Tom Sparks

A year in the making the little house on Rua 4  is finished .

Alice and Mikes House.

It is winter in New York, this morning looking out my window I saw snow on the roof tops. Snow flakes were falling it, was cold and dry. As the day moved on I went outdoors and the snow was turning to slush. Everyone but me was wearing a hat or a cap. My head was cold. People on the street were all busniess. This was not a play day, work needs to get done. This is New York,  #newyork

Dissociative fugue, formerly fugue state or psychogenic fugue, is a dissociative disorder and a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality

in·trac·ta·ble

Dictionary result for intractable

/ˌinˈtraktəb(ə)l/adjective

1. hard to control or deal with."intractable economic problems"

   synonyms:

   unmanageable, uncontrollable, ungovernable, out of control, out of hand, impossible to cope with; More

   • (of a person) difficult or stubborn.

     synonyms:

     stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, inflexible, unadaptable, unmalleable, unbending, unyielding, uncompromising, unaccommodating, uncooperative, difficult, awkward, perverse, contrary, disobedient, indomitable, refractory, recalcitrant, pigheaded, bull-headed, willful; More

trac·ta·ble

Dictionary result for tractable

/ˈtraktəb(ə)l/adjective

1. (of a person) easy to control or influence."tractable dogs that have had some obedience training"

   synonyms:

   controllable, manageable, malleable, governable, yielding, amenable, complaisant, compliant; More

   • (of a situation or problem) easy to deal with."trying to make the mathematics tractable"

RSS Lives

RSS is a type of web feed which allows users and applications to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. - wikipedia 

RSS was created around 1999, at that time I was in the Network Technologies program at North Seattle Community College. I didn't start using RSS myself  till later. I used a variety of rss readers, the one that stuck with me the longest was Fever 1.39 . To use Fever you need a web server and a version of SQL I have access to both those things so in 2010 I started using Fever to aggregate all the sites I wanted to follow. Over the years this list has changed as sites disappear and as I became interested in other things. Fever was created by  Shaun Inman he stopped supporting it in 2016 . 

Another web service I started using around 2010 was Pinboard   It is a service that lets you store links (url) to web pages you want to remember and return to. Pinboard has many good features one of which is generating an RSS feed from your list of links.  Here is a feed of my links  keep in mind you need to open this link in an RSS reader, its format is designed for a machine to read not a human. My account is public at Pinboard you can review all the link I have save, I am sure a physiatrist could make hay out of the list. 

#rss 

The traveler would be me.

1. The Book of Disquite  - Pessoa
2. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
3. The Walk by Robert Walser
4. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

One: I have started reading this book numerous times. Sometimes I open it at random and start the content is in small components like a assemblage of notes.  

Two: Ricardo Reis was one of the 70+ heteronyms used by Fernando Pessoa, Saramago places both Reis and Pessoa in his novel as main characters. This choice is research into two of Lisbon's greatest authors and into life in Portugal in the 1930's.

Three: The Walk extols the virtues of walking without  clear purpose, in the manner of a Flaneur. I m interested in this practice and this ook is considered research.

Four: Zuboff's new book is a dense treatise on modern "Stack" capitalism and the surveillance systems currently built into the commercial internet. Zuboff has her detractors but the threat she discuses is very real.

____________#literature #Lisbon #Portugal

Shenzhen has been an important experiment for the Chinese since 1980 when it was designated a  "Special Economic Zone". It was created to be an experimental place for the practice of market capitalism within a community guided by the ideals of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" 

Shenzhen is the gateway between mainland China and Hongkong. The Chinese government  hoped Shenzhen would become the "silicon valley" of China, it has and it seems to have surpassed the American silicon valley. 

Here is a Bloomberg video that highlights some of the more dystopian aspects of Shenzhens development.  I must say it looks shiny and clean.

Video dated Jan 24, 2019 

____________

"Fernando Pessoa is an infinte solar system, made up of clusters of plaanets near and far, many of them still unexplored, or unknown. His life was a continuous self-dividing into new worlds, which he experiences as a frustrating inability to complete his works. In an autobiographical text written in English he confessed:

"My writings were none of them finished; new thoughts intruded ever, extrordinary, inexcludeable associations of ideas bearing infinity for term. I cannot prevent my thought's hatred of finishing."

via: Ines Pedros - os Lugares de Pessoa

#Pessoa #Lisbon