The Null Device
2001/6/19
Scare meme of the day: A CD-eating fungus has been discovered. So far, this killer fungus, which devours the aluminium in CDs, has only been found in the tropical climate of Belize. Rumours of it having been genetically engineered by the RIAA to force a migration towards secure trusted-client systems such as SDMI have not been confirmed.
I got 111 on the quirkyalone quiz, somewhat higher than Graham's result.
Firstly, I wonder how gender-specific the test is; one thing I've observed is that solitude is seen as more acceptable for men than women, because of some combination of culture/biology/patriarchal oppression/what have you. Therefore I wonder whether there may exist tendencies towards solitude which fall within the average for men but are considered unusual for women. Myself being male, my result may thus be skewed.
Having said that, it wouldn't be skewed by that much. I do like walking alone, tend towards solitary creative activities (music, reading, writing and such in my case) rather than socialising (I never understood nightclubs, for example), and have never fit into scenes, subcultures or cliques. Rather than having circles of friends, I have probability clouds of friends/acquaintances. I'm also rather skeptical about the whole courtship-ritual thing as being optimal for anything other than forming breeding pairs (I have decided that I don't intend to breed in the foreseeable future (I'd be a lousy father, for one), so it's not really a priority for me). I also don't particularly like sharing a house with other people, and would rather not have to smile and act nice to whatever strangers are in my living room through no action of my own. If I want to be amongst people, I'll catch a tram to Brunswick St. or something. I value my solitude (though not at all times, to be sure), and don't appreciate attempts to rid me of it, however well meant.
Of course, there are probably drugs on the market to cure my personality
type and reduce people like me to well-adjusted Shiny Happy People,
able to contentedly vegetate in front of the TV like a normal member
of society, like a pig in a cage on antibiotics; no alarms and no surprises.
</RANT>
Today in the mail I received a few copies of the new FourPlay remix 2CD, DigitalManipulations, which were sent to me because I contributed to it. I've been listening to it a little, and
it's pretty good (this is my opinion of the other contributors, incidentally;
I've heard my own mix so many times I'm a bit sick of it, and also I can find
the faults in it too easily). There are 27 tracks, ranging from electronic
ambience to cut-up, digitally distorted beats to various experimental weirdness,
with contributors including Deep Child, B(if)tek, Black Lung,
Machine Translations and Darrin Verhagen, as well as some you probably
haven't heard of (including myself and Graham, to name two). If you're the
kind of person who buys records from Warp or Mego, you may want to give it
a listen.