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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
ammutbite
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9:17p |
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ammutbite
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3:51p |
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giogio
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7:44a |
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deusdiabolus
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12:15a |
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| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 |
deusdiabolus
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11:19p |
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| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 |
drownedinink
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11:09p |
I am my own PR department
The idea of putting sections from my Big Secret History Book Project up on a blog as I finish them has crossed my mind, especially now that I'm nearing the halfway point. Now I don't believe that digital media is going to completely replace print media and any Luddite tendencies on my part spring more from inclination than from ideology or deliberate planning - certainly I know enough about digital media to be confident that there are plenty of people more than willing to pay for a print version of online content, thus the question "Am I just giving away for free what I can make money on?" isn't really one I'm losing sleep over - so I don't really have actual beliefs leading me toward either direction, but I do have some practical pros and cons. The various pros all boil down to the obvious: free exposure. There's also the sort of convenience the Internet offers aspiring writers through its very nature. Fishing for feedback would be a very simple matter and shopping the manuscript around (when and if it's done!) will be a little less painless. Perhaps even there will be enough of a buzz that offers of representation or publication will even come to me; it happens. The cons, though, are worrying. For various reasons I'm uncomfortable with the idea of openly displaying a project that will not be anywhere near completed for a long time, especially before it's edited and critiqued by peers and others. This might be easier to swallow if it was a work of fiction or opinion-based non-fiction, but this will be a history written for a broad audience but under academic standards, and leaving a simple yet severe and excruciatingly embarrassing mistake in the text (which really is inevitable) open to universal scrutiny might cause enough harm that all the good would be moot. Also, while I won't be making any revolutionary, orthodoxy-shattering arguments, I do have several points I make that, as far as I know, are original or at least have only been touched on by other historians and writers. Maybe I am a tad paranoid, but the possibility of plagiarism - or maybe someone "taking the bloom off one of my roses" is a less harsh and more apt way of putting it - is the strongest barrier against going through with this. Anyway, there are alternatives: having a blog that just posts key excerpts and/or keeping it in an online portfolio that's open only to people I invite in, among other things. I'm not terribly good at promoting myself, which is really unfortunate given my career aspirations, but I hope at least I can take advantage of the technology of my time and do something rather than trusting everything to word-of-mouth and whoever publishes my work. |
drownedinink
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8:27p |
TIME WARP!
So you might have heard that a private swim club in Philadelphia threw out a group of black kids. Usually country clubs, golf clubs, and the like are discreet about their bigotry, enough so that the racism, sexism, and classism at such places is often treated like an open secret, but in this case the club's president actually issued this statement: "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion...and the atmosphere of the club." You couldn't aspire to a more catastrophic choice of words than that. There is a happy ending of sorts; a private boarding school is letting the kids have full and free access to their pool and it seems like the public, the entire Internet, and even Congress is about to go vigilante on the club's asses. At the same time, a co-host of FOX News' morning show, "Fox and Friends", capped off a discussion about a study on dementia by suggesting that Alzheimer's and dementia is caused by people intermarrying with other ethnicities and "species" (!!!). This is too much for even FOX News, apparently, and another co-host tried awkwardly to laugh down her cohort's eugenic-y perspective. The camera crew must be commended for still catching a look of exasperation and horror on her face. Oh, FOX Newz, never change! So, yeah, you probably didn't need more evidence that we've somehow gone back in time to the Age of Robber Barons and Segregation and Eugenics, but if you did here it is. |
bigbrother2084
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12:42p |
For one second at exactly 12:34:56 on 7/8/09, we had a pure numerical order of time and date... this occurred while i was alphebetizing CDs ... |
bigbrother2084
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7:54a |
The releases of my B-day week that give a clue as to what this year will be like for me: Music: Franz Ferdinand -Can't Stop Feeling The Maccabees -Can You Give It Bombay Bicycle Club -I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose Marmaduke Duke -Silhouttes Mu -Mu Stackridge -A Victory For Common Sense The Rumble Strips -Welcome To The Walk Alone Hercules And Love Affair -Sidetracked Maximo Park -Questing, Not Coasting Reverend And The Makers -Silence Is Talking Film: - Blood: The Last Vampire ( BloodTheLastVampire-movie.com ) - Bruno ( MeinSpace.com/Bruno ) - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ( HarryPotter.com ) - Humpday ( Humpdayfilm.com ) - I Love You, Beth Cooper ( ILoveYouBethCoopermovie.com ) - Weather Girl ( WeatherGirlMovie.com ) |
| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 |
drownedinink
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5:02p |
so soon after July 4, we learn DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK, at least not here in the US of A(ss)
Yeah, I'm still furious about health care, so thank God for news sources that stir the bitter in with the raging sarcasm: In short, the lesson of today’s health care anger-parsing cycle is that if the Democrats want to pass a reform bill with 60 Senate votes, the final product Obama signs will probably just be to mail every American a pistol and a single bullet with a little note saying, “For when you get cancer.”I couldn't have said it better myself. My personal health care plan is to hope I gain citizenship to Canada, the Netherlands, or some other country with same-sex spousal benefits and a public health care program by legally marrying some nice, handsome Canadian, Dutch, whathaveyou. It's a hell of a lot more feasible than expecting the Democrats to actually do anything other than kowtow before health industry lobbyists. |
| Monday, July 6th, 2009 |
deusdiabolus
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10:14p |
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drownedinink
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9:52p |
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deusdiabolus
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9:03p |
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deusdiabolus
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8:31p |
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ammutbite
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7:10a |
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ammutbite
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6:23a |
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deusdiabolus
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12:39a |
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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009 |
slit
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7:57p |
Vintage vampires.
