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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 •







    Re: The Draka Arts Site...


    One of life's frustrating truths, which one learns very quickly when one tries to write about anything: that which is unpleasant is so much easier to explain or bring alive for the reader than that which is pleasant. Hence, perhaps, our love as a species for souvenirs, keepsakes, photos ... what is a memory but a story one's earlier self tries to tell one's later self, as that later self itself strains to find the references it needs to connect the story that the earlier self is telling it?



















    That frustration comes very fully into play when one tries to answer the seemingly easy question "why did you go to Burning Man". The physical hardships of the desert, some of the political ugliness - these are easy things to understand, so easy that some will seriously ask "so it's all one big exercise in Masochism". As, indeed, it sometimes is, and say hello to the good people over at the House of Atonement, if that's the way your personal brand of kinkiness goes. But usually it isn't, or at least it didn't used to be.



















    Usually, the concept was that one would see the harshness of the desert as a challenge, achieving a pleasant comfort in spite of the desert, and the vastness of the desert as an opportunity. The desert was seen as a blank slate, not in the sense that there wasn't anything of value already out there, but rather in the sense that the works of man already present were few and far between, and likely to remain so for a good long while to come, leaving one free to try things that one couldn't at home, because almost all of the land was owned and one didn't have the space in which to do them. The desert offered an eternal fresh beginning to the temporary society gathering in it, in which the realities of property ownership and loitering ordinances need not get in the way of one's fleeting daydreams as they took tangible form.



















    Thus the frustration for one telling such a story - that sort of freedom, that of just being able to lay claim to a bare patch of ground and see what one can do with it with a little hard work and imagination, has not been part of life in places like Illinois since the frontier left them behind in the mid 19th century, leaving social engineering to begin to slowly take over where freedom left off, after its relatively brief stay. This site, the homepage of Draka, the dragon car sometimes seen at Burning Man, allows one to see one of those fleeting daydreams that took form, as somebody took advantage of the novel freedoms offered by the emptiness of Northern Nevada. Whether the reader will understand why somebody might want to do so is a question I have to ask myself as I write this piece, but the site I'm reviewing offers some help in this, and I'll try to offer some more.



    [ continued ]