techno, oh well, it was john's idea and i wrote him he could take out the fuck words.. i didn't have a copy since i wrote it in real time like 99% of my posts.
it was a little more than agitation light.
umm. i assume you are meaning volume discussion.
i don't think anybody should be intimidated by the discussion.
i think they are basically voicing some kind of discontent in the architectural realm the world over. but still having some hard time to shed their own elitist curtain walls ;.)..
don't let them bully you.
I have read and an am considering a response to the Volume/purple thread - but have to run do some "real work" at the moment so no time to post it now. I'm not intimidated, really, just don't want to only comment for the sake of commenting.
At this moment I have to inform you all that if you sneeze I will no longer be able to say "Bless you" to you because apparently the word "blessing" connotes belief in a deity and a tendency to rave about said belief. I don't want to post this on the thread where said vocabulary opinion was made known, as I don't want to pollute that thread with arguing.
Agreed, LB. Apparently offering condolences in religious terms leads to wars. Unlike, you know, intolerance towards people who have incorrect ideas. Arrgh.
Sorry - I got a little pissy there for a moment and thus forgot to post that I think the Purple Thread is a great idea for a new way of presenting opinion/information here at Archinect. Bravo for the effort, John Jourden et al for making it happen.
on the purple discussion... and i don't want to post it there since it would be off topic in a meta sort of way... is this now like an 'elvis has left the building' situation and are we now supposed to discuss amongst ourselves? i applaud archinect for the effort, but if the characters aren't going to answer perfectly logical questions [how do you get your writers?- what could be more straightforward than that?], then they might as well have made it an interview.
i feel i really can't comment on a magazine i don't know and have never read, but i really hope those latin american politics images are at least 2 years old or else they make little sense. at $20 a pop, it's bound to stay within a really small circle. at least october, grey room, oppositions, catered to small circles not determined by affluence [at least not directly]. big graphics and big dollars seem to destine this one to the wallpaper, poseur heavy, cool to have in my coffee table crowd.
aml, you make a good point. Some of the most critically acclaimed magazines in history have died very quickly due to pricepoint issues. But it costs money to make them beautiful, so would they be so good if they were cheaper?
lb - it is a potentially great thing, but I share aml's hesitation on the 'elvis has left the bldg' nature of the format...the recently bolded text of the featured members only adds volume to this notion.
(i was actually coming to TC to share this thought, thinking, like you aml, that it wasn't exactly on message for the featured discussion...)
the willingness to try a new format is great...that said, it felt like reading an interview, and unless the 'characters' return for discussion, it will feel like commenting on a feature, not posting to an active discussion. nevertheless, we should give it a minute before settling on this position...
otherwise, the content is intriguing, and comments from the regulars seem to be headed in a useful direction...
the cost thing is interesting (as part of a larger issue), and certainly worth pursuing on the featured discussion.
tough question rationalist | it seems that traditional forms of media have become expensive if not by anything but the the fact that are elitist (not that i find anything wrong with that I'm an architect for fuck sake and my clients will invariably be elite)
i love nice pics and glossy magazines as much as anyone... and a long time ago, i actually did some small research on metropolis, and recorded how it had to reduce its size several times over mainly due to cost issues. harvard design magazine also used to be big and is now sort of standard sized. it just amazed me, $20 vs., for example, $6 for metropolis [less if you're subscribed]. or $10 for log.
i just think there's some contradiction in the thinking of being agitative [and new and reinventing the way architecture is perceived and all the stuff i could grasp while browsing, because i'll be the first to admit that it was sort of hard to follow not because i can't read the words -i've translated heidegger and adorno, for fcks sake- but because it all seemed terribly *ornamented* in theory archibabble discourse and i got the feeling the whole time that the main idea could probably be distilled to 2 good paragraphs]. sorry. that was a long parathesis right there.
let me try again.
i just think there's a contradiction in thinking you're agitating stuff, while doing it from within established institutions, and orhan's question hit the right nerve: where/how do you get your writers? because if anyone can submit [like log, for example], then i can see some logic there, but if this is a platform for columbia/amo/oma/etc, how can they frame themselves as representatives of the 'fringe'or alternative thinking or whatever they meant?
