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posted by Jer Clarke at 00:45

[working on my essay for philosophy, i think i might be on to something!]

When considering the nature of KNOWLEDGE, appeal to the common use of the word know is innapropriate because though if you asked someone "do you know that you are a human" they would say "YES!" if you asked them how they know they would say "because i know it's true", and if you asked them what "true" means they would say that it is "something that is not false". thus their use of the word KNOW is not caused by a compromise wherein they allow anything which the believe beyond reasonable doubt to be true, but merely their ASSUMPTION that what they believe is unquestionably true, which of course is itself brought on by their lack of consideration of the possiblility that they could be wrong, and their ignorance of other possibilities (such as Unger's evil scientist controlling their perceptions with electrodes)
posted by Jer Clarke at 12:46

it's amazing how badly you can fuck yourself over just by thinking positively. seriously.

university is hard. really hard. all my life my teachers have been instilling this fear in me that THE NEXT STAGE will be harder than the current one. that it will take all my time and energy just to keep up. but it never seemed to happen. junior high, then high school then college. all of these had bad parts, and stress points, but at no time did i ever feel like there really was no way that i could get through it. i always knew that i could just work till it was late and be ready for whatever it was. but now all of a sudden i'm faced with exams that just comprise to much detailed information for me to cram in in a two day period, and papers that require research and thought that is completely impossible to accomlish on such a timescale (a timescale, of course, on which i did all my work since grade 6)

it's strange, but it really does make me feel stupid. or at least as if any intelligence i have is pretty useless. i mean, so many people can get through university fine. they get the bachelors degrees and go out into the world and do any number of pointless things. so why do i seem unable to follow through with this? i guess it's kind of stupid, cause i'll probably pass as long as i don't give up now. but is there really any glory involved in passing with a 65%? do i need any glory?

also, i let down my study group, effectively taking advantage of all their hard work.

what a dick.
posted by Jer Clarke at 17:42

Looking at pictures of yourself is such a strange thing to do. i mean, who the fuck is that person? is that me? does my nose really stick out that much? are all those curves actually part of my face?

usually i try to stay behind the camera, but i know i'll regret if later if i have no images of myself so i let people steal the fire when they ask. but it really does kind of phase me to look at the results. i find it hard to believe that my girlfriend can have sex with me without laughing for example. also, i tend to feel fat, which i don't believe i am, or at least not really...

it's a usefull philosophical tool though, like we tend to just look through the window of our vision out at world that we process instantly. the things we can do without having a single thought are amazing. but when you look at a picture of yourself you're confronted with the fact that you're really out there. not just your eyeballs and brain, but all of you. When you see a picture of yourself, especially one that really doesn't represent your "residual-self-image" you're confronted with that part of you that you really can't control, maybe it's the auto-pilot that gets caught in the photo (which would repudiate the traditional cultures that claim that photo's steal your soul, maybe they just steal everything else?), and, being forced to look at it is what makes viewing the photo uncomfortable. i dont' think we like to be reminded of our mortality-limitations-just humanness, at least not in such a dynamic visual way (it's easier to brush of the existential unease of a question like "why are we here" than it is to look at yourself making a face in normal conversation that you would grimace at if anyone you were talking to made it).

maybe it's just me that thinks that though, maybe everyone else just looks at photos and says "yup, i'm ugly" or "yup that's just me". i've always had a weird relationship with my body, and rarely do i look in a mirror without having to re-confront the stranger i see there.
posted by Jer Clarke at 21:50

it wasn't a matter of motivation this time. usually there was a feeling of boredom, lazyness and apathy, like actually caring about this silly thing just wasn't worth the effort.

but this was different, there was motivation, just not to do this. an urge to write in a journal, to build a journal, to find readers for a journal. to take, look at and publish pictures, to copy the amazing world outside (and inside) the home and give it a chance to be as beautiful-monstrous-ironic and amazing as it truly was. there was even a skewed kind of motivation to work on the sound project, but less.

all this, but it still seemed that the comic must be drawn, that it was the important thing, that people like the comic, people respond to the comic, the comic is popular. the fact that the comic must be maintained untill the t-shirts could be sold ALONE should have been motivation to complete the panels, but the apathy remained. the feeling that very little was left to be said with this format, that its subjectivity had been stolen by overuse, corrupted by the redundancy of time, and had effectively become passive.

the ideas no longer stimulating, it seemed like a waste.

but they still loved it, and asked for more.

and there are comics to be finished.
posted by Jer Clarke at 23:11

end of semester is upon me again, and, again, i am not prepared for the slew of work that is about to slap me in the face. twice a year this happens, twice a year i wish that i had worked harder leading up to the mad week, but know that there's no way i would have.

yup.

i'm not sure what i think of the pictures i've been taking. i'm pretty sure that they're good, but i don't know if they're actually worth anything other than self-gratification. i have a feeling that at best they'd be usefull as an accompanyment to a blog, like if i used each day's picture as the focus of the text, or even if i just left them there. hmmmm... it makes me wish i hadn't given gimp that design, it would be perfect for my purposes..

and the comic, and the comic, and the comic. i've been slacking lately. there's no denying it. in the 10 months that i've been doing it i have never gone so far into debt with myself and any readers that still bother to show up. but i'm just not enthousiastic about it anymore. i feel like i'm just repeating myself or something... but how else am i going to express myself? blog? i've been repeating myself in this damn thing for months now, and i barely even use it. and blogs are pretty much a dead end anyway. like they allow their users to get comfortable and not worry about working too hard, which really isnt' what i'm looking for. i've already shown that i at least have something in me that can motivate me to create, IF i have a schedule to keep, and that the shit i create maybe isn't the shit that i normally consider it to be, so why should i digreess into the blogosphere when i have something good going?

my friend aiden who was a straight edge (a kind of punk subculture meaning non smoker, drinker, drug-user, sexual philanderer) for two years recently quit and started drinking and smoking. it's nice to be able to hang out with him at bars and stuff and not worry about being the only one drunk, but it really seems to bum him out... like he knows that what he was doing before, though it was harder and maybe less fun, was more respectable, at least to himself. he actually seems to drink more to get over the fact that he can no longer consider himself like he used to... which kind of worries me...

point is, i think it might end up like that somehow...

of course...
posted by Jer Clarke at 10:35

new design, i think it's pretty in an ugly way.
posted by Jer Clarke at 19:22