2001/5/31
Salon has a fascinating piece on China's Weiku generation, a generation of young, wired hipsters that arose in China in the wake of the Internet boom.
Members of the Weiku generation dominate China's newly emerging avant-garde art and independent music scenes, and are also emerging as some of the newer stars in theater and film. A disproportionately large number of Weikus, after receiving visual arts degrees, went to work in advertising and design companies. Some of the more enterprising have launched their own companies, often in the areas of Web site and graphic design. They're willing to wear traditional business attire to work, but accessorize their clothes with a wry smile of practical irony.
The political passions of Chinese youth have long since been diluted by the market economy anyway, and while there is little fondness for the Communist Party, the Weikus see no point in replacing the bastards they know with the bastards they don't. What they consider more important is to push China's stagnant culture to start developing along with its economy, and to stimulate more critical thinking, now so lacking in cautious, conformist Chinese society.
Sex sells, as any survey of advertising billboards will confirm. now two projects seek to utilise this principle to sell religion. First, there are the Swedish entrepreneurs working on a Bible with scantily-clad supermodels; and now, the world's oldest multinational corporation has gotten in on the act. Apparently someone in Rome saw this and decided that nothing would liven up the current Pope's private prayers as having them read out by Broccoli Spears, N'Sync and other contemporary artists of similar calibre. Who knows, perhaps Britney will do for Catholicism what Marilyn Manson did for Satanism?
There's a new Windows email virus, capable of destroying files and damaging systems. This time, it's purely memetic. The SULFNBK.EXE virus consists of a warning email, warning of a dangerous and undetectable virus, hidden in a file named SULFNBK.EXE, and instructing the recipient to locate and delete this file. SULFNBK.EXE, however, is a Windows system component to do with long filenames, and deleting it does the damage. (via Plastic)
Armchair revolutionaries, rejoice. A US company has made an anti-corporate protest computer game, modelled on the Seattle riots. In State of Emergency, players get to smash shit up and take on riot cops to overthrow the oppressive American Trade Organization.
This makes one wonder:
- Do players get to smash real-world corporate logos? If so, did the publisher license them from Nike, McDonalds et al.? If so, wonder how much Nike makes from each copy sold?
- Who owns Take Two Interactive Software; wouldn't it be ironic if it were a tentacle of AOL Time Warner or someone.
A thought: If Titanic was, in the words of the Film Threat review, "Star Wars for chicks", what does that make Pearl Harbor? "Independence Day for chicks"?
Secret histories: There's a new book out about the fascinating history of women sailors in centuries past:
When she grew up she married a sailor and went to sea. Soon she left her husband for the infamous pirate Jack Rackam, whose crew she joined, dressed as a man. She then conceived a passion for another crewman, and confessed her sex to him. Sadly, he turned out to be a woman too, Mary Read . . .
(via RobotWisdom)
It had to happen: computer games for cats. Well, actually, it looks more like a cat-teasing screensaver. (via Jim)
Now this is amusing: the Buddha and Hitler Show; sort of like Guido and Jocasta meet Terence and Phillip. (via Grouse)
I'm not making this up: The latest stop on band touring schedules in the southern US is the tiny, conservative hamlet of Skullbone, TN. Named after a form of bare-knuckle boxing, Skullbone and its environs are a sort of redneck homeland; Confederate flags are everywhere, and at the local band venue, which has played host to acts like Nazareth and Eddie Money (who, I'm told, are well-known), vendors sell Ku Klux Klan merchandise. Not surprisingly, the legendary Southern hospitality is not extended to all:
Asked whether it was safe for black people to attend concerts at Skullbone, one vendor of concert souvenirs, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "I'd advise against it. It's not a good idea. They're liable to get beat up. Last year there were two blacks in the alcohol-free area, and when the sun went down, people started saying things like, `Those two trees there look mighty sturdy to me.' They got out of there pretty quick."
(via Plastic)
2001/5/30
Big Five recording company Bertelsmann has announced that damages won from MP3.com will be shared with artists. Interesting to note that this is exactly what Universal, now MP3.com's new owners, have refused to do. (Whether the damages were just, though, is another question altogether.)
2001/5/29
Sounds like common sense to me: An insurance company which offers insurance against cracker attacks has increased its premiums for sites running Windows NT, and plans to do so for Microsoft's IIS as well. The reasoning is that NT systems have more downtime, and open-source systems have more experienced system administrators.
This looks interesting: FreeJ, an open-source live video mixing system. Still in the early stages, but it could be very promising.
Speculative fiction scenario: In the US, where tertiary education is bloody expensive (so much so that parents start saving for their childrens' college fees when they are born), a service has opened that will pay your way through college, in return for a percentage of your future income. The next logical step from this would be allowing individuals to sell shares in themselves, with each share paying a dividend from the individual's income; be your own publicly-held corporation, as it were. Young people would issue shares to pay their way through college, and then strive to buy them back, becoming private(ly-held) citizens again.
One could take it further and allow shareholders voting power over the individual's actions, such as their vote in elections, or where they will move to. For example, you may want to move to a pleasant neighbourhood, but your shareholders may prefer you to live somewhere cheaper, closer to work or otherwise more profitable, and until you buy back majority ownership of yourself, you don't get a choice. Putting your career on hold to raise a family may also be out of the question until you have majority ownership of your personal stock; if adverse economic conditions kept a lot of poorer/less successful people from buying back their stock before their biological clocks run out, some social-darwinists may see that as a good thing.
Of course, there's the matter of the whole scenario looking a bit like slavery in neo-liberal-capitalist garb, But still, it could make for a good fictional scenario; or possibly the kernel of a Swiftian essay.
2001/5/28
Former member of 90s heroin-pop band Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan joins New Order. Temporarily, mind you; he's filling in for Gillian while she takes care of her ill daughter. And in other news, the next New Order album has been announced: the title is "Get Ready", and it's due out on August 27.
(OK, so "Get Ready" it's not quite as enigmatic as "Movement" or "Low-Life"; let's hope it's not all e'd up dance anthems and Top 40 fodder. Actually, that thought reminds me of the worst version of Blue Monday I ever heard; yes, even worse than Orgy's kiddie-goth take on it. It was by an outfit named Exposed, and was pure commercial dance. The vocals were done in the usual commercial-dance girly-house style, with lots of "whooh!"s interpolated: "How, does it feeel, when you treeat me lahk you do. when you've laid your hands upon me, and told me who you are, whoo-ooh-ooh!". I believe Sydney wideboy Pee Wee Ferris was behind this cultural atrocity.)
An interesting and amusing piece by a writer describing his career in the online porn industry.
My specialty was writing booty letters to the magazine, which are, by the way, completely bogus... The tough part of this job was concocting original euphemisms for male genitalia. Thinking up synonyms for "penis" is far more challenging than you might think. There are only so many ways to say cock, and all the good ones suffer from overuse. I did have a reference book, a sort of industry trade pornographic thesaurus that got passed around the company, but the real rush came from making ones up on my own. After all, I am a writer. My personal favorite was "swollen trouser-troll." I coined that puppy. That's all me.
