Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Incent my writing through random harvesting

I would like to write about a lot of truly significant things...but I'm too tired. Instead, I'll cull little pieces from what I've stored up in my wiki or Ecco file

Tucked Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship:

Mr. Reese and his Web site, www.tothenextlevel.org, embody an increasingly popular strategy for evangelism in the Internet age. In the segmented realms of the Web, said Tony Whitaker, editor of a guide for online evangelists, sites that use overtly Christian material will reach only people who are already Christians, while everyone else can click by. Unlike Christian radio or television, the new medium calls not for powerful religious symbolism or rhetoric but for the absence of them, he said.

In culling through my pile of old issues of The New Yorker, I came across David Denby's review of Matrix Revolutions. The ending the essay made me ponder my own misconstructed sense of helplessness, about which Tokyo Story actually has a lot to say:

In the first movie, the lifelessness of the humans’ speech made one doubt that humanity was actually worth fighting for. But if one ignores the wilder speculative meanings that have been drawn from the series (we are all wired together in a simulated reality), there remains something halfway palpable in these movies: in a period in which gigantic corporations and entire governments devote themselves to promoting made-up realities, people may genuinely wonder what world they are living in. The fact that so many intellectuals in particular found “The Matrix” fascinating suggests how impotent they feel to change anything around them. Movie critics, however, are fascinated by the aesthetic life or death in the object right before their eyes, and they tend to fight one machine or pod at a time rather than recast their helplessness as a theory of subjection. It’s better, perhaps, to win or lose small battles than to never start fighting at all.

This 21st-Century Japan, More Contented Than Driven:

China, long the center of Asia, fell under foreign domination in the last century and a half. Japan, long content in its relative isolation or as a tributary nation to China, went out into the world, competing against the West and dominating Asia.

But China never lost its sense of being a great power and appears comfortable now in reassuming its traditional role in Asia.

I had been using the word incentivize. Recently, I heard someone use the word incent. Which one to use? Perhaps neither to avoid jargon. Posted by rdhyee at February 4, 2004 11:10 PM