Not Even Sure Why

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:36:23 +0100

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices, 1996. (via esperensnare)

Always reblog Eno (via thedanmorris)

Eno lets you in on a little truth. 8-bit, overcompressed, glitch art, what have you. Exploiting the limits of technology and making stuff to what it’s not really meant to do. That where art breaks things (and gets so popular that it goes on so many t-shirts that you get sick to death of it.)

The three types of specialist

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:12:18 +0100

jkottke:

From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.

Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.

(via @moleitau)

rhamphotheca: Blood Falls, a Natural Time Capsule Containing a...

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:48:12 +0100

rhamphotheca:

Blood Falls, a Natural Time Capsule Containing a Unique Ecosystem

This five-story, blood-red “waterfall” pours ever so slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley. Geologists first discovered the frozen waterfall in 1911, and believed the red color came from algae. Its true nature turned out to be more spectacular.

Roughly two million years ago, a small body of water containing an ancient community of microbes was sealed beneath the surface of the Taylor Glacier. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, the microbes have remained isolated inside a natural time capsule, in a place with no light, oxygen, or heat.

The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the seepage its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the microbial subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

More photos of Blood Falls can be seen on Atlas Obscura

futurist-foresight: This algae-powered building in Hamburg is...

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:24:25 +0100

futurist-foresight:

This algae-powered building in Hamburg is truely green!

futurescope:

The World’s First Algae-Powered Building Opens in Hamburg

via inhabitat:

The world’s first algae-powered building just opened in Hamburg! Dubbed the BIQ House, the project features a bio-adaptive algae facade and it will serve as a testing bed for sustainable energy production in urban areas and self-sufficient living buildings. International design firm Arup worked with Germany’s SSC Strategic Science Consultants and Austria-based Splitterwerk Architects to develop the BIQ House, which launched as part of Hamburg’s International Building Exhibition.

[read more] [IBA Hamburg] [BIQ House]

Design for the New Normal (Revisited) | superflux

Thu, 16 May 2013 04:48:31 +0100

Design for the New Normal (Revisited) | superflux:

thisisliams:

This is an absolutely fascinating look at a possible future.

"The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:24:29 +0100

“The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.”

- The mosaic of our shared ancestry can be drawn forwards and backwards. Not only can we look to the past and cherish our shared ancestors, but we, too, will become the shared ancestor of everyone a thousand years beyond us.

You know … if we have kids.

(via The Atlantic)

(via jtotheizzoe)

A video game about mass surveillance in the age of Big Brother and Little Brothers | Polygon

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:36:31 +0100

jmatheny:

We live in a hyperconnected, technologically turbo-charged world of mass surveillance and “digital shadows” that is so subtly controlling, that it makes the notion of Big Brother seem quaint.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/13/4326718/a-video-game-about-mas…

View Post

"As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:12:24 +0100

“As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does before an approaching mountain storm. The scariest [fear] of all is not being silenced or sent to prison; it is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty about what comes next… It’s as if you are walking into a minefield blindfolded.”

- Hao Qun, as quoted in The Guardian. China Tries to Rein in Microbloggers.

The News, via The Guardian:

China has launched a new drive to tame its boisterous microblogging culture by closing influential accounts belonging to writers and intellectuals who have used them to highlight social injustice.

The strict censorship of mainstream media in China has made social media an essential forum for public debate, but authorities have shown increasing determination to control it. Previous campaigns have warned the public against spreading rumours – a theme that has recurred in this crackdown – and ordered users to register with their real names.

Now attention has turned to the country’s opinion formers. A recent commentary in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned that “Big Vs” – meaning verified accounts with millions of followers – had become “relay stations for online rumours” and accused them of “harming the dignity of the law”.

Somewhat Related: The South China Morning Post reports that the central government has ordered universities to stop teaching seven subjects, among them civil rights, press freedom and the communist party’s past mistakes.

(via futurejournalismproject)

Special Guest Edition: The Hawkeye Initiative IRL!

