2002/4/30
According to AOL Time Warner, fast-forwarding through TV ads is theft. Wonder how long until the doctrine of "attention rights" is enshrined in law, with criminal penalties for circumvention. (via Plastic)
Blogging has been a tad sparse lately, but here's something to think about: are we primates with memes, or colonies of memes infesting the brains of primates?
I'm dreaming of the Queen: The Pet Shop Boys sing about Eminem, and a (fictional) young gay fan's one-night stand with the shock rapper. (via Reenhead)
The world is going to hell; aggressive, violent macho hawks are in charge like not for a long time, and there's no escape; everyone gets the bad karma, one way or another.
No one is preaching peace. No one striving for genuine camaraderie or balance or compromise. And too few of us seem willing to believe that 9/11 has mutated into a brutish hollow excuse for the Bush administration to perpetuate a war for oil and to proclaim new enemies and to chip away at the Constitution and your civil liberties in the name of increased federal control and fewer dissenting voices.
(via Graham)
2002/4/29
Subject line of recently received spam: "ALL NEW ASSBANGING SITE"
Upon seeing that, I half wondered whether "assbanging" is not the latest post-ironic synonym for "rockin'" or "bitchin'", as in "dude, assbangin' Segway!".
2002/4/28
"Henry Raddick" has written 239 Amazon book (and other item) reviews, all bristling with his own brand of sardonic wit.
"Sudden Strangers : The Story of a Gay Son and His Father"
A well-written book with a movingly told story which I initially bought just to leave lying around the house. My son Jonathan (who's straight) may think he's won the pierced nose battle, but I will win the mind-games war on the issue.
"Telemania Smiley Face Phone"
It's a bright and shiny phone, there's no doubting that, but stare at it long enough, waiting for her to call, and that smile turns into a mocking grimace.
(via Plastic)
Our Friends in the Middle East: A government cleric in that bulwark of moderate liberalism, Saudi Arabia, has called for the enslaving of Jewish women during a pro-Palestinian telethon. Shaikh Saad Al-Buraik, who has close ties to the Saudi royal family, also called for holy war against Jews and Christians and affirmed that his hatred of America would collapse the universe if contained within it. (via Charlie's Diary)
2002/4/27
There were too many things on last night; at least two gigs worth seeing. It was a tough decision, but in the end I decided to go to Pony to see Steward's last solo gig in Australia, along with Tugboat and Simpatico. I got in a bit late (due to work and such), and thus only saw the last part of the Tugboat set; they had a reduced lineup and played a sort of slowcore set, ending with a Mojave 3 cover. Then Steward went on, with a MiniDisc player, a guitar and a Hello Kitty toy of some sort. His material can be described as jangly pop meets drill & bass; during the set, he strummed a guitar, with a variety of distortion pedals, over some crunchy electronic beats, and generally jumped around like a maniac. Simpatico, meanwhile, was a guy with an acoustic guitar and a MiniDisc player with some backings, who sang a sort of slightly twee jangly pop, rather reminiscent of The Field Mice (and perhaps The Smiths in places as well). I ended up getting his CD, titled The Difference Between Alone & Lonely.
2002/4/26
Zany, sickeningly sweet fun with a big diamond on top: Polly Esther (of Suck/Filler fame) is back, focussing her withering sarcasm on the new trend of wedding porn.
Last night I went to the band night at Pony. It was organised by the Eaze people, but was a change from the usual poets, video makers, interpretive fire-twirlers and miscellaneous beatnik types one associates with Eaze, instead being more of an indiekid crowd. You know the sort; black-framed glasses and striped sweaters and canvas sneakers and checkered shirts and dark blue work shirts and ironic T-shirts and kiddie paraphernalia and fur-lined parkas and anti-haircuts and girls with short hair and boys with oversized sideburns and such; mostly clustered three-deep around the bar talking with people they know from either bands or sharehouses they were in.
Anyway, the music: By Ferry Or Steamer played some nice instrumentals, as did Chinless Kings (in a rather minimalistic sort of way). Ruby's Arms were a bit too country-&-western for my liking (what is it with country music and inner city indie types; is it something ironic, like wearing vintage summer-camp T-shirts?) At Sea consisted of two blokes with an acoustic guitar and an acoustic bass guitar, the latter of whom ranted into a microphone whilst playing. Towards their last piece (a lengthy number), they began to sound like an acoustic Mogwai (not a bad thing, IMHO). Finally, Midstate Orange came on. Their sound is a combination of power-pop, wall-of-noise shoegazer endings, false endings, and 1960s retro-kitsch (in places they sounded like The Monkees or The Banana Splits or someone).
2002/4/25
You've probably seen this already: w3m, a text-mode web browser which can display inline images in an xterm.
Yes, xterms apparently have character codes for showing bitmaps. Wonder how long until the Linux framebuffer console gets those as well...
