Category Archives: Uncategorized
My Makers Thesis is DONE!
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve had a number of things on my plate, including my ongoing Masters Thesis project. Well, now it’s DONE, and you can read it here! It’s a real page-turner. I … Continue reading
Tom Leddy’s Everyday Surface Aesthetics
Tom Leddy, in his article ” “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty’” (Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3), 259-268), attempts to position everyday notions of organization and cleanliness within the discourse of aesthetic … Continue reading
Toward a Material Consciousness
Kant’s “free play” of cognition (421) marks the outer bound of his liberal human. The free-play of cognition acts as a black box beyond the bounds of which we have no conscious access. For Kant, the best that this subject … Continue reading
On The Social Life of Things
In The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Arjun Appadurai argues for a “methodological fetishism” of commodities in analyzing the societies in which they circulate: …we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed … Continue reading
A Sociology of Things
Igor Kopytoff suggests a biography of things: “In doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and … Continue reading
The Sci-Fi Corridor
Kottke brought this article to my attention, all about the corridor in science-fiction film. The designs that Roger Christian synthesised from Ron Cobb’s prolific and extraordinary conceptual sketches for Alien (1979) are lingered over lovingly at the start of the … Continue reading
>Lyrics, (Mis)Heard
>In a previous post, I mentioned the experience of mishearing lyrics, only later to have them corrected. At the time, I was not able to come up with an example of my own, nor did I receive much help from … Continue reading
>Tracking Students DOES Pay Off
>Here is a study by the Tom Loveless of The Brookings Institute that suggests tracking students (at least in Math) increases their performance. Which schools track and which do not? The evidence reported here indicates that urban schools serving mostly … Continue reading
>A New Word – Diegesis
>I came across this word when reading up on Julien Donkey-Boy, a film which adheres to the Danish Dogme 95 rules for film-making. The second of the Dogme 95 rules, according to Wikipedia, states, The sound must never be produced … Continue reading
>Razors and Renovations
> It started as a leak in the toilet drain. I hadn’t done any plumbing since we bought our house and was eager to try my hand at it. The toilet job seemed pretty simple: There was a cast iron … Continue reading
