1/4 cup ground almonds
1 ts butter
sprinkle of sugar
lemon zest
squirt of vanilla

Filling:

about half a brick of cream cheese
4 tbs  ricotta
1 egg
1 ts vanilla extract
3 ts sugar
1 ts lemon zest

blend, line ramekins, and bake for about 20 mins at 350C . voila!

coming home

In 1978′s Coming Home, Jane Fonda plays an officer’s wife who takes up volunteering as a way to keep busy while he is away in Vietnam. While volunteering she encounters Luke, who she coincidentally went to highschool with and who–newly returned from Vietnam– is left without both legs. Although the relationship between Sally and Luke begins awkwardly, his catheter spills all over her in a fit of rage, the two begin to reminisce and eventually become friends, and their friendship eventually leads to, what could be read as, a functional romantic, not just sexual, relationship.

What is interesting about the film, political politics and ideologies aside, is that the representation of the affair between Sally and Luke is guided by affection and is not stunted by the institutional limits of marriage or the corporeal limits of the body. Yet it is specifically the latter, the limits of the body, which the couple seem least concerned, and, we can assume, that the audience may be most concerned.

Luke is partially disembodied; he lacks limbs and some feeling. Luke is also depicted as being very much embodied; he describes pains, he caresses her, is prone to emotional outbursts, and more generally displays a full range of emotion.

The sexual encounter between Sally and Jake exemplifies the body as an affective becoming (if we can accept that becoming exists along a continuum of bodily networks that are intersected by the neural networks that allow for and carry feeling, that the body is, quite simply, a plane of affect).

He does not feel from the waist down, but he knows that he is in her. The encounter is tacit.

The act of penetration is not an interfacing of genitalia to produce the jouissance of the encounter, but it is instead a affective response. The response is the merging of two desiring bodies.

And, feminist camps would delight, that is Sally, who through oral sex, experiences an orgasm. (If the orgasm is understood to be a limit by sexuality and porn studies, then what does that limit suggest? And, more than that, what comes–pardon the pun–before the climax?)

(incomplete)
(unedited)

So then, the precise difference between SNS and other kinds of CMC ismaking your network visible. For them, this key difference “can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made and these meetings are frequently between ‘latent ties’ (Haythornthwaite, 2005)”

I used to feel that various SNS platforms were variations on a theme; being differentiated by target market, different widgets, privacy settings and, of course, the cultural perceptions and all the perks of ‘belonging’ that came along with it. boyd and Ellison suggest that “Structural variations around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.” Though we can speak of structural variations and code, I still wonder to what extend cache, or better put, cultural capital really influences the SNS that we choose.

The example that first springs to mind is LiveJournal. LiveJournal, I think, does a decent job at combining all the most pertinent features of the blog necessary for diarying (emotion, location, and other indicators of intimacy) along with the networking aspects of SNS in the friends features.

is twofold: it is both an apparatus that facilitates networks and a logic that governs how things are done with that apparatus

it regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms

Galloway, Alexander, R. Exploit.