January 4, 2006

no invaders in sf

you know those space invaders secretly mounted on buildings all over paris? they started invading the world in 1999. and san francisco is not on the invasion map! are we over it? why not invade sf? (sf doesn't need invading?) here are some lovely flickr sets of invaders in paris. and amsterdam.

*on an unrelated note, have you ever done a google "related" search on your own site? i did for the first time today, and i am left wondering: why are the sites similar to mintcar all unabashedly left-wing or chinese music blogs?! and jimmy t's there!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

google keeps track of your search data, referral data, etc. the reason why you're linked with these seemingly random sites is because the ppl who view these sites also visit yours. ;) for more info, visit: http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html

-psycho

Anonymous said...

wowie zowie! about google- that makes sense.

google google google. my dad keeps the television tuned to investors'/marketplace news. it's google this, google that, google-patterned socks. no need to even employ quotation marks- google is ubiquitous. google might as well coin its own dictionary, just for the purpose of listing its own logo next to the definition of "ubiquitous" or "universal". google is a new, cute lil rockefeller or carnegie or astor. except, it's not, and it's different.

enough google for a lifetime! thanks for posting this; i was in the dark about space invaders. i'm sure there's a conspiracy-theory sort of explanation for the absence of space invaders from s.f. what it is, i dunno yet.

what i'm riproaringly curious about is why Le Parkour hasn't become a huge phenomenon yet. being at home, i rifled through a bunch of older magazines i had kept, including the Spring 2003 n.y. times magazine men's fashion issue. there was a spread on Le Parkour (from the Parisian suburb of Lisses). Le Parkour is to Paris as skateboarding is to California's Orange County. except, it's cooler.

Anonymous said...

p.s. one more thing about "google" and current search technology- it's all very reliant on algorithms. ick! it would also explain google's map of the roads of the north berkeley hills. Spruce Street is highlighted and Euclid Avenue is not, perhaps because more google users request driving directions that involve using Spruce as a route.

that's one hunch. :p like i said, ick!

as a kid in high school, i loved using the internet, because it was so much more novel then. these days, websites are all engineering themselves in the style of Casinos- they want you to spend as much time on their sites, continuously wandering off on detours and memes, and losing track of time! my dad still uses AOL, and i got mad when i figured out that you can no longer keep track of the time you have spent logged online!

how unethical! how shocking! how utterly profit-generating! ick!

Miss J said...

le parkour not a phenomena in the states ... has something to do with the different kind of urbanism in the US ... more space, less density (parking lots and fields of concrete better for skating than jumping) ... also has something to do with crazy legal action in the states?

i like google because they take care of my blog. mostly.

i really wonder if companies like google with their "new ethos" will leave a lasting imprint on our world ... (i'm generalizing that this kind of ethos is younger, more fluid about intellectual property, more collaborative and left / libertarian-leaning, dare i say, more intimate / unobtrusively pervasive). i dont know exactly.

Jimmy Tran said...

the world does work in mysterious ways...well, more like internet cache, but you get what i'm sayins

Anonymous said...

I must be missing something crucial because I fail to see how the related search thing is related to space invaders. Neither does google, if that's what this means:

http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=related+search&word2=space+invaders

Oh well. Being on another continent clearly clouds my understanding of "Americans".

Anonymous said...

"i like google because..."
nice. you put it in good hands.

"i really wonder if companies like google with their "new ethos" will leave a lasting imprint on our world ...

"dare i say, more intimate / unobtrusively pervasive"

dare all you want jean! i love the daring.

well, by this point, i feel like this is more a barroom conversation than a bloggie conversation. for me, at least. the internet's charismatic "intimacy" is just its peril. think about the analogy between George W. Bush's authorisation of wiretaps... and the now-internet's pervasiveness.

i leave it at that, for now. you know me- i love deciphering texts, and i love to make people do the same!

a hint: think of science & think of physics. the problem of this "intimacy" is a problem more scientific than social.

and, by now, i'm hopin' that people see that there's little difference between the adjectivies "scientific" & "social". i get socially rammed up the ass by well-meaning friends for being an anthropology major with an F minus g.p.a.

while the concept of anthropology itself might sound dumb (about as dumb as sociology or social welfare or....architecture, or education), a class or two in the subject will make you think things in a different light.

perhaps a class or two is all you need in life; because anthropologists (at least at u.c. berkeley) can-not for the love of kwanzaa find any new/hip/relevant/readable/intelligent reading-texts to assign to their students.

need i say, mother-fucks.

enough typing. all i shoulda said is: anthropology ought to think more scientifically, mathematically AND statiscally. if nothing else, these three, stupid, adjectives speak for themselves.

my love-letter to the department:

ADDRESSED TO: Musée de l'Homme
DEAR SIR ANTHROPOLOGY IV, ESQUIRE,

You Need To (Vous Devrez) fucking go for a long swim in the Mariana Trench.

Take Some Paid-Time-Off from the university-laboratory-classroom and actually think for yourself.

treat human beings as individual variables; and treat society as the most-possible-complex matrix of algebraic equations. as a matrix of memes.

yours truly,
short, starved, slave-wage-paid, naked, brown-blind, female 3-month-old baby.

from antarctica with love.
---

End Letter.