Asking all my life.
I made a little shortcode so I could do something like this….
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[/ap_if]That way short posts don’t federate with all the fancy permalinks & titles. Long ones do.
Curious to lean more about the AT Protocol?
This is a very comprehensive git repo of PM resources. As someone wanting to “officially” make the switch, I want to make sure to go through all of this.
I made a little plugin to bring back bookmarking to my WordPress. It’s mostly for me, but it’s on GitHub, so….
ethernick/simple-bookmarks
Setting up a new mastodon home on cosocial. Follow me @ethernick@cosocial.ca
As one can tell, I show up once a year on this blog to shave my beard off. I had hope to share more. And I did for a while… just somewhere else.
A relatively new and young ( a 1.5 and 4.5 year old ) family has a tendency to do that. I come back here not to post so much as to look back at my archive. I might come back and write more, but you might need to wait 3 years, give or take.
In the meantime, I am still tinkering on pet projects.
If you haven’t been paying attention to Mastodon and the Fediverse, I recommend you do. Decentralized social media is cool. With the help of a a project called Shuttlecraft, I now to have my own plot of Federated digital land. Come by won’t you?
With Shuttlecraft came a re-introduction to Glitch. I was completely unaware what they were up to, and that’s a bad on my part. Because while the internet is opening new languages, as someone who want to put something on the net, I felt you had two choices: a webhost that is still kind of antiquated, which a limited support of antiquated services, and going all cloud all the time – which can get costly.
Then there is glitch. A webhost that’s kept up. Technical enough for developers getting into things like react & node.js, but not uber technical that you need to spin up cloud instances and install every Unix package and then configure your choice of webserver from scratch.
If you haven’t taken a look at ethernick.com in a while, swing by there too, won’t you?
Well, it looks like nap time is over, and I’ve got to get the little one. See you again in Movember.
I’ve gone off the beaten track for the past couple of posts. And it’s time to get back to Ong and his characteristics of oral cultures. And today, we’re going to look at
The noetic role of heroic ‘heavy’ figures and of the bizarre
In this, Ong focuses on the tall tale.
The absurd and larger-than-life heroes and characters, in oral cultures, aren’t as grandiose as they seem. Their extreme nature is normalized & memorized over time.
It’s easy to see this in fiction, the larger-than-life images and situations we watch. With advancements in technology and CG, there is an almost infinite rabbit hole we can take ourselves.
For the longest time in our literate culture, books have held these grandiose images and stories. Then came the moving pictures. To me, it seems appropriate that some of the earliest attempts to catch our imaginations were centered around flying to the moon or robots and androids.
Most of the great stories have elements of the absurd, bizarre, larger-than-life characters and journey. They stick with you.
And not only that – they have an immediate word-of-mouth quality.
In a story with a million over-the-top moments and characters, when recounted and told to friends and family, if you miss a part, a feature, it still can captivate. The heart of the story travels, even if you don’t know exactly how big or green The Hulk is.
For fiction to be grandiose is expected. What’s really difficult to think about is what’s next: the “real” world.
In 15-20 years, what will we remember about these past few years?
It might depend on how many fictionalized movies come out.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen an interesting trend that, I think, relates to this thought – the fictionalization of history.
Take a look at these two lists, biographical films and biographical mini-series. I smashed them together to get this.
We are creating & consuming our history more and more through infotainment.
Some could argue that this isn’t real history. That these fictionalized moments are outlandish, over-the-top, made for our viewing pleasure. But maybe at the root, that’s the point. Make history bizarre, outlandish, and grandiose, and maybe we’ll actually remember a nugget of truth?
I’ll admit, my napkin numbers may be reflective more about technology. That the cost to make TV and movies is decreasing, so that overall more content is made in general.
But as I think about it, does this really sway the thought? How many books are there fictionalizing history? Is the history that we learn (not the journalistic history of historians) all but a story?
Perhaps TV & movies, by their very nature, allow for the outlandish, bizarre, dramatized life for our viewing pleasure. They are designed to recreate larger-than-life moments “on the big screen,” which is kinda why we like it.
We take in all this over-the-top content, and over time, what happens?
The absurd and outlandish fade, and the nugget of a moral, thought, or feeling remains.
Ong doesn’t oppose this outlandish and bizarre, only that in oral cultures, it was more prominent. He even mentioned that in literature, this continues. However, it’s an artifact of an oral culture. It was heavily required for an oral society as a tool to normalize information through society over time.
The “heroic” heavy figure, the Ong notes, fades with literate culture. Over time there came the “anti-hero,” that “you do not need a hero in the old sense to mobilize knowledge in story form.”
I can’t entirely agree that there was always a heavy hero. In several storytelling traditions, more complex figures took center stage. Take the trickster, the raven, the coyote, Loki, Kaulu, Mercury, the Monkey King, and more.
Let’s look at the gods of Rome or the Norse – sure, magnificent and over the top with grand powers and bizarre and otherworldly experiences – yet flawed and almost human. They were, as Ong might call them, “heavy” figures, but all heroic? No.
How about the Indigenous peoples of North America whose, for lack of a better word, gods were animals and nature itself. “Heavy” figures? Yes. Heroic? Not all.
If Ong was right about needing a hero, though I disagree, perhaps in the postliterate the “heavy” figures are not an external hero, but ourselves. Celebrities taking the limelight. While the rest stage our lives to be bigger, to be more outlandish, to be more grandiose than they are. All with the idea to be seen, and maybe what’s harder to acknowledge, to be remembered.
Though, perhaps this is a transition? Maybe we’re stewing and creating the recipe to create a new set of Roman and Norse-like gods. People who may actually have been real at one point in time, only to have their lives made bizarre and over-the-top from some sort of common societal draw.
Photo by Robert Gourley on Unsplash
Originally posted on Substack
