Tomorrow is party time! Well, at least its OOo Project Day time, at foss.in. I've posted the presentations and urge everyone to attend who can--the talks, workshops promise to be immensely interesting. If you cannot attend--and despite India's valiant efforts to change this, the majority of people won't be able to, I recommend my colleague's Frank Peters and Jürgen Schmidt's presentations; mine can be ignored, though it does tell newbies how and gives incredibly useful links...
Sankarshan's is special (I can't speak to the others unsent because I have not seen them.) I met Sankarshan several years ago, at LinuxAsia, in Delhi, when I was developing the idea of regional mentors and thought that he should be one; I still do. But he especially impressed me and many others at LinuxAsia with a brilliant presentation on community management issues. In his talk, he detailed the problems that befall a real project in India: the attrition of members, the problem of keeping things going, communication; and also the successes: foss matters not just for computer savvy elites (those who actually attend our talks) but for farmers and others who are taking to computerized systems in order not just to compete but to survive in this neoliberal world. And foss, with its emphasis on the commons (is that a universal concept in agriculture?) works best. Or would one rather the Monsanto model, locking users into proprietary dependencies for that which they need?
So I'm looking forward to Sankarshan's talk, and the others, and trying my best to fully understand Jürgen's,for what he lays out is both important for new developers (and old) and also stimulating. I'd like, in fact, to video Jürgen's presentation and make it wide available, if he's in agreement, as we need such material for all.
As to Bengaluru: I arrived late last night (early today), around 02:30 and slept about three hours. The flight was long--about 20 hours, altogether, though pleasant, however much I didn't sleep. I spent the time working, but.... At some point I ran out of battery power and tried changing batteries but was foiled by a jammed battery and so watched the latest Bourne movie (not as good as prior [or as Die Hard or Live Free] but has tidbits of political relevance, with episodes damning waterboarding, Bush's totalitarian ambitions, and so on) and part of Ratatouille, which is decidedly not as entertaining (or at least not in the same way) as Flushed Away, and for interesting reasons.
Briefly (and how can I speak of Bengaluru when I have only ventured out for a short walk today and am ensconced in a colonial palace with the reminders of colonial past, its dream, nightmare, memory all around? A lovely hotel, a whiplash of history), Rat foregrounds the commitment of identity cartoons assume and put under erasure. For that reason, it's very smart. Oh, it's also smart because Pixar has gone beyond technology here: we no longer watch the film as geeks marvelling at what computers can do but at what artists can imagine. So, just as Disney at their prime pictured the imagined forest of Bambi or Snow White lushly, as if every leaf was the adamic first and not something already seen, a meaningless brusstroke subtended to the action before us, so to does Rat picture the world: it's glorious to gaze upon, it's a world of sense not simply sound and fury.
And the rats are rats. I heard an interview with the director and one of his concerns was to represent rats as rats, not humans more or less rat looking. He succeeded. (Once, as a student, I unrolled my futon late at night and a little family of roof rats panicked out, fleeing for the window; I fled down the stairs. But this little family looked just like those pictured in the film.) And that's where the movie was interesting. For in foregrounding the ratness of the rat, its correspondingly difficult to take the same naive pleasure that one takes in Flushed, which is really about humans dislocated to an exotic but all the same familiar environment. There is no real ratness, no perceptual snag to arrest the grace of mimetic transfer. But there is in Rat: one is reminded of the rat and of ratness. Of course this is the point of the film, and when the airplane landed, that point was being explicitly enunciated. But that point alters the equation of entertainment (mimetic transfer) to a more Brechtian position, and for a cartoon of this nature, that's quite interesting.
Sankarshan's is special (I can't speak to the others unsent because I have not seen them.) I met Sankarshan several years ago, at LinuxAsia, in Delhi, when I was developing the idea of regional mentors and thought that he should be one; I still do. But he especially impressed me and many others at LinuxAsia with a brilliant presentation on community management issues. In his talk, he detailed the problems that befall a real project in India: the attrition of members, the problem of keeping things going, communication; and also the successes: foss matters not just for computer savvy elites (those who actually attend our talks) but for farmers and others who are taking to computerized systems in order not just to compete but to survive in this neoliberal world. And foss, with its emphasis on the commons (is that a universal concept in agriculture?) works best. Or would one rather the Monsanto model, locking users into proprietary dependencies for that which they need?
So I'm looking forward to Sankarshan's talk, and the others, and trying my best to fully understand Jürgen's,for what he lays out is both important for new developers (and old) and also stimulating. I'd like, in fact, to video Jürgen's presentation and make it wide available, if he's in agreement, as we need such material for all.
As to Bengaluru: I arrived late last night (early today), around 02:30 and slept about three hours. The flight was long--about 20 hours, altogether, though pleasant, however much I didn't sleep. I spent the time working, but.... At some point I ran out of battery power and tried changing batteries but was foiled by a jammed battery and so watched the latest Bourne movie (not as good as prior [or as Die Hard or Live Free] but has tidbits of political relevance, with episodes damning waterboarding, Bush's totalitarian ambitions, and so on) and part of Ratatouille, which is decidedly not as entertaining (or at least not in the same way) as Flushed Away, and for interesting reasons.
Briefly (and how can I speak of Bengaluru when I have only ventured out for a short walk today and am ensconced in a colonial palace with the reminders of colonial past, its dream, nightmare, memory all around? A lovely hotel, a whiplash of history), Rat foregrounds the commitment of identity cartoons assume and put under erasure. For that reason, it's very smart. Oh, it's also smart because Pixar has gone beyond technology here: we no longer watch the film as geeks marvelling at what computers can do but at what artists can imagine. So, just as Disney at their prime pictured the imagined forest of Bambi or Snow White lushly, as if every leaf was the adamic first and not something already seen, a meaningless brusstroke subtended to the action before us, so to does Rat picture the world: it's glorious to gaze upon, it's a world of sense not simply sound and fury.
And the rats are rats. I heard an interview with the director and one of his concerns was to represent rats as rats, not humans more or less rat looking. He succeeded. (Once, as a student, I unrolled my futon late at night and a little family of roof rats panicked out, fleeing for the window; I fled down the stairs. But this little family looked just like those pictured in the film.) And that's where the movie was interesting. For in foregrounding the ratness of the rat, its correspondingly difficult to take the same naive pleasure that one takes in Flushed, which is really about humans dislocated to an exotic but all the same familiar environment. There is no real ratness, no perceptual snag to arrest the grace of mimetic transfer. But there is in Rat: one is reminded of the rat and of ratness. Of course this is the point of the film, and when the airplane landed, that point was being explicitly enunciated. But that point alters the equation of entertainment (mimetic transfer) to a more Brechtian position, and for a cartoon of this nature, that's quite interesting.
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