Oh, and be sure to read the readers' comments at the bottom. (via Hobbsblog)
I have just been informed that the first Designers Republic book is coming out in July. Titled 3D>2D:The Designers Republic's Adventures In and Out of Architecture, it will retail for £35, and be available through their web site. Tempting, though I probably pass.
2001/5/27
Here is the text of an email I recently sent to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about DVD region coding (which they are investigating).
Famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki voyage fame) believes that the Norse god Odin may have been a real person; more specifically, a tribal king in what is now Southern Russia, some time during the first century. If that is true, that could go some way towards explaining those stories about the British royal family's official genealogy showing them being descended from Odin.
Everybody's favourite corporate citizen and all-round Good Neighbour McDonalds admits to having lied to vegetarians for the past 10 years, saying that their fries are suitable for vegetarians, whereas they were, in fact, cooked in beef fat. Mind you, this affects not only the minuscule proportion of the dreadlocked feral population who eat at McDonalds, but the rather large Hindu population of India, whose religion forbids eating beef. Hindu nationalists are not amused.
A disturbing new subculture has appeared on the Net: pro-anorexia web sites and mailing lists, organised by groups of young women who believe that being morbidly thin is attractive, and more important than health. The sites offer commandments such as "thou shalt not eat without feeling guilty", tips on how not to eat and how to hide your anorexia from caring people who just don't understand, and encouragement to surrender to peer pressure and constantly strive to be thinner.
The street/own uses/tech: Some well-meaning cracker has written a paedophile-hunting email worm. The Noped worm searches the target's hard drive for things that look like child pornography (apparently by looking at file names; not the most accurate method) and, if found, mails a sample to a US federal agency.
2001/5/25
NASA have released new photographs debunking the "face on Mars", and showing it to be nothing more than a hill. Of course, the true believers can always claim that the pictures are fakes, created or doctored to suppress the truth about alien civilisations, or something of the sort.
After the Swedish Antichrist had their first album, 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, deleted and destroyed on grounds of copyright violation, The KLF released a version with the infringing samples excised. This version fit on a 12" single, and came with this instruction sheet on how to simulate the original album, using only three record decks, a TV, stack of records and a tape of Top Of The Pops.
A novelty company in Britain has started selling an "invisible toy doll". The Invisible Jim action figure consists of empty packaging boasting features such as "lack of darting eyes" and "realistic fake hair", and retails for £1.99. Nonetheless, some purchasers have failed to get the joke, and returned it for a refund, on the grounds that the "doll" was missing.
Some local governments in the US have hit upon an ingenious means of raising revenue: by installing red-light cameras and shortening amber light times from five to three seconds, thus catching more motorists.
Scientists have found a neurological defect which causes poor impulse control.
Rudolf Cardinal said: "This finding suggests a mechanism by which Acb (nucleus accumbens) dysfunction may contribute to addiction, ADHD and other impulse control disorders."
Battery kids: In the US, baby-boomer parents, many of whom undoubtedly smoked pot and listened to Black Sabbath in their misspent youth, are making sure that their kids don't get to make the same mistakes, and as such are wiring their teenagers up with tracking devices to keep them out of trouble. Though the devices may ultimately cause more harm than good. (via Plastic)
A psychological study commissioned by printer manufacturer Lexmark claims that the fonts you use reveal your personality. Courier is conservative, used by "old-school" journalists, Helvetica shows that you're "in touch with contemporary issues" and Times New Roman shows trustworthiness and compromise between old and new. And presumably all of the above show that the user is too apathetic to actually find and install some less overused fonts. (via Meg)
I just discovered (via Graham's blog) that I got mentioned in another Australian article, this time about weblogs. And it's too late to pick up a copy. Sorry, Mum.
Yes! the ACCC gets stuck into DVD zoning. DVD zoning, the quango argues, may breach the Trade Practices Act; a ruling may require all players sold in Australia to be multi-region (as in New Zealand). Now maybe all us Region 4 plebs can actually get stuff like The City of Lost Children before waiting for an exec at Sony to decide that there are enough Australians into quirky French art films to justify bringing it out in Region 4, without getting it FedExed from the States at extra expense.
Mind you, if such a ruling comes down, it may well be struck down by one of those "free trade" treaties that removes governments' rights to interfere with multinational corporations' profits.
2001/5/24
Wonder what was going through this bloke's mind. "Hmmm... maybe if I insult her enough she'll go out with me"? (btw, Jin Wicked rocks. Check her site out, folks.) (link via Jim)
Tonight I went to the Builders Arms (which makes me think of a similarly-named DAAS song) to see some bands. I missed the first band, but caught Sir (who played a number of new songs, in their usual trip-hop-without-the-breakbeats sort of way), and then an outfit named Panel of Judges, who were a sort of indie/power-pop thing.
According to this test, I am 45% Internet pure. Though had I taken it some years ago, it would have been lower, as back then I did spend much more time online, and didn't get out quite as much. Then again, back then (a) I did live in an outer suburb where there were no live bands worth seeing (and all-ages bogan-rock shows don't count), no arts/spoken-word nights and no cafés with groovy decor and chai tea (and even if there were, everything's so spread out that you'd probably have to drive for ages to meet a friend there anyway), and (b) back then, USENET was actually something other than a sewer of spam and random newbie questions. (I remember those days; I spent way too much time in alt.religion.kibology.)
When USENET went down the toilet (some time around 1995; it coincided with my Honours year, which probably contributed to my dropping out of USENET), I did what a lot of people did, and retreated to mailing lists. I formed one of my own, inviting various people to it from across the net; that is still going, though not as fiercely as before. I also joined a number of other lists, some of which have been host to some quite stimulating discussions.
My posting to mailing lists declined somewhat when I began blogging, some time
around 1999. Looking back, I'd say this blog largely took over the role that
lists have held before that, and USENET before that: of providing a forum
for me to exorcise the voices in my head post
links to articles I find interesting, observations and miscellaneous thoughts.
Curiously enough, I also have kept a journal/diary since 1989/1990 or so. And when I started blogging, that has also declined, as I am more likely to have said what I meant to say before actually writing in it. Or maybe as I'm further and further away from being an angst-ridden adolescent.
An interesting piece about the quest for the ultimate stink bomb, and the use of odours as psychological weapons.
During the Christmas season county administrators in the northeastern United States will sometimes spray public-property evergreens with a fox-urine-based repellant, in order to discourage poachers. In subzero weather, and open air, the scent is barely detectable. But bring the tree into a closed, 70-degree house and it'll stink up the place.
Dalton and her associates also discovered that people's reactions to odors varied dramatically, depending on the situation in which the scent was smelled. (In normal tests, for instance, people like the smell of wintergreen. But in situations where subjects are told that they'll be smelling an industrial solvent -- but are still given wintergreen -- they won't like it. Most, in fact, will feel actually sick.)
Some members of Italy's misunderstood, persecuted paedophile community have taken a leaf out of the Mafia's book and established a terrorist group, planning terrorist attacks against police officers and judges engaged in the fight against child abuse.
An extract from seized material says: "The only option left for the pedophiles' political party is a recourse to terrorist action and the physical elimination of the people who are most active in fighting violence against minors."
Wonder whether they have thought of dealing drugs to finance their terrorist activities.
