2003/1/31
Another part of the Windows web browsing experience us Linux users miss out on: Malignant toolbar installs itself into Internet Exploiter, redirects home page/web searches to xupiter.com (owned by a shadowy Hungarian company, apparently) or the sites of businesses who paid them for placement (and who are, I would guess, unlikely to be highly ethical), and downloads pop-up gambling games behind your back. The toolbar resists attempts at uninstallation, and the programmers keep changing its code to keep one step ahead of anti-spyware tools.
Healan said some installations probably occurred when people clicked "OK" in a pop-up box without really knowing what they had agreed to, or when they meant to close the pop-up window.
Apparently SBS is airing a documentary on Wesley Willis tomorrow (Saturday) evening, at 10pm. I probably won't catch it as I'm DJing that night (and my TV reception is quite poor). (ta, Cos)
Horror train smash in NSW; 9 killed and many more injured as a peak-hour commuter train derailed between Sydney and Wollongong. And here we were thinking these sorts of things happened only in backward third-world countries like Egypt and England.
George W. Bush's Axis of Evil as extreme holiday destination.
North Korea was nowhere near as tough as I thought it would be, but Cuba was a real disappointment because it's so touristy.
Iraq should be popular as Egypt as a tourist destination; it's got the Garden of Eden, the first ever city, the Hanging Gardens, yet hardly anyone visits.
On the third day (in Iran) three guys burst in while we were talking to some students. They took us back to the hotel and turned our rooms over. When they found cameras, tapes and tourist visas, they decided that we were spies.
The amusing account of a journalist who listened to the entire 24-CD Throbbing Gristle box set in one sitting.
Worried that if I just sit around my flat listening to Throbbing Gristle all day, I might start baying myself, I venture outside. This proves to be the biggest error of judgment I have made since embarking on the project in the first place. It's difficult to know exactly what would be the ideal activity to engage in while Throbbing Gristle provide the soundtrack. But I can reveal that shopping in central London is not among them. A journey by Tube is even more like a descent into some netherworld of the damned than usual. The heaving crowds of Oxford Street, nerve- jangling at the best of times, are rendered nightmarish.
(via Cos)
Well, it looks like I'll be doing another DJ set this weekend; this time, it'll be on Saturday evening, at the Season/Squipplepippy gig. (Btw, isn't "Squipplepippy" a cool name for a band?) Right; time to buy a Discman that works properly.
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: The local branch office of the Catholic Church has attracted criticism after officially supporting a visit by an American psychologist who claims that homosexuality is an illness and can be cured.
Meanwhile, it has recently emerged that, on the other side of the world, a religious organisation has been rounding up single mothers, sexual abuse victims and orphans as well as girls who were too dangerously pretty to be allowed out, stripping them of their identities, forbidding them to speak, and forcing them into slavery, making a tidy profit of their labour. Is this in Saudi Arabia? Nigeria? Or perhaps one of the excesses of the Taliban? No; it's the work of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and its "Magdalene Laundries", the last of which closed way back in 1996.
2003/1/30
Beware the badly-translated Asian Two Towers bootleg DVD captions; some are oddly streetwise, like "Bring your pussy face to my ass" and "You gonna pick it up or what?"; and some, like Eomer saying "too long i wanted my sister" are just disturbing. (via MeFi)
The Melbourne Electronic Music Festival Film Festival programme looks interesting. Perhaps too biased towards the dance-music side of things, but should be interesting nonetheless.
Won't someone think of the children? Under new laws unveiled in Britain to protect children from the paedophile menace, having sex in one's private garden will be a crime, punishable by up to six months. Sex in one's home is still legal, however, even with the blinds open. If you're in Britain, now may be your last chance to legally have a bonk in your backyard (though wouldn't it be too cold for that sort of thing?)
The latest craze in Germany is kartoffelkanone, or "potato bazookas" made from drainage pipes which launch potatoes using ignited hairspray. There have already been several injuries.
A spokesman for the police in Brandenburg said: Woodland on Sundays echoes to the thump-thump of these guns. It is a growing social problem that needs to be tackled.
Could this be the European equivalent of backyard wrestling? (via Slashdot)
European journalist Timothy Garton Ash's survey of anti-Europeanism in America; Europeans are seen as "EU-nuchs" or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"; cowardly, amoral, godless, unprincipled, weak, effeminate, petulant, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, of poor personal hygiene and monumentally ungrateful for America constantly saving their asses: (via Graham)
A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see "the Americans" as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see "the Europeans" as limp-wristed pansies... The sexual imagery even creeps into a more sophisticated account of AmericanEuropean differences, in an already influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace entitled "Power and Weakness."[3] "Americans are from Mars," writes Kagan approvingly, "and Europeans are from Venus"echoing that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism are at opposite ends of the political scale. European anti-Americanism is mainly to be found on the left, American anti-Europeanism on the right. The most outspoken American Euro-bashers are neoconservatives using the same sort of combative rhetoric they have habitually deployed against American liberals. In fact, as Jonah Goldberg himself acknowledged to me, "the Europeans" are also a stalking-horse for liberals. So, I asked him, was Bill Clinton a European? "Yes," said Goldberg, "or at least, Clinton thinks like a European."
(Meanwhile, Tony Blair is seen as a honorary American, or at least as a member of the US State Department, and trying to tow Britain across the Atlantic, as it were. Already the renowned New Labour spin doctors who created "Cool Brittannia" are working with the Whitehouse to sell "Brand USA" to a skeptical (and Europeanised) British public. The modest proposal of a few years back that Britain leave the EU and join the United States is looking somewhat less absurd.)
The Kraftwerk gig was excellent. I showed up and made my way to the balcony, finding a spot with a good view of the stage, as David Thrussell was playing all sorts of weird tunes. Then the DJ stopped, and things were quiet for some minutes, except for the crowd yelling and stamping.
Then the Metro was filled with the sound of an old-fashioned speech synthesizer uttering bits of German, and the curtain rose, revealing four middle-aged men standing behind consoles (and looking not unlike characters from some Star Trek-like TV show).
They played Computerworld and the projection screen glowed cathode-ray green (older readers may remember this colour); they also did Pocket Calculator, with an animation of a calculator, their (quite topical) anti-nuclear protest song Radioactivity, a version of Neon Lights with a verse in German, and their one song about a pretty girl, The Model.
