One of my neighbors started feeding a feral cat that had been skulking around. It got used to the idea of free food and started hanging around more frequently. One day it brought this little kitten - left it in the garden in the pouring rain. My neighbor cleaned it up and gave it residence in an unused toilet out the back of our building. Mama cat liked the idea and now that’s where they both hang out.
The guy I was sharing a server with freaked out about my piece on Anonymous - and has insisted that I get off ‘his’ server before it got hacked. I was critical of anonymous to some degree - but am of the opinion that they are more reasonable than that, given especially that many […]
One of my interests is in emerging art forms. Various kinds of new media have the potential to be the greatest vehicles of artistic expression we have yet seen. I consider gaming to be one such platform - and have explored the art of gaming narrative previously on this blog (and will do so again shortly). Another emerging art form is the demo - which garners considerably less attention because of it lacks a mass appeal. While the demo scene has been around for a considerable amount of time (it grew up around c64 gaming scene where those providing cracks and trainers would preface the game with a short loading screen which would attribute to themselves the credit for the crack), it is yet to fully mature as an art form. Nevertheless, I believe its potential can be seen in recent work by some of the top demo crews on the scene today. This post is a review of three examples of such work. While many will refuse the label of ‘art’ for such work, I will nevertheless consider them as such and provide my review on such a basis.
I went into the city today to watch the APEC protest and took some photos. I was absolutely amazed at the size of the police presence and the lengths to which they had gone to prevent the organisation of an effective protest. It seems they had totally surrounded all entry points into Hyde Park where the protesters where trying to gather - allowing them only one entry and exit point. They then set up stations blocking off various streets. It really looks like massive over kill - which will only fuel the negative public perception of the event. We the ordinary folks just watch on in childlike wonder while our leaders swan around playing ‘Nations’ with their friends.
Quantified modal logic often plays a central role in the debate between those who believe in the existence of possibilia (possibilists) and those who deny their existence (actualists). Traditional logical and semantic theories, when applied to the subject of modality, make the derivation of the Barcan formulas possible. These theorems serve as an affront to common sense intuitions that deny the existence of objects that are merely possible, or that objects have necessary existence. Recent contributions attempt to either render the validity of the Barcan formulas irrelevant to the broader metaphysical issues, or to sate actualist intuitions in a variety of other ways. I argue that these attempts are failures. The possible worlds framework is the proper theoretical apparatus of the possibilist – but not the actualist. The actualist must find some other apparatus to underwrite their intuitions. I argue further that this is not as bad for the actualist as it sounds, since the possible worlds framework cannot itself be used as a motivation to adopt possibilism