I helped a friend move last night. With El and two other folks we tackled opening the Uhaul- a surprisingly tough task bc all of Jonah’s stuff had rammed itself against the door during the Toronto to Montreal trip- and then shunting his worldy possessions up the skinny staircase to the second floor. I’m a […]

1. i talk to my plants
2. i live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
3. i speak french well, but
4. english is my first language.
5. i live with elran
6. i love that guy a lot.
7. i was born in waterloo ontario
8. and have lived in new brunswick,
9. california,
10. and toronto too,
11. but mostly montreal.
12. i’m allergic to cats, […]

Want to hear me read this post to you, baby?
I went to put the water on to boil and realized that pretty much every time I enter the kitchen I burst into song. And I blame American Idol. Every time I’m alone in a tiled space I have a new need to compulsively belt […]

I have been heaping ‘cut stuff’ from my ongoing MA thesis into this blog, some of it in public and some hovering in draft status because it’s way to messy to be really online, even in here. The ol’ thesis, thankfully, is going well. I’ve just finished going through it again from beginning to end, […]

In a way, I think the Internet, with its end-to-end (face to face) architechture, restores what Harold Adams Innis calls “orality” to our communications.
There are whole realms of media between us in this end-to-end architecture though, of course. Many kinds of soft and hardware between users of a forum or email service, etc. But there […]

Pragmatic system design to overcome rigidities is the logic that initially motivates much of the business behavior that produces large scale trusts, like Standard Oil, or AT&T, or Microsoft. They buy up companies that are steps in their own process hoping to smooth the way. This is the desire, I think, which is other to […]

I’m Risa, this is my little blog. It’s full of thoughts about writing, bits of fiction, a draft of my MA thesis and stuff i’ve cut from it, and poetry, and all kinds of way too personal stuff stuff that’s too half-assed or silly to go anywhere else, ok, so heads up.
I’m founder and editor […]

open source is a metaphor for the internet- and in the way that a metaphor hits upon strange, reified pieces of two disparate things and fuses them to produce an idealized version, open source makes the best meaning of all the possible connectedness of the internet.
Similarly money is a metaphor for the material world. it […]

12:56 AM, July 15th, so now it’s my birthday. i just turned twenty five and joined the ‘quater century club’.
I really like birthdays. They’re the best holiday because there’s a tiny piece of them that’s not culturally constructed or a corporate invention. Each of us really did come into the world on a day. On […]

when people say “anything is possible” they are usually basking in the glory of having sought something and obtained it. this is what they feel, and its true as long as you look at it and them this way:
anything one truly, deeply, perfectly, wants from the experience-position one is in (the long complex code […]

“It is not exactly true that social sciences have always alternated between actor and system, or aganecy and structure. I might be more productive to say that they have alternated between two types of equally powerful dissatisfactions … ANT might have hit on one of the very phenomena of the social order: maybe the social […]

My idea that my body is a network in the same sense that a computer is a network is a thought experience I’ve transcribed here, leaving evidence. Your thought, reading this, is your own, and if you talk about it then that conversation becomes another part of my ideaworld’s life as it extends beyond me. […]

Proprietary systems for coordination and communication- content management- have been in place for corporations and government institutions, at a cost in the tens of thousands, for at least 4 decades (Campbell-Kelley, 2003, 4). This situation, combined with Microsoft’s condensate market share, should encourage us to think of software in the contemporary period in relation to […]

Is there a difference in the thought systems of a culture built on an idea of ownership (straight capitalism), and therefore of increasingly material imaginary boundaries, and a culture such as Carolyn Marvin describes, where the land holders tell her, “we don’t have a boundary, we have an argument.” ()?

I’ve started working on writing pieces that link together. Bits of poetry and prose and quotes from other people’s writing that expands the idea of the poetry, or that inspired it. I’ve learned a little xhtml and css to do this. I’m really a beginner with any kind of programming (they don’t teach that in […]