Last night I went to the Prince of Wales Bandroom to see FourPlay and george. First up was one Danielle Spencer, a well-groomed bottle-blonde who played electronic piano and sang (or possibly lip-synched; I couldn't tell) FM-radio pop songs into a Britney Spears headset, over slickly produced backing tracks. Her lyrics seemed rather bland and repetitive, and the music (most of which came off a Roland hard-disk recorder that her producer was operating behind the stage) was all rather MOR; polished drum machine loops, overly loud bass guitar, a bit of alternative-style guitar strumming, and those chime bells that have found their way into too many overproduced pop ballads. One got the impression of a Home and Away starlet trying to be Tori Amos (or perhaps Toni Halliday) but coming out as Dido instead.
Next up were FourPlay. I'd tell you that they rocked, but then again, I'm biased. They played with their characteristic energy; at one stage, Peter snapped the G string of his cello, and (as one does with a G string) threw it into the audience, where it was snapped up by a group of screaming female fans. And there were quite a few of those; in particular, FourPlay's Jeff Buckley cover seemed to excite the girls in the audience quite a bit. Wonder why...
Finally up were george. And they didn't sound at all like the Corrs (as Graham would say); though the male vocalist (the muscular guy with the oddly shaved hair) did sound rather like Jeff Buckley. Because the sound at the Prince was rather poor (see below), I couldn't form a complete opinion of how good they are. Though they do like their dramatic buildups. Halfway through the set, FourPlay came on stage and joined them on strings.
One major disappointment was the sound system at the Prince Bandroom. Seemingly designed more for booty-shaking bass than for actual fidelity, between the subwoofers under the stage and the main speakers pointed well above the crowd, there seemed to be too little midrange; as such, the sound was flat and muffled. During FourPlay's set, the chatter of the people at the back of the room almost drowned out the band, even from the second row.
Scare meme of the day: Bread, potato chips contain a known carcinogen, in alarmingly high quantities. (via Charlie's Diary)
2002/4/24
The Onion: Magic-Store Employee Not The Same Since Losing Virginity:
"Scottie was always up for coming over to my house and teaching me how to use a hopping casino coin or a stiff rope," said best friend and fellow magic aficionado Andrew Welch. "Now, he just wants to go to parties. He's all, 'Is anyone having a party this weekend? We should go to that bar we went to on New Year's Eve. There were cute girls there.' God, Scottie, get a life."
A US congressional candidate has come up with a novel way of funding NASA: with a 1% tax on science fiction and "space-related" toys, puzzles and games. (via Plastic)
2002/4/23
The world's last Stalinist dictatorship, North Korea is entering the IT marketplace. They have a booth at Comdex in China, though currently it has only computers pointing to North Korean websites and the ubiquitous posters of Kim Jong Il.
"The great general Kim Jong Il is devoted constantly" to information technology, Kim Ho, an official of North Korea's Academy of Sciences, said at a news conference. On Sunday and Monday, organisers say developers will display more than 100 products, from translation programs to video games.
I imagine that their range of video games would be pretty unique.
If you think public transport in Melbourne is poor, it's apparently much worse in Adelaide. They're still using diesel trains on their (poorly patronised) suburban rail network, it seems. (via The Fix)
Mulholland Drive explained, quite credibly too. Excellent. Though don't read it if you haven't seen the film (which is highly recommended). (via Found)
2002/4/22
No more Mr. Nice Geek: The copyright racket's recent string of coups in getting laws passed to protect its interests at the expense of everyone else has highlighted the way in which the tech sector is outclassed by the much smaller entertainment industry in political influence. So some enterprising geeks in the US have formed the so-called GeekPAC, to fly representatives around to talk to and educate politicians. Which will have no impact next to Big Media's hardball tactics, argues this article; instead, the geeks should take a leaf out of the playbooks of groups such as the NRA; single out one or two recalcitrant politicians and use their money and resources to get them voted out, sending a message to others. Macchiavellian, but it's that kind of world. (via Techdirt)
A page written by an outfit calling themselves "Objective: Christian Ministries" and detailing why Apple Computer is a tool of Satan; from their new Darwin OS, based on Communist open-source software and demonic BSD UNIX to notorious atheist Richard Dawkins' preference for Macintoshes, it's all here.
Mind you, I'm not sure whether these people are a joke or a genuine group of honest-to-goodness religious fruitcakes. For what it's worth they also have a campaign to shut down Landover Baptist as an "anti-Christian hate crime".
Bruce Sterling's speech to the 2002 Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference, about the state of online freedom and privacy. Interesting, in a rambling and in places hubristic way.
It's the Wintel Gates OS versus Hollywood and the music industry, and as elephants fight, the grass is trampled. This is one of those *new* kinds of war, where the soldiers are perfectly safe and the *consumers* supply all the casualties. The hallowed halls of Best Buy and Circuit City are strewn with broken glass and broken promises.... The supposed explosion of digital creativity on a million websites and a thousand channels... Well, come 2002, it boils down to 95% market share by a single ruthless feudal empire! And you wonder where your excitement's gone? A thing like Linux... that isn't a competitive free-market innovation, that thing is like a slave revolt.
Former Swingin' Sixties it-girl and veteran actress Julie Christie (still venerated by '60s fetishists, and the subject of a song by Spearmint) has revealed that she suffers from autobiographical amnesia, a rare condition which strips away short- and long-term memory. Which may mean that her subjective experience of her glory days is now less than that of her fans.
