to get there when everyone was out at lunch. That view of the lake is sweet.

Also bought a new mattress because existing one from IKEA was murdering my back.

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