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Spaghetti Teens is a fanzine dedicated to publishing the work of young creative people. Send in your artwork, playlists, essays, and spaghetti recipes to Serena at spaghettiteens@gmail.com
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ART BY SERENA HOCHAROEN X ABBY TAYLOR…4-5 OVERHEARD IN A COFFEEHOUSE ………………………. BY TOM LADENDORF………………………………………..6-7
SCIENCE FICTION AND ROBOT SELF-PORTRAITS….. BY SERENA HOCHAROEN……………….………………..8-11
THE INTERNET AGE: A MISDIAGNOSIS……….……….. BY DANIEL AMMER………………………………………12-15
KANYE WEST QUOTES……………………………….….16 HEAR ME NOW THAT I AM DEAD INSIDE…….……….. BY SERENA HOCHAROEN………………………..………….17
RADIOLOGICAL INFATUATION…….…………….……….. BY DANIEL AMMER……………………………….……..18-19
ABBY TAYLOR: A SPAGHETTI TEEN…….……BACK COVER
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overheard in a coffeehouse tom ladendorf
“…but, I mean, nothing that we have now will compare to what we’ll have in 20 or 30 years. And I’m not just talking about computers and smartphones and the things that will replace smartphones – it’s gonna go so much deeper than that. Like TV. Like, right now, neuroscientists can already see what parts of the brain are being stimulated by different kinds of activity. But in 30 years? They’ll be able to map the individual neurons – literally, be able to map a correspondence between individual neurons firing, the feelings and cognitions they cause, and what is causing their firing. So if you’re a neuroscientist, you do a study on 100 people and show them all 3 hours of great TV, recording neuronal activity the whole time. When you’re done, you can pick apart the funniest moments of each show (if we’re talking about comedy – if we’re talking drama, say the most exciting or deeply felt moments), identify what they’re doing to the brain, have a computer analyze the linguistic patterns in the dialogue, and – so here’s the really crazy part – reverse engineer funniness. So for these 100 people, you know (or your computer knows) how to write the empirically, scientifically funniest joke. And you can see where this is going: with computers, you’ll have such advanced linguistic processing that you can literally have computers write the dialogue of a show for you. Just, say, feed them a situation, a premise, a cast – and maybe you do this really precisely, into a database, or maybe computers will just be able to parse your speech – and then you have the computer write, or actually compute, an episode. In an instant. And it’s the funniest episode of this show, this theoretical show, anyone has ever seen. And then you can do this with your favorite shows. You take your favorite episodes, run a study on some people, watch their heads, and then in half an hour, you have a computer write a season or two of the show, where every 6
episode is as funny as the funniest episode. This is for real – this is going to be nuts.” “Wow, yeah, that’s pretty fucki—“ “And look, I already know what you’re going to say: ‘That’s cool, but that’s just TV. It’s just mindless entertainment. There’s no depth to it. It’s not art.’ Or whatever. But this is going to go beyond TV. If we’re talking about doing this with TV by monitoring brain responses of people watching TV, why not do the same thing with movies? And books? And I’m not just talking about comedies, or just about entertainment – I’m saying that you’ll be able to generate scripts for hundreds of Citizen Kanes, Casablancas – and, you know, with the movies, you’ll only generate a script, and it’ll be brilliant, but it’ll just be a script, but with books, I mean, shit, you’ll literally be able to generate hundreds of Dickens novels. Or Tolstoy, or Shakespeare, or whoever. And when I say something like you’ll have a computer writing hundreds of Hamlets, I’m not talking about hundreds of plays that are pretty much just rewrites of Hamlet; I’m talking about hundreds of plays with the same depth of feeling, the same linguistic complexity, and the same resulting catharsis, as Hamlet. And you’ll be able to mix it up – to say that this play is going to be equally influenced by Hamlet and Macbeth but it’s set in Mexico in the 1930s. Or maybe you like mix Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, or, you know, you’ll be able to get really crazy, and mix like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch and Dostoevsky. It’s literally fucking boundless, and with advances in computers, you’ll get it all in an instant. It’ll be like editing pictures in Photoshop or whatever.”
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sci-fi by serena hocharoen I am being overtaken by technology. It’s weird that I say that, because I’m not in New York City. I’ve checked my Facebook account on my phone hundreds of times today and I have only been awake for one hour, the majority of which I spent in bed. Greg, my brother, texted me asking for my home address twenty-five minutes ago, but I haven’t replied. I’m getting lazier with texting him. I should start caring about people. He lives in New York City, the first city in the United States to have adopted the working robot class into their daily lives. When it happened, there was a televised celebration where the mayor cut the red tape and let the robots walk down the red carpet or whatever. “Jane, if you don’t text me back I’m calling you,” he texted me again. I don’t understand why Greg needs to call so often. He called last week. He said the subways are emptier now that a lot of people don’t have to work anymore. He’s still scared that there’s going to be a robot invasion eventually, though. Whatever. I don’t understand why it’s so urgent that he needs my home address. I refresh my News Feed for the tenth time since getting back in bed this morning. In reality New York is being overtaken by technology. But then what am I being overtaken by?