While they stayed at their workstations, playing keyboards and operating their laptops, visuals were projected on the screen behind them, ranging from the sorts of retrofuturistic computer graphics (lots of wireframes; remember when those were cool and shading was too expensive?) to old stock footage of the Tour de France, train and road travel across Europe and the like.
Their songs varied quite a bit from the recordings; the version of The Robots started with them transposing the main riff into different notes, and went on into some improvisation with new (yet quite fitting) synth lines.
(Oh yes, the consoles they were using looked pretty nifty, consisting of a keyboard of some sort, a foot pedal and a laptop. I wonder whether the keyboard part is an off-the-shelf instrument of some sort, or a box containing various controllers and such, and indeed whether the keyboard is not just a controller for software on the laptop, Kraftwerk being famed for their fondness for Cubase VST.)
2003/1/29
Gulf War 2: The Game, a semi-interactive animated projection of the likely events of the war.
2003/1/28
Right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh denounces anti-war demonstrators as "Communists" and "anti-American"; radical leftists call for a boycott of his advertisers, demonstrating their commitment to pluralism and diversity of opinion. These are probably the same people who tout Cuba as a model democracy. (via FmH)
If you're in the US and you've ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you're guilty of a federal felony. It doesn't matter if you've forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry's bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload. Be warned--you're what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon.
The law even grants copyright holders the right to hand a "victim impact statement" to the judge at your trial, meaning you can expect an appearance from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or the Business Software Alliance (BSA), depending on what kind of files were on your hard drive. You'll no longer have that hard drive, of course, because it'll have been seized by the FBI, and you'll be in jail.
The NET Act works in two ways: In general, violations are punishable by one year in prison, if the total value of the files exceeds $1,000; or, if the value tops $2,500, not more than five years in prison. Also, if someone logs on to a file-trading network and shares even one MP3 file without permission in "expectation" that others will do the same, full criminal penalties kick in automatically.
No peer-to-peer users have been prosecuted yet, but there is a lot of pressure from the RIAA on the Department of Justice now to begin such prosecutions. Which means some poor bastard is about to get crucified. (via FmH)
During the Spanish civil war, anarchists inspired by surrealist and abstract art developed torture cells based on non-figurative art and the psychological properties of shapes and colours:
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial. The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
The surrealistic cells were used to torture Francoist Fascists, as well as (of course) members of rival leftist factions and splinter groups. (via Charlie's Diary)
(If they built something like that these days, mind you, they could probably pass it off as the latest clubbing sensation and charge admission for it.)
A Californian reader of the subversive/paranoiac news site Unknown News recently noticed that his expensive broadband connection was unusually slow; he did a traceroute to another Californian site, and found that his traffic was routed through a US Government machine in Virginia. More experiments revealed that this was the case for all of his traffic.
The questions this raises are: (a) would there be an innocent explanation not involving surveillance (such as network balkanisation and/or everything going through a central interchange; isn't MAE East in Virginia, for example?), (b) if it is a surveillance operation, how plausible is it that the author's subversive and potentially un-American reading habits contributed to the rerouting? If he has a fixed IP address, they could filter packets by it, of course; if not, it may be the result of a Middle Eastern-looking flight student, or a Green Party activist, using his ISP?
Britain is considering withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights; Blair must have been hanging around with George "Treaties? We don't need no steenkin' treaties" Bush for too long.
(To give them credit, they intend to re-sign the bits of the treaty they don't object to (i.e., all but the clause about freedom from torture or degrading treatment) almost immediately.) (via Leviathan)
2003/1/27
The scandal of the Bloggies, the supposed Academy Awards of the weblog community; it turns out that in the nomination process, corruption and favouritism are rife, with judges voting as a bloc, voting for people they know and like rather than objectively judging weblogs, and predictably the A-List(tm) storming home every time. It appears that the Bloggies selection process is dominated by a small clique of "in" bloggers who use this to increase their and their friends' Whuffie. (via The Fix)
(And I was wondering why there wasn't one right-wing populist jingoblog among the nominations, despite the dominance of such blogs in the public eye (and if you're reading this, you're by definition not the public eye; sorry).)
And then there are the Anti-Bloggies, which are the Razzies to the Bloggies' Oscars (or the Ig Nobels to the Bloggies' Nobels, or something like that), but still tend to focus on Well-Known Blogging Personalities and the memes that pass between them.
(Tangent: one of the downsides of a reputation economy is that it tends to be riddled with cliques, with insiders getting bonus Whuffie just for whom they know, and things soon starting to resemble the sociology of a high school canteen or a goth club, where your status depends more on petty politics than on your individual qualities. Discuss.)
2003/1/26
The Pentagon's battle plan for Iraq will involve hitting it with 300-400 cruise missiles each day, in order to demoralise the population. This is more than the total number of cruise missiles launched in the first gulf war's entirety. All areas will be targeted; which makes official statements about attempting to "minimise civilian casualties" rather hard to believe. (See also: "we had to destroy the village to save it")
Kudos to the first person to explain satisfactory why this is not terrorism. (via Stumblings)
The Null Device has finally jumped on the desktop icon bandwagon; only some years after the standard came out of the bowels of Redmond. That's what happens when it's too hot to sleep or do anything productive.
Yesterday was apparently the second hottest day on record in Melbourne (something like 44 degrees, which is about 15 more than reasonable). One of those days when you realise that weather is an integral part of the human condition, and not just some trivial fact. It's being too bloody hot is every bit as real and significant as awareness of one's mortality, longing for spiritual transcendence, love, or any other yardstick one may define "being human" by. Which makes one wonder why it's only times when it's too bloody hot (or too bloody cold or too rainy or something) that people notice this fact, and usually write off weather as an inconsequential truism.
I heard today from a former Norwegian exchange student living in Australia that the weather features quite heavily in Norwegian literature, presumably because they have so much of it. For example, one novel published recently over there deals with a prolonged period of intense rain, during which everybody retreated to their homes and got really deeply into various interests and solitary activities; or something much to that effect.
Meanwhile, in English, weather is usually seen as a cliché; i.e., "nice weather we having" being the standard content-free conversation starter; a linguistic no-op, to all intents and purposes.