Dubya's Middle Eastern buddies, the Taleban, have decreed that Hindus must wear pieces of yellow cloth to designate them as non-Muslims. Didn't the Germans try something similar some decades ago? (Also, I so wouldn't want to be the one Jew in Afghanistan these days.)
Did the U.S. army massacre an entire African-American regiment in 1943 to suppress rebellion? The U.S. army denies this, but witnesses and investigative journalists have cast doubts on the official report. (via Lev)
BZZZT! Actually, I steal most of my links from Plastic, not Metafilter. Come to think of it, I don't even read Metafilter. And I don't write this blog for consumer satisfaction, but rather because the voices in my head tell me to do so. If someone happens to enjoy it, well, good for them. (link via Graham and/or Meg)
Corporations are citizens, individuals are subjects: In the US, Bush's treasury secretary has proposed plans to abolish all corporate taxes, saying that they are inefficient and it would be more productive to tax the consumer directly. The corporations already control US government policy (I doubt that ordinary Americans really want draconian copyright laws and reduced environmental regulations, to name two issues).
2001/5/23
We apologise for the inconvenience: It looks like my acb(at)dev.null.org email address isn't working at the moment. If you've been trying to mail me there and getting bounces, acb(at)spamcop.net will work. (acb(at)dev.null.org was redirected to there anyway.)
Cool! They're working on a sequel to Cube (the minimalist Canadian sci-fi thriller). The working title of the new film is Hypercube.
100,000 lemmings can't be wrong (an ongoing series): It is claimed that women in the UK are choosing to give birth by caesarean section because all the stars are doing it, thus putting themselves in danger and diverting scarce resources from more needy patients. (Btw, what kind of person has Patsy Kensit as a role model anyway?)
I'm not making this up: The Bush administration has sent a $43m gift to the Taliban, to reward them for their hard line against drugs. (Or is it because of their inspiring commitment to faith-based governance.)
"The Taliban used a system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious terms."
A model government indeed. And they keep those darn atheists, feminists and humanists in their place too. (via Plastic)
Australia's One Nation party is probably the political equivalent of Sylvania Waters. In the latest twist in this torrid saga, Pauline Hanson has thrown a hissy fit and threatened to leave the party if new member Graeme Campbell is preselected as a One Nation candidate. Campbell is head of the now deregistered Australia First Party, connected with shadowy extreme-right groups.
2001/5/22
Find of the Day: At JB HiFi in the city today, I found (for $6.99) a copy of the Doug Anthony Allstars' Dead and Alive live album, recorded in London in 1993 or so. It's very amusing. They should still have some copies.
More press on the Universal takeover of MP3.com. WIRED says that MP3.com will continue operating as "an independent website". Mind you, the article also statest that Universal will fold independent-label MP3 seller emusic.com into its FarmClub.com venture. A look at the FarmClub website's terms of service reveals that artists' submitted tracks become the property of FarmClub, much like Recording Racket standard practice. Meanwhile, MP3.com's damage-control flacks have been putting out fires with a FAQ designed to allay fears; however, the mood in MP3.com's forums is one of gloom.
UK General Election update: Following in the footsteps of anarchist funsters Chumbawamba and Marxist-Castroist popsters Manic Street Preachers, Welsh pop act Catatonia have approached the protester who egged the Deputy PM last week -- and asked him to star in their video. Meanwhile, the Monster Raving Loony Party have launched their manifesto, which is blank. Their reported policies include the usual silliness (moving school desks closer together to reduce class sizes), as well as thought-provoking ideas (such as turning Britain into a tax haven), in the finest Sutchian tradition.
Recently, that font of Solomonic wisdom, the National Arbitration Forum, ordered AIMster to hand aimster.com over to AOL, as apparently AOL has the exclusive right to anything beginning with "aim". You see, when people see 'aim', they inevitably confuse it with AOL Instant Messenger, and allowing anybody other than AOL to use those letters would be a grievious injustice. In response, the people at The Register have claimed all domains ending in -ster.
I went to Splodge tonight; they showed a number of films, all connected to either the Sydney or Melbourne Luna Park. Highlights were Fantasies of a Starving Artist, a psychedelic mid-70s piece about an artist named Martin Sharp, and Shirley Thompson Vs. The Aliens, a 1971 B-movie satire about a young widgie (i.e. Australian 1950s rocker chick) who is contacted by aliens, entrusted with a message of world peace, and ultimately committed to a mental institution by the local pinks. I get the feeling that the latter film's creators listened to a lot of David Bowie.
2001/5/21
Could this be the next big thing after reality television? In Russia and Canada, two popular TV news programs feature strippers as news anchors, titiliating the audience with nudity as they recite breaking news stories. The shows are cheap to make and wildly popular, which may make them the Next Big Thing.
AP has an interesting article about urban explorer groups.
A writer, Julia Solis feeds her fiction with the odd artifacts and remnants of human history discovered in abandoned asylums. Photographs she's taken capture the eerie aura of their crumbling interiors.
Yeeng! Recording Racket heavies Vivendi Universal to swallow up mp3.com. Expect "mp3.com" to go the way of PolyGram (remember them?), and actual MP3 downloads to be replaced by Sony/Universal's locked-down Duet system; you can say goodbye to listening to unsigned artists on your untrusted Linux system. Or maybe not; MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson looks set get a seat at Vivendi CEO Messier's right hand as a technology guru; though how important open formats are to him remains to be seen.
Rebranding for the New Millennium: Since X-Day, and the arrival of the Xist Pleasure Saucers, the Church of the SubGenius' profile in the fringe cult marketplace has declined somewhat. To counter this, the Church has now selected a new logo.
Personally, I love it. It's very clique-ish, as it represents a secret society (us) where only the *true* SubGenii wiill recognize the logo. The Dobbshead is everywhere, and any moron can (and does) rip it off and use it for whatever. But the "Bob" Icon represents only one thing: SLACK.
Expect to see the new SubGenius Eikon scrawled cryptically in random places, next to muted posthorns, three-fish glyphs and "THIS IS A HEAVY PRODUCT" stickers. And praise "Bob".
Shortly before his death, Douglas Adams wrote about the circumstances that led to him writing the Hitchhiker's Guide, a work born of poverty and despair.
Is Pac-Man a carefully veiled piece of social commentary about race relations
in America? This guy
suggests that it is; meanwhile, the good burghers of Plastic have
their own
theories. And speaking of old arcade games, mame.dk is back. No banner ads this time, so they're depending on the
generosity of donors concerned about free gam3zpreserving classic arcade games for future generations.
The Continental Cafe has closed its doors for the last time; though there are reports of two new operators looking into reopening it. Then again, if the result is anything like what happened with the Valhalla Cinema (which used to play a lot of cult films and do a roaring trade with students and people with 3RRR stickers on their cars, until the landlords forced the owners out, took over, and reopened it as a rather blah suburban cinema which shows very few films, most of them either disnannies or Working Title britcoms), they may as well not bother and turn the place into yuppie apartments or clothing shops straight away.
Found object of the day: I had reason to be in the Ivanhoe Coles supermarket today, and found in one of the aisles a 3-videotape "value pack", consisting of the following titles:
- Clinton Under Oath - The President's Testimony
- Girl Power - The Unauthorised Biography of the Spice Girls
- Navy Seals - The Real Story
Wonder what the target market could possibly be.
