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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 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 ]




    A smallish city and a town that probably should be called a village, and really little more - one finds little but the emptiness of a desert so barren as to inspire incredulity in some at the notion that people could live here at all; the evening, left to its own devices, would at times become almost impenetrably dark. Away from the encampment, one sees the Jackson range faintly traced out against a velvety black night sky in the soft blackish blue tones that remain of the moonlight, after it has worked its way through the dust which, even at night, does not have a chance to completely settle out of the air; more silhouette than landscape, the mountains reveal little more their profile, coyly granting only the vaguest hints of their more prominent features to those who would lovingly gaze upon them. The brilliant stars of one's imagination are not to be seen, as far away from most of the world as one is; their light barely ever had a chance to reach the ground. Even the light of the moon, so bright in the starlessly overlit red midnight skies over Chicago, is dimmed.





    The pitch black night, like the Playa, becomes an empty canvas. During the day, when sudden dust storms haven't turned the air opaque, the sun reveals all in blinding detail and the artist must accept this. As the sun sets, however, those creating Black Rock City find that since like almost everything else, light is present only to the extent that somebody had the foresight to bring it, that this allows them to do what would be impossible in more brightly lit locations: to sculpt the light, choosing what the viewer will see and how he will see it. What by day is clearly a shabby looking sheet of plywood, by night, with the right lighting, become the wall of a convincingly solid if fittingly mysterious looking temple. Nighttime is when the visuals of Black Rock City came alive, the sunstroked day being more a time to scurry out of the merciless light in search of shade, company, quieter creative activities, and if such gods as one believed in pleased, maybe a little air conditioning or at least a mister; daytime temperatures easily topped 100.





    Cultures carry over, even when a fashionable postmodernism encourages participants to pretend that they could leave such things behind, and "work during the day and play at night" is a well-ingrained pattern of behavior in much of the Western World; most of the participation seemed to take place during the day, the tired participants relaxing to enjoy the spectacle at night, as a light show played itself out against the darkened open playa.

    [under construction]