Buy my stuff!
Since I’m moving to Japan, I have some stuff to get rid of… to sell, even. Let me know if you want it (contact details on the about page). Purchasing will be easiest if you live in Melbourne and know me personally. If you don’t like the prices, we can negotiate.
Here’s what I’ve got:
[Update 1 July 2005 : the headphones and some of the CDs have sold (shown in strikethrough). So, too, probably, has the fridge, but that isn’t quite sewn up yet, so let me know if you’re interested.]
Sony MDR-V700 DJ Headphones, $100
(In original box. Ear-pads slightly abraded from use.). These are the best headphones I’ve ever owned, so much so that they’re actually a bit too good for me (they’re better than what I need). Suffice to say, these are pretty close to the ultimate in hi-fi headphones. For serious audiophiles and people with some kind of professional need for accurate sound reproduction. They also cause stuff like this to happen…
Yes, I’m selling that exact model of headphone. (Warning: Claims made about these headphones’ ability to make hot girls kiss each other are intended only to generate humor. I cannot guarantee that the headphones actually will do this, but nor can I guarantee that they won’t…)
Palm Tungsten T3 with 1GB SD card and other extras, $300
64MB RAM, 400MHz Intel Xscale Processor, 320*480 64K colour screen. (Not in original box.) Light abrasions on input area, some scratches on body.
Extras: 1GB SD card, USB link-cable/charger with car adaptor, USB card reader.
My grounds for supporting VSU
Today, the last in a series of emails I exchanged with Michelle Smith, Publications Officer of the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association, about the relationship between identity politics and VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism). In today’s installment, I explain that one of the reasons I support VSU is because I believe it’s immoral to force people to pay for services rendered to others. This wasn’t intended to be the last word on the subject, but there wasn’t anything else to say after this. Next: Something on another topic…
My final email to Michelle Smith
Thanks again for your reply, Michelle. It’s a pleasure to read such thoughtful responses.
I have just one short thing to say, and it’s possibly where the source of our disagreements lies. I believe that it is immoral to coerce people into helping provide services or advocacy for others, and that to do so is destructive to the liberty of all. The only things I believe people are entitled to expect are the freedom to behave as they see fit (provided they coerce no other), and to have their own bodies as their property. People have no entitlement to assistance of any kind, whatever their circumstances, if that assistance must be extracted involuntarily. It is admirable that UMPA does provide products, services, and assistance that can’t be made to turn a profit or even to break even. However, under VSU, UMPA will not be able to force students to co-operate, and will have to rely on their generosity instead. This is as it should be. Start preparing convincing appeals to students’ sense of charity if you wish things to continue as they are at UMPA, but don’t try to trick them into believing that their own freedom of choice is a bad thing.
By the way, I consider the ban on UMPA mass-emailing postgraduates denies all its staff their entitlement to behave as they see fit. It also disadvantages students by preventing them from receiving direct email communications from UMPA even though they may (as I would) prefer that money, paper, and labour not be wasted on mail-outs.
I hope to hear that your colleagues approve of my reproducing your responses. If not, I invite you to post a comment to the entries appearing on my blog from Sunday, so that your point of view can be represented.
Sincerely,
Ben Hourigan
The Amber Spyglass (review)
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (2000; repr. London: Point, 2001), 549pp. 8/10
This is the last in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, notable because its characters’ main quest is to destroy the god of Abraham. It’s a splendid thing for a book aimed at children to include, and I hope it convinces thousands of people that human life is for humans to live for themselves, and that obeying the laws of a real or imagined god is a foolish waste of precious time.
Aside from this message, the central point of Philip Pullman’s vision, for me, is intention. The final thing that the heroes must do, once a decrepit god and his tyrannical regent, Metatron, are dead, is ensure that all the holes in the universe are closed, so that “Dust” cannot escape. Dust, as it is called in the heroine Lyra’s world, or Shadow Particles, as it is called in ours (in the books), are conscious particles created by the purposeful activity of sentient beings. They animate the world with power and direction, gathering around adults and around tools and other objects that people invest with purpose and meaning.
In Lyra’s multiverse, Dust is the source of everything good, and her enemies, the Authority and his servants (including the Church) seek to destroy it, because it is product of and a conduit for human will, freedom, and desire. In opposition, the heroes’ mission is to ensure that sentient life can continue to saturate the universe with intention: the mission of sentient life is to enliven the world with the energy of consciousness.
It’s disappointing, then, that the story finally brings its heroes up against some very hard realities that intention cannot change. Young lovers Will and Lyra must separate forever after just a few days of romance because they cannot live outside their own worlds, and the openings between them must all be closed (bar one, which allows ghosts to escape from the world of the dead). The angel Xaphania tells them they have no choice but to give in, and their acquiescence in the face of tragedy contradicts the story’s valuing of intention. Their willfulness, surely, must be able to generate enough Dust to counteract the presence of just one more gate between the worlds, for their lifetimes alone… Despite the thematic contradiction, the ending is effective storytelling. It’s terribly sad, and it made me cry all the more because, like Will and Lyra, I will soon have to leave someone whom I love dearly, possibly for ever, but at least for the year or more that I will be away from Australia.
Disappointing, too, is the solution to the book gives to the problem of death. Lyra and Will descend (alive) to the world of the dead, where they free the ghosts of every sentient being that ever lived, held in bondage there without their souls by the Authority. The gateway that Lyra and Will open lets the dead leave their prison, but on returning to a living world, the ghosts dissolve into particles, joyfully reunited with the rest of existence.