People love a bigot (an ongoing saga): France's far-right demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen has survived the first round of the Presidential election, beating the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, once considered a favourite. While it is very unlikely that Le Pen will become President, this result has sent shockwaves through France and triggered spontaneous protests.
Life imitates Douglas Adams: A NY Times piece arguing that global communication has sown conflict and enmity, rather than the new era of understanding it was supposed to usher in.
But at this halfway point between mutual ignorance and true understanding, the ''global village'' actually resembles a real one -- in my experience, not the utopian community promised by the boosters of globalization but a parochial place of manifold suspicions, rumors, resentments and half-truths.
(via Slashdot)
Tonight I went to see The Dancing Bear at the Comedy Festival. It was quite amusing; mostly consisting of Dan Lee recounting anecdotes of youthful misadventures (such as the time he threw a McDonalds drink out the car window at a traffic cop and had to pretend to be mentally ill to get away with it) and numerous other digressions, mostly accompanied by facial expressions and such. Though unlike some monologues I've heard (one other Melbourne spoken-word artist at last year's Fringe comes to mind), Dan Lee was actually quite engaging. Anyway, it's on for the final time tomorrow night (Monday) at 8.30pm, at Bar Open.
Metablogging: Lev seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. His blog hasn't been updated for some 3 weeks. I passed by his shop yesterday, and found it closed, with letters (addressed to his various aliases and pseudonyms) piling up under the door. I wonder what happened to him. Has he become the casualty of a vicious eBay-related turf war? Has the law finally caught up with him? Or is he simply lying low, hiding from an angry husband or father?
2002/4/21
Research testing the maximum rotational speed a CD can withstand. At 52x, some CDs fell apart. Hmmm; this suggests the first workable copy-prevention method for unrippable audio CDs; simply make them physically too fragile to withstand the speeds of modern computer CD-ROMs, whilst playing perfectly at 1X on a CD player. Wonder whether the Recording Racket will try something like this.
2002/4/20
Life riffs off David Lynch movies: Robert Blake, who played the sinister eyebrowless cameraman in David Lynch's Lost Highway, has been arrested for murdering his wife in real life. (via Lukelog)
Tonight I went to see
Down Town Brown's show, The Future of Rock'n'Roll in the comedy festival. It was quite entertaining, as DtB shows usually are. It didn't differ much from a regular DtB show, save for some interludes, some extra costume changes, and the emergence of the anti-DtB, three highly dodgy geezers with suspenders and bad haircuts/teeth who wowed the audience with a harmonica/guitar/washboard performance and some enthusiastically daggy tap dancing. Anyway, Down Town Brown said that they're extending their season for an extra week (i.e., next Thursday to Saturday), so if you missed them, you can catch them then.
(And it's about time someone brought back the washboard as a deliberately daggy musical instrument, used more for its ironically self-deprecating semiotics than its expressive qualities. Perhaps that would make it a more rootsy/alt-country answer to the Casio keyboard...)
2002/4/19
You've heard of the research unanimously pointing to ecstasy causing long-term brain damage? Well, apparently much of that is propaganda, with experiments being compromised to give politically useful results, and contradictory research being frozen out of journals.
Killer applications for the web: A map of library cats residing in libraries and bookshops around the world. Well, so far, mostly in North America and Australia. Hmmm... wasn't there at one stage a cat in residence at PolyEster Books?
Scientists in Sydney have developed a device which increases creativity through magnetic stimulation of the brain. My reactions: (a) I want one, then (b) if it ever makes it to market, it'll probably be banned worldwide; the effects of millions of people becoming unpredictable creatives could be too economically destabilising to allow.
A drug that eliminates sleep, without the side-effects of stimulants such as caffeine, Marketed as Provigil, it is currently prescribed only to patients with certain medical disorders; but we all know that the street finds its own uses for things, right?
But would executives pressure their employees to take a pill for the team? Possibly, says Serwer, if they heard that workers at other firms were pulling Provigil-fueled all-nighters. "You would be at a competitive disadvantage if you didn't," he says.
Read: An author finds that unencrypted E-books increase book sales, pouring cold water on the article of faith that unrestricted copying equals lost sales. (via bOING bOING)
There's something disturbing about a world where companies sell padded bras for 9-year-olds. (via Reenhead)
Comedy Festival: Tonight I went to see Cyderdelic. They're a UK comedy outfit whose act is being a mad anarchist outfit/sound system, probably inspired by Chumbawamba, the KLF and the anti-capitalist movement. They played some ravey musical numbers (which were mostly prerecorded; or at least, the Roland S-50 on stage wasn't plugged in), slapped each other around, ranted hyperbolically (at one stage arguing heatedly over whether an animal-research lab experimented on badgers or budgies) and showed videos of their antics at various demonstrations. The show finished with them leading the audience out into Swanston St., megaphone in hand, and proceeding to blockade taxis whilst chanting "we all live in a fascist regime". Classic.
