Pomo Divination
Aug. 15th, 2001 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraMorning. The fog is opalescent thick and swirling, coalescing into halos around the orange street-lamps, a quick sensory shift to the pre-dawns of Victorian seaside towns up and down the white cliffs of an Albion now long bygone. Chased by byzantine dreams all night but the only fragment I can remember now is that Waggy James dissed Ben for something that was not Ben's fault and that I flew off the handle and vigorously defended Ben.
I've become obsessed with Gnutella the last few days. The breadth and width of all the goodies there for the hoarding, sure, but even more than that, with the sense that these random inventories of computer files somehow represent individual psychological imprints, the virtual sulci and gyri of specific personalities. After a while, you start recognizing the patterns (it helps in this regard to have a Mac and to be able to run very specific search strings for Mac-enabled files.) There's the guy from Lucas Arts with his proprietary art software bundles and his Deep Purple mp3 collection; there's the guy from Pixar with tantalizing glimpse of Renderman (serial number and everything!) sticking out from the middle of his poor quality Chemical Brothers collection. (Wait? What's Perry Como crooning, "Surrender," doing there?) There's the Japanese sound freak with his bundle of esoteric audio software, much of which I've never heard of -- Adaptec, Halion, Joliet Volume Access, Logic Audio Platinum. Low-hanging fruit, four-star quality -- but the stealthy joy of packratting not withstanding, what's the point of cluttering your hard drive with things you're never gonna use?
Gnutella as a divinatory system... Gnutella as a kind of cyber-Feng Shui (spelling?) telling you to watch your back -- the dragon's breathing from this direction. Or maybe that old standby, alien invasion: The Martian Software Company... Could definitely be worked as a useful status detail in an urban horror fantasy story...
On the ever-engrossing here-and-now front -- spent four hours yesterday driving to and from a one-hour meeting in Mountain View. Maria apparently was so hard up to impress Backlash's one remaining paying client -- a struggling tech start-up -- that she even drafted the mutinous moi to add to her entourage. No prep, no nothing, just -- boom! -- be there. The buzz word of the day was traction, sliced, diced, served as an adjective ("Is this immediately tractionable?") and even garnished into an action verb ("If you can traction this up...") Runner-up phrases included: "liquidating the value," "it's all margin" and "event-based marketing opportunity."
(Come to think of it, "it's all margin" is mighty catchy too. Makes "margin" sound like a health drink, Gatorade for start-ups.)
I did well at the meeting. Wore my severely cut black silk suit and interrupted Maria strategically at those moments when her rambling thought balloons threatened to explode and fill the room with noxious fumes of mass confusion. The tech start-up's newly hired boss asked Maria, "Can she come back when we're doing the redesign? I want her input -- " and then asked me for my contact information. This gave me the opportunity to pass around my defunct business cards -- a corporate address that no longer exists, a voicemail extension that links up to limbo -- which gave me a great deal of admittedly malicious pleasure.
I left, intending to cleanse my soul with a long bike ride once I got home. But somewhere on that long stretch of acrid highway between San Jose and Morgan Hill, I started feeling sick, my legs trembled and ached, and I knew I was having an allergic reaction to the corporate world. When I got home, it was all I could do to make nice with Robin and crawl into bed with Ellen Datlow's new anthology, The World's Best Fantasy and Horror, whose annual publication is always one of the high points of each summer.
I've become obsessed with Gnutella the last few days. The breadth and width of all the goodies there for the hoarding, sure, but even more than that, with the sense that these random inventories of computer files somehow represent individual psychological imprints, the virtual sulci and gyri of specific personalities. After a while, you start recognizing the patterns (it helps in this regard to have a Mac and to be able to run very specific search strings for Mac-enabled files.) There's the guy from Lucas Arts with his proprietary art software bundles and his Deep Purple mp3 collection; there's the guy from Pixar with tantalizing glimpse of Renderman (serial number and everything!) sticking out from the middle of his poor quality Chemical Brothers collection. (Wait? What's Perry Como crooning, "Surrender," doing there?) There's the Japanese sound freak with his bundle of esoteric audio software, much of which I've never heard of -- Adaptec, Halion, Joliet Volume Access, Logic Audio Platinum. Low-hanging fruit, four-star quality -- but the stealthy joy of packratting not withstanding, what's the point of cluttering your hard drive with things you're never gonna use?
Gnutella as a divinatory system... Gnutella as a kind of cyber-Feng Shui (spelling?) telling you to watch your back -- the dragon's breathing from this direction. Or maybe that old standby, alien invasion: The Martian Software Company... Could definitely be worked as a useful status detail in an urban horror fantasy story...
On the ever-engrossing here-and-now front -- spent four hours yesterday driving to and from a one-hour meeting in Mountain View. Maria apparently was so hard up to impress Backlash's one remaining paying client -- a struggling tech start-up -- that she even drafted the mutinous moi to add to her entourage. No prep, no nothing, just -- boom! -- be there. The buzz word of the day was traction, sliced, diced, served as an adjective ("Is this immediately tractionable?") and even garnished into an action verb ("If you can traction this up...") Runner-up phrases included: "liquidating the value," "it's all margin" and "event-based marketing opportunity."
(Come to think of it, "it's all margin" is mighty catchy too. Makes "margin" sound like a health drink, Gatorade for start-ups.)
I did well at the meeting. Wore my severely cut black silk suit and interrupted Maria strategically at those moments when her rambling thought balloons threatened to explode and fill the room with noxious fumes of mass confusion. The tech start-up's newly hired boss asked Maria, "Can she come back when we're doing the redesign? I want her input -- " and then asked me for my contact information. This gave me the opportunity to pass around my defunct business cards -- a corporate address that no longer exists, a voicemail extension that links up to limbo -- which gave me a great deal of admittedly malicious pleasure.
I left, intending to cleanse my soul with a long bike ride once I got home. But somewhere on that long stretch of acrid highway between San Jose and Morgan Hill, I started feeling sick, my legs trembled and ached, and I knew I was having an allergic reaction to the corporate world. When I got home, it was all I could do to make nice with Robin and crawl into bed with Ellen Datlow's new anthology, The World's Best Fantasy and Horror, whose annual publication is always one of the high points of each summer.
