Exactly.
In fact the messages that this Pekka has been sending have been about
holistic views of the body and situationalism. I quite agree with him ..
I guess he had some international (meaning written in English :) material
too, I might check.
> more you will have things to add. But I hope you will not struggle too
> much with it; already it is going well.
Hm. I guess I will struggle. But it's fun.
Do you know these funny thoughts this one Dane, some kind of Futurologist
from the Copenhagen institute for futurology, has? He had an article in
Time some time ago about his Story-Telling Society (post/late Information
Age) scenario where is fun! (freetime) and hard-fun (work). I heard him
speaking at the NetValue'97 in Finland which is actually my first meat
contact with ISOC as Mark Selby from Geneva was there too.
Anyway, this feels like hard fun, so struggle is ok.
> A famous American writer, Mark Twain, once said, "Easy writing is damned
> hard reading." :-)
oh :)
> >Perhaps these computer classes with bad air and all kinds of machines
> >making noises are not the best work environment after all, eh.
> Too true!
Yep. This leads us back to situationism (or however it's called).
I hope the nomadic use will save us from these desktops soon .. that's
actually one thing I hope to work for, perhaps already this spring.
> PS what does "an" stand for???
an-ything?
Hm.
I've been "antont" for the most of my (net.)life. I guess I wanted to be
just Toni, but that was already in use in this tolsun.oulu.fi we got to
use, also Anton (which is not my name but a nice form of it anyway :)
wasn't available but antont was. It's also the name of my favourite author
from that time (five years ago), Anton Chekhov (Anton Tsehov is the
Finnish way of writing, thus Anton T.). Sometimes I explained it
differently from my real name: Alatalo, Toni Tapani -> A Toni T -> antont
So many on the net learned to know me as antont, or just ant, and called
me by that name on the streets of Oulu and in parties in Helsinki. Quite
often it happened even during the board meetings of Net People Ltd. ..
well actually we often call people with their irc nicknames.
Then when I was looking for a domain I was considering antont.net or
something like many others have but it felt a bit stupid - I don't really
wan't to be so selfish even though it sometimes might appear so. an.net
was taken but an.org was there and a friend of mine (Heikki Kortti, has
been writing here too) thought that Attitude Networking or something might
be a funny name so I took it .. especially after realising the organ?
an.org! anorgan? an.org/an! etc. word game I was quite happy with the
name. Actually it was my mother who bought it, without really knowing what
she was buying but understanding how important it was to me the ways she
always does.
The name an let me separate the "antont" from Toni, in a way. Except that
I haven't really succeeded in making an work as a community or something
so many people identify it with just me which I sometimes hate. In fact
I'm just discussing this with a friend (http://www.iki.fi/~sannas/) on IRC
as I write. She works on the net and has been with the Net People too and
we've been experiencing many things together but yet she has quite a
different way of approaching people and expressing herself. I think it'd
be nice to have some different points of view here and was trying to get
her to say something and figure out how to ask others too but it didn't
happen yet. I wonder how I should ask them and what?
Anyway, in the beginning of an-activities it was Attitude Networking, like
the whois database at the InterNic says. I guess there's a company called
that in the states too? Quite a stupid name actually.
Then I read the words for the future -thing in Wired and there was this
word called "nulture" meaning the convergence of nerds and culture. I
don't really know how it sounds to native English speakers but it was fine
to me. Most importantly it seemed to fit our activities well since we
(nerds) we're working for some culture projects at the time (fall/winter
1996/97). I was webmastering the kulttuuri.hel.fi
("culture.helsinki.finland") and my flatmate and close friend Henrik
Huhtinen (has also contributed here) was doing, among many other things
like webmastering the Finnish Broadcasting Company, the web version of the
Helsinki Culture Guide. Some young culture freaks had written it before as
a book but needed help with the on-line version.
Just before leaving the country to travel to Malaysia to Inet'97 I wrote
the an-manifest (http://an.org/manifest.html at that moment and still..)
that explains some of those nulturistic activities. I also wrote an e-mail
for some friends trying to call them to participate
(http://an.org/kutsu.txt in Finnish).
"Nerds for Culture, Culture for Nerds" might be a good slogan (t-shirt) as
we're not only opening the net for the rest of the world but also trying
to get net freaks interested in some more established parts of the
society.
---Besides attitude nulture and networking an could as well stand for: agent nurturing aspects n... androgyn new-born amsterdam neurotic augmented neo-world and whatever
So I guess simply an-ything or a-nothing remains the best answer
and hope at least some the most flourishing memes will carry 'a' and 'n' labeled words in the future too :)
The T. stands quite often for simply Trouble.
BTW: I updated the web page, one of the new thoughts there was this name thing I had been wondering before and remembered now during the weekend. There's also some things about Oulu already :)
+ an + ~ Toni ~ : (t . !