2002/4/18
In the US, some corporations are taking out life-insurance policies on low-level employees, that pay the employer in the event of death. Though rest assured that no link has been found between the policies, known in the business as "dead peasant" policies, and increased employee mortality, poorer working conditions or other increases in the probability of a payoff. (via Plastic)
Romantic Love Considered Harmful: New research shows that teenagers who are preoccupied with romantic thoughts in their adolescence are more likely to suffer depression later in life. (via FmH)
Heeding the golden rule that one has to dehumanise an enemy to marshal public opinion against them, Australia's defence minister's office banned the taking of photographs which could "humanise or personalise" asylum seekers, lest they start to seem inconveniently unlike a formless terrorist menace and/or reason to vote Liberal.
Everyone's a critic: Judge sentences photographer to 2 1/2 years jail for taking photographs of corpses in a morgue.
One of the images showed the hands of a 2-year-old boy wrapped with plastic. In another, a man's body was posed with an apple, while another showed a woman with a key between her lips.
The judge called Mr. Condon's project ''idiotic'' and questioned the photographer's remorse.
IMHO, taking the photographs without permission (of the relatives; the subjects, after all, being beyond caring about such matters) could be considered somewhat callous; however, sending someone to prison for it is just stupid, and reeks of authoritarianism and an all-American puritanism.
2002/4/17
That Richard Neville article torn to shreds, by someone who's not a flag-waving commie-hating all-American patriot either. (via Graham)
CD sales are down. The Recording Racket, of course, blame MP3 piracy and file sharing, and are quick to argue for even more draconian copy-prevention laws. Though that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Charlie Stross' blog is very insightful and well worth reading, with philosophy, science, culture and miscellaneous geekery aplenty. (via Peter)
I just picked up a Handspring Visor Deluxe handheld to replace my dead Pilot 5000. It was a choice between this one and the slimline Visor Edge, both heavily discounted, but I went with the Deluxe, because (a) the only advantage of the Edge is that it's slimmer and sexier-looking (not something I look for in a handheld computer), (b) this one was cheaper, and (c) I don't like the idea of a PDA with volatile memory running on an internal rechargeable battery (as those degrade over time).
Now to get it working with Linux...
NME names The Smiths as the most influential artist of the past 50 years, edging out the Beatles. In the Plastic thread, there is some outrage from people who don't understand why a pack of whining nobodies could be more influential than the Beatles, and countercriticism questioning whether songs like "She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" are that much more significant than the likes of "Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loves Me" or "The Queen Is Dead".
Meanwhile, the Stone Roses are at #3; which seems a bit odd. (I don't mind the Stone Roses, but are they really the third most influential band of our time?)
According to a Department of Health and Human Services report released Monday, McDonald's meat from antibiotics-injected livestock is now the primary source of antibiotics for U.S. children, particularly for uninsured youths from low-income households.
"Every day, food scientists are discovering new antibiotics, growth hormones, and other chemically engineered substances to inject into the nation's beef supply," Lugar said. "And with Americans working longer and longer hours just to make ends meet, people can't afford to waste time sitting around some waiting room until their name is called. Unlike a doctor, our fast-food providers can deliver a full spectrum of antibiotics in minuteshot, fresh, and with a smile."
High-tech musical toys from the MIT Media Lab allow children to compose music without learning musical theory. The Toy Symphony site is here. How long, I wonder, until a future generation of ravers/indie kids pick up on these and start using them on records?
Happy citizens of McWorld: no need to fear terrorism, when you can learn to kill terrorists with Coca-Cola cans; and more neat tricks, as anti-terrorism instructors will gladly show you (for a fee and proof of US citizenship).
(I sense a new marketing campaign in this: Coke for Freedom. Perhaps with ads in which sassy US-flag-wearing skater kids defeat vaguely terroristic meanies with Coke cans.)
But how can you identify a terrorist?
"They'd have black hair," one student offers. "Brown skin."
"They probably wear those kinds of shirts you button up at the neck," another says.
"Usually they got brown eyes. They might act nervous. Or maybe they'd show no emotion at all. You know, they sometimes have those dead eyes."
Though Middle Easterners, chronically nervous brown-eyed people and others are perhaps understandably concerned at the prospect of red-blooded patriots preemptively dealing out two-fisted "justice".
"I was on a fight where the pilot came on the radio, telling the passengers we have plenty of weapons at our disposal -- blankets, shoes, pencils," recalls Carol North, the psychiatrist. "It's a little unsettling when you are about to take off." She worries about what could happen if people misread something like mental illness as suspicious behaviour, and there is certainly a new risk for anyone who looks or sounds like they are from the Middle East.
2002/4/16
Just heard Bis's cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart; it's pretty amusing, in a 80s-retro-kitsch sort of way. They use a speech synthesiser to do part of the vocals.
Recently East Timor, which attained independence after years of bloody repression, held presidential elections. A thought that occurred to me: would East Timor have had any chance of getting its independence today, had it not done so before the World Trade Center terrorist attack? Probably not; given how governments across the world have capitalised on the War On Terror to label domestic pro-autonomy movements (from Chechens to Uighurs) as "terrorists" ineligible for sympathy or human rights, I can imagine Indonesia being given carte blanche to pacify its recalcitrant province by all means necessary, with no interference from the Western media, in return for joining the coalition against al-Qaeda.
