People of the world, I have finished my thesis. I think in many ways I am a changed person. It may seem grandiose and bombastic of me, and despite my proclivity for such tones, there are now 89 pages worth of commentary in the world that weren't there before. I wrote them, interspersed heavily with rephrasings and blockquotes. I could tell you how I've changed, but that might be too much. As it turns out, over-determination is just the noisy road to despair. I think perhaps that's not my preferred route, despite the fact that it will take me time to remember why and how to go about avoiding it.

I cannot remember being this tired, and certainly not for such a sustained period. I still have so much work to do. It's bizarre, really. I think I may get 4 days to pack at the end, but the day before I leave is the all-encompassing "proclamation," which it makes me laugh to think about. Oh, the pomposity. They will call my name, and then they will "proclaim" on what scale I have been lauded. A more ridiculous social gathering I cannot imagine, all of which is ameliorated by the fact that it is simultaneously a BBQ. It's like the twilight zone here. Or maybe I'm just looking out of the psychedelic lenses that being this tired and this overwhelmed by the all-important mystery of their expectations have given me. Un-freakin-believable. I better be unconsciously psychic, that's the only way I'll make it out of here without being mangled.

All the more so, let me say that I am looking forward to spending the weekend with my promotor (Dr. Paul Cruysberghs) and a dozen other graduate students for the purpose of examining The Sickness Unto Death. Apparently Dr. Cruysberghs does something like this every year. We're going to a cottage and we're going to read Kierkegaard, all weekend.

I gotta go be outside for a while ... even though it's raining.

Lates!

Cakes

Again through Boing Boing, this is really simple and powerful. An art professor at the Art Institute in Chicago, who's Iraqi, locks himself in a room and lets people shoot him with a paintball gun through the internet. Momento the human.

Interview with Wafaa Bilal
by Brian Boyko

Mr. Boyko makes a point about dehumanization in IT, but after thinking about the more deadly connotations, that sounds a bit nerdy. Granted, it is from "the network performance authority."

Once again, I found a cool thing at Boing Boing. I have to resist the temptation just to repost everything they post, so awesome are the peeps over there. For some reason I've always been interested in the regional differences that seem to crop up in the terminology for carbonated beverages, and once again, the omniscient virtual realm has provided neatly organized answers to my questions. Alan McConchie is responsible for this, and you can look at the info and contribute to the information via his survey.

Yesterday I had the very fortunate experience of travelling to one of my favorite places of all time (Maastricht, NL) to attend a very small and intense conference on freedom in Psychoanalysis. It was held at the Jan Van Eyck Academie which seems to be a small group of independent artists and scholars who do what they do and then host lots of cultural and academic events. It was a really great day, I was all aquiver with new information and they provided lunch! I wasn't confident enough to say anything, but talking to some of the scholars I think Lacan's interpretation of Kierkegaard indicates the way the modern paradigm is forced to conceive human freedom negatively in terms of our freedom to die/defy the law. It is certainly the case that Adam's freedom in the garden is limited to the possibility of sin, which is of course unlimited, but once he takes that "qualitative leap" and eats of the fruit, we're all condemned to that distance from God that allows us to rattle around anxiously and do all kinds of things that seem contrary to nature. This is the account Haufniensis gives in The Concept of Anxiety anyway. I think that this corresponds to the distance that the symbolic order (language etc.) gives us from Lacan's sense of the Real, as an utterly meaningless transcendent element we need protection from. So says Lacan, the dilemma is now: "Your Freedom or your Life." You can be free, but that means giving up everything that makes your life meaningful.
Yee ha!

This is just plain cool.... A 2,100 year old computer. The picture above is of course only a replica. The original spent two millenia at the bottom of the ocean.

Hilarious! I think our paranoia is getting the better of us? Not to mention a bizarre degree of cultural isolation.

Wireless spy coin was just a Canadian poppy coin

AND, I found this through BoingBoing and now I'm totally hooked on Bibliodyssey, such amazing stuff goes up there, even though pk insists he's very busy. Some people can do it all... I thought of Phoebe when I saw these skull people.

I found this following a mention of Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Xul Solar was an Argentinian "everythingologist" and this link leads to an incredibly beautiful blog (and what looks like a very fantastic blog) post by misteraitch.