An interesting WIRED article about E-Gold, an anonymous, gold-based online payment system which can be used to buy everything from EFF memberships to ammunition to cheap books and flag-burning kits (not to mention shares in pyramid schemes and online gambling). It has a related denomination called the E-Dinar, based on an Islamic gold standard defined in the Koran, and for all the anarcho-libertarian kudos it gets, it owes its existence to a radical Islamic sufi sect sworn to the cause of eliminating the evil of paper currency and destroying capitalism:
E-dinar's British COO, Yahya Cattanach, and his family share a communal condo with Castiñeira in the comfortable Jumeirah district of Dubai. The company's Spanish president, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, is also the president of the Islamic Mint. And finally, uniting all three men - as well as e-dinar's Swiss CEO, Malaysian CFO, and German CTO - is one crucial biographical datum: All are high-placed members of the Murabitun movement, a modern, Western offshoot of Sufi Islam and possibly the only religious sect in history whose defining article of faith is a financial theory.
A global gold-backed Islamic currency may not be so far-fetched. Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad (best known for berating Australia for its racist commitment to pluralism and intolerance of "Asian values" and such, and denouncing currency trading as a Jewish plot to destroy the economies of Muslim nations) has proposed a global "Islamic trading block" based around the gold-backed "Islamic dinar", which would instantly make E-Gold the currency of a big chunk of the world.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, the pressure group best known for releasing a list of "hate symbols" including the "peace" and "anarchy" symbols and the Wiccan five-pointed star, has warned that E-Gold is a terrorist tool; then again, aren't open 802.11 access points and MP3 sharing networks also a terrorist tool? Is anything not a terrorist tool these days? (via vigilant.tv)
2003/1/25
A useful list of smutty phrases in French (cut out and keep in wallet or purse): (via MeFi)
English: "I don't give a shit!"
French: Je m'en bats les couilles
Literal translation: "I slap my balls against it!"
Not all that far away from "I unclog my nose towards you, sons of a window dresser!"
2003/1/24
Also via The Fix, an online poll for the top 10 albums of all time. It appears to be mostly voted for by angsty teenagers, judging by the selection of alternative there is there, and the fact that The Cure are seriously overrepresented in the top 100. Anyway, of my votes, only 1 got in the top 100 (The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead), or indeed the top 1000 (though Lush's Split and New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies are just under the top 1000. (My #1 choice, The Field Mice's Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way? is in the 1,690th place.)
Salon Premium (which cheapskates can access for the cost of viewing a 4-page Flash ad) has an interesting case of six worst-case scenarios for Bush-era America; from Handmaid's Tale-style erosion of reproductive rights and grinding poverty for the least well off to environmental catastrophes and, of course, catastrophic blowback over the Middle East over Iraq and Bush's backing of Ariel Sharon.
"By insuring the health of the fetus over that of the woman, the goal is to give the fetus a higher legal status than the woman," Feldt says. "Again, it's women as vessels."
Six weeks later, an Indonesian Muslim living in Chicago, a quiet, industrious father of five enraged by the Palestinian expulsion and by images of Iraqi children killed by U.S. bombs in Baghdad shown again and again on Al-Jazeera TV, drives a rented truck filled with 2,000 pounds of fertilizer into the busiest downtown intersection at lunch hour and detonates it. At least 534 people are killed when a seven-story building collapses on top of an audience attending an outdoor concert.
(via The Fix)
Proof that "punk" has lost whatever meaning it may have once had: the "pro-life" hardcore punk movement; that's right, pierced, blue-haired people moshing and militating for reimposition of traditional sex roles and moral values. The signifiers of punk have been completely disconnected from the radical social causes they signified.
JUST ANOTHER Sunday night punk rock concert. But these kids are wearing bright red sweat shirts inscribed with the words I Survived on the front and Over 1/3 Of Our Generation Has Been Wiped Out on the back.
(via rotten.com)
If this WIRED Magazine article is right, the recording industry as we know it will be dead much sooner than we expect, and it's not just the Napatistas nickel-and-diming them to death with their MP3 sharing programs: new technology is democratising music production and distribution and making it easier for artists to be independent of major labels, while the labels are still stuck in a business model which assumes that they have the whip hand, the major labels are owned by a handful of gigantic corporations and dominated by conservative bean-counters concerned with short-term risk minimisation, and even if they got their choice of draconian new copyright laws with severe penalties for violation from the government (most of whom don't particularly like the degenerate hot-tubbing filthmongers in the recording industry anyway), it'd be too late.
If the majors collapse, or are reduced to a shadow of their former selves, that could be good. It could mean less homogeneity, clearing the deadwood and allowing a new diversity to flourish. Then again, that's sort of what happened with the rise of grunge in the early 90s, or so The Sell-In suggests, and it ultimately got assimilated into the system. Chances are, the cycle would repeat itself; though hopefully, the next time around, with artists having more autonomy, the system would look more like book publishing (where authors retain their copyrights and have more control) rather than the pimplike racket of the recording industry (where the legal "author" of a piece of music is the multinational corporation who lent (that's right, lent; it all comes out of the artist's share of royalties) the artist the money to get it recorded, and contracts give companies draconian levels of control over the artists' careers). The present system is riddled with scams and systemic corruption (a throwback to the days when the nascent recording industry was dominated by organised crime), and it's about time for a change.
Ding dong, the witch is dead! Hilary Rosen, the much maligned head of the RIAA who spearheaded several aggressive crackdowns on file-sharing and other such crimes, is resigning from the post at the end of the year. It is not clear what, if any, the political outcome of her resignation will be.
Meanwhile, a judge has ruled that a US ISP must reveal the identity of a serial MP3 downloader to the RIAA. Are the days of BSA-style "copyright audits" on private MP3 collections coming? Soon it may be prudent for anybody who has downloaded MP3s from the Internet to destroy their hard disks beyond forensic recoverability, avoiding expensive prosecution and/or lengthy prison terms. (Or, when they come for you, claim you were "just doing research" on music piracy.)
2003/1/23
According to a recent A Word A Day a "goth" is "a rude or uncivilized person". So it's synonymous with "mook" then?
(Which other youth subcultures are named after words for disagreeable people? There's punk, for one.)
(Thanks to Cos)
Eleven of my autotraced digital photographs (the ones taken with my old 640x480 toy camera and autotraced to make them look less crap, with interesting results) are currently being exhibited at Good Morning Captain in Johnston St., Collingwood. They're all from around Melbourne (except for one from Apollo Bay), taken between 2001 and 2002, and will be around for the next 2-4 weeks (unless someone buys them first).