(And in case you're wondering: no, I didn't buy it.)
2001/5/20
This poll should be interesting to watch; for one, it'll be interesting to see whether the Nu Marxists are as predominant amongst No Logo-reading types as they are in the Australian S11/M1 movement, and whether anarchism is more popular than their lack of organised structure would lead you to believe. Also tellingly, "libertarian" is not an option (perhaps it's a subcategory of "conservative", or perhaps those gun-toting Ayn Rand freaks are seen as diametrically opposed to everything No Logo advocates).
I picked up the new Depeche Mode album, Exciter, a few days ago. It's pretty good; all in all, more inspired than Ultra. It's produced by Mark Bell, the Warp artist who also produced Björk's material, and this is evident in the trademark skittering glitch beats on some of the tracks, merging with the usual synths, guitars and some lush orchestration. There's perhaps a slight Radiohead influence in places (or perhaps that's just the zeitgeist), as well as touches of some fellow Mute artists (Barry Adamson and Goldfrapp come to mind in places). As most albums, it has its stronger and weaker points (some of the songwriting has that antidepressant-tinged blandness that crept into DM lyrics in the 90s), though the overall quality is pretty good. It makes good background music, with echoes of the doomed romanticism that characterised DM's best albums (i.e., Some Great Reward through to Violator).
The big guns of the Recording Racket are bringing out MusicNet and Duet, two "Napster-killer" services, to turn the kiddies onto a legal, legit way of downloading their favourite buzzy warbles, in a "secure" format that the recording companies can keep under tight control. The thing is, not only do the tracks need special software to play (you'll need to fire up your Windows PC every time you want to listen to the latest Bizkit Park opus), but they also expire after 30 days, meaning that you have to download (and pay for) them all over again if you still want to listen to them. Ah yes, I can see how that will prove a big hit.
What would the Star Wars universe be like if it was designed by leading industrial designers?
Bad vibes/paranoia/rant: I've been reading K. W. Jeter's Noir recently. It's engrossing; sort of like early William Gibson meets Neal Stephenson, only much darker and more nihilistic. It's quite a good read, though by no means a comfortable one, as the corporate-ruled, monetised dystopia of the book is a little too close to the world we are moving towards, as wealth and power are increasingly concentrated with every multinational corporate merger, bought legislators sign away chunks of sovereignty to multinational treaties, aided by the fact that most people care more about the latest reality TV show than the more boring things happening around them. (Also, the rationales for making copyright violation a capital crime, presented in the book, are a small leap from the arguments of Microsoft and the RIAA. As for reanimating condemned convicts into eternally-suffering trophies: if George W. Bush's America had the technology, how else would they use it?) Sometimes it seems as if the age of liberal democracy (as flawed as it was) is slowly but inexorably coming to an end, to be replaced by a new global feudalism. And while a lot of the technology in the book may be far-fetched, the trends behind it are a bit too ominously familiar.
2001/5/18
Just in case you thought that "Jedi" wasn't a genuine religion, here's proof that it is: the official homepage of the Australian Jedi religious body. Not only that, but they have a lawyer to keep the Electoral Commission at bay (or so they say), and a council they're having elections for:
Current Nominee's
Master edeity (self nominated)
Brother Truongy (self nominated)
Master Vader (nominated by edeity)
Sister Zseena (self nominated, and might I add, very dubious)
Brother Insane (self nominated)
Brother Huru The Hut (nominated by Bree)
Sister 99 (Self Nominated, she tells me she is a "Hot Babe")
Hot babes are most welcome, but anyone can join; you just have to apprentice yourself to a Jedi Master, who will instruct you in Jedi philosophy. (You can find several Jedi Masters on the web site.) Or you can join, say that you're a Master and instruct joiners with lower self-esteem in Jedi philosophy. Don't know any Jedi philosophy? Just make it up as you go along (think kickflick cod-Buddhism). Who knows, you might even get laid. (Even if not, you will get a free email address out of it, so it's not a dead loss.)
You'll need a Jedi name; it's sort of like a goth name or a BBS screen name. They already have dozens of members, with names like Insane, Ronin, Necronius and Xenomorph, as well as the usual borrowings from George Lucas. Just make up something like "Lord Darknezz the Awesome".
If you feel like basing your spiritual beliefs on a Hollywood blockbuster, you could probably do worse than this. (via Lev)
The best-laid plans of mice and men: Tayside Police in the UK who handed out leaflets promoting an anti-drug web site to schoolchildren were left with egg on their face when they discovered that the site was a porn site. The privately-run drugsaware.com had gone out of business, and the domain name was snapped up by a Russian porn operator.
And, speaking of people having egg on their face in Britain: Splat the MP. (links via the Reg)
2001/5/17
An interesting and insightful speech by Richard Stallman on copyright, globalisation, E-books and the recording racket:
copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical purposes, itÂ’s a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.
The Soviet Union treated it as very important. There this unauthorized copying and re-distribution was known as Samizdat and to stamp it out, they developed a series of methods: First, guards watching every piece of copying equipment to check what people were copying to prevent forbidden copying. Second, harsh punishments for anyone caught doing forbidden copying. You could sent to Siberia. Third, soliciting informers, asking everyone to rat on their neighbors and co-workers to the information police. Fourth, collective responsibility -- You! You're going to watch that group! If I catch any of them doing forbidden copying, you are going to prison. So watch them hard. And, fifth, propaganda, starting in childhood to convince everyone that only a horrible enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying. The U.S. is using all of these measures now.
Cycling '74, purveyors of avant-garde creative audio software such as Max/MSP and Pluggo, have just launched a record label. Called c74, the label will release music in all genres, as long as it's generated with Cycling '74 software. (Which means there'll probably be a good representation of electroacoustic noise sculpture and experimental ambient glitchcore electronica, and a paucity of straight four-on-the-floor doof.)
Ralph Osterhout worked designing weaponry for the US Navy Seals, now works as a toy designer. New Scientist has an interesting interview on the subject of high-tech toy design.
Some parents say: "When I was a kid we had plain wooden blocks and we were really encouraged to use our imagination." But I think we are much more creative today. Give a child complex three- dimensional puzzles that are very sophisticated and you stimulate a higher level of creativity. How do you expect a kid who plays with wooden blocks to come up with a new receptor blocker for HIV later in life?
There is now an asteroid named Arthurdent; it was so christened by a German astronomer who identified it in 1998, and confirmed by the International Astronomical Union -- one day before DNA passed away. (via Found)
What do spelling checkers say about modern culture? The spelling checker in Microsoft Word 97 has some telltale gaps in its lexicon:
Your computer knows baddies Lenin and Trotsky, but not peace lovers Lennon, McCartney, and Starr. It remembers Auschwitz but not Woodstock. Your spell-check will gleefully accept Ku Klux Klan (try typing it in lower kase, your komputer will gently suggest that you kapitalize your k's). Ominously, Word 97 acknowledges German politicians Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder - we may not know exactly what these men are up to but we can assume, from the company they keep in our spell check, that they are bad, bad men.