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:48:06 +0100

thehawkeyeinitiative:

I recently received an email from an anonymous fan sharing how she pulled a Hawkeye Initiative themed prank on her CEO to illustrate a problem with some artwork.
My personal compliments to her and her accomplice on a mission well done; they perfectly took the concept of The Hawkeye Initiative one step farther, and effected actual change. I hope this gives you as much of a laugh as it did me (the artwork is currently my desktop), and inspires you to be unafraid to stand up and take action in your own awesome way.

Now, excuse me while I go play my new favorite mech game. :)
-Skjaldmeyja

AnonymousFan8675309:

I work with an all-female team of data scientists, in the gaming industry. This makes me the professional equivalent of Amelia Earhart riding the Loch Ness Monster.

I love my job. Our company in particular is great. Firstly, our game (HAWKEN) is beautiful and people love it. Secondly, half of our executive branch is female. Half of them are punk rock, and all of them are badassed. Our gender awareness standards, compared to the industry at large, are top shelf. We are talking Amelia Earhart in Atlantis, at a five star resort, getting a mani-pedi from Jensen Ackles. I have it good.

For the last six months of my tenure at Meteor Entertainment, there has been only one thing I did not love about my job. This
picture:

Our CEO loves this picture. It is to all appearances his favorite piece of comic art for the game. He had it blown up poster-sized, framed, and displayed on the out-facing wall of his office. There, it looms over the front room like a ship’s figurehead. It is the first thing workers and visitors see when they enter the building and the last thing they see when they leave. This little lady’s undermeats have been the open- and close- parens to my work world for the last six months.

I loathe this picture.

Why do I loathe it? How, you ask, can I stay mad at a sweet young belle who has so obviously taken a break from her important welding to offer me a piping hot cup of coffee and/or a vigorous hand job? (And probably, given her apparent safety consciousness, simultaneously?) If you don’t already know the answer, you might want to check out things like #1ReasonWhy, and the Bechdel Test, and also this, and this, and this and this, and all these other things. (And while we’re talking you should check out this other bullshit right here.)

So at our office holiday party, while our CEO was having everyone in the company sign it, I stand there grinding my teeth into tiny shards. Until, suddenly, it came to me: a vision.

And so it came to be that I approached Sam Kirk, a wickedly funny co-worker who shared my sentiment. Sam, turns out, is a very talented artist who can be bribed-slash-inspired using a medley of feminist indignation, hysterical giggling, and two $90 bottles of añejo tequila.

A month-and-a-half later, our vision was a reality. I give you:
Bro-sie The Riveter.

I want to make it completely clear that everything in this prank that required actual talent was done by Sam. Find this, and more of Sam’s art, at TheRealSamKirk.com.

We blew (ahem) Brosie up poster sized. We framed him. And then, at 7:30 on Monday, April 1st, we snuck into our CEO’s office and switched them.

I stood in the entryway, dizzy with joy. It was glorious. There Brosie stood, proud, nipples testing the air like young gophers in springtime, the post-apocalyptic breeze gently swaying his banana hammock. Brosie said, loud and proud: “Get ready, world! I am here to lubricate your joints and tighten your socket.”

I basically spend the next few hours having a joy-induced neurological episode.

As the morning progressed, Brosie (ahem) revealed himself to our co-workers. The air resounded with startled, suppressed gargles of mingled joy and horror. Some take pictures. Some instantly turn and flee. Several men blush and grin in vindicated solidarity. Several women ask us for prints. At this point I am in total rapture. This is the moment I have been dreaming about for six months.

Yet somehow everyone in the office manages to keep quiet about it. Until, finally, our CEO arrives.

We hear a loud: “What the hell is this?!” And then all goes quiet. Ten minutes pass. We panic.

We are both suddenly and painfully aware that we have, in fact, just punked the CEO of our company. He is by all accounts an awesome dude. He is also a late-50s ex-army guy who happens to determine our employment futures in an at-will state. Meep.

Twenty more minutes pass. And then our CEO comes up to my desk, taps me on the shoulder, and says this:

“That was a brilliant prank. You called me on exactly the bullshit I need to be called on. I put up pictures of half-naked girls around the office all the time and I never think about it. I’m taking you and Sam to lunch. And after that, we’re going to hang both prints, side by side.”

