The blogger folks need to use some browser detection on their interface. It look beutiful on IE 5 for Win32, but on this iMac, it’s a bit crampt. I haven’t surfed it on the Linux box yet. It’s probably even worse there.
I came over to the union to see if they had any decent Samba books and to get out of the office for a few minutes. I found a great book on design that I should probably go back and buy. It had everything from architecture to household products and all manner of other things in between.
I’m feeling desperate today, though I’ve no reason to. It’s a sure sign I should get back on the zoloft. It’s the one thing that helps. A copy of AdBusters that I glanced at yesterday has a lot of rhetoric about drug companies and the profits reaped from depression medication, which the Adbusters people seem to think of as little more than sugar pills. They show an amazing ignorance both for the reality of depression as a disease (and not just something you can get over by force of will) and of the well-doccumented success of the current medications. Depression is a real thing; It’s a real thing I’ve suffered from for as long as I can remember. When I’m wise enough to take my meds, I’m better in every sense of the word. If I skip them, it catches up with me and no task seems worth doing and no accomplishment seems earned or worthy of pride. Depression, in my case, leads to a devaluing of my self and everythign I’ve ever done or might do. It’s a scary thing.
But while I’m bitching, the folks at AdBusters have always annoyed me. They are a part of a very large group of leftists who don’t have the balls to become marxists outright but somehow want to be part and parcel of consumer culture while still dissing it. Yet they offer no way to tell what parts of consumer culture are useful and which parts are to be derided. It’s a pan-ironic stance that ammounts to nothing–silly entertainment for would-be intellecutals. There’s certainly a place for the sort of ironic tactics that AdBusters endorces. But without a philosophical backing, they merely single out what targets suit them for the moment and find themselves caught up in all manner of contradicions. They become one more standard of hipness. Why are we against, Segrams? Because AdBusters says we should be (the frequent attacks on Segrams are a continuing thread. Segrams is blamed for alcohol-influenced death, sickness, and violence. But we’re left wondering what the solution should be? Prohibition? One of the greatest public policy failures of the century?
Blah….I’m too angry with them to make sense….