A look at three films Hollywood wouldn't dare make after 9/11: Dune, Starship Troopers and Fight Club.
Starship Troopers is a penetrating satire of post-9/11 war hysteria as might be imagined by an idealistic New World Order fascist. It's hard to believe it was made pre-9/11; impossible to think it could be made post-9/11.
(via Gimbo)
Poster companies in the US have attracted criticism for sanitising a poster of The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover, removing a cigarette from Paul McCartney's hand. This was done without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records.
"watcht this bitch!" 21-year-old IRC user overdoses online, taking lots of drugs in front of his webcam, while his friends on IRC cheered him on. Suicide or just stupidity? (via MeFi)
2003/1/22
Whitehouse spokesman Tony "the accent" Blair puts aside all pretense of wishing to avoid war in Iraq, and says that there is no way out for Saddam Hussein; war is inevitable, and use of nuclear weapons is on the table. Meanwhile, the chorus of celebrity opposition to the war has been growing , with Damon Albarn adding his voice to the opposition; wonder if this means that Liam Gallagher will speak out in support of our boys in the gulf and/or encourage someone to take a baseball bat to that little Albarn artfag.
(In the interests of fairness, I'd insert a link to the Onion's "Handlers Desperate To Prevent Tara Reid Political Awakening" story from last year, but it's no longer online: instead, here's a link to my link to it last year.)
An article from the Age about the resurgence of rock in the trendy clubbing precinct of Prahran. Venues best known for more types of house music than you probably knew existed are now putting on rock bands, because rock patrons drink more.
Of course, in the super-stylised $80-logo-T-shirt heartland of Prahrahran, the rock that's displacing some of the dance music is, as you might expect, the stylised back-to-basics rawk of The Strokes/Vines/Datsuns/whatever. There it's another label to wear; sort of like the "bogan rock nights" some club there had a while ago, where all the thirtysomething designers and advertising types put on their $120 designer-label flannelette shirts and went to get shitfaced to some Ackadacka with their fellow young professionals.
A good interview with Jason Sweeney (of Sweet William, PBXO and Simpático fame, and a really cool guy too), where he talks about music scenes in Adelaide, Melbourne and overseas, influences and various other stuff.
When I first heard the Simpatico EP, Ill admit, I thought it did sound British. Surprisingly though Jasons main influences are Australian bands, and this reinforces the fact that there are many great Australian groups that the British simply are not exposed to.
(ta, Naomi!)
Via Neil Gaiman's blog (where else?), a page on Gaiman, the Welsh colony in Patagonia. I wonder how much of the original Welsh culture there remains there, and to what extent it has been assimilated into Argentina?
A scholarly work by two Russian mathematicians positing a new chronology for British and European history, and seemingly proving that Britain didn't exist, and all references to it map to places in eastern Europe and the Balkans. "London" referred to either Constantinople or a Bulgarian town named Tyrnovo, England (or Albion) was Albania, Scotland was Scythia, the Welsh were Turks, and the Norman Conquest was actually a reference to fourth crusade and the conquest of Constantinople. The conspiracy of cartographers strikes again, so it seems.
(If this is true, and these things didn't happen in British history, then what did? Perhaps the Royal Family is actually descended from Odin (as their official genealogy is said to claim), or perhaps the Queen is a giant lizard?) (via Psychoceramics)
2003/1/21
South Africa's government goes open-source, adopting a policy of switching to open-source software on principle, saving license fees and building up local programming skills. Microsoft, understandably, are not amused.
(I wonder how long until MS and their ilk will find some way of using international "free-trade" treaties to force governments to dump open-source-only policies as "unfair subsidies" or "expropriation" or some similar menace to the smooth running of global neo-liberal capitalism.)
An interesting analysis of arguments for invading Iraq, from the likelihood of Iraq arming al-Qaeda to the US wanting to bring democracy to the Iraqi people (the majority of whom are pro-Iranian Shiites).
This nixie tube clock looks pretty nifty. (Though I get the feeling that nixie tubes draw a lot of power and aren't exactly environmentally friendly.) (via Charlie's Diary)
2003/1/20
I just downloaded and compiled Sodipodi, after seeing a link to it from a Slashdot forum on SVG. It looks like a fairly promising vector graphic editor for Linux; and about time too. (KDE's Kontour is slow and bug-ridden, the new KDE Karbon requires KDE 3 which doesn't play well with Debian yet, so I haven't had a chance to try it.) It's still a bit rough (it prints lots of diagnostic messages on stdout, and lacks a few things, such as a "select all" option), but it's looking quite promising.
Well, the DJ set went quite well. I played for around two hours in total (I can't tell exactly, as it was too dark to see, and the three pints of Guinness I had on the drinks rider probably also contributed). I managed to play a bit of The Charm Offensive (Just Like Bob & Terry) and The Lollies (their hidden track, Happy), which was quite possibly the first time either act was played in Australia, and expose the good Seaworthy/Heligoland fans to my choice of music, getting a fairly positive response. (I played a bit of the sort of ethereal/shoegazer stuff that would go well at such a gig, like Slowdive, Lush, &c., a few other things that fit in reasonably well (The Field Mice, and various other indie bands), a few tracks by local bands, and some odd things which people found amusing (including the cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit recently mentioned here).)
The only major hitch is that I suspect my old Sony Discman finally gave up the ghost towards the end of the set; at least it was considerate enough to not do so at the start, though.
The bands, btw, were quite good. Seaworthy reminded me a bit of the first Mojave 3 album in places, and Heligoland's new material is sounding quite impressive. (Their cover of Kraftwerk's Neon Lights was also quite inspired.)
Anyway, I'll be DJing again sometime in the near future. Watch this space for details.
After a long absence, Leviathan's back and blogging; apparently he found his weblogs.com password in an old disk at the back of his bug porn collection or something like that. Anyway, check it out before they come to take him away.
