End of the World Party

I wonder if tongodeon ended The Bet too soon. (Read the whole mess for a backstory of epic proportions, and more furry culture in the mainstream than you ever cared to know about.) For those of you not in the know, The Bet concerns determining whether or not furry culture would enter the mainstream significantly by/in 2009. At the start of 2009, tongodeon believed that he had won the bet, and that furry culture was not mainstream. One of the original "hypothetical ways" that tongodeon would have lost The Bet was if Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears did a duet in matching aardvark and otter suits.

Via i-D magazine, we have a Lily Allen photoshoot. In half of the pictures, Ms. Allen - who, we note, is a major pop starlet and recording artist - is topless.

In the other half, she is... indeed... wearing a panda costume.

So here's the deal, folks. The Tom Glenne 5.5 wants to play the Victoria Blues Bash. We need people to e-mail and suggest - gently! - that they would like to hear us play this year. So drop an e-mail to info@jazzvictoria.ca and let them know that yes, you would like us to come rock out.

We're also still looking for general gigs all through August. Any takers?

I think this is going to be like putting a lit match next to a keg of gunpowder, but Esme sent me this paper and this particular paragraph popped out at me. So I apologize in advance for anybody who feels that this is offensive - really, this is so not my goal here - but I thought it was too interesting not to share.

The following quote is taken from the paper "Japanese Subculture in the 1990's: Otaku and the Amateur Manga Movement" by S. Kinsella (JSTOR link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/133236 ; you will need access to JSTOR to read this but ask me if you want a copy of the paper), where the author observes first that "this [dojinshi] is one of the very few cultural and social forums in Japan (or any other industrialized country) not dominated by privileged and highly educated sections of society." It then continues - and this is the bit that I find fascinating:

This observation is particularily interesting in light of the high levels of interest in self-education and the accumulation of cultural information that can be observed within the amateur manga world. By applying Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the "cultural economy" to Anglo-American fanzine subculture, John Fiske has developed the theory that these subcultures can operate as "shadow cultural economies", providing indivudals who feel lacking in official capital culture - namely, education - and the social status with which it is rewarded with an alternative social world in which they have access to a different kind of cultural capital and social prestige.

This jumped out at me because I have *seen* this phenomenon in fandom. This model explains a lot that has baffled me about:

1. why fandom exists,
2. why it produces economies (cultural and otherwise),
3. why it produces BnFs, and
4. why there are people (some even on my LJ friendslist) who actually make Non-Trivial Money off of this, and those who aspire to do this as a major life goal. Why are there capital incentives for people providing Fandom Services, and why is there a workforce to provide these services?

If you believe that manga/anime fandom is a shadow culture (and, I would argue, a shadow economy) for the culturally marginalized, then the answers to these questions become apparent. In order:

1. Fandom exists because it provides an accessible subculture to those marginalized in the dominant culture,
2. This is an inherent property of the self-organization of complex systems,
3. This is an inherent property of social hierarchies (again, in a complex system, you get self-organization)
4. Being able to make non-trivial money off of fandom and being able to be a BnF[1] is seen as being more accessible - and is! - than being able to ascend to the same relative position in the major culture.

To be honest, the major life goal is the one that sort of baffled me. I have never understood why people do get so obsessive over fandom, and spend so much time and effort investing their energies in it. I know at least one person who is now taking... well, a radically different employment career... as a result of wanting to spend more time drawing yaoi. I know people whose primary income derives from drawing fanart. I know people who aspire to have that kind of employment. None of these things make sense to me, when for an equivalent investment of time, labour, and intellectual energy, you could (say) get a degree. I know people whose works of fan fiction are larger than some people's doctoral theses. (I'm showing my biases here.) Under this model, if you are sufficiently marginalized out of the framework of accomplishment of the dominant culture, and you are embedded into a shadow culture, then naturally your focus of attention will turn to completing life goals that are considered important by the shadow culture. And we have Fandom.

Marginalization, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean that you're, well, a horrible nerd. (For instance, who hasn't seen this flowchart?) You could, for instance, be a woman (the paper presents statistics on just what % of amateur dojin creators in Japan are women, and it's a huge number), simply not able to access higher education due to cost (this is particularily true in the US right now), or perhaps you have obligations on your time (children, family, medical conditions) but still want to contribute meaningfully to some form of cultural dialogue or discourse. These are all reasons in our dominant mainstream culture - both in Japan and in America - why people don't end up making, or feeling like they are making, significant mainstream cultural contributions.

Perhaps contributing to your culture, and inventing a shadow culture when you are unable to contribute to a mainstream culture, is part of the human condition. The earliest shadow culture I can think of is the Pythagorean tradition of ancient Greece (history majors will correct me here. Jess, show me the power of your degree.)

In conclusion: this post is so headed for Fandom Wank, isn't it?

[1] Big Name Fan, not Backus-Naur Form.

Next time I go out drinking, I'm drinking a Tequila Stuntman. Take a well shot of tequila with lime and salt, snort the salt up your nose, squeeze the lime into your eyeballs, drink the shot, and get your drinking partner to punch you in the face.