Ruby Underboob and Brosie the Riveter, together at last

Yeah. That happened.

This wonderful experience has taught me two things that I hope to carry with me for the rest of my career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and in gaming. It taught me this:

Lots of men (like Sam) are already sympathetic to the stupid, constant crap women put up with in gaming/STEM, and they are ready and willing to call that crap onto the carpet.

And, most importantly, many of the guys who are behind that stupid, constant crap are totally decent, open-minded human beings who just don’t realize they’re doing it. You know how sometimes you don’t realize how much you and your girlfriend are talking about shoes or menstruation until some dude walks into the room? Well sometimes guys don’t realize how much they’re talking about titties.

We just haven’t been around enough for them to notice.

There is only one solution to that, ladies. Bust out your baby-Gap tee and your protective welding goggles, and let’s turn this damn industry into the environment we want it to be. It’s hard work, and yes, there are a couple genuine assholes along the way. But if Ruby Underboob can brave the occasional droplet of molten metal, so can we.

Speaking from experience, it’s worth it.

—K2

About our CEO, Mark Long:

Mark has a long and storied history with, among other things, research, games and comic art. He’s a partner in the RoqlaRue gallery in Seattle, representing “chick art.” Mark considers himself a feminist activist. He is proud to have created a graphic novel trilogy with Nick Sagan (Carl’s son) that features a female hero so strong, Hillary Swank is attached to star as her.

Mark and I are now in an open dialogue about gender in comics and gaming.

paratactician: doctorscienceknowsfandom: orbsteeb: if you need a good summation of 21st century...

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:12:31 +0100

paratactician:

doctorscienceknowsfandom:

orbsteeb:

if you need a good summation of 21st century gender relations I would direct your attention to the passage in the illiad where achilles falls in love with hippolyta at the exact moment he is murdering her and then has the temerity to throw a tantrum about it

Millennia before refridgerators were even invented.

Except it’s not in the Iliad, it wasn’t Hippolyta, and that’s not really what happens. Which is not to detract from the fundamental point, but.

A basic reconstruction from the bunch of dubious sources we have is that Penthesilea the Amazon came to Troy looking for an honourable death in battle; she fought Achilles, who killed her; he shed tears over her corpse because she was so beautiful; Thersites, the Greek army’s resident troll, made fun of him for it, so he killed Thersites too.

There’s a lot of really fascinating stuff you can do with this episode regarding both the objectification of women (Achilles only notices Penthesilea’s beauty once she’s dead, i.e. rendered permanently passive and ‘objectified’ in the most literal way possible; if you want to get very 1980s you can start talking about apertures in her body versus apertures in the text) and the sexualisation of death (it’s a striking example of the ‘beautiful corpse’ motif which in heroic poetry is more commonly applied to male warriors). But it’s such an interesting point I don’t want to see people walking away with their facts wrong. Also, Penthesilea was fantastic - she took out several Greek heroes, in one version she kills Achilles and Zeus has to bring him back to life, and her name means something like ‘she who brings grief on people’ - and I’d rather she not get reduced to a helpless victim and used as a token in a Tumblr game of Spot the Misogyny. She wasn’t murdered, or fridged; she was a warrior, and she died a warrior.

(Eustathius of Thessalonica insisted that after Achilles killed her he had sex with her corpse, but Eustathius of Thessalonica was honestly a bit of a weirdo.)

how to scholar

"Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:48:14 +0100

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

- Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history? (via courtenaybird)

"Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn’t..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 02:24:15 +0100

“

Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn’t evenly distributed is the fact that there are plenty of humans who don’t want this future at all. It’s all too much change, it may be literally too much change to process for human hardwiring. Many older humans are living future shock, right now. It was ever thus.

But the difference now is that those people are alive.

In 1900 the percentage of the American population over the age of 45 was 17.8%. In 1950 it was 28.4%. As of the last census the share of the US population over 45 is 36.4%. Hell, the 65+ share’s gone from 4.1% in 1900 to 13.3% in 2010. More and more people still in the society, with greater and greater influence, still constructing societal and legal norms based on emotional, psychological, cultural and technological frames of reference that are less and less relevant.