Addictive website of the day: The Covers Project, an online database of cover versions of songs, which shows the longest chains of cover versions so far, and accepts contributions. Also, it's accessible via XML-RPC; so if you were ever wondering what you can do with all this web-services stuff your local Sun/Microsoft salesdrone keeps rabbiting on about, this may be the answer. (via bOING bOING)
Tonight, I went to the Old Bar in Fitzroy to see Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen. They rocked. They played two sets, going for about two and a half hours in total, performing various songs on accordion, contrabass, violin, clarinet and a few other instruments. Most of their songs had an eastern-European feel, though some were rather Spanish, and there was even a spirited Irish jig in the set. Their performance was intense; the melodramatic lyrics (from a world where people are routinely beset by entire Hells of devils, it would appear) executed with fearsome intensity; it wasn't all brooding madness though; there was a good dose of humour (the performers' stage personas and affected accents; the instrumental solos, which whilst technically impeccable were perhaps a little too flamboyant in places to be entirely straight, and the song where the musicians, who had wandered into the audience, joined in with animal sound effects in appropriate places). Towards the end, they did a few earnest songs; just acoustic guitar and heartfelt lyrics, with no theatrics; there were tears in the audience. And then they launched into an encore of their signature number which was about either sex or cannibalism, depending on how you interpret it.
Anyway, they're playing tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Old Bar again; I recommend seeing them.
2002/4/15
The Texas of the Southern Hemisphere: Australia joins the US in opposing the International Criminal Court, a permanent body empowered to punish war crimes and other gross human rights abuses. Is the Australian government opposing this out of loyalty to the Bush administration (in whose policy, actions taken against enemies of "global stability" cannot be counted as war crimes), or for its own uses?
2002/4/14
Read: Richard Neville on the ugly truth behind the war; not quite the first Good War since WW2, as consensus holds, but the usual filling of mass graves in the name of the almighty dollar.
These negotiations collapsed in August 2001, when the Taliban asked the US to help reconstruct Afghanistan's infrastructure and provide a portion of the oil supply for local needs. The US response was reportedly succinct: "We will either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs." The notes of this meeting, which took place only weeks before the strike on America, are now the subject of a lawsuit between Congress and the White House. Was the Taliban really destroyed for harbouring terrorists? Or was it for failing to further the ambitions of Texan millionaires?
Blum makes the point that Americans are taught it's wrong to murder, rob, rape and bribe, but that it's okay to topple foreign governments, quash socialist movements or drop powerful bombs on foreigners, so long as it serves the national interest. From plenty of examples which prove, despite the current rhetoric from the White House, that the West is not always on the side of the angels, these three capture the essence of much US foreign policy:
An early image of liberation was of Kabul's haggard residents watching TV, a seamless advertisement for freedom. Except, whose TV? The last US bomb on Kabul hit the studios of al-Jazeera, the independent voice of the Middle East. Funny, that. The Afghans may now need to settle for CNN and Fox, a victory, perhaps, for civilisation and US exports, as well as for the pipe dreams of Unocal. The Pentagon claims this "smart bomb" lost its bearings, as another one did over Belgrade in 1999, when it flattened Serbian TV, killing and maiming the staff.
Photos appeared on the Web showing bodies of those shot displaying white plastic wrist restrainers bearing the words "Made in USA". As pointed out by the US magazine The Nation, Article 23 of the Hague Convention forbids a warring party "to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered". General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, defended this apparent war crime: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type."
The beauty of the web (other than the infinite variety of cat pictures, that is) is that it allows people all over the world to post sarky comments about crazy people that disturb their lives. And to whit: this page, by an American suburbanite about the crazy redneck who moved in next door and proceeded to build variously shonky "home improvements" (and accidentally set some of them on fire), replete with stealthily taken photos. (via the CoFD)
Somebody came to this site searching for "black frame emo glasses". No, this is dev.null.org; you probably want BlackFrameEmoGlasses.com, the #1 blog about indie genre hairsplitting, musical obscurantism and where to find those doovy 1950s gas-station-attendant shirts. Second door on your right.
Missouri vs. the Mascaraed Menace: A wide-eyedly earnest response to Missouri's goth-eradication campaign, in what appears to be the Goth equivalent of one of those britneyblogs which goes on about how N'Sync are really talented artists and people who say they aren't are just mean. Meanwhile, some advice on what to spend the goth-eradication fund on. They range from MKULTRA-style provocation to start clique wars to paying Britney Spears to do a Bauhaus cover. (via deadlybloodyserious.com.)
2002/4/13
Also via Lukelog, The Curse Engine -- generate authentic-looking Irish curses (in Gaelic, natch) from a list of parts.