Those guardians of morality in the One Nation party have called on the new givernor-general designate, Anglican Archbishop Hollingworth, to publicly condemn homosexuality, and move towards "strong moral values" (such as, presumably, hate).
Corporate globalisation: Fresh from their success with the WIPO treaty (which begat the DMCA, the EU Directive on Copyright and other such draconian laws), entertainment and media conglomerates are pushing for a treaty requiring nations to enforce other nations' judgments. This treaty is also favoured by European governments, hoping that they can get neo-Nazi web sites banned worldwide. Mind you, it would also enable corporations to shop around for the most friendly copyright/patent laws and have them enforced worldwide, as well as require the US government to remove Falun Gong websites if the Chinese government complains, not to mention a whole host of other consequences.
Overpaid, oversexed and over here: Those damn Seppos can't leave their guns alone for a minute, it seems. U.S. soldiers serving in military exercises in Australia have been taking shots at protected wildlife, to take home as trophies, apparently forgetting that this is a Communist country where you're not allowed to shoot things just because you feel like it. Mind you, this is coming from Vladimir Putin's propaganda organ, Pravda; make of that what you will.
Age-old sectarian enmities, passed down from generation to generation, have found a home in ethnic soccer clubs in Australia. During the 1990s, Serbian and Croatian fans would riot during games, and sometimes vandalise or torch the rivals' soccer clubs; then the authorities stepped in and banned clubs from advertising ethnic affiliation, forcing these traditions underground. Recently, a Serbian player has been accused of making a three-fingered salute at Bosnian Muslims during a match, starting a riot. He initially denied it and then claimed that the salute was an innocuous "Christian Orthodox salute". An Islamic group is claiming that the salute refers to the Serbian practice of amputating Muslims' fingers, as practiced during the Bosnian conflict.
Soccer isn't the only place where such ancient hatreds are revived by new generations of tribal warriors; a predominantly Greek graffiti gang in Melbourne has been spraying "DEATH TO TURKS" on walls next to their tags. Given the popularity of hip-hop culture among second-generation ethnic youth, I wonder how long it is until we have ethnic-Australian rap groups bustin' rhymes about their ancestral enemies' historical atrocities and how it's payback time.
2001/5/16
According to a hoopy frood named Clyde, May 25 is Towel Day. Those left disconsolate by the recent death of Douglas Adams are encouraged to carry a towel around.
(With all these tributes, Adams has probably gotten more publicity since his death than over the past few years. Part of me wonders whether he's not just spending a year dead for publicity reasons. In any case, he certainly had his fans.)
A British divorce law firm has stirred up controversy by advertising its services on posters in lavatories at trendy bars. The posters in womens' toilets read "All men are Bastards!", whereas the ones in mens' toilets bear the old anti-Thatcherite election slogan "Ditch the bitch".
OK, two more things about Douglas Adams: firstly, Neil Gaiman has posted a short piece about him to his online journal; and then there's this piece he wrote about the Internet. He was a very canny fellow, and we'll miss him. (links via Graham and Jim)
According to flyers appearing around universities, the next important date on the hectic Nu Marxist social calendar will be the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October. That's right, those latter-day Cecil Rhodeses will be gathering to further their agenda of Anglo-Saxon capitalist world domination, with only the Dreadlocked Menace standing against them. Wonder whether, this time, the Lyndon LaRouche people will be joining in the festivities.
(Mind you, I have been told that the CHOGM was instrumental in pressuring South Africa to end apartheid, and one of the few international bodies to condemn Shell-sponsored genocide in Nigeria, but it's best not to let the facts get in the way of a good protest opportunity. After all, such meetings don't come along every few weeks, do they?)
It's a strange world: In Teesside, the world's youngest paedophile has been placed on the sex offenders' register for 18 months. The offender, a 13-year-old boy, was found guilty of possessing more than 300 obscene pictures of children and teenagers. Some of his victims were even older than himself.
As mainstream suburban kids have adopted the "gangsta" look, the gangbangers of Los Angeles who started it are swapping their baggy pants and bandanas for more conventional clothing, all the better to slip under the radar of police and prey.
2001/5/15
The president of Britain's National Farmers Union, speaking in Australia, has claimed that the foot and mouth epidemic was the work of eco-terrorists. The authorities, however, have made no such claims, and green groups were quick to condemn the comments as "mad hatter" views. If you know anything about a group calling themselves the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the police may want to have a word with you.
Taking dressing to success to new extremes: in the US, executives and salesmen are having chin implants. The implants give a stronger, more confident-looking chin, and are very much in demand, partly because, in this age of lay-offs and labor-market flexibility, anything that gives you an advantage over the next guy could make the crucial difference.
"People with weak chins in the media are portrayed as embezzlers or as having weak characters," he said. "So a strong chin is very important. This has spilled over from film to industry with executives and even now salesmen who feel a strong chin would enhance their credibility."
Surely executive codpieces can't be that far off...
Have I mentioned how wonderful Everything But The Girl's live version of The Smiths' Back To The Old House is? No dance beats, just a guitar and vocals. If any female vocalist can do Morrissey justice, it is Tracey Thorn. I'd love to hear them do a cover of Asleep, or Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me...
2001/5/14
Ye gods, Vogonische Dichtkunst. That's right, someone has translated Vogon poetry into German.
News from Cannes: Bolshy British kitchen-sink film director Ken Loach has spoken out against current British film, saying that it's too concerned with being Hollywoodish. He has a point; most of the films coming out of the UK are rather formulaic. I blame Working Title and the "Cool Britannia" thing. Meanwhile, critical reaction to Baz Luhrmann's latest opus, Moulin Rouge, has not been the nigh-universal acclaim the Australian press would have us believe, with some critics dismissing it as little more than a music video aimed at adolescents. I guess we'll have to wait to find out.
I went to the computer market in Collingwood today and bought an extra 128Mb RAM, doubling my Linux box's RAM. The change is quite impressive: I'm running Nyetscape 6.0, Windows 98/Internet Exploiter under VMware (with 60Mb allocated), and the GIMP, and it hasn't once touched swap. It's a lot cheaper than having a separate Windows machine for web browsing.
An opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal argues that high-school cliques are good, that the parents of Alpha kids (cheerleaders, jocks, abercroms and such) should not feel stigmatised, because most of the anti-clique arguments come from former nerds and outcasts still bitter about being ostracised in high school. (One could probably argue that the clique system, with its subtexts of intense competition and conformity, is very useful for preparing children for taking their places in the consumer-capitalist world once they grow up.)
Retro-futurism: Some predictions for the year 2000, written in 1950.
Any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment. If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her "queerness." It is astonishing how easily the great majority of us fall into step with our neighbors. And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?
2001/5/13
The WINE Windows emulator for Linux may be a long way from replacing Windows, but it is bearing some fruit. First came WINE-based video players which used Windows codecs to decode proprietary formats, and soon Linux users will be able to use Windows web browser plug-ins in Linux browsers. At last; non-brain-damaged Flash support on Linux, not to mention QuickTime, Shockwave and such. Now the only reason to use Internet Exploiter under VMWare will be if you want a browser that doesn't crash.
