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Bandwidth
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
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And this, being out of bandwidth has forced me to realize how stupid I've become. It's like giving a man 2 penises, wasn't one getting them in to enough trouble? Bandwidth, it's the appendage that enforces stupidity, it's too easy to quickly Google answers to every inane question, fill your time with meaningless side-quests, get nothing done...
Mornings now, no more surfing the net, doom scrolling, I'm missing out on the news and my weather app refuses to update itself and tell me it's raining outside and - while it won't kill me to look out the window, I still would prefer to doggedly check my phone.
And texts? Did somebody send me a text? I won't know until I pass by an internet connection where I've grabbed a password. I've been using the wi-fi of cafes to download movies; catch up on the world, it's not a bad thing, really, it enforces a schedule on my life.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse - Fritz Lang
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
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About a criminally insane genius who plots the overthrow of civilization and runs a vast criminal enterprise from beyond the grave.
Everyone smokes everywhere they please, the yo-yo is a favourite a pastime of the police, and for a film made in 1933 it's almost entirely modern in it's sets and furniture. There's the deranged patient and psychiatrist - his office filled with for art - masks of different tribes, various deformed human skulls (a-la Mutter Museum), the paintings of patients or other lunatics, Dr. Mabuse is - in a sense - the original "Joker", set out to upend the world for it’s own sake, the pleasure of it, and there are surprisingly innovative techniques - for example the cut from mugshot to the scene.
Still, almost a hundred years later a great film, only we've forgotten who the villains are; Dr. Mabuse's manifesto was not intended to become the roadmap for 20th century capitalism...
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande - E.E. Evans-Pritchard
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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I have absolutely no interest in the Azande people, but I do have an interest in the rest. Anyways, an early 20th century "study" by Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the beliefs of the Azande of the South Sudan as pertains to the title. His explanations are excellent and somewhat illuminate the reasoning process behind it all. But - all in all - I preferred Levy-Bruhl's "Primitive Mentality" - which as opposed to focussing on one tribe describes an aggregate of how "all tribes" (worthy of an Anthropologist) arrange their thinking and 'supernatural' beliefs. So while I enjoyed it will be moving on to the bookstore, I can't keep them all...
Sea Change
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
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This is an interesting tale of a sailor who one day woke up and discovered that the ocean had changed colour. From a formerly beautiful violet to the blue-green we're familiar with today. And how he spoke to other sailors and discovered that many had noted the same as well.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gmVbwba8Xk
Now, at first I wondered about Gladstone's Colour Theory (Linked Here) - maybe in Homer's time it was a wine dark sea? What if the sailor's were all victims of the Mandala effect? (Linked Here). Or maybe - from time to time - reality resets itself and / or "reboots" - runs a different, updated program? Anyways, there is much to mull in this - how you can wake up one morning to a profoundly different world than the one you went to sleep in the night before.
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