A look at the parallel universe of Christian apocalyptic fiction, comparing and contrasting it with science fiction and techno-thrillers. (via bOING bOING)
Web comic of the day: Cat And Girl, which is what it sounds like. Cuter than Pokey the Penguin, and no less philosophical. (via Lukelog)
2002/4/12
I wandered down to Synæsthesia this afternoon, and picked up Can't Stop It!, the compilation of Australian post-punk from between 1978 and 1982. Some of the tracks on this CD are surprisingly recent sounding; Essendon Airport's How Low Can You Go sounds like something off a recent Sadness Is In The Sky compilation, Ash Wednesday's Love By Numbers, with its sequencer riffs, sounds like it could have been put together a few years ago (though this may be because of the 80s retro thing), and the track by Equal Local (who featured TB-303 circuitbender and marital sadomasochism advocate Robyn "Devilfish" Whittle among their lineup) sounds almost like one of those contemporary free-jazz/laptop-glitch act. Though the CD also does have its moments of sloppy, inchoate punk-rawk noise (The Slugfuckers' contribution comes to mind).
I also picked up the new album by Letraset, the more experimental side project of Minimum Chips. On first listen, it has some very nice ambient moments, including a track a little reminiscent of Radiohead's Treefingers. Though I haven't had a proper listen to it yet.
Eclectic local (Melbourne) band Dandelion Wine are looking for a bass player. ("Must be committed to recording and touring; no hobbyists or stoners. Must be interested in touring overseas.") If you fit the description, let them know.
Separated at birth? Does anybody else think that the Chemical Brothers' "The Test" sounds like Boom Crash Opera's 1989 release "Get Out Of The House"?
3RRR just played the new New Order single, Here To Stay; it's quite good. It has captured that classic cold feeling of New Order circa Power, Corruption and Lies, and (at first listen) the lyrics aren't annoying. Apparently it's on the 24 Hour Party People soundtrack.
Only in New York would you expect something like this to arise: A dating service run by therapists, matching up people with compatible issues and neuroses. But the question is, is it any more crazy than the conventional dating system? (via Plastic)
New research shows why people look chunkier on TV. The 2D image apparently emphasises waist-to-hip ratios and neck thickness, which makes women look fat; TV, however, is more flattering to men, who come out looking more rugged (which is why male TV stars often look relatively puny in real life).
2002/4/11
Emperor/clothes: You've probably heard the hagiographic claims about how the Star Wars films are drawn from that deep well of primal archetypes and myths going back to Homer/the Upanishads/Joseph Campbell. Well, that's rubbish. They're mostly a knockoff of pulp sci-fi ideas, though surprisingly many people don't see that, blinded by the hype or the desire to see Star Wars as one of the Great Stories.
Campbell's approach can give any adventure story, from "Bulldog Drummond" to "The Perils of Pauline," a place in the pantheon. In fact, his acolytes are hard at work doing just that with such movies as "The Matrix" and "The Wizard of Oz." It adds up to little more than a party game for drunken grad students, or a smoke screen for filmmakers covering their tracks.
In the US the Bible-belt state of Missouri has allocated US$273,000 to stamp out "Goth culture" among its youth. Which is a laudable goal, though probably not for the reasons they had in mind. (via rotten.com)
2002/4/10
Chuck Palahniuk (who, incidentally, has a web site here) on memory and record-keeping. Is record-keeping an addictive drug that supplants and weakens memory and takes the place of knowledge, or is memory itself a drug? (via Plastic)
Patriotism is the first refuge of spammers, it seems. A lot of recent spam seems to be putting in "patriotic" imagery, as if to make those receiving it feel like no-good terrorist-sympathising ratfinks if they deign to complain. One series of porn spams that landed in my SpamCop account points to a (apparently distastefully pornographic) website on a site named usadefender.com (which is located in the spam hub that is Argentina). And then there are all the spammers with words like Eagle in their assumed names or email addresses.
"It's just a twisted mass of black-frame glasses and ironic Girl Scouts T-shirts in there.": 37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster in Athens, Ga. Rescue workers are still sifting for the wreckage for copies of Magnet, heated debates over the definition of emo and other signs of life.
In the U.S. the FCC plans to ban unserialised streaming audio players, as they don't allow listeners to be tracked enough to satisfy the copyright racket. This means that using open-source streaming audio players (such as xmms), or systems such as Ogg Vorbis, would be illegal in the Land of the Free. (via bOING bOING)
2002/4/9
I've been playing around with Zope, and it's very doovy. As such, I get the feeling that this entire blog will end up rewritten in Zope.
Anyway, as of now, Upcoming Events in Melbourne has been rewritten, and is now running via Zope. See if you can tell the difference.
Life on the Net in 2004. Make sure you pay your way.
Fond memories of the days when there were alternatives to Microsoft's OS pass through your mind -- but that was before the government realised that software was like petrol -- a totally essential commodity in the lives of most businesses and individuals. Legislation was passed in 2003 that required all software developers and vendors to be licensed and a 45% tax added to all sales. Of course, much to Microsoft's glee, this killed the Open Source movement since being an unlicensed software supplier risks a stiff fine or even a jail term and those licenses are incredibly expensive.