On May 8, staff and students at Amherst University arrived to find a campus-wide ban on coffee, aimed at stamping out caffeine use. Signs on campus announced the ban, a press conference was held on the dangers of the drug caffeine, and black-market coffee dealers sold espresso beans to addicts jonesing for their fix. The whole thing was an art project, organised by a student and drug policy critic named Andrew Epstein, who persuaded the administration to go along with it.
Coming soon to a McLympiad near you: genetically engineered posthuman athletes capable of outperforming ordinary humans.
In a 1995 survey, nearly 200 aspiring American Olympians were asked if they would take a banned substance that would guarantee victory in every competition for five years and would then cause death; more than half answered yes.
Once they were acclaimed (mostly by themselves, mind you) as the New Beatles, but now, alternative/britpop band Oasis' fortunes have sunk to a new low. How low? Well, they've been reduced to having slanging matches with boy bands.
A moment of silence, please: Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and a number of other things, has died of a sudden heart attack. Adams had been working on a Hitchhiker's Guide movie.
2001/5/11
Planning to start a weblog but can't think of an appropriately whimsical and offbeat name for it? The Surrealist Domain Name Generator can be of help. (Also usable for musical side-project names and dot-com startups, where appropriate.) (ta, Bonni)
The Victorian government is reopening four passenger railway lines closed in the early 1990s. The Ararat, Bairnsdale, South Gippsland and Mildura passenger railway will be reopened within 3 years, with services run by private operators. Not surprisingly, three of the reopened lines are in the electorates of independent MPs who hold the balance of power. (Still, decent passenger rail coverage is a Good Thing, IMHO.)
Selling Christianity: Catholic Supply of St. Louis, MO is now selling figurines the Sports Jesus. Lifelike figurines of white-robed Jesus playing a wide range of popular American sports, including baseball and grid-iron. Sometimes it's hard to tell the intentional kitsch from the unintentional. Though, then again, in this age when most people express their identity by consuming products, what better way to profess your Christianity than by conspicuously consuming Christian merchandise?
The British government (the only Western democracy to require ISPs to have back doors accessible to the security services) has passed legislation requiring sysadmins to be licensed. They say this wasn't their intention, but nonetheless it is on the books. It'll probably be a useful tool to ensure compliance; sysadmins who are slow in handing over passwords or too eager to tell their users that they're being watched could find themselves struck off the register.
Strange bedfellows: It has emerged that, during World War 2, Scottish nationalists allied with the IRA attempted to establish an alliance with Nazi Germany, with the aim of establishing a Nazi-allied Scottish Republic in the chaos of the Blitz, (via Lev)
2001/5/10
Cryptozoology in the news: A couple in Lithgow have filmed what may be the Blue Mountains panther, a mysterious big cat sighted in the Blue Mountains since the late 1970s, though remaining elusive.
A study has shown that tall men are more likely to divorce and remarry, taking younger second wives, and thus having more children. Height is a more significant predictor of this than other status indicators, perhaps because in the ancestral environment it was a useful indicator of fitness, and as such, sexual selection may ensure that humanity keeps getting taller.
Good news on the film front; Terry Gilliam has finished the Good Omens script. Given that Gilliam is involved, I have high hopes for this film.
A BBC piece on the recent Norwegian RFC1149 test, in which Internet traffic was carried by carrier pigeon. The live test has resulted in some ideas for speeding up CPIP (Carrier Pigeon IP), such as better error-correction techniques. Wonder whether any new RFCs will come of it.
Prison policy imitates Ed Anger column: Arizona prison officials are looking for a psychiatrist to treat a paranoid schizophrenic death row inmate, restoring his mental competence so that he may be executed. Unfortunately for them, all psychiatrists contacted have thus declined, because of this thing called the Hippocratic Oath.
After being voted off the UN Human Rights Commission and Narcotics Control Board, the US throws a hissy fit and threatens to stop paying its dues. And then, reminded that they haven't paid their dues for years, amends this to a threat to forget about paying overdue UN dues, of which it was going to generously pay half. Such are the privileges of being the World's Leading Nation.
Under Bush, U.S. to militarise space; which may see the US Air Force expand its mission to space-based combat, or the creation of a US Space Force. Nuclear-armed orbital battle stations and jumbo cosmospheres, here we come.
(Mind you, it's possible that the militarisation of space may be seen by future historians as the start of humanity seriously venturing off the surface of Earth. Sad fact is, there's nothing like war or inter-tribal conflict to motivate human endeavour. Perhaps it's the age-old club-the-rival-caveman's-brains-in instinct.)
Well, I absconded from work a bit early this evening and went down to the Punters to see some bands, for the first time in a while. The first band was Radius, which was sort of laid-back guitar ambience (sort of like Mogwai or Art Of Fighting) with the occasional female vocals, and sporadic forays into indie-pop territory. Then was a rawk band named Dead Sorority, which didn't do that much for me. Finally, Sir came on and played a set of their trademark kind of hypnagogic cabaret. (sort of like trip-hop only slower and without the breakbeats, or something like that), including a new song and an unreleased number. I chatted with Jesse and Liz of Sir after the show, and they plan to release an EP/single in the not-too-distant future, which is something to look forward to.
2001/5/9
Shock, horror! Pauline Hanson's reactionary-populist One Nation party is allegedly being infiltrated by the League of Rights, an extreme-right-wing racist group. The League of Rights-affiliated Australia First Party, long associated with neo-Nazi skinhead gangs, Holocaust deniers and the like, is apparently unofficially merging its membership into One Nation, a party with actual membership in the Senate. It remains to be seen whether this propels lunatic-fringe hate groups into parliament or ends up sending the moderate-reactionary vote back to the National Party and/or what's left of the DLP. (via Lev)
As foot and mouth disease and the Real IRA take their toll on tourist numbers, the British Tourism Authority are looking at a solution for stemming the tide: by re-branding Britain with a new logo.
Police have used a little-used bylaw against race-hate pamphlets against anti-sweatshop activists protesting outside the Nike store. The bylaw prohibits the distribution of pamphlets without a permit, and has been enforced at the police's discretion (e.g., when the pamphleteers are neo-Nazis, or when an influential corporation's public image is at stake).
2001/5/8
US voted off UN drug control committee. The vote (by secret ballot, though suspected to have been influenced by European and South American delegates concerned with US drug policy) comes shortly after the World's Leading Nation lost its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, not to mention its unilateral tearing up of the Kyoto treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The question is: is this more likely to marginalise the US as a cowboy state, or to lead to the wane of the UN as a body of real influence? (Didn't the League of Nations die of irrelevance after world powers started ignoring it?)
In London, radical leftists picket film criticising Cuba. Opponents say that Before Night Falls, which deals with the persecution of a gay poet in Cuba, is "playing into the hands of the CIA". Wonder whether, when it reaches Australia, the S11/M1 people will be blockading the cinemas in a "Carnival against Disinformation".
Muscular Christianity: The Religious Right in the US is trying a new tack to stamp out the plague of homosexuality: perhaps taking a cue from post-Columbine goth-profiling lists, they are circulating lists of warning signs of pre-homosexuality in children. Pre-gay boys, you see, are sensitive and aesthetically inclined, and pre-gay girls like to wear army boots.