2003/1/19
Weblog compedium; a list of links to more blogging-related software tools than you could shake a stick at.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a long and detailed blog entry about the bizarre and disturbing world of animal hoarders (you know, the unhinged, reclusive types who pack dozens of cats or dogs into their tiny apartments until the neighbours complain about the smell of the filth and rotting carcasses and have them institutionalised). (via bOING bOING)
And here's a point-by-point reply to John Le Carre's "America has Gone Mad" article. It's not quite a lawyerly refutation; more like a wrestlerly one. (ta, Mark)
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein today told investigators he is not developing nuclear or biological weapons, but instead has been doing research for a book on weapons of mass destruction he hopes to see published next year. Hussein, whose palaces were recently searched by the United Nations as part of an ongoing investigation, said he always been strongly opposed to such weapons, and believes he was a victim of weapons of mass destruction during his childhood.
2003/1/18
Rifts are emerging in the anti-war movement in the US (yes, there is one), with some activists (from moderates to anarchists) claiming that anti-war umbrella group is a Communist front. ANSWER stand accused of being a front for doctrinaire Marxist groups, supporting the governments of Iraq and North Korea, having backed Slobodan Milosevic and having defended the Chinese government's Tienanmen Square crackdown as recently as 2000.
"Basically, ANSWER is dominated by the IAC, which is largely a front for the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist group that has been around since the 1950s," said Stephen Zunes, chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. "They are very effective at organizing because they are hierarchical. The main problem that I have with them personally is they have been very reluctant to acknowledge the nature of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Sounds much like the S11/No Logo movement, which became little more than a brand name for the Democratic Socialist Party (the "cops of the protest movement") and Socialist Alliance, and indeed the local Indymedia site (which is apparently controlled by Resistance or someone and censors posts inconsistent with Marxist principles, or so some anarchists have claimed). Then again, who would you expect to organise mass movements: the anarchists?
"They are uncritical of anybody that the United States and NATO oppose, from Milosevic to Saddam Hussein," said David Walls, a sociology professor at Sonoma State University. "That's the weakness of their position. They won't acknowledge that there is something despicable about Saddam's regime and violations of human rights; they think it's too much of a concession to the imperialists. But it leaves them without a lot of credibility themselves."
A timely reminder that no one side has a monopoly on stupidity.
2003/1/17
The release date of the next Harry Potter book has been announced, and the publisher has kindly released two excerpts, including the first sentence. Over at plastic, this has been turned into the start of a collaborative literature exercise.
Petunia ran out of the house. "Thank God you arrived, officer," she said. "They've got no right to take him! They've got no right!" The policemen looked up at the flying car hovering over the house. "Call in air support," said one of them. A few miles away, two helicopters sprung into action. "The car's license belongs to one Arthur Weasley," said one officer. "Arrested four times for posession of illegal and unlicensed substances - claimed they were 'magic potions'". Arthur Weasley saw the patrol cars down below, but did not worry. "Those Muggles and their laws," he said, shaking his head and laughing.
According to Beat, there's a new New Buffalo gig coming up at the Empress soon. Unfortunately, it's on the same night as Kraftwerk, so I'll miss it.
The piece goes on to say something about her new album. EMI did fly her over to LA to work on it, and did put her in a studio with a producer who worked with Madonna and William Orbit (though he also worked with Björk, so it may not be too bad). More encouragingly, the album will have contributions from Jim White (of Dirty Three) and Laura Macfarlane, which suggests it won't be too MOR, formulaic or manufactured. Though time will tell.
Things I found in my PO box today:
- Two CD-Rs containing demo tracks from The Charm Offensive (a very promising new indie-pop band I saw in London some months back). Interesting; their material sounds somewhere between Birdie or Blueboy or someone and Black Box Recorder without the sarcasm (though with the conspicuous Englishness left wholly intact). I'll probably play some Charm Offensive in one of my DJ sets.
- The photocopy edition of Cat and Girl #3, along with some stickers and button badges, and an amusingly useless leaflet showing bar/pie charts about the planets and their search engine statistics.
- A mobile phone bill
A number of young idealists are on their way to Baghdad to act as "human shields", lending their moral authority to defend the peaceful Iraqi state against US imperialist aggression. As one guitar-wielding peacenik says, "Baghdad is probably the most peaceful, mellow place I've ever been in my life. Everybody is so laid-back it's unbelievable." Though this neglects the fact that Saddam Hussein's regime is monstrously brutal, with a shocking record of torture and murder.
According to Amnesty International the regime was busily torturing and executing various enemies, real and imagined. Eyes were being gouged, tongues ripped out and heads cut off. The torture of political detainees, said Amnesty, "generally takes place in the headquarters of the General Security Directorate in Baghdad or in its branches in Baghdad".
Now it could well be that Amnesty International has been infiltrated by Dubya's disinformation operatives (perhaps via Phony Blair's "Nu Labour" government) and turned into a pro-US propaganda engine, with their strident denunciations of US capital punishment and racism merely acting to lull bleeding-hearted Guardian readers into a false sense of trust and get them to swallow the bigger lie; it could be, but I doubt it.
This Iraq war is a sordid affair. On one hand, Saddam Hussein is a monster. (Not even the most delusional Marxist could argue that he's the leader of a liberation movement... well, maybe the Spartacists could, but everybody knows they're barking mad.) I doubt that there's much support given to him by the Iraqi people that's not the result of blind fear of what happens if they don't. On the other hand, the Saudis are just as bad, by all accounts, but they're Our Allies so it's OK. And pretending that the US invasion of Iraq will be all about giving a helping hand to the poor downtrodden Iraqi people (who happen to be sitting on one of the biggest, and most strategically important, oil fields in the world) stinks of hypocrisy. Given that the US is reportedly considering pocketing Iraqi oil to pay for its occupation (how fortunate that those poor Iraqis have this means of repaying their benefactors!) adds to suspicions that it's all about oil.
OTOH, the "peace activists" who plan to go to Baghdad to act as human shields for a murderous regime just because it opposes the US don't seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. In fact, they make student-newspaper pro-Cuban apologists (whose ability to excuse away the apparatus of totalitarianism as a higher form of freedom never fails to amaze) look like mature and well-reasoned political commentators.
Thomas Frank on the corporatisation of cool, on how ersatz "rebellion" (and ersatz "authenticity") is the engine of consumerism, and the false hip-square dichotomy created by advertising:
So it offers not just soap that gets your whites whiter, but soap that liberates, radios of resistance, carnivalesque cars and counter-hegemonic hamburgers.... If our fragmented society has anything approaching a master narrative, it is more of a master conflict. We are in constant struggle - not against communism, but against the spirit-crushing, fakeness-pushing power of consumer society. And we resist by watching Madonna videos or by consorting with more authentic people in our four-wheel-drives, or by celebrating consumers who do these things.