Another warning appears -- "Your license for this recording has expired, unable to play." Damn -- another $49 if you want to listen to that music for another year. You wonder, if as they claim, these new measures significantly reduce piracy, why music is now so much more expensive?
(via Slashdot)
I finally got around to seeing Mulholland Drive tonight. It was very Lynchian; a bit like Lost Highway, only with more of an illusion of coherence (i.e., at the end, it looks like the plot fit together, until you think about it and realise that it didn't). There are, as you can imagine, many slow, dimly lit tracking shots, eccentric characters, quirky props and surreal, dreamlike sequences, not to mention eerie music and sound in the background (courtesy of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti). I may have to see it again sometime.
2002/4/8
Woke up this morning to hear 3RRR playing a rather odd song; a vaguely klezmerish eastern-European-sounding number about cannibalism. Apparently it's by an outfit called the Black Sea Gentlemen who are playing next week in Johnston St. May have to check them out.
2002/4/7
The Democrats' image-conscious leader Buffy Stott Despoja to marry PR man. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.
That's more like it: Melbourne's public transport system to be unified, with a common name and signage moving to reverse the fragmentation imposed when it was cut up and privatised. Which should go some way to dispel the "beggars can't be choosers" image of public transport as a shabby, inadequate welfare scheme for the carless poor. Now if they actually put some money into it and built some much-needed rail lines in the car-dependent outer suburbs...
The emergence of the gay gangsta rap subculture, a gay subsubculture of one of the most homophobic subcultures. I wonder how much of it is continuous with mainstream gangsta hip-hop and how much is an appropriation of the semiotics of such, sort of like the gay urban cowboy thing or bogan-themed club nights in Prahran. And are there any openly gay rappers yet (and not in house music or such either)? (via rotten.com)
Hmmm... perhaps I should have called my Curve remix the Binary Presets mix... oh well, too late now...
Subterfugue, a system for intercepting and altering system calls from untrusted Linux binaries, scriptable in Python. Get it before it's banned under the SSSCA. (via NtK)
David Brin on the five memes that shaped the planet on a deeper level: feudalism, machismo, paranoia, "the East" and neophilia (which Brin terms the Dogma of Otherness). (via the Horn)
This is nifty: Historical Atlas of the 20th Century, with lots of informative diagrams. And the most overrated and underrated events of the 20th century. (via the Horn)
2002/4/6
Microsoft are at it again; this time they're using patents to prohibit GPLed implementations of the CIFS protocol (as used in Windows file sharing, and implemented by the GPLed SAMBA package). The only way to license the patents in question is to assent to a licensing agreement specifically prohibiting evil Communistic parasite second-hander licences such as the GPL. Looks like the war has begun...
2002/4/5
More on high-school slang post-9/11, from a rather sarcastic website in Russia; also from them, 911 things to hate about America, from foreign policy to "Hot, blonde Mormon girls refuse to put out". I suspect this guy has a bee in his bonnet.. (via The Fix) "
Women are the new blokes, it seems. A recent survey in the UK has revealed that today's young professional women enjoy pornography, visiting lap-dancing clubs. The question remains whether this is a result of a relaxation of traditional gender roles, subconscious pressure on women to behave more like the boys to fit in in a unisex society, or a combination of both?
This evening I went to see Theatre In Decay's production of Screaming in America, an original play about subversive comedian Bill Hicks and his posthumous fame. It was good, with good use of video segments (including a quite clever representation of Internet chatrooms), and fairly interesting (presenting scenes from Hicks' life and the effect he had on his fans, and raising questions about the man vs. the message); and you get the feeling that Rob Reid enjoyed stepping into the role and ranting. This play had the hallmarks of this being a Theatre In Decay play (sets assembled of junk, TVs tuned to static and angry, dysfunctional relationships were all in evidence, as was a disjointed, vaguely anarchic style that characterises their productions). Anyway, it's playing throughout the comedy festival, and is worth a look.
Scare meme of the day: Laughter can trigger asthma attacks; what doctors are calling "mirth-triggered asthma" is more common than attacks triggered by exercise or smog. So if you suffer from asthma, you may do well to avoid amusing situations.
Terrorism in the news: This April 1st, two radio DJs in Kansas read out a warning to the public about their water being contaminated with a dangerous substance called "dihydrogen monoxide". Now state water officials are saying that the hoax was equivalent to a terrorist attack. I guess that such jokes are now soooo September 10. (via Found)
2002/4/4
Only in America: A technical glitch briefly replaced cable TV channels in Detroit with an Arabic-language soap opera from a channel catering to Detroit's Arab-American community. Consequently, thousands of subscribers panicked, thinking that terrorists had hacked into the system.
"It's a sad sign of the times that Arab-language programming should create such fear," Black says.
(After all, only a supervillain like Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein would stoop to such a dastardly act as targeting decent Americans' cable TV.) (via rotten.com)
It looks like my Pilot (an ancient US Robotics Pilot 5000, not one of those new-fangled PalmPilots) is cactus. The touch screen finally gave out, and now varies between locking the machine up and not working at all. I've managed to get the data off it, and now am looking at what to replace it with. (I'm thinking of going with a Psion.)