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TECHNOLOGY IS THE ADVANCEMENT OF HUMAN NATURE TECHNOLOGY IS THE HINDERANCE THAT WILL LEAD TO THE ULTIMITE DEMISE OF THE PLANET TECHNOLOGY IS... well perhaps that is the best way to look at it. Technology, simply put, is not a thing. It's an idea or a concept that an individual imposes meaning on, positive or negative, in order to best fit or support their current mindset in the midst of a lecture, an argument, or a lonely or angry emotional breakdown. It becomes the target of the good, the bad, and the other. If presented with the question "what is technology?" one would have trouble materializing it in a few short sentences. But, I digress and I shall instead make my own point on this subject using very recent life events. As far back into my short life as I can remember people have been cautious about the rush of technologies available to the kids of my generation and have been consistently theorized a vast number of ways that this very technology could lead to a variety of negative results. A handful of the more fleshed out theories in pop-culture are mass neglect of our environment (It's Such a Beautiful Day and other Isaac Asimov shorts), mass obesity (see Wall-E), degradation of social skills (The Feed), and perhaps most prominent is the fear of artificial intelligence as portrayed in the Tron Series (starting in 1982), iRobot, or the latest film to be released in 2015 featuring everyone's favorite South African Shock-Rap outfit Die Antword (Chappie). Yet these are not the fears that keep most modern parents up, as these issues would not occur for a few generations. Instead they worry about our social health, the ability to communicate, how much we learn, and evolving in a way that is alien to them. Some of these are slightly more reasonable than others, but often times the serious issues are not the ones that are recognized or altered (an unfortunate trend that seems to riddle the med- and psych- areas of science). One major concern that I have a new found appreciation for is something more along the lines of a social addiction or at least heavy reliance and the result (something of a withdrawal I would argue) that comes about when we as a people (perhaps mostly with young people but with adults and parents these days as well) are removed from said technology for a matter of mere days.
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So here's what happened (and in some form or another is still happening) to me. I am currently studying abroad in South East Asia for a semester away from my campus in the Midwest of America. Much of my reason for going so far away was originally to get away from all of my social normalities, rely on my phone less (I have a bad habit of about 3000 texts on a slow month), and to try to avoid mediums of conversation like e-mail and Facebook in order to build quick relationships for my almost 5 month stay. I still stand by these goals and I've been doing alright in some areas, but it began with a rocky start... Upon landing in Hong Kong for a surprise 24 hour layover, things were fine. I was able to access the airport internet with enough time to send a quick email to my parents and figure out the location of my hotel. Locations and direction - these are things that I now realize I take for granted, but this realization did not occur for another two days. The knowledge that this layover was not planned for, temporary, and taken care of by other powers was enough to prevent any sorts of panic or uneasiness. The following day I boarded my flight to my final destination in Singapore. Upon landing there were no issues. In retrospect it would have been a kind thing to contact my parents to let them know I was still alive but I figured I would do it at the dorm that I would be living at since it was bound to have some kind of internet access, which turned out to be a bad assumption. During the weeks that lead up to my study abroad experience, everyone said that you would have some amount of shock and negative recoil as a result either culturally, socially, or a feeling of being seriously lost. While it wasn't that I didn't believe that this was going to happen to me, I didn't realize that it would be such a hit, at least of the latter two. As for the remainder of the events of the night, I was not able to figure out the wi-fi, nor was it available in our rooms. A student gave me my key and took me to my room and his advice was to "get some sleep and figure it out in the morning." The rooms are tiny and not exactly the chrome-like cleanliness that one might imagine when one thinks about Singapore. After making my bed I fell asleep, a dim inclining of panic and underwhelm beginning to build in my chest, but somehow 20 hours of traveling managed to quell that for the time being. The morning was the first stage. I knew I had to register somewhere in Singapore. That was the one thought in my head. I had no internet connection to check my email for directions and I had no sense of direction or map so I began to search for an office. I was only pointed to a bus stop and told to take it... now began the second stage in the anxiety that would follow me around for a few days. Being lost with only a destination of a bus stop and no resources to fall back on was somehow numbing to feelings, any feelings. I was not, at this point, excited to be in on the other side of the planet. I was not afraid of being lost. I was not worried that I had not contacted my parents in a day (which doesn't seem like a big deal even now, but I suppose when your son is the stranger in a strange land, I see where it could cause problems for parents). I was not worried that I did not know anyone. I simply had a minor headache, a fuzziness from just waking up, and a bus titled A1 to catch. If it was not for the French guy sitting across the aisle from me, I'm not sure what I would have done. I explained that I was a new student and had just landed and he got OFF the bus with me to point me to the registration office. It was the first clear set of directions that I had received since the student from the night