We’d all like to think we’d reinvent ourselves, re-assimilate, learn and grow along a constantly regenerative learning curve. But most of us wouldn’t. We’re just not cognitively wired for it. We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security.

…

Imagine it now. A functional lifespan of, say 200 years. Working with people who owned slaves. Trying to negotiate international trade treaties to deal with global warming by reconciling voters who watched their brother’s head get spun into a fine red mist by a Boston infantryman or a Georgian cavalryman. Getting funding for stem cell research from voters who grew up believing not only were black people a genetically inferior race, but other versions of white people were, too. 200 years is what Bruce Sterling posits in Holy Fire, a gerontocracy, and it’s a goddam mess.

”

- http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2013/04/arcanum-immortality-is-so-so-creepy.html (via grinderbot)

Serious current this week

(via wolvensnothere)

In the war of juves against elds, it’s best to be a defector.
Wasn’t this a storyline in a Toxic serial way back when?

"What do you mean, “what can I do?” You can participate. You can connect. You can get actively..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:36:10 +0100

“What do you mean, “what can I do?” You can participate. You can connect. You can get actively involved. You can turn off the tv. You can cancel the Disney vacation and buy bushels of tomatoes to can or turn into salsa. You can get some pots and grow a pot garden… of vegetables. You can put a beehive on the roof of your house. Just like today— whatever today looks like— is the manifestation of billions of individual decisions accumulated over time, tomorrow will be too. We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality. Somebody else will not fix things. Somebody else will not make me healthy. Somebody else will not make me happy. These things are my responsibility. Not the neighbor’s, not the government’s, not the church or the civic club.”

- Joel Salatin (via realistdreamer)

brianmichaelbendis: Morpheus by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:12:17 +0100

brianmichaelbendis:

Morpheus by Bill Sienkiewicz.

"There’s no urban smog, but the city reeks. This dense, greenhouse stink is composed of the rot from..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:48:18 +0100

“

There’s no urban smog, but the city reeks. This dense, greenhouse stink is composed of the rot from flood damage, the decay of dead lawn and parks, and bursting, sneezy clouds of weedy pollen from invasive species. At the seashores, the great, flood-stricken port cities of the past smell like dead fish and invasive brine. This fetid greenhouse fever doesn’t smell much worse than the urban smog that brought it into being. People are used to it.

…

Modern cities are elderly, too. Brick and stone are mortal, and entropy requires no maintenance. Every major urban industry leaves its silent retinue of dead smokestacks. The early 21st Century left a rich heritage of quaint, gentlemanly rubbish: the archaic cellphone towers, the poisonous and horrifying fossil-fuel plants, the squalid paper-shuffling headquarters of extinct government bureaus. Commonly, this is where the cities stuff the climate refugees.

”

- http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130507-bruce-sterling-2050-city-vision/1 (via grinderbot)

ALLEGORY

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:36:04 +0100

ALLEGORY

"If the first rule of a dysfunctional system is ‘Don’t talk about it,’ then our primary goal should..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:24:04 +0100

““If the first rule of a dysfunctional system is ‘Don’t talk about it,’ then our primary goal should be to tell the truth, to be as honest as we can manage to be. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh of relief and say, ‘Fantastic - I wasn’t mad or alone in thinking that, after all!’ So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.””

- David Edwards, Burning All Illusions (via dishabillic)

nevver: Almost

Mon, 13 May 2013 02:24:33 +0100

nevver:

Almost

"When a system is set up to accomplish some goal, a new entity has come into being — the system..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 02:24:27 +0100

“When a system is set up to accomplish some goal, a new entity has come into being — the system itself. No matter what the “goal” of the system, it immediately begins to exhibit system behavior; that is, to act according to the general laws that govern the operation of all systems. Now the system itself has to be dealt with. Whereas before, there was only the problem — such as warfare between nations, or garbage collection — there is now an additional universe of problems associated with the functioning or merely the presence of the new system.”

- Systemantics

Put another way: When faced with a problem, you might try building some sort of system to address that problem.

Now you have two problems.

(via paperbits)

randomghost: Gorilla Bot by Darren Bartley

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:24:15 +0100

randomghost:

Gorilla Bot by Darren Bartley