What to do with a fashion-obsessed sissy boy? Nicolosi recommended corrective nudging toward macho recklessness. When an audience member worried that such an approach might stifle a budding artist or performer, the therapist responded that a boy wouldn't necessarily have to give up piano entirely; he could simply tickle the ivories a little less and toss the football a little more.
Could this be a sign of a new Christian Fundamentalist war against the artistic temperament, coming in through the door of mainstream Fundie homophobia? As it becomes entrenched, we may see more (non-homophobic) justifications for why anything other than hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity is un-Christian, and returns to Puritan arguments against art.
The fascinating case history of Elinor Nicol, Scotland Yard's expert lip reader. Nicol (not her real name) was deaf from age 4, and consequently developed the ability to precisely lip-read, and thus make out inaudible conversation. Her talent has helped put away IRA bombers, drug dealers and murderers, and also helped the community in other ways:
"I also work in hospitals, interpreting what is being said by people who cannot do anything except move their lips very slightly. I did one where a woman who was recovering from an operation simply wanted her family to shut up when they came to visit her, to stop asking stupid questions. I was able to pass that message on. She was very grateful, although I am not sure her family was quite so pleased."
A community group to buy the Espy, the (in)famously grungy St Kilda rock'n'roll band venue, from developers who wanted to put condos up on the site. Mind you, the developers still keep the back of the lot. Also, I wonder who the "community group" is; for all I know it could be a consortium of local entrepreneurs wanting to transform it into a more upmarket venue and capitalise on the million-dollar bayside views.
A piece on trip-folk singer-songwriter Dido. (Wonder how much creative control she has now that she has made it big and Arista swallowed up her label; it will be interesting to see whether her next album has a more commercial LaFace-urban-R&B sound.)
2001/5/7
A profile of Naomi Klein, author of globalisation exposé No Logo. Incidentally, she now has a Slashdot-style No Logo news site, for all your anti-corporate needs.
Lengthy public transport diatribe: The Victorian government is looking at public transport options for Outer Eastern Melbourne, to supplement the $1bn freeway to be built. The possibilities look moderately promising (new railway lines, a tram extension, &c), though I suspect they'll settle for half a dozen new bus services, running six days a week to 7pm, or some token "solution" like an automated phone-based car-pooling registry, chosen because it is inexpensive and innovative, even if thoroughly useless. (This is, after all, the government which banned public transport advocacy groups from the consultative process.)
I think that more should be done to improve public transport in the outer suburbs. (I lived in Ferntree Gully for 15 years, and hence know how poor it is. I was one of the luckier ones, though, living within 10 minutes of a railway station.) Expecially now that gentrification is forcing low-income earners into the outer suburbs, where surviving without access to a car is difficult, a public transport system would be much needed.
<SPECULATION TYPE="CRACKPOT"> For one, Melbourne's commuter rail system has the fatal disadvantage of running only radially; i.e., in and out of the city. There are no lines circling the city, and to travel from one outer suburb to another, one has to go into the city centre and back out. The spur line from Huntingdale to Rowville could be a step in the right direction, being not far from the Belgrave line. Additionally, it could service Monash University, which has the distinction of being (a) Melbourne's largest university, and (b) in the middle of suburbia, half an hour's walk from the nearest railway station and wholly dependent on cars and bus services.
Secondly, extending the tram line to Knox City is an OK idea, though it is, once again, radial; a journey into the city by tram would take 2 hours or so. It could be extended into an outer-eastern tram network, with a tram going from Knox City to, say, Bayswater (and to the Rowville rail terminus in the other direction, if need be), linking two railway lines. And more lines could be added, running along the wide roads, and making the outer east more hospitable to the carless. </SPECULATION>
Suck has an interesting piece about cranks in cartooning, from the Hearst days and Dick Tracy to Jack Chick and Johnny Hart.
After the Alaskan oil drilling thing and tearing up the Kyoto accord, the Bush administration attempts to paint itself as a concerned, environmentally-conscious one. Recently, Bush's EPA chief has condemned wind-powered electric generators for endangering birds with their spinning blades; a problem that the bird-friendly oil and gas industries (which funded Bush and have benefited from his wise rule), conveniently, do not have.
So that's why the last Nick Cave album has been so long in coming: because he has been spending his time starring in action films with John Travolta.
2001/5/6
I think I will have to check out the Zero7 album; I heard a track from it on 3RRR's Far and Wide, and it sounded pretty doovy; perhaps a little like Air circa Moon Safari. No Australian distribution, but Heartland may have imports... (link via Meg)
The end of civilisation as we know it has been averted yet again, as Hollywood studios strike a deal with screenwriters, preventing a strike that would have crippled the entertainment industry. And the world breathes a collective sigh of relief.
As the dot-com bust bites, one type of consultant in Silicon Valley is seeing a boom in business: the repo man.
He follows morning traffic down Highway 280, past enormous Spanish-style mansions. As he zooms by Apple Computer Inc.'s headquarters, Mr. Kevern laughs. "It's unbelievable how many cars I got from that lot -- 100 cars easily," he says.
Silicon Valley's reluctance to give up its cars is a remnant of the great optimism that led to their purchase in the first place, adds Mr. Kevern's boss, Mr. Doyle. "You find a lot of lottery tickets in repossessed cars," he says. "It's their last hope."
A piece in The Age about the closure of the Continental Cafe, and another one by local music-scene figure Stephen Cummings. (Interesting that they mention that the Espy and the Punters Club are rumoured to be under threat of closure. The Espy, by the million-dollar foreshore of of hyper-yuppified, de-souled St Kilda, has had packs of predatory developers circling it like vultures for ages. St Kilda, formerly home to artists, bohemians and other scruffy lowlife, is rapidly turning into the new South Yarra, and in general, most of the live-band-venue scene south of the Yarra has been replaced by boutique DJ bars and things more polished and upmarket than the vaguely grungy, Dionysian phenomenon of rock band venues.)
2001/5/4
Could this be the next Mahir, or the next GLOCK 3? Icy Hot Stuntaz, taking the hiphop scene to whole new levels. And they have merchandise and even a MP3 of them flaunting their wicked-ass rhymin' skills.
Fontomas is releasing a CD of their fonts, so if you missed some, you will be able to get them.
Horrorshow, mes freres! A disturbing new subculture has emerged among disenfranchised young men in France's cities. Denied opportunities for betterment by their lower class position, they are seeking transcendence and status through gang-raping 'bourgeois' girls.
"These cases invariably follow the same barbarous pattern," said Isabelle Steyer, a Paris barrister. "The girl is always seen as more bourgeois than the norm, or better educated. The gang who attack her believe that since she's supposedly sleeping with her boyfriend, she's fair game. Peer pressure discourages him from trying to stop them. It's the law of the high-rise estate."
(via Plastic)
No, this is not the Viridian list: A Swiss company has developed a sports car that runs on rotting vegetables.
Just in case you thought that, maybe, just maybe, the tobacco companies aren't evil scumbags: Documents have emerged revealing an R.J. Reynolds niche marketing campaign from the mid-90s, targeting gays and the homeless. It's name? Project SCUM. This ostensibly stood for "SubCultural Marketing", but the derogatory connotations are rather hard to gloss over.