An engineer in the UK has developed a silence machine which selectively eliminates predictable noises. The machine is basically a noise-cancelling device, equipped with a signal-processing computer programmed to find and cancel only those noises targeted, letting other sounds through.
A propagandistic News Corp. article about the evils of coin-operated CD duplicators, how they threaten to kill musical artists, and how outrageous it is that they're perfectly legal, as a result of our inadequately lax copyright laws. (Keep in mind that News Corp., along with Disney, is one of the major advocates of legally mandating copy-protection in all electronic devices in the US.)
NEW machines installed in Adelaide convenience stores make the illegal copying of the latest CDs and computer software - which costs artists and software designers millions of dollars - as easy as buying a loaf of bread.
It also makes legal copying of CDs you already own, for backups or use in the car, for example, or of your band's demos, or whatever, easy. But we all know that consumers have no legitimate reason to copy CDs.
The machines are able to operate under the same legislation as public photocopiers, where the burden of responsibility for copyright breaches lies with the user and not the owner of the equipment.
How much do you want to bet that there'll be legislation in parliament to remedy this promptly?
2002/4/3
The Onion in fine form: Countries Who Met Over Internet Go To War. And then there's Sullen Time-Travelling Teen Reports 23rd Century Sucks:
"They still had pizza, which was cool," Geremek said. "But kids were into splicing their DNA with beetles, so they get, like, these temporary mandibles shooting out of their foreheads. It sounds like it would be pretty cool, but it actually looked kinda gay."
Could it be.. the end of popular music as we know it? Please, say it ain't so... (ta, Cos)
If you're happy and you know it... set up caller ID for your phone to announce you as "Osama Bin Laden". (via Unknown News)
Sexy Shauny poses for a good cause, with only a bicycle, a strategically positioned sheet and a winsome smile. Isn't she a stunner?
2002/4/2
The New Chapel St.: News from the Yarra Leader on what will replace the Punters Club: it will be a pizza bar named Bimbo Deluxe, with alcohol and "funky DJs" playing fashionable sounds for today's hip urban youth. One thing's for sure: it's not our place anymore; it now belongs to the trendies, wideboys and label-wearing wankers in $80 T-shirts.
Another reason not to trust "free" proprietary software: file sharing program KaZaA contains a secret P2P application which will resell your CPU cycles and bandwidth to KaZaA's corporate clients; essentially, this will use your Windows PC as part of a distributed ad serving network. They say that they'll let users opt out of this, but that's not what the licensing agreement says (unless "opting out" involves getting rid of KaZaA altogether).
Life imitates BonsaiKitten.com: Cats with short legs hit the market. The new breed, named "Munchkins", have legs 1/3 of the normal length, and are incapable of jumping or climbing furniture; they have been bred for owners who keep cats indoors. (via rotten.com)
"No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity." AOL buys up 200 blogs, from well-known ones to ones like ScratchMyselfRedAndYellow.org, in a deal brokered by Dave Winer. No news on how many AOLTW board positions will go to A-List bloggers.
"You can't really put figures on this," one executive told The Register , "but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos," he said.
In related news, we have been unable to confirm the rumoured merger of Virulent Memes with the Albury Mail, however, we can tell you that The Null Device is not being acquired by News Corporation to become James Murdoch's new personal blog.
Qt for your VT-100! Or rather, a compatibility library that lets you recompile some Qt applications to run in a text console. Well, I don't think this is an April Fools' joke.
2002/4/1
An article inquiring about the absence of protest music, so prevalent during past conflicts such as Vietnam and the Gulf War, but all but nonexistent during Bush Jr.'s global adventure. There are protest songs on MP3 websites, but none appearing on new albums next to the "tribute to heroes" compilations; meanwhile, anti-war songs like John Lennon's Imagine have been pulled from centrally-controlled airwaves, and former dissenters from Neil Young to the Wu Tang Clan have recorded patriotic war anthems. Is it because the US recording and broadcast industries are now controlled by a handful of corporations who see no room for unpatriotic (or unmarketable) material, that nobody wants to be the commie ratfink who's first to stop singing God Bless America and cheering on the daisycutters, or just that music these days (including the independent labels) is purely about consumerism and lifestyle, and dissent doesn't shift enough units?
consider the question that Bay Area anti-prison activist and Freedom Fighter Music co-producer Ying-Sun Ho asks in reference to rap: "You don't think a song that talks about nothing but how much your jewelry shines has a political content to it?"
(via Unknown News)
This afternoon, I went along to the blogmeet Graham had called together, meeting up with Graham, Cos, Lev, Dave, and a SubGenius named Alex in Edinburgh Gardens. After a while, we repaired to the nearby Lord Newry Hotel (which seems like a fairly typical pub, though with some decent music on the jukebox), where a lot of Guinness was consumed and considerable conversation was had (not to mention a few games of pool, testing the hypothesis that intoxication improves one's game). All in all, an enjoyable afternoon.
Afterwards, I went to the Corner (along with Graham), to catch the Eaze Bootleg CD launch, though we got there late, and all but two bands had finished.