and i am officially in a bad mood today, so sorry about that. see, i don't even usually write here in thread central. this is like therapy. whew!
aml,
i think you should carry your posts to purple thread. by the way, it doesn't make any difference if this people respond to john jourden's thread any further. like there are a lots of threads that first few people who started the conversation didn't appear again. it is really their choice.
hah, yeah, myriam, it isn't exactly ubiquitous here in tokyo either. sometimes if i'm in an obscure bookstore i see copies, but it isn't exactly A+U yet...
LB and LIG, about religious comments in daily life..."bless you" doesn't bother me, but LIG's comment in tuther thread actually took me back..i had to think a bit about why something as well-intentioned would make me feel uncomfortable, but it does...and i have no idea why (no offence meant, mind you).
I do know that my aunt (who grew up christian fundamentalist like myself) was visibly angry at our display of shinto and buddhist gestures in our daily life when she visited us here in tokyo last month, and would have been deeply offended if we directed any of that at her (or her family)...so maybe it is the same sort of thing...sometimes religion is unwelcome in even the most benign forms... hell i have a jewish friend who becomes intensely angry if i accidentally wish him a merry christmas, and neither of us really believe in anything supernatural...human psychology is such an odd beasty.
Like jump, I had to look at Gin's comment a couple of times, but have no problems with the common things like 'bless you' or 'merry christmas'. I think it's just because it was more deeply religious than a non-believer is used to hearing. Not offended, just made me pause for a minute...
Other religious pet peeves include "I'll pray for you," and religion at the office. Once my project manager took the team out to lunch to celebrate a project milestone, and what do you think happened? The rest of the team talked God for forty minutes straight, while I became more and more uncomfortable by the second. I tried to gently steer the conversation in another direction to no avail, and eventually sat there trying to say as little as possible, until I burst out with something blunt and offensive.
i have no problem with bless and things like that but it really pisses me off when i say 'may allah bless you', people get freaked out and they look at me weird.
that wouldn't bother me orhan, simply because it is alien to me and wouldn't register as anything but a well wish...
when my mum offers to pray for me though i get uncomfortable and have to ask her not to tell me that cuz it frankly creeps me out. like someone is stalking me or something.
my mum is of the type of christian who (until recently) believed that all men have one fewer rib than women. she was very upset to learn otherwise, so we have come to a deal...she doesn't pray for me, and i don't ask her about evolution...so far is ok, but i am very grateful to be living in a country with no discernible religion. makes life more comfortable and my girls won't be taunted for asking hard questions about evolution at school...
totally unrelated, but today my oldest daughter's teacher is coming to our house to visit (school year just started last week in japan). she will visit the home of every parent so we will all know her and she will know us and how we live. i quite like this arrangement.
Well, apologies for any offense cause by my comment on the other thread. What I wrote was lifted straight from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (hardly a fundamentalist denomination, if you've been following the news) and I honestly didn't give it a second thought. In Episcopalian/Anglican circles, it's part of the funeral liturgy, and a fairly common litany when a loved one has passed away:
V. Rest eternal grant (him/her), O Lord; R. And let light perpetual shine upon (him/her). V.May (his/her) soul, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. R. Amen.
(BCP, p. 502)
It seemed pretty non-offensive to me, and I generally make a deliberate effort not to bring my religious views into the workplace or into archinect. (And I get pissed as hell at people like evangelicalbunny who overtly use such forums as a means for proselytization.) But then, I also recognize that what's perfectly non-offensive to me might be offensive to somebody else with a different background.
I'm active on another message board that has a religious (particularly, but not exclusively Christian) focus, and we have a regular "prayer request" thread where people share their joys, sorrows, etc. When somebody posts news of a loved one passing away, the "Rest eternal grant them..." line is a very common response, and done almost out of habit more than anything else. I guess I fell into that habit when respoding to the Virginia Tech thread, and momentarily forgot I was on a different forum with a much different audience. It wasn't meant as a particularly denomination-specific comment, nor as a means of proselytization, but again, apologies for any offense caused.
