Newsletter v.3.8 | Podcasts, Writing, Video, Blood, & Aliens

Hello,

You're reading the (mostly) weekly email newsletter written and sent pit by me -Neil Gorman.

A general whats going on with me update:  

1. I turned in my tenure dossier and formal request to be promoted from an Assistant Professor to an Associate Professor. I'm beyond thrilled that this is done! I won't know the answer till October, but at this point, all I can do is let the power that be look at what I've turned in and make their decision.  
2. I had surgery to repair a hernia. (Well... As I'm writing this, I have not had the surgery yet, but by the time you read this, I will have had it). My advice: If you avoid getting a hernia, avoid it! I'm hoping that the recovery from the surgery will be quick and complication-free.
3. I've started creating my own mental health agency, which will provide psychoanalytic psychotherapy to individuals, couples, families, and groups. (Perhaps one day to organizations and communities, but not right out of the gate.) I'll also provide psychoanalysis to individuals through the agency. I'll tell you when the website for the agency goes live.
4. In addition to using podcasts to deliver content to students and the general public, I've started to look into creating video content. Lots to learn there, but I think it will be fun to learn.

Having told you all of that, I'll launch into the regular newsletter stuff.

Podcasts

This week I was finally able to record episode 046 of the InForm: Podcast with Jared. The topic of the podcast was why some people have so much fun hating on Freud. We talked for about an hour, and we covered the following.

We both still feel like there is a good amount of stuff left to cover, so I suspect we will be revisiting this one sometime.

I'm also working on setting up some more interviews for InForm in July. If I'm able to land some of them, they will be really fun.

Writing

For years now, I've wanted there to be a good introduction book I could use to teach social work students about psychoanalytic theory and techniques. I've used many books, and I've liked many of them, but I've never had the perfect book for me. Ergo, I've decided that I need to write the book I want to use. This is a big deal, and saying to all of you that I'm planning to write this book actually makes me feel a touch of anxiety. Be that as it may, I'm telling you: I'm in the beginning stages of planning this text. Expect to read more as the weeks go by.

Tools

As mentioned above, I've started to explore the wide world of video content production. One of the things I've found that I'm going to be using is FiLMiC Pro (it is an iPhone & Android app, but I'm using the iPhone version.) So I grabbed the app aver seeing this video by Ali Abdaal.  

I may get a good camera at some point, I've looked at the Cannon M50, but I might just stick with using an iPhone and iPad FiLMiC Pro combo. If anyone has camera recommendations they would like to share; please shoot me an email.

Ghosts of my life

I wrote this post on the main [S][J][P] site this week about a story I heard about Oger (the frontman from the band Skinny Puppy) and Al Jorgensen. From that post...

The story was that Jourgensen would perform and do crazy stuff like cut himself and bleed all over and that Ogre would fake cut himself and fake bleed all over the place. In both cases, the crowd would go nuts when the blood (real or fake) would flow.

The story I told went like this, "Jourgensen was cutting himself for real, but then he would go into a dressing room and see all this fake blood from when Ogre played that same place a few weeks earlier. People would go up to Jourgensen and say 'This guy from Skinny Puppy was here last week, and he can bleed so much more than you!'"

When this happened Jourgensesn was mad because he knew what Ogre was doing was fake.

Meanwhile, Ogre would play all these places that Ministry had played before he did, and hee would see all this real dried blood all over the place. Then after the show people could go up to Ogre and say something like "Man, have you ever seen Ministry play? That Al Gourgensen due is cutting himself for real. Your performance was good... but man, what Jourgensen did was way more intense."

The way I tell the story, Jourgensen is like, "Fuck this cutting myself for real shit! The Skinny Puppy dude does it for fake and people love it." And Ogre is like, "I've got to get more hard-core about my performance, be more like this Jourgensen guy in Ministry."

Living in the Jackpot

I read this article on Gizmodo (not the most rigorous of news sources, but it is fun to read what is posted there), which argues that extraterrestrials should've settled the entire Milky Way by now. The article suggests that technologically advanced life that develops closer to the center of the galaxy has a better shot at jumping from their home star/solar system to another star/solar system because of how must closer and faster things move at the center of the galaxy.  

Things start off slow in the simulation, but the civilization’s rate of spread really picks up once the power of exponential growth kicks in. But that’s only part of the story; the expansion rate is heavily influenced by the increased density of stars near the galactic center and a patient policy, in which the settlers wait for the stars to come to them, a result of the galaxy spinning on its axis.

This seems like the sort of thing I'd find in a comic. I wonder what the researchers who created the model do for fun? (Did they make this model for fun, or were they getting paid to make this as part of their day jobs?)

It also makes me wonder if we might have gotten humans to Mars if we did not spend huge amounts of money on things like this.