People worked harder and longer in the '90s than in previous decades; they saw more ads on more surfaces than before; they ran up greater household debts; they had less power than at any time in the past 50 years over the conditions in which they lived and worked. In such an environment our anger mounted. And from the eternally outraged populist right to the liberation marketers of Madison Avenue, those who prevailed in the past decade have been those who learnt to harness this anger most effectively.
A good interview with Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials books, in a Christian magazine named Third Way, going into Pullman's views on religion, atheism and morality in a secular belief system.
The kingdom of heaven promised us certain things: it promised us happiness and a sense of purpose and a sense of having a place in the universe, of having a role and a destiny that were noble and splendid; and so we were connected to things. We were not alienated. But now that, for me anyway, the King is dead, I find that I still need these things that heaven promised, and I'm not willing to live without them. I dont think I will continue to live after I'm dead, so if I am to achieve these things I must try to bring them about and encourage other people to bring them about on earth, in a republic in which we are all free and equal and responsible citizens.
I'm amazed by the gall of Christians. You think that nobody can possibly be decent unless they've got the idea from God or something. Absolute bloody rubbish! Isn't it your experience that there are plenty of people in the world who don't believe who are very good, decent people?
(via Stumblings in the Dark)
2003/1/16
Your humble narrator will be DJing this Sunday at Pony, at the Heligoland gig. Expect a combination of shoegazing, laptop electronica, indie-pop and eclectic weirdness. The first DJ set starts about 8ish.
Here's why you should destroy your old hard disks: two MIT graduate students, Simson Garfinkel (known for his work in computer security) and Abhi Shelat, did an experiment in data-mining old hard disks; they bought 158 second-hand hard disks; on 49 of those disks, they were able to recover "significant personal information", including medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and credit card numbers. And if students can find these sorts of things, it's sure that some businessman of above-average ethical flexibility will have thought of the same thing.
(It's funny that there are no pages on effective ways to physically destroy hard disks beyond recovery. There must be quicker, easier and more efficient means than smashing them with a sledgehammer or tossing them in an incinerator. Cory Doctorow recommended dropping platters in acid in one of his stories; though, obviously, exact instructions weren't given. You'd think that some paranoiac on the Internet would have done the research and posted it for the benefit of fellow victims of persecution.)
A crushing blow in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case. US Supreme Court upholds copyright extension, paving the way for copyright as a perpetual property title, and the evolution of "intellectual property" into a new feudalism. After this, it is likely that nothing will ever enter the public domain in the US. At this rate, it will take global nuclear war, alien invasion, comet strike or the near-extinction of the human race to do anything about it.
Another amusingly apt Onion piece I missed earlier: One Look At My Music Collection Will Show You How Much I Respect Women.
Unfortunately, at this point in my life, I haven't really made as many connections as I'd have liked. If I could just get a woman to see my CD collection, I know she'd realize that I'm not like the other guys. I can really understand the female experience.
Australia is moving one step closer towards developing its own version of a US-style culture of jingoism, only combined with the "unique Australian national character" endlessly waffled on about by the Professional Australians: a group is planning to distribute a commitment oath on Australia Day. The oath itself, which is inoffensively content-free, has attracted support from everybody from the conservative RSL to the go-getting trendies in the Republican Movement. I wonder how long until schoolchildren are reciting something like this every day, with the magic of peer pressure and herd psychology ensuring compliance.
And does anybody else consider the idea of an oath pledging tolerance and openness a bit ironic, if not hypocritical?
"What's the biggest lie the political and cultural ruling class tells itself? Where's the greatest disparity between image and truth? What are the attributes which any self-respecting Professional Australian boasts about the most -- and possesses the least? ... Suspicion of authority. Independence of spirit. Nonconformity."
-- Greg Egan, Distress (pp120-122)
2003/1/15
Veteran spy novelist John Le Carré says the USA has gone mad. And this in a Murdoch paper too; my, my.
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting Americas anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of Americas Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
Journalist almost freezes to death when trying to use a Microsoft Smartphone mobile to call for help after a ski accident in the Scottish Highlands. He was eventually rescued when a passerby lent him her Nokia phone. Proof that bad UIs can endanger your life. (via bOING bOING)
Bush on North Korea: We Must Invade Iraq:
"For years, Kim Jong Il has acted in blatant disregard of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons, and last week, he rejected it outright," Bush told reporters after a National Security Council meeting on North Korea. "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to remain in the hands of volatile, unpredictable leaders. Which is exactly why we must act quickly and decisively against Saddam Hussein."
Also, Creationist Museum Acquires 5,000-Year-Old T.Rex Skeleton:
Gill called the discovery "a powerfully compelling refutation" of secular scientists' long-held assertion that dinosaurs lived on Earth millions of years before humans. "The fact that no human remains were found anywhere in the vicinity of the site of the skeleton serves as proof of the tyrannosaur's ferocity and huge appetite," Gill said.
The Year in Scripting Languages, a roundup of what happened in 2002 in the worlds of Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl and Lua.
(Lua? Oh yes, it appears to be a new embedded scripting language of Brazilian origin. No idea what it looks like, as the site doesn't actually show any code.)
"Forget about Basic and go for Lua! Lua is just as easy to use, but a lot more powerful. Lua is also very easy to extend."
-- Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.help.
A Canadian American woman was feeding her baby when she noticed
subliminal messages coming from a toy on the infant's crib.
The Wal-Mart toy, which makes soothing sounds and music to fall asleep to, was also saying "I hate you", in a very quiet, childlike voice.
The toys have since been removed from stores; where the message came from remains unknown.
(via New World Disorder)
9yo Russian boy shoots fireballs from his eyes, setting fire to clothes, furniture and domestic appliances. Whatever's in the vodka over there must be good. (via New World Disorder)
2003/1/14
The latest group to jump on the DRM bandwagon is the porn industry. Seeing their bottom lines affected by file-sharing of dirty pictures, they are turning to copy-denial mechanisms to make sure that people don't share porn. The basic idea seems to involve wrapping porn in executable programs which require you to enter your credit card number before you see anything; in other words, a pay-per-perve scheme.