Okay, now that I've finished my martini, time for bed....
i, too was put off by the original comment but decided it wasn't worth reacting. i love that someone did speak up, that it was discussed, and that LiG explained (and very well, too). you're right, techno, this is such a great 'place'!
my office recently went after a project for a church school. among the reasons our marketing person put on the boards for the school to hire us was that 'project team members are christians.' well, i'm not, thank you very much. i stewed about it for a couple of days, really conflicted about how to respond before, independent of me, it was finally decided that this would not go on the board. i HATE that it bothered me so much, but i also hate that someone else could assume that they could speak for me and put me in the position of stewing silently for that couple of days.
i'm quick to mouth off in the wrong circumstances. maybe i should have said something sooner in this one.
That would cross a line for me as well, and not only because it sounds like something the slimeball marketing director in my office would try to pull. Even if the statement in the presentation was factually true, it would still represent a gross invasion of my personal life by my employer, and be a case of my employer exploiting my religious beliefs for their own monetary gain. I'd be raising bloody hell if they ever pulled a stunt like that.
Saying "we should get this church job because we're Christians" is obnoxious. And yet, saying "we should get this job to design all the sidewalk/street furnishings in the 12-block neighborhood because everyone in our firm walks to work every day and is intimately familiar with the requirements of pedestrian furnishings" is somehow less so. Why is that?
There is a hilarious link on the Ren building post that leads to a website where someone with actual knowledge of Chinese characters debunks what people who get Chinese character tattoos think their tattoo says. With the danger of that cross-cultural misunderstanding firmly in place, I will offer that I have always been taken by the notion of "namaste" as a greeting. Namaste was explained to me to mean "I greet the god within you" which I felt was a way of acknowledging that while different people/cultures have different notions of religion and spirituality, we can agree to acknowledge in one another the shared concerns of our human spirit (spirit being a very wishy-washy term for "good" or "soul" or "hope" or "love" or whatever that indefinable aspect of humanity that I refer to as "god" might be.)
But I've never used that word in that way because 1. I'm afraid I'd be culturally butchering a meaningful phrase with my own western misunderstanding and 2. I think as an American-suburban-raised Caucasian you have to be wearing birkenstocks and reek of patchouli and pot to use that phrase with any earnestness - I'm not quite there.
lb, i've understood 'namaste' to mean "the divine within me bows to the divine within you" or something like that...switch "bow" for "greet" or similar...
this came from someone that reeked of patchouli, lived off the grid etc.
Steven- my office does lots of religious schools, and for some reason I end up working on them instead of the secular schools. I've recently had negative feelings about an 8-foot tall cross that the school I'm working on wants to erect on their lawn. Not that there's anything wrong with a religious school erecting a giant cross, it's just that my own personal gut reaction is negative. I haven't said anything to the boss about it, but there's just an irony that the single agnostic (really, I'm a fine hair away from athiesm) in the office has to deal with the cross.
Thread Central
I'm glad you enjoyed it tumbleweed... Its nice to know I have the architect community to help out with these tough decisions...
SBD, you tried to hit the mouse but it rant back to hide? You're not going to come back from London with a Madonna accent, are you?!?!?
I'm not too sure i like seeing abra's words so carefully | carelessly edited
techno, oh well, it was john's idea and i wrote him he could take out the fuck words.. i didn't have a copy since i wrote it in real time like 99% of my posts.
it was a little more than agitation light.
umm. i assume you are meaning volume discussion.
i don't think anybody should be intimidated by the discussion.
i think they are basically voicing some kind of discontent in the architectural realm the world over. but still having some hard time to shed their own elitist curtain walls ;.)..
don't let them bully you.
I have read and an am considering a response to the Volume/purple thread - but have to run do some "real work" at the moment so no time to post it now. I'm not intimidated, really, just don't want to only comment for the sake of commenting.