(panicbreakfast? Wanna get hammered?)

This strikes a little close to home:

BC Ferries... inundated by people wearing fursuits.

New idea of the day: Steak Punk.

Large, British Men killing each other with giant slabs of beef.

Okay, guys, one last plug for tomorrow's grand event:

The Tom Glenne 5.5
Live at Monty's
Show starts at 9, tickets $5 at the door

Featuring: skeezy Clavinet funk, naked ladies, Tom shouting at people incomprehensibly, Johnny Bluefeather's third nipple, cats and dogs sleeping together, amateur pole dancing, Chris "Every Rhythm is a Funky Rhythm" Meglic, me singing, and a fascinating variety of things you can't do on stage any more and will never see ANYWHERE ELSE. EVER.

Seriously, folks, it'll be a good time and we need all the love and support we can get.

So I now have officially completed all of my coursework for a B.Sc in mathematics. So much for my undergrad.

On to grad studies!

Reminder of upcoming TG 5.5 gigs:

April 18th. Fort St. Cafe (the Pauline Edwards CD Release Party). Tickets at the door or available at... uh, other places?
April 26th. Monty's Showroom Pub. 4 hours of blues, funk, and strippers. Tickets $5 at the door.

The wonderful thing about being a nut
is that you're awfully hard to crack.
I think that I'm a macadamia nut,
which means I'm a nut in a mac.

A nut in a mac in academia,
with a mac on my nut (that's my head),
and they keep getting crackers to bust my nut up,
but I'm still pretty sure I'm not dead.

Now I'm sure, if you must, that you could bust a nut,
Lock him up in a little nuthouse;
But the nuthouse isn't to keep nuts on the in,
it's to keep all the other folk out.

So hooray for the nuts, never caught up in ruts,
always doing the best a nut can.
Always out and about, either inside or out,
with our own little strange nutty plans.

Got a confirmation e-mail today: the paperwork has gone through, and I am being offered a spot at the University of Victoria for May 2009 in the Master's program in computer science.

TODO:

- ship Mac Pro
- ship Mac Mini
- buy new Mac to replace Mac Pro and Mac Mini
- find new office space for startup company
- finish presentation on group characters for Wednesday
- study for stats lab final on Friday
- Dredmor
- Spectre
- death.

Suppose the social new engineering site TrustBook(TM), in order to compete with its neighbours, introduces the concept of trust. Trust T is a map from (U x U) to [0,1] where U is the set of TrustBook users; here T(A,B)=0 means "person A does not trust person B at all" and T(A,B)=1 implies that "person A trusts person B completely."

So what is a good metric for trust? The naive approach is T(A,B) = 1 / (c * d(A,B)^p) where c and p are constants, and d(A,B) is the length of the shortest path between A and B on the graph whose vertices are users and whose edges are given by the friending relation. Now there are a lot of reasons why this is a crappy way of doing things. (An easy one is: "how much do you trust yourself?" A harder thing to consider is "how much do other people's opinions matter?" In the current scheme, nothing matters but distance, or your Erdos-Bacon number, or wherever the friending relationship comes from. There are other reasons why this sucks.)

But here's the interesting question with social connotations: suppose this IS your trust metric. What do you set your personal values of c and p to? That is, how do you want to model your trust of other people based on the number of degrees of relationships between yourself and them?

Bonus Question: model your own trust metrics. Use both sides of the Livejournal if necessary.

How the financial crisis has affected Iceland. Basically, all of its banks exploded.

However, the following paragraph jumps out at me, discussing why Alcoa had such a big problem getting aluminum smelting plants established in Iceland (whose volcanoes and waterfalls provide huge sources of cheap, renewable power):

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

... ohh, yeah.

So when other people have hardware problems, of the "I need hardware and it is unavailable" variety, it usually involves RS-232C, horrible modems, and adventures in Chinese hardware manufacturing.

In my case, I can't even buy an internal hard drive any more.

Seriously. I went to Future Shop, and they were OUT of internal hard drives. Not one. With one of my drives in my RAID configuration showing Ominous Signs of Failure, and coupled with the fact that I usually dynamite a hard drive once every 2 years, I am not in the mood to piss around with this sh*t. So I have an external backup solution, and two crappy WD 500GB drives that I purchased from (ugh) Staples, that I may take back tomorrow if my hard drive decides to last for a few more days. Anyhow, backing up now and we'll see what happens.

Still. How the FUCK can you be out of INTERNAL HARD DRIVES?! The end times are near.

Mmm, been awhile since I've done this.

( The Dark Sciences )

I am currently - quite desperately - looking for somebody with wheels and a passport who would be willing to dash from Vancouver to Seattle and back early this weekend (as in, early in the morning) to pick up a Minimoog D. Anybody game? i'll get gas and lunch.

Fuck, but it's hard to find places to play live music in this town.

Fuck DJs.

Fuck your iPods.

Fuck DJs with iPods.

Today, I discovered that there is actually a magazine out there calling itself "The Journal of Erotic pon farr Literature."

Merry Christmas.