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josephdunphy

Last seen: 14 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •







    Continuing from above ...


    With an obviously much different image in mind, a happily soused couple late on Sunday that same week decided that it would be the perfect place to hold their wedding party with their equally drunk friends, and it was all good. Draka, as it travelled through "Black Rock City", the collective encampment that was everybody and everything at Burning Man 2001, became a natural meeting place. "So did and does Center Camp", somebody is likely to say. In a sense, perhaps, but more toward the beginning of the week, I found, and in a very low key kind of way.





















    People brought their fatigue and mild disorientation in Center Camp, sat down and exchanged a few niceties with strangers, but for the most part, the company they enjoyed was the company they brought into the wide side offered by the Camp and as simple a thing as bringing one's own refreshments has reportedly been enough to get one thrown out of this central meeting place, which seems to function more as a very large coffeehouse than anything else. Draka represented raw spontaneity. It was there when it chose to be there, you were never quite sure when that would be, and so you had to break out of your routine to experience it; you couldn't work it into that routine. That made for a higher energy experience and a qualitatively different kind of meeting place, one that perhaps invited the short term traveler to ask himself why such wandering meeting places don't exist at home. "Aside from the fact that we really wouldn't want people doing this on the front of a CTA bus, Joe?", you ask.





















    Yes, aside from that. Life is not an all or nothing affair. Other places can have people ride public transportation in less than a fearful churchlike silence without arrests following and public spaces look less than utterly corporate without the body count rising; the eternal unasked question is why so many places in America (the alleged home of the supposedly free and occasionally brave) can't bring themselves to do the same.

    By reminding what had been absent in his daily commute, and that there was nothing inevitable about that absence, maybe this experience could get him to question that a little bit more of that blankness and blandness of contemporary American life to which he had become accustomed in the long run, if he were to drop the postmodernist blinders and accept the notion that the status quo was a thing that the individual could legitimately question. More immediately, by pleasantly jarring the unexpected traveler out of his comfort zone, the experience knocked him out of the ingrained patterns of behavior that promoted his self-reinforcing isolation, to leave him pleasantly foundering around in the company of his equally pleasantly disordered fellow travelers, to whom he would reach out before he regained his composure and realised what he was doing, leaving spontaneity to ensue and take hold as the new reality, however briefly.




    [ continued ]