Other than the issue about screen grabbing being trivially easy, would anybody in their right mind download and run any executable content from a porn site? The porn industry is rife with unethical and sleazy business practices (from unkillable popup ads and equally immortal auto-renewing memberships to rerouting customers' dial-up modem connections via Moldova or wherever), all held up by a legacy of Puritanical shame. Customers don't want to complain or draw attention to their shameful vices; the cowboys and mafiosi who run a lot of porn sites take advantage of this and screw them royally. What's to say that if you downloaded a "copyright-enabled" porn viewer, it would not hijack your computer and use it for sending out spam or launching DDOS attacks on rival porn sites or something?
(Which is not to say, of course, that there aren't honest, ethical porn/erotica sites. Just that they're probably not a vast majority of the industry.) (via Techdirt)
H4x0r group claims to have written universal P2P infector, commissioned by the RIAA. The alleged worm infects MP3 files, exploits vulnerabilities in players under Windows and Linux and sends catalogues of your MP3s to the RIAA as evidence for prosecution. Oh, and did I mention that it's undetectable? So, if you have MP3s, physically destroy your hard disks NOW. (Don't just erase them; computer forensics people can recover wiped disks.) US federal prisons are not pleasant places to be.
(If the RIAA is involved, it'd be more likely that it would be a psychological warfare operation and not a technical operation; the purpose being to destroy as many unrestricted MP3s as possible. It would work like this: circulate a few things like this, stage some arrests (make sure there are TV crews to film the SWAT teams going in) and publicise that the "pirates" were brought to justice by a new P2P worm, and watch guilty geeks nuke their MP3 collections and drop their hard disks in sulphuric acid. Then, when the smoke clears, sell all the songs back to them in rights-managed pay-per-play versions, and laugh all the way to the shareholders' meeting. Could the RIAA possibly have a better way of getting all those pesky MP3 files off the market?)
(Of course, there's also the possibility that it's 100% bullshit made up by some bored teenager.) (via bOING bOING)
Via FmH, two more paranoid than usual links; firstly a guide on how to disappear in America without a trace, much of which is probably quaintly anachronistic. Though the gist is, if they really want to find you, they will, no matter what you do.
Satellites can bounce LASER light off of your windows and, by measuring the minute distance differences between a vibrating window and the satellite, reconstruct your speech -- from orbit! I don't know how much this process costs yet it was demonstrated for PBS some years ago so it may not be all that expensive. The quality of the audio is poor but it can be understood.
Given Moore's Law and the dropping costs of high technology, it's not all that far-fetched to imagine that this sort of thing is now being used on deadbeat dads and people with overdue library books; or if it isn't, will be soon.
Secondly, a somewhat more academic and less Loompanicsesque paper on surveillance techniques and countermeasures, with a catalogue of 11 types of strategies against surveillance:
A common form of switching involves certification transference: A ticket, entry card, license, entitlement or identity marker belonging to someone else is used. South Africa provides an unusual example. There, welfare payments can be obtained from ATM machines. The recipient enters the correct information into the computer and offers a thumb print for verification. A colleague reported one enterprising family that collected welfare payments long after an elderly relative had died. They cut off her thumb and continued to use it.
A more subtle form involves conversational ploys in which a surveillance agent is duped into believing that a machine is invalid. Consider the story told me by a Russian. A family coming back from a picnic is stopped by police and the driver fails a breathalyzer test. He protests, "That's impossible, I haven't been drinking, your machine must be broken. Please try it on my wife." She also fails the test. The man gets even more insistent that the machine is broken and says, "Please try it on my young daughter." She is tested and also fails. At which point the police officer, doubting his own machine, lets the man go. The man later remarks to his wife, "That was really a good idea to let her drink with us.
Writing in invisible ink is a familiar children's game and it has its' adult counterparts, although these may rely on bad science. Thus, a bank robber was identified and arrested in spite of rubbing lemon juice on his face because he had been told that it would prevent the surveillance camera from creating a clear picture.
(Of course, these links are provided for the curiosity and interest of law-abiding readers only. If you're an al-Qaeda terrorist, drug user, MP3 pirate or other criminal, please do not follow them. We thank you for your cooperation.)
2003/1/13
Remember 21C, the glossy, graphically impeccable cyberculture magazine of the 1990s, which followed in the footsteps of MONDO 2000, coming from a combination of the inner suburbs of Sydney and the cyberculture Petri dish of the Bay Area? (Come to think of it, remember the heady, optimistic futurism of early-90s cyberculture, when it was about more than new ways of making a buck and the latest titanium-plated gizmos?) Well, it's back, at least in the online sense. (The glossy, coffee-table-proportioned dead-tree edition may still be some way off.) And they've got articles, such as this one on bootleg remixes, and this slightly pomo celebration of the mythology of pimp culture.
2003/1/12
Well, this year's birthday dinner was fun. Lots of friends (from everywhere, from my school/uni days to gigs), good food (it was at Gogi's, a fairly decent Indian restaurant in Fitzroy) and good conversation all around.
Score! I recently managed to find a copy of Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners, for a pittance, in a certain bookshop in Northcote. (It was a mid-80s edition, with cover artwork that looks like a promo still from the supposedly dire film and day-glo lettering in DTP clip-art fonts, making it look more like a cheap romance novel than the cult classic it is acclaimed as.) I had been keeping an eye out for it since reading excerpts or references to it in various other books. So far, I'm enjoying it; it seems to capture the zeitgeist of London in the late 1950s, and the rise of what would become Modernism (and indeed the roots of much of youth culture since), quite vividly.
Once I'm finished with that, I'll probably go onto the PDB file of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
An official investigation in Britain claims that commuting on trains is a health hazard, with the cumulative consequences of the stress of riding in overcrowded, unreliable trains resulting in high blood pressure, chronic anxiety and even fatal heart conditions for countless passengers. Britain's privatised trains are chronically overcrowded because it's cheaper for operators to pay overcrowding fines than to run longer trains.
Cary Cooper, professor of psychology and health at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, said: 'People develop a constant internal anger on crowded trains that they cannot easily displace.
'Then they hear that the train has stopped for 20 minutes for no apparent reason. If travel was cheap at least people could rationalise it.'