At this moment I have to inform you all that if you sneeze I will no longer be able to say "Bless you" to you because apparently the word "blessing" connotes belief in a deity and a tendency to rave about said belief. I don't want to post this on the thread where said vocabulary opinion was made known, as I don't want to pollute that thread with arguing.
What a frustrating day.
i would post it if any of it was scanned or photographed. show the bathing suit shot anyway. for the boyz in quiet offices.
Agreed, LB. Apparently offering condolences in religious terms leads to wars. Unlike, you know, intolerance towards people who have incorrect ideas. Arrgh.
Sorry - I got a little pissy there for a moment and thus forgot to post that I think the Purple Thread is a great idea for a new way of presenting opinion/information here at Archinect. Bravo for the effort, John Jourden et al for making it happen.
Thanks for getting it, LiG!
on the purple discussion... and i don't want to post it there since it would be off topic in a meta sort of way... is this now like an 'elvis has left the building' situation and are we now supposed to discuss amongst ourselves? i applaud archinect for the effort, but if the characters aren't going to answer perfectly logical questions [how do you get your writers?- what could be more straightforward than that?], then they might as well have made it an interview.
i feel i really can't comment on a magazine i don't know and have never read, but i really hope those latin american politics images are at least 2 years old or else they make little sense. at $20 a pop, it's bound to stay within a really small circle. at least october, grey room, oppositions, catered to small circles not determined by affluence [at least not directly]. big graphics and big dollars seem to destine this one to the wallpaper, poseur heavy, cool to have in my coffee table crowd.
maybe i'm just in a bad mood today.
aml, you make a good point. Some of the most critically acclaimed magazines in history have died very quickly due to pricepoint issues. But it costs money to make them beautiful, so would they be so good if they were cheaper?
lb - it is a potentially great thing, but I share aml's hesitation on the 'elvis has left the bldg' nature of the format...the recently bolded text of the featured members only adds volume to this notion.
(i was actually coming to TC to share this thought, thinking, like you aml, that it wasn't exactly on message for the featured discussion...)
the willingness to try a new format is great...that said, it felt like reading an interview, and unless the 'characters' return for discussion, it will feel like commenting on a feature, not posting to an active discussion. nevertheless, we should give it a minute before settling on this position...
otherwise, the content is intriguing, and comments from the regulars seem to be headed in a useful direction...
the cost thing is interesting (as part of a larger issue), and certainly worth pursuing on the featured discussion.
*my 2 cents.
tough question rationalist | it seems that traditional forms of media have become expensive if not by anything but the the fact that are elitist (not that i find anything wrong with that I'm an architect for fuck sake and my clients will invariably be elite)
i just got the giggles from my horoscope
i met rob brezny in albucrackee. my exgirlfriend/future wife is a big fan. me? not so much.
i love nice pics and glossy magazines as much as anyone... and a long time ago, i actually did some small research on metropolis, and recorded how it had to reduce its size several times over mainly due to cost issues. harvard design magazine also used to be big and is now sort of standard sized. it just amazed me, $20 vs., for example, $6 for metropolis [less if you're subscribed]. or $10 for log.
i just think there's some contradiction in the thinking of being agitative [and new and reinventing the way architecture is perceived and all the stuff i could grasp while browsing, because i'll be the first to admit that it was sort of hard to follow not because i can't read the words -i've translated heidegger and adorno, for fcks sake- but because it all seemed terribly *ornamented* in theory archibabble discourse and i got the feeling the whole time that the main idea could probably be distilled to 2 good paragraphs]. sorry. that was a long parathesis right there.
let me try again.
i just think there's a contradiction in thinking you're agitating stuff, while doing it from within established institutions, and orhan's question hit the right nerve: where/how do you get your writers? because if anyone can submit [like log, for example], then i can see some logic there, but if this is a platform for columbia/amo/oma/etc, how can they frame themselves as representatives of the 'fringe'or alternative thinking or whatever they meant?
and i am officially in a bad mood today, so sorry about that. see, i don't even usually write here in thread central. this is like therapy. whew!
aml,
i think you should carry your posts to purple thread. by the way, it doesn't make any difference if this people respond to john jourden's thread any further. like there are a lots of threads that first few people who started the conversation didn't appear again. it is really their choice.
absolutely, I'd love to continue the cost vs. content discussion over there.
ok, i'll try to post something later on.. didn't mean to rant so much.