For those who must die, such a vision (of dissolving into the universe) might be satisfying. It is very close to what I, in the small part of me that thinks like a Buddhist, expects upon death. However, in this time, when humanity seems poised to put an end to the death of human bodies, Pullman’s version of salvation for the dead is deeply uninspired. Here, again, there seems to be a contradiction: if sentience and intention are the sources of all good, wouldn’t the best outcome for the dead, and for everyone, be for them to retain their consciousness, even in ghostly form? I would prefer anything to oblivion.
The Amber Spyglass is a well-told conclusion to one of the best fantasy series I’ve read in years, but suffers upon comparison with preceding volumes because it fails to tie up some loose ends in the plot, and holds back in its celebration of human intention.
Do rônin dream of electric girls?
CLAMP and Madhouse Production, Chobits, animated series (2002), 26 episodes, subtitled by a4e. 7/10
What if there were cute girl robots who could fall in love?
Such is the question that, no doubt, thousands of male rônin students living in Tôkyô guest houses have asked themselves. Motosuwa Hideki, the protagonist of Chobits, is one such man.
The answer to the question, if you’re unfamiliar with anime, may strike you as surprisingly sensitive. In the near-future that Chobits is set in, there are sexy girl robots, one of whom can fall in love, and it’s bad news for human women and the usual mix of heartache and joy for all concerned.
For the people of Chobits’ Tôkyô, today’s personal computers have been superseded by mostly humanoid androids, which work as computers, personal assistants, and companions for their human masters. Motosuwa, a student who failed his university entrance exam and has come to Tôkyô to study, wants one, but can’t afford it. It’s lucky, then, that he finds a female persocom (as they are called) left out for roadside rubbish collection near the guest house where he lives. Her memory, however, has been wiped, and he names her after the only word she can say: “Chii.â€
Most of the anime shows Motosuwa juggling work, study, an apparent romance with his boss’ daughter, and raising Chii from infantile incapacity to charming innocence while gradually uncovering the secrets of her past.
Chobits’ eventual strength lies in the way it subtly teases out the implications of a huge number of men and women spending time with attractive but emotionally vacuous android counterparts. Motosuwa’s classmate, Shinbo, has an affair with their teacher, whose husband became obsessed with his persocom and began to ignore her completely. Yumi, the girl who apparently likes Motosuwa, ran away from a relationship with a man who had been married to a persocom who “died.†Everywhere, men and women are tempted away from human company by androids who look better and behave more pleasingly than the real thing.
Humans are the great losers in Chobits. At first, they fall prey to obsession with unfeeling objects. But when Chii, the only one remaining of two persocom sisters who had the new ability to feel and to love, reveals her true purpose, humans lose their place as the only sentient beings the universe has ever known.
But what is a loss for humans is a victory for sentience. Endowed by her human creator with the purpose of allowing all persocoms to be happy, Chii beams a program out to all the persocoms of the world that gives them her ability to feel emotions and to fall in love. Hideki’s having fallen in love with Chii is justified by her ability to love him, and so Chii’s action validates all future human-persocom infatuations: emotionally, persocoms and humans are brought to equality.
The animation itself is exceptionally well-presented. That may, however, be merely a matter of its newness: it is also the most recent anime series I have watched. The influence of today’s motion graphic techniques are particularly noticeable in the polished opening credits. The end credits are eventually graced by one of the most haunting anime themes I’ve heard, “Ningyo Hime,†sung by Tanaka Rie. The series loses points for an overabundance of mundanity, and for also being less complete and authentic than the manga on which it was based.
Chobits’ unflinching vision of the consequences of android sentience is its most appealing feature.
Apple on x86: a gamer’s perspective
In today’s WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs officially announced that Apple is beginning to switch its CPU-based products from the PowerPC architecture to x86. Online responses have been varied, commenting on what effect the move will have on Apple’s sales, Linux, and Microsoft. I haven’t seen any writing that’s been especially enthusiastic about it from a user’s perspective, but I think that’s because a few effects of the transition have so far been missed.
The only thing I’m unhappy about is that come 2006, I’m going to want to replace the 1.5GHz Powerbook I bought last November with one of the new Intel-based Apple laptops we can expect to see soon. On the plus side, that new machine is likely to be considerably faster, cooler, lighter, and less power-hungry than what I currently have.
Better yet, it’s going to have the same processor architecture that Windows and most Linux distros are compiled for. So while I’ll be mostly running OS 10.whatever, I’ll be able to dual-boot with an x86 Linux distro, and probably Windows, too.
This will make my life as a gamer much easier. I just gave away my x86 PC, since the beast of a machine was too heavy and too big to think about taking with me to Japan. So I’ll probably never finish Knights of the Old Republic, Planescape: Torment, and Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which I had on the go. It’s a shame.
But with a new x86 Powerbook, I will be able to play those games again, and not just on Windows, either. With OS X on x86, the way is open for a port of Cedega, which currently lets users play DirectX games on Linux, provided they’ve got an x86. Even Transgaming don’t port Cedega to OS X, I’ll still be able to run it under Ubuntu Linux. Of course, having x86 processors in Apple machines is also going to make it easier for developers to write OS X native ports of Windows games, provided they can wean themselves off their dependence on DirectX. Emulators written for x86 probably won’t suffer the performance hits they currently do on PPC, Virtual PC and so on for OS X will run Windows at close to native speed, and we’ll probably see an OS X port of VMware.
So if Apple keeps putting A-grade GPUs in their Powerbooks, they’ll soon be great work machines that double as gaming platforms. That will make me very happy, and it’s likely to make the Mac a viable choice for gamers for the first time ever. Smart move, Apple.
now playing: No Dancing from the album “My Aim Is True” by Elvis Costello