(Similar things could apply in Melbourne; especially with the new trams and trains which have fewer seats as to accommodate more standing passengers. Only here it's easier to drive everywhere, so everybody who can, does.)
Another piece of cheerful news I can't resist passing on, given that I've just gotten a year older: new research shows that young women no longer dig older men; so, guys, if you were hoping that age would give you an aura of sophistication, and the sorts of cute chicks that ignored you when you were their age would be irresistably drawn to you and away from the immature young studs their age, prepare to be disappointed. (Not that it's a personal issue for me right now, mind you; just passing on the good tidings.)
(All of a sudden, I feel like putting on Pulp's Help the Aged.)
Pete Townshend, frontman of power-pop pioneers The Who, has admitted to paying for child pornography, but claims that he was doing it in the name of research for a book, and his activities as a vigilante against padeophiles (of whom he strongly maintains he is not one). Townshend's name and credit card number were found when the FBI raided a pay-per-view child pornography web site.
The British government official in charge of educational standards claims that a decline in family conversations is responsible for today's primary school students have the worst language skills in memory. Family conversations have devolved to a "daily grunt", a monosyllabic exchange, under pressure from long working hours and a TV-centred lifestyle. (via FmH)
(I wonder how this will tie in with the rise of the Internet and mobile phones; could we see a generation who have inarticulate verbal communication skills but can SMS rings around anyone today; a brave new world of grunting, nimble-thumbed cyber-cavemen? The interpersonal skills of a borderline-autistic IRC junkie could be the norm within a decade.)
Could this be the most authentic gangsta rap song ever? Bandit holds up a fast-food place, kills five people execution-style, and then writes a rap song about it.
I said give me the doe you say no, no?
is it no you said stick some lead to your head
guess what punk now your dead
with all that blood bursting out your Head
from Head to toe if you wanna know I gotta go,
thats why they got me on
the worlds most wanted show
Police found the handwritten lyrics in a suitcase, along with stolen money. Instead of a chance to record with Dr Dre, the author got the death penalty for his trouble. Maybe keepin' it real isn't such a good idea after all. (via rotten.com)
2003/1/11
I've been unusually disciplined so far this year, with regards to CD buying. I'm trying to keep my habit under some measure of control (for reasons which will become apparent later), and not to grow my collection too rapidly. So far, the total number of CDs I have has only increased by two.
Over the past two weeks I picked up Flunk's For Sleepyheads Only, an OK piece of chill-out electronica from Norway. It hasn't really grabbed me; the version of Blue Monday there, incidentally, is a bit irritating IMHO. (Aside: why is it that every cover of that song ends up sounding disappointing; we had Orgy's whiny mall-goth take on it, Pee Wee Ferris' cheesy commercial-dance cover (don't ask), and Flunk's, while not dire in the way that they were, is still disappointing.)
Last night, I picked up local spoken-word artist Klare Lanson's Every Third Breath; which is mostly ambiguous cyberbabble over glitchy, vaguely Björkish electronic beats and bleeps (proviced by Cornel Wilczek, aka Qua), replete with lyrics written in cod-XML. It's technically quite good, though whether it'll have lasting appeal remains to be determined.
Today I went to Dixon's Recycled and picked up three more CDs, though sold three which I wasn't likely to listen to anymore. One of my new acquisitions were plunderphonic art piece Deconstructing Beck (on a classy unprinted CD that just screams "copyright violation"). Another was an equally (if not more) choice find; one of the Least Essential Albums Of The '90s. That's right, dear readers; I'm now the proud (but only in an ironic sense) owner of The Adventures Of MC Skat Kat & The Stray Mob. It'll sit proudly in the bulldada section of my record collection, next to Acid Brass, my Wesley Willis CDs and Spaced Out: The Very Best of Nimoy/Shatner.
I just saw this on another blog:
(): may cause drowsiness, nausea, and in some rare cases serious complications with the liver have been reported. Side effects similar to that of Vespertine. Do not take () if you are currently taking Slowdive. Ask your doctor if () is right for you.
Heh. Speaking of which, there should be a bit of Slowdive and the like in my DJ set next week; quite possibly a few of the rarities will get spun. Watch this space for details.
This site has (alongside numerous bootleg mixes of top-40 pop tracks) a rather amusing electroclash version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, by someone calling themself Dsico. (The hand-coded JavaScript scrollbar's a bit silly though.) (via Graham)
2003/1/10
You've probably heard of Cory Doctorow's new novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; perhaps you had read Jury Service and were intrigued, but not enough to pay the Amazon shipping. (It has been rather thin on the ground in Melbourne bookshops, especially since Slow Glass is no more.) Well, Cory has kindly licenced it under a Creative Commons licence, and made it free to download. No poxy "rights management" either; you have a choice of ASCII, HTML or PDF. (A PalmOS document file would be nice, though; hint, hint...)
Engineers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed an inkjet printer which prints electronic circuits, laying down layers of conductors and semiconductors on a flexible substrate. This could eliminate the printed circuit board and make actual electronic components a thing of the past.
The one problem is that circuits thus printed are irreparable; once they break (or if a mistake is made), they're junk, which would increase the volume of stuff being thrown away (especially since you can always print a new gizmo). Perhaps someone will come along and invent a nanodisassembler which chews up dead circuits, salvages useful chemical compounds and stuffs them back into printer cartridges (or makes some other use of them)?
Also, I wonder whether the electronics industry will demand that all such devices be fitted with mandatory "digital rights management" technology to prevent people from pirating gadgets (or indeed printing illegal SACD rippers/Macrovision killers/portable OGG players they downloaded from an underground file-sharing network). Or perhaps whether all such printers will watermark their output with the time and GPS coordinates of manufacture, allowing illegal gadgets to be traced to their creator. Which will work, until someone prints a noncompliant circuit printer and uses that to print more copies of itself.
Hugo Chavez, leftist president of oil-rich Venezuela, No Logo anti-globalist posterboy and target of an unsuccessful (and some say US-organised) coup last year, gave US$1M to al-Qaeda shortly after September 11. Chavez is also trying to turn his country into another Cuban-style dictatorship, suspending elections and ordering troops to fire on pro-democracy protestors. Or so says a "high-ranked military defector". The truth or a convenient pretext for toppling an irksome left-wing populist regime? (Didn't they say similar things about Allende?)