I've never even heard of Volume. What on earth are they talking about?
That's because it costs $20 so nobody buys it...
buys it? I've never even SEEN it!
hah, yeah, myriam, it isn't exactly ubiquitous here in tokyo either. sometimes if i'm in an obscure bookstore i see copies, but it isn't exactly A+U yet...
LB and LIG, about religious comments in daily life..."bless you" doesn't bother me, but LIG's comment in tuther thread actually took me back..i had to think a bit about why something as well-intentioned would make me feel uncomfortable, but it does...and i have no idea why (no offence meant, mind you).
I do know that my aunt (who grew up christian fundamentalist like myself) was visibly angry at our display of shinto and buddhist gestures in our daily life when she visited us here in tokyo last month, and would have been deeply offended if we directed any of that at her (or her family)...so maybe it is the same sort of thing...sometimes religion is unwelcome in even the most benign forms... hell i have a jewish friend who becomes intensely angry if i accidentally wish him a merry christmas, and neither of us really believe in anything supernatural...human psychology is such an odd beasty.
nice one vado!
vado can we hear more about this ex girlfriend/future wife. I suspect i have one of those...would love to hear about your haunt
i'm hoping...
to be...
post number...
9000!!!
woohoo...yay thread central!
thanks for that...now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
oohh...maybe some late night thread?
9000 posts that's a hell of alot :: me thinks we should have a holiday and a party at 10K
btw sorry if wishing anyone 9000 posts offends their religious beliefs
Like jump, I had to look at Gin's comment a couple of times, but have no problems with the common things like 'bless you' or 'merry christmas'. I think it's just because it was more deeply religious than a non-believer is used to hearing. Not offended, just made me pause for a minute...
Other religious pet peeves include "I'll pray for you," and religion at the office. Once my project manager took the team out to lunch to celebrate a project milestone, and what do you think happened? The rest of the team talked God for forty minutes straight, while I became more and more uncomfortable by the second. I tried to gently steer the conversation in another direction to no avail, and eventually sat there trying to say as little as possible, until I burst out with something blunt and offensive.
i have no problem with bless and things like that but it really pisses me off when i say 'may allah bless you', people get freaked out and they look at me weird.
that wouldn't bother me orhan, simply because it is alien to me and wouldn't register as anything but a well wish...
when my mum offers to pray for me though i get uncomfortable and have to ask her not to tell me that cuz it frankly creeps me out. like someone is stalking me or something.
my mum is of the type of christian who (until recently) believed that all men have one fewer rib than women. she was very upset to learn otherwise, so we have come to a deal...she doesn't pray for me, and i don't ask her about evolution...so far is ok, but i am very grateful to be living in a country with no discernible religion. makes life more comfortable and my girls won't be taunted for asking hard questions about evolution at school...
totally unrelated, but today my oldest daughter's teacher is coming to our house to visit (school year just started last week in japan). she will visit the home of every parent so we will all know her and she will know us and how we live. i quite like this arrangement.
Well, apologies for any offense cause by my comment on the other thread. What I wrote was lifted straight from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (hardly a fundamentalist denomination, if you've been following the news) and I honestly didn't give it a second thought. In Episcopalian/Anglican circles, it's part of the funeral liturgy, and a fairly common litany when a loved one has passed away:
V. Rest eternal grant (him/her), O Lord;
R. And let light perpetual shine upon (him/her).
V.May (his/her) soul, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
R. Amen.
(BCP, p. 502)
It seemed pretty non-offensive to me, and I generally make a deliberate effort not to bring my religious views into the workplace or into archinect. (And I get pissed as hell at people like evangelicalbunny who overtly use such forums as a means for proselytization.) But then, I also recognize that what's perfectly non-offensive to me might be offensive to somebody else with a different background.