Well-known Melbourne live band/show venue the Continental Cafe, which has been home to live music since World War 2, is to close in a week or so. Apparently the landlord decided that he can make more money by converting the building into offices and/or luxury appartments, and put the rent up, forcing the Conti people out. (Sort of like what happened with the Valhalla cinema in Northcote some years ago; the landlords demanded a year's rent in advance, drove the Valhalla organisers out and took over the cinema, turning it from a cult mecca into just another boring suburban cinema, better known for Disney matinees and Working Title feel-good britflicks.)
(Apparently a lot of live band venues are finding it rather tough going, with the GST hitting them twice, making people reluctant to spend money on seeing bands and also taxing the bands performing. According to the Metro News, the Dan O'Connell may be forced to close soon, and other venues are also feeling the pinch. Well, at least there's a moratorium on poker machines, so they can't just turn them into pokie venues; only executive townhouses and such.)
The Conti wasn't the most comfortable venue (for one, unless you ordered dinner, you were stuck standing in a narrow corridor-like area), but they did have some great shows. I recall seeing The Paradise Motel play a double set there once, with strings and some great lighting.
Remixes of video game tunes. Doovy! I should probably finish off that Bubble Bobble ska mix I started ages ago and send it their way...
Is Sony wilfully violating the GPL? This page (allegedly by a developer of POSE, the GPLed PalmPilot emulator) alleges so.
"We don't really care about that. Go ahead, sue us and see how far you get..."
Could this be a deliberate strategy to test the GPL in a courtroom and defeat the FSF with superior legal firepower, invalidating or weakening the GPL? Such a strategy may be profitable to Sony, allowing them to make proprietary versions of GPLed software, building in trusted-client access-control technologies (something Sony is very keen on) without fear of their secrecy being compromised.
2001/5/3
Here's something good: the Simputer, a sustainable, low-cost computer for the developing world. Developed in India, it's based on an Intel CPU and Linux, has a touch-sensitive screen, flash RAM, built-in telephone modem and USB port. The Simputer will cost about US$200 to produce, and the designs will be publicly available, giving hope to the dream of an affordable humanist computing platform for most of the world's population.
You know those spam emails that fill up your mailbox offering wealth, sex and freedom from debt? Well, A journalist recently decided to take up the offers in a week's worth of spam, and report back the details. Here is the dirt on fake university degrees, instant credit repair, "weight loss" products and that "Internet Spy" thing; not surprisingly, it's all a ripoff, if not criminal fraud, and a number of these companies are on the run from various law-enforcement and regulatory agencies.
An interesting interview with Noam Chomsky about globalisation, biotech, the IMF and all those things those reds and ferals are jumping up and down about:
Debt is not valid if it's essentially imposed by force. The Third World debt is odious debt. That's even been recognized by the U.S. representative at the IMF, Karen Lissaker, an international economist, who pointed out a couple of years ago that if we were to apply the principles of odious debt, most of the Third World debt would disappear.
For example, if somebody comes into your office from the university biology department and says, You're going to be a subject in an experiment. I'm going to stick electrodes into your brain and measure this, that, and the other thing, you're permitted to say, I'm sorry, I don't want to be a subject. They are not allowed to come back to you and say, You have to be, unless you can provide scientific evidence that this is going to harm you. But the U.S. is insisting on exactly that internationally.
The international economic arrangements, the so-called free trade agreements, are basically designed to maintain that. They undergird what's called a "flexible labor market," meaning that people have no security. The growing worker insecurity that Alan Greenspan once said was one of the major factors in the fairy-tale economy. If people are afraid, they don't have job security, they're just not going to ask for better conditions.
(thanks, Toby!)
Meme watch: "FOR SALE" stickers have started spontaneously appearing on the signs of troubled dot-coms in California's sprawling technology parks.
A new form of youthful delinquency is troubling Japan's salarymen and respectable commuters: a growing subculture of trendy young women using their commuting time to give themselves elaborate cosmetic treatments.
Up here for thinking! Biologists in Norway have come up with an innovative way of finding genes likely to be connected; by searching academic papers. They have developed a program which scans titles and abstracts of papers in a publicly available database for the names of genes, and determines genes' probable connectedness by whether their names appear in papers together, and which other keywords appear. As such they have made a step towards extracting patterns from the ever-growing "biobibliome", or body of published papers in biology.
Making consumerism fun: Taking product placement to a new level, a Los Angeles company is planning an all-product-placement movie. Foodfight! will feature animated brand mascots uniting to fight "Nazi-like brand X products" that are trying to take over a supermarket. (via Plastic)
2001/5/2
The Onion's in fine form today: Lowest Common Denominator Continues To Plummet:
In a Syracuse University study conducted last month, reruns of Happy Days, a show derided by 1970s critics as "targeted to third-graders," were deemed "beyond comprehension" by 75 percent of present-day third-graders. The surveyed students expressed frustration with the show's characters, some of which exhibited more than one trait. "Fonzie rides a motorcycle, but he also likes girls," one subject said. "I don't get it." The test group also took issue with Happy Days' "boring," non-fatal motorcycle crashes and confusing lack of gunplay and/or graphic nudity.
Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute have found that the brain is hardwired to detect musical harmony and distinguish it from noise or disharmony. The distinction appears to be made in Broca's area, which is also involved in understanding language.
Proprietary format good, open format bad: Here comes another CD copy protection scheme, which hopes to make CDs you cannot rip into your MP3 collection for your own personal use. Somehow, this new system will redirect the felons who rip CDs to a site where they can download access-controlled Windows Media files. Of course, this locks you into Microsoft's platform, but then again, I suspect that this access control technique may not work on other platforms (such as Linux).
2001/5/1
Rumour of the day: Post-ironic slacker pop star Beck joins the Church of Scientology. The question is: if this is true, is he doing it sincerely or ironically?
A BBC piece about UNIX' one billionth second, and the elaborate parties the Penguinheads are planning to mark the occassion.
International Smash Shit Up Day: Contradictory reports about the anti-capitalist rallies in Melbourne; a 3RRR announcer this morning, quoting International Socialist/M1 officials, has painted a picture of a sea of red flags, and about 10,000 people attending; meanwhile, the PM edition of the Herald-Scum (the local Murdoch) said it was an abject failure, with only 300 people attending and no protests outside the Nike store. (I walked past the Nike store; it was closed and boarded up, with a phalanx of police out the front, presumably to ensure that protesters don't graffiti the boards.) Meanwhile, the wheels of capitalism keep turning as the stock exchange trades as normal.
That's right; Strider. (I'd have linked to mame.dk here, except that it's dead.) (Were you expecting Tetris perhaps?) Anyway, hope everyone has had a good Walpurgisnacht.
The entrepreneurial spirit: In the UK, university students are turning to prostitution to pay for their studies, with 60% of the prostitutes in some parts of the country being hard-up university students, and brothels advertising for workers in student newspapers.
Sarah, a 20 year old from Edinburgh studying business studies, is typical. Forced by debt into prostitution, Sarah's services are advertised on the internet by the escort company she works for.
Business studies? I suppose one could argue, though, that working in prostitution to get through university could be useful career experience for the ruthless world of making a buck.