K (born in 1994) has been watching Buffy (from 1997). Her thoughts: 1. They wear their pants too high. 2. The fight scenes are boring (read: pre- Matrix). 3. It's annoying how they don't have cell phones and have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where everyone is. 4. Buffy's shirts are too baggy. (I was confused by this because I grew up in the eighties, and to me Buffy's tops are tight. But I think she meant they don't actually cling, and they hang, slightly, over her too-high pants.) 5. Those floral print dresses or jumpers (note: she called them "things") that girls wear are ugly. 6. ALL Willow's clothes are ugly, "but they write her that way." 7. "You can tell it's from that time back when people thought doing ANYTHING with a computer made you this super geek. And they just bang anything on the keyboard -- like they'll tap three keys and it's oh my god here's all the information we need, you're such a genius." 8. There was one guy character she thought was hot, but then she looked up the actor and realized he's my age now and was disgusted. |
deusdiabolus
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6:09p |
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deusdiabolus
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5:50p |
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deusdiabolus
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4:13a |
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deusdiabolus
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2:43a |
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| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 |
deusdiabolus
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8:21p |
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bigbrother2084
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6:33p |
I'm DJing tonight @ Davey's... Celebrating our *cough* freedom... 3402 Main, KC |
drownedinink
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12:00p |
Chad's history corner
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - And How It Died by Philip Jenkins - Like most cliches "History is written by the winners" is largely true in a sense, but at the same time it is often possible to piece together the history of the losers and distill a reasonable reconstruction of the truth from propaganda and distorted accounts. If it weren't, then we wouldn't be able to have sympathetic or neutral book-long histories of the Zoroastrians, the Aztec Empire, and al-Andalus. Philip Jenkins makes the case that there's another "history of losers" that often gets overlooked - and it involves, contrary to expectations, the majority of Christians in the medieval era. Jenksins' argument can basically be broken down into two parts: European Christianity in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was, in terms of raw numbers as well as cultural influence, actually the stagnant fringe of Christianity, while the numerical majority of Christians and the true vital core of the religion was based in Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia; and this African and West Asian Christianity was all but wiped out by a combination of growing and systematic Islamic intolerance, the failure of most sects of Christianity to survive the decline and collapse of many eastern cities in the later Middle Ages as well as the catastrophe of the Mongolian invasions, and other geopolitical factors. A little distracting but amusing part of his arguments here is his visible impatience with scholars who argue that Islam was exceptionally aggressive and those who overcompensate by maintaining that Islam was exceptionally tolerant. You can almost hear Jenkins fighting the temptation to type, "Islam doesn't really have a worse or better track record than most if not all religions, including Christianity itself, okay?" Of course, it does jar the narrative to have such digressions to contemporary politics, but I for one can hardly blame Jenkins for doing his best to keep his book from being cited with approval by someone like Jonah Goldberg or the folks at WorldNetDaily. (Jenkins does raise the fascinating fact that, between 1000 and 1400, the countries of Europe and the Middle East as well as China all almost simultaneously went from being relatively tolerant to becoming increasingly xenophobic and hostile to minorities, but he doesn't dwell on that point too long). Also the last third of the book asks general historical and cultural questions about why and how religions die out, what imprints they leave, and what are the theological implications for believers who face the loss of all political representation, marginal status, unrelenting persecution, and a centuries-long history of failure. It's very interesting, particularly for anyone with the slightest interest in the history of religion and culture, although at times he reiterates points made in the rest of the book. Still, the section does have very recent and very tragic anecdotes, such as the brutal persecution of the few remaining outposts of Iraqi Christians after the Iraq War and the discovery in 1997 of an old woman named Lucine, literally the last Armenian Christian in the Turkish city of Diyarbakir. The one complaint I have is that Jenkins, apart from discussing at length its influences on Islam and European Christianity and that it may have been the purest representation of Christianity from the first century CE, doesn't really go into much detail about how these Christian sects regulated their communities and what distinct beliefs they developed, but admittedly these things are probably better suited for another book entirely. (Oh, and I especially want to recommend the book to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alagbon, since Jenkins does discuss briefly but in some detail the influence the music used by the Syrian churches had on European Christian religious music.) |
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