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Dec
20
Dec
13
A scathing critique of Lupe Fiasco’s Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool
No you read right, that is what the Chicagoan MC titled his sophomore effort, slated for a December 18th release. Its title refers to the eponymous track from his first album Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor, released last year to wide critical acclaim. The album continues his healthy obsession with overarching concepts, wrought by meticulous and abstract character development. So it is the usual (to any Lupe fan) of the conflicts and convictions that blight his characters, painted with sometimes drowning allegorical lyrics that usually don’t allow for a top ten hit. While you will likely not be dancing to a song about child rebel soldiers [Little Weapon] massacring whole hamlets with nothing but stupor as the fire they set is mirrored on their precocious and drug-hazed eyes, you can make your spirit weep like an old native american at the sight of highway development when you hear emotions presented as stark and uncompromising as Lupe has managed to do. The album is riddled with such non-commercial topics, with a great soundtrack to back it up. And that is precisely how this opus plays, like a great movie soundtrack coupled with writing redolent of Pink Floyd in at their most expressive, witty, and downright amazing, something fans of hip hop rarely see executed with such mastery these days. The best way to describe the soundtrack — that is to say the production — is that it somehow extracts Casablanca’s raw emotions and Frankenstein’s gloominess, and transcribed them on a beat machine. It runs in the vein of other immaculate-sounding albums of this year, namely of Graduation by Kanye West, and American Gangster by Jay-Z. The music and the lyrics of this album seem to have eloped to Prague, with a skilled scribe and a master cellist at their side, plucking every right chord and gathering all the disparate love sounds to make what I can without restraint call, the best damn rap album of this year.
Dec
8
On the Question of Morality
I’ve been working on an essay about the subject of morality, and somewhat serendipitously got asked a question about it on my philosophy take-home exam. I gathered some disparate thoughts from it and typed them up in order to later transpose them onto a bluebook. So I finished that draft and started writing by hand, then did a complete 180 and rewrote the better part of it (which wasn’t wise, especially since I was running out of time). So this is draft numero 1, and is a response to the grandiose question : Why be moral?
Are we random agglomerations of flesh and ’soul’(a more proper term would be consciousness, but indulge me for literary effect), or are we rather a part of some grander plan, plot, or design? Overwhelmingly, the majority of people in our humble planet seem to be positing the latter, with no wiggle room for a complete sublation of their hypothesis. We are of course alluding to the tendency for people to cite religion as a reliable enough basis for morality. So I propose a thoroughgoing refutation of their views in any kind of system of morality, as I do not find their reason for acting in a certain way, neither cohesive, nor accessible to all. There is no Leviathanic or authoritative reason to be of good moral persuasion, as there is no such thing for love, or even hate. So morality as a set of tools brought to bear on separate quandaries to adjudicate, is a product of our evolutionary ancestry, and thereby of our capacity to be creative and to reason. On this perfectly mundane foundation, there is no need to postulate transcendental reasons as Plato or Augustan might have, but rather a more thorough understanding of happiness and suffering. It must be enough for us to ground our ethics on identifiable things like science or philosophy, where bad-faith is barked at whenever it chooses to rear its perfidious head, and where discussion is accessible to every person regardless of other biases they might have. Still, all we can glean from all of this is a way in which we can exercise our moral ‘instincts’ or positions more fully and in a more impartial way, we have not touched the ‘why’ we should be moral, just the ‘how’. I submit to you that after hours of rumination about the former, I cannot begin to fathom anything close to a good reason why. I also suspect that no one has ever done so convincingly. Ultimately, the why can be bifurcated into the “why-why” and the “how-why”, the former represents my reservations about a cohesive and superlative reason to act morally, and the second my thoughts on how we can move — however asymptotic — ever closer to pinning it down, a return to the auspices of happiness and suffering. In face of these things, I find that no appeal to transcendence does any good, since only another mundane thing can fix a mundane problem. So realization of this, by people who are parti-pris to this moral system(its non-compulsory nature being important), is paramount in trying to establish a fair sense of morality. Compassion, empathy, benevolence, and sympathy to other sentient beings(non-anthropocentric) are therefore the only reliable things on which we can count people to be consistent, and realization that it is a common strife in beings’ lives that happiness and suffering bring is plenty to prevent this world free from dogmatism, to continue on the testing road of ethics.
ps: not a terribly thorough proofreader so please point out errors if you see them.
Dec
8
More Poems
1 Hey I shagged your mom!
2 Well you took your sister to prom!
1 Nice comeback whore
2 I hope your dad’s balls itch more
=====================
Hey I can’t go to the funeral
Still haven’t finished my Juvenal
I’d say it to your eardrum
Still haven’t finished my Juvenal
I’d say it to your eardrum
But have found it full of cum
So I gesticulate instead
Cue you, shaking your head
Cute you sitting abed
Cue you, shaking your head
Cute you sitting abed
Ends this poem , here’s me playing dead
ps: I better never get remotely famous. or this stuff is just going to float up like your retarded cousin’s turd in the kiddie pool at the family reunion. Anyways i’m not remotely creative or funny, but I did laugh at “i hope your dad’s balls itch more”, whatever that’s worth.
Dec
8
The Vagaries of Life (poems)
In my heart dwells a deep yearning
For sumptuous scholarly learning
From attending school, what abysmal hole have I dug?
I guess cocaine’s still a hell of a drug
Must I resort to nose candy,
To get myself feeling randy?
Think I’ll do two lines daily
To go on living gaily
===================
1 Who’s to blame for this baby
2 Surely not sweet Mary, but maybe…
1 Why she said she’s not sat on a rod
2 Well we surely can’t blame God!
1 How do we work out
2 What all of this is about
1 Without the benighted shadow of doubt
2 We shall take the Christian route!
(offense sold separately)
Apr
22
Microsof Silverlight Demo
Previously known as WPF/E, it’s a rich extensible platform for apps and media in general, and it’s cross-platform(Safari and Firefox on Macs included, Wikipedia says other platforms are still being considered). Seems like a cool technology, though I’m rooting for it to be linux compatible.
read more | digg story
Nov
27
Nov
15
Cool Firefox bug, dancing page
In the latest firefox release (2.0) something weird happens when you delete a bookmark from the toolbar; the page dances up and down.
When I did this I only had 1 bookmark on there (flock user) and after removing it and seeing it jump up and down, I tried again and it works.
Tell me if this works for you. (try this with one bookmark only(not a live feed) and right-click delete it)
Nov
7
XBOX LIVE VIDEO INTERFACE PICS
these are pics from the talked about Christmas gift from Microsoft, enjoy!!!
Nov
7
great quote from Scoble’s comments
“There is no limit to the good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.” - George Marshall
something good to keep people doing their thing.