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before telling me to go to sleep. This was also the first set of real instructions that I received that did not come complete with a written email, something that I have become very used to as a student. I was redirected in the office to the first theme of my international adventure: lines. This line was on the caliber of DMVs in the middle of the day back home. There was a line to get a receipt to wait for your number to be called to wait in another line to only begin to register for a student visa, if you think I am joking then I am glad you find this humorous. Thankfully, the angels in Singapore were there to guide me. I received a Facebook message (while being on someone else’s phone for the internet) from a student from my university back home - a born Singaporean - who asked me if I would like a small tour, being that he was available for the afternoon. I am forever grateful of this offer. I was able to find the general vicinity of my classes and where internet access was available. Upon logging on to the internet, I realized my parents had panicked and asked the university to contact me personally, this is what I mean when I stated that it is not only my generation now dependent on and this medium of socializing. After this tour I simply stumbled upon the other Americans from my university in the subway station. With that, I went to Chinatown for my first Singaporean meal. Later I was able to acquire an Ethernet cable to connect to the web from my room, I finished unpacking and I went to bed. While this seems like the perfect ending to a story that would lead to a totally smooth transition, that would be for a short boring story. The days that came were what caused me to reflect upon the technology in my life and the social expectations it causes. I expect to be socially stimulated every time I flip open my laptop and hit the keys "f"-"a"-"c"-enter and feel an immediate sense of connection which will allow me to plan for the day or the week, thus, fulfilling my actions. However this is not the case when you are on a fourteen hour time change, starting school in three days, and all your Facebook contacts are still on vacation for the next two weeks. The stimulation, in this case, is not available and where do you go from there when the internet cannot provide you with that kick of social fulfillment? This is the problem and reality that I would like to address for you. It is only an issue that lasts for a few days, so in many senses of the word "problem," is slight overkill. People that derive minute amounts of stimulation from social media and mobile devices are generally aware of how to survive without them (I hope), however that does not mean that they will not feel a strong amount of withdrawal and anxiety when the technology is not available to them. It is not that my generation is crippled by this technology but we are socially dependent on it. A common criticism among many is attachment to mobile devices. It is a hindrance on social interactions in a small sense. Almost everyone has that one acquaintance who will flip out and dive into a lecture based on how (s)he's lived with their flip phone since the 4th grade and they love it since...etc. so most people can survive without their devices during the course of their interactions with this and most other persons however, I have an obsolete bar phone in my pocket now with 5 contacts (two of which are emergency numbers) and 25 sent messages in the 4 weeks that I've had it yet I still look at my phone during the slow points in lecture, simply hoping for that little bit of stimulation that I used to get from the vibration of receiving a text. And this lack of stimulation builds up to drug-like issues. I spent much of my alone time during the first few days staring at a blank screen, expecting to get something from it while I fought feelings of simultaneous sluggishness and jitters. I was uneasy with the shift and to a small extent I still am, but there
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have been ways I've been able to beat it. In simple interactions with international and Singaporean students, even just hellos and eye contact help. Exercise helps to replace some of the needed endorphins from the lack of electronic stimulation and getting on a sleep schedule have all allowed me to calm down to the point where I am comfortable and capable of being productive after about a two week period of uneasiness. So, back to my point: technology is far from killing us. Obesity is due in large amounts to the sugar intake of children and the lack of participation in organized and unorganized sports for a multitude of reasons, very few having anything to do with the children's choices (http://www.aspenprojectplay.org/the-facts). Artificial intelligence is carefully contained in Mario simulations. We are quite capable of forming new bonds with other human beings in real life. We are capable of accomplishing assignments and doing well in interviews and ultimately having a profession, in fact rejecting technology completely will cripple an individual in this field. And some of us like staring at our phones or playing massive multiplayer video games too much, that I can agree with. But the caution that I've rarely heard about in any public announcement or argument on a newscast is our social dependence on these technologies and its prevalence in our lives as almost a drug habit. Again, this only becomes a problem when we are stripped of our ability to stay connected and thrown into a stressful and trying environment and I am by no means suggesting an abandonment of this technology (it SHOULD be embraced) but having the awareness of this addiction to this new stimulation is just what is needed to transcend it and take advantage of the time that we are living in. Indeed, with this awareness, this generation can continue to move forward and avoid some of the negative effects of technology while continuing to rapidly improve the living quality of the vast majority of people on this planet. Hell, practicing this awareness may someday even help prevent the robot apocalypse.
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KANYE WEST x 21ST CENTURY I'm living in that 21st Century Doin' something mean to it Do it better than anybody You ever seen do it Screams from the haters Got a nice ring to it I guess every superhero need his theme music - Power
I’m living in the future So the present is my past My presence is a present Kiss my ass - Monster
Bitch I’m cold…I Ain’t used to being told stop So I could never be your robot - Robocop
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hear me now that i am dead inside serena hocharoen
1. unluck – james blake 2. kerosene – big black 3. new calm pt ii - ought 4. heart cooks brain – modest mouse 5. light up gold i – parquet courts 6. your hand in mine – explosions in the sky 7. metatron – darkside 8. gray death – xiu xiu
playlist can be streamed here: http://8tracks.com/serenus/hear-me-now-that-i-am-dead-inside
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