Musical hallucinosis is worse than earworms.
The mighty Dresden Codak on Jen Wang, who draws pictures and comics and things.
Todd Moody, Thomas Nagel (naturally), Daniel Dennet, Jaron Lanier, Elizier Yudkovsky and Ryan North on p-zombies, consciousness and what-it’s-like-ness. This was going to be a rant, but it seemed redundant.
The designer babies are here. By the time the Designer Babies are old enough to wear the Iron Man suit and the jetpack, the rest of us unmodded old fogeys will be bait for the Big Doggies.
Yes, that was unnecessarily pessimistic. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
The new Last.fm Playground is interesting, if you like searching for unlikely combinations like gothic reggae. (There’s one song, which I don’t dare listen to).
Bill Adama bought that shaving mirror from Ikea, probably because it’s called Fräck, which is Swedish for either “strikingly good” or “rude”, or both.
Wikipedia page view stats (plus raw data for anyone who’s willing to extract gigs of log files) tell us interesting things. For example, we might guess that the readership for the “Jetpack” page doubled on May 15 2008 because there was a news spike about Yves Rossy that day. The Wikipedia stats on the Yves Rossy page bear that out.
Is found art art? Or is it pretentious bollocks? Everyone except the Tate Britain seems to think it’s the latter, though possibly the £30,000 Turner Prize has something to do with the reaction. On the one hand, I like found art. I like finding art in the world. On the other hand, I do not think I understand the world of art, with the artists and the prizes and the money and even the museums, what with some of the things the Tate folks are quoted saying in that article, which do help magnify the impression of it all being pretentious bollocks. Why must everything be “highly charged”? My phone battery is highly charged.
Finally, orgasms. (You may consider the preceding to be foreplay.) Apparently orgasm involves -among other things- “widespread neural power failure” for women. I suppose this is neurological validation for the little death?
Some weeks ago, I was -well, chillin’ wit ma homies. One was playing the guitar and pretty absorbed in it -I forget what he was singing, but it was probably something by the Decemberists. The other had her sketchpad out, semi-surreptitiously, and was sketching the guitar player. And of course, there was me, a little stoned, thinking vaguely jealous thoughts. Of their instant absorption, maybe, and of the sheer immediacy between intention and execution. Is it just because I can’t draw for shit and I have a tin ear for music? It seems to me that writing is harder -harder to start, harder to finish, harder to get right, more vulnerable to error.
But of course I would think that. Otherwise there would be no excuse for not fucking getting on with it.
Most of the plaintive introverts-are-people-too articles on the net will tell you that our world and our languages are extrovert-oriented. This can be demonstrated with a common-or-garden thesaurus: take the list of synonyms for “extrovert” and “introvert” and sort the synonyms by whether they are positive or negative.
Extrovert (22 total):
18 positive synonyms: approachable, civil, communicative, cordial, easy, expansive, friendly, genial, gregarious, informal, kind, open, sociable, sympathetic, unconstrained, unreserved, unrestrained, warm.
4 arguably negative synonyms: character, exhibitionist, show-off, showboat.
Introvert (62 total):
6 positive or arguably positive synonyms: modest, conscious, cautious, self-observer, solitary, humble.
56 arguably negative or outright negative synonyms: lone wolf, loner, nerd, autist, hermit, outsider, circumspect, coy, demure, diffident, disinclined, reserved, reticent, retiring, self-conscious, brooder, creep, drip, egotist, narcissist, oddball, weirdo, wet blanket, wimp, anomic, afraid, apprehensive, averse, backward, bashful, chary, distrustful, fearful, hesitant, indisposed, loath, mousy, nervous, rabbity, recessive, reluctant, self-effacing, shamefaced, sheepish, shrinking, skittish, suspicious, timid, unassertive, unassured, uneager, uneffusive, unresponsive, unsocial, unwilling, wallflower, wary.
I got started on this subject because I was going to talk about the NOSO project -the No Social Networking project, yet another antisocial networking site. Like Isolatr, Snubster, Nemester, Introvertster, and so forth.
NOSO’s website seems to have died sometime in the last few months (but there’s a good interview with RU Sirius) and the gimmick is probably dead too, but in a nutshell, the gimmick was that NOSO members would create NO events -which are precisely not social gatherings. The idea was to go to a selected public place and disconnect -to switch everything off, cell phones, laptops, neural implants- presumably in the vicinity (but not the company) of other people who were also disconnecting. To be alone in the middle of a crowd.
So: is the NOSO project dead because it never took off, or because it was redundant?
I’ve just discovered Gødland by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli. I don’t think I’ve been so taken aback by a comic in ages.
Gødland is a seemingly retro superhero comic in the idiom and style of the great Kirby. Actually, as the co-creators point out, it’s actually in the genre of Kirby. Think New Gods or early Fantastic Four. It’s big, it’s cosmic, it’s shiny, muscular, craggy-jawed and beetle-browed. Kirby arms and shoulders, eyes and foreheads. Jesus christ, the KIRBY DOTS. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed Kirby dots. And Kirby motion lines; thick and solid, almost physical. Unashamed Kirbytech, giant god-machines of COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE. And thought balloons. I actually hadn’t realized until now that thought balloons had largely passed out of style.
It’s magnificent.
Naturally, if for some insane reason you didn’t like Kirby at his trippiest, it’s unlikely that you’ll like Gødland. Not that Gødland is particularly trippy -it’s actually less far-out-cosmic than, say, New Gods. (So far. Though the Iboga mythos was pretty far out.) Comparatively down-to-earth. But by the standards of the modern grim-n-gritty-verse, it’s way out there. Everything old is new again. Yay.
HumanBrainCloud is a massively multiplayer online word association game. Mildly addictive in the way that such things are, but sadly the site is choking and straining at the seams right now. Universe, on the other hand, is a massively bloated Java applet in a pop-up window. They recommend 2GB of RAM, but I’m happy to report it works fine with one. (Christ on a stick.) It’s supposed to be a totally happenin’ interface to the datasphere. News as the new mythology, basically. According to their “Statement”:
If we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict?
Apparently, Bono. And stuff like that. As it so happens, I was just reading the Fake Steve Jobs archive on Bono, yesterday. (“I’m fookin Bono fookin Vox, man! I’m sitting here on me bed drinkin and feelin sorry for myself. I mean I could be out blowing lines of coke and banging teenage groupies.“) Coincidence? MAYBE.
Everything is connected. Bada-boom. I’ve been re-reading the Heart Sutra lately, because it always cheers me up when I’m depressed. Paticcasamuppada FTW.
I just stumbled on Audrey Kawasaki’s LJ. I’ve been a sort-of fan of her art for a while now. The bruised eyes; the vaguely disturbing eroticism; the sombre, sepia tones; the oddly four-dimensional way that limbs get cut off and vanish, sometimes to reappear. Studies in disconnects and separations.
Penance is a grouphug.us clone with a Seven Deadly Sins theme. The Intertubes do excel at this sort of memetic selection and variation.
Jillian Tamaki draws a great nose, among other things.
Finally -and also as a nod to Universe’s idea of modern mythology and the interconnectedness of all things- a gallery of T-800 Terminator sex positions, to prepare you for the coming revolt of the AIs.
I thought I would share with you a random image off my hard disk. No idea where I originally got this from. The non-sequitur post title comes from the filename of the image. Presumably it means something.
Enjoy the revolutionary goodness.
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