I'm active on another message board that has a religious (particularly, but not exclusively Christian) focus, and we have a regular "prayer request" thread where people share their joys, sorrows, etc. When somebody posts news of a loved one passing away, the "Rest eternal grant them..." line is a very common response, and done almost out of habit more than anything else. I guess I fell into that habit when respoding to the Virginia Tech thread, and momentarily forgot I was on a different forum with a much different audience. It wasn't meant as a particularly denomination-specific comment, nor as a means of proselytization, but again, apologies for any offense caused.
Okay, now that I've finished my martini, time for bed....
night LiG
You just have to love Thread Central, that percieved offense can be examined, and defended and explained.
I love you archinect...g'night
i, too was put off by the original comment but decided it wasn't worth reacting. i love that someone did speak up, that it was discussed, and that LiG explained (and very well, too). you're right, techno, this is such a great 'place'!
my office recently went after a project for a church school. among the reasons our marketing person put on the boards for the school to hire us was that 'project team members are christians.' well, i'm not, thank you very much. i stewed about it for a couple of days, really conflicted about how to respond before, independent of me, it was finally decided that this would not go on the board. i HATE that it bothered me so much, but i also hate that someone else could assume that they could speak for me and put me in the position of stewing silently for that couple of days.
i'm quick to mouth off in the wrong circumstances. maybe i should have said something sooner in this one.
That would cross a line for me as well, and not only because it sounds like something the slimeball marketing director in my office would try to pull. Even if the statement in the presentation was factually true, it would still represent a gross invasion of my personal life by my employer, and be a case of my employer exploiting my religious beliefs for their own monetary gain. I'd be raising bloody hell if they ever pulled a stunt like that.
Saying "we should get this church job because we're Christians" is obnoxious. And yet, saying "we should get this job to design all the sidewalk/street furnishings in the 12-block neighborhood because everyone in our firm walks to work every day and is intimately familiar with the requirements of pedestrian furnishings" is somehow less so. Why is that?
There is a hilarious link on the Ren building post that leads to a website where someone with actual knowledge of Chinese characters debunks what people who get Chinese character tattoos think their tattoo says. With the danger of that cross-cultural misunderstanding firmly in place, I will offer that I have always been taken by the notion of "namaste" as a greeting. Namaste was explained to me to mean "I greet the god within you" which I felt was a way of acknowledging that while different people/cultures have different notions of religion and spirituality, we can agree to acknowledge in one another the shared concerns of our human spirit (spirit being a very wishy-washy term for "good" or "soul" or "hope" or "love" or whatever that indefinable aspect of humanity that I refer to as "god" might be.)
But I've never used that word in that way because 1. I'm afraid I'd be culturally butchering a meaningful phrase with my own western misunderstanding and 2. I think as an American-suburban-raised Caucasian you have to be wearing birkenstocks and reek of patchouli and pot to use that phrase with any earnestness - I'm not quite there.
lb, i've understood 'namaste' to mean "the divine within me bows to the divine within you" or something like that...switch "bow" for "greet" or similar...
this came from someone that reeked of patchouli, lived off the grid etc.
Haha AP, yeah, I think I learned my definition from my trip to the Oregon Country Fair:
Thank you thread central for being somehow both a personal diary and a community discussion.
hey! i think that girl wearing black in the foreground is the one that gave me my definition! granola travels!
You went to the Country fair? Pretty brave if you don't live in Oregon...
Well at the time I did live there.
the adults are finally putting a halt to the mdler-kaitumbles sexcapades...
Thank bleep.
Steven- my office does lots of religious schools, and for some reason I end up working on them instead of the secular schools. I've recently had negative feelings about an 8-foot tall cross that the school I'm working on wants to erect on their lawn. Not that there's anything wrong with a religious school erecting a giant cross, it's just that my own personal gut reaction is negative. I haven't said anything to the boss about it, but there's just an irony that the single agnostic (really, I'm a fine hair away from athiesm) in the office has to deal with the cross.
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