The Null Device
2003/8/11
Cosmic Breed Mod Gear, a Hobart-based outfit who make some pretty nifty clothes. I just got two items made up by them and am quite satisfied with them. (Thanks to Laverne for the link)
After an Intel engineer pleaded guilty to terrorism charges for (donating to the wrong charity/taking up arms alongside the Taliban), Ian Clarke, inventor of the anonymous peer-to-peer filesharing program Freenet, has announced his intention to leave the US:
As an Irish citizen living in the US - I have decided that it is time to leave this country - it is starting to look, smell, and act as Germany did during the 1930s. I wish you Americans luck in regaining civilized justice in your broken country, if not, I hope that the EU will be accepting of political refugees from this brave but failed experiment.
Paranoia, common sense, or somewhere in between? Meanwhile, the Slashdot replies are divided between the usual poorly-spelled "good riddance traitor scum/the Irish are all drunken cowards who supported Hitler" flamage and "USA sucks/Bush is a moron" counter-flames.
Funny how for the FOXNews-following Patriot Pack, it's pretty much an article of faith that Hamidi took up arms alongside the Taliban against the U.S., whereas the goddamnliberals asert that he was railroaded for (a) being Middle-Eastern and (b) doing insufficient research before donating to a charity.
They do things differently in Hong Kong: a fashion shop has decided to stir up some controversy with a line of Nazi-themed merchandise. Izzue, which may be their equivalent of Dangerfield or Hot Topic or Violence Jack Off or something like that, also decorated their stores with Nazi banners and symbols:
Red banners with white swastikas on top of iron crosses hung Saturday from the ceilings of some of the firm's 14 stores. The banners also carried a sign that resembled the symbol of the Third Reich: an eagle above a swastika. One branch broadcast Nazi propaganda films on a wall with a projector.
This isn't the first time Nazi symbolism has been used to get attention in Asia; some years ago, a Taipei restaurant covered their walls with images of Holocaust victims and a bar named the Third Reich, replete with Nazi propaganda posters and uniformed waitresses, opened in Seoul. Perhaps over there, the whole Nazi thing is seen by some as just kitschy retro exotica?
The latest instalment of Patrick Farley's mega-doovy webcomic Spiders is up. It's set in the parallel universe where a forward-looking, technologically savvy Gore administration (!) wages war against terrorists with open-source distributed robots and Ecstasy bombs -- only it gets weirder than that. The visuals are amazing, making full use of the web, and referencing everything from Illuminatus! to Fight Club to rave culture (though mostly in the visual style). And it doesn't use one jot of Flash -- it's all inline images. Don't miss it.
Along the lines of stars without make-up: Models without Photoshop (2). With roll-overs showing the Before image. It's interesting to see how fallibly human the original, unretouched images of the Modern Ideals of Feminine Beauty look without that old Photoshop magic. Though some people on MeFi think that the "originals" were retouched in the opposite direction to look exaggeratedly freakish.