mostly I link.
You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.
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Choose your own Adventure: Pong
weezer sucks.
(…) I took my first stab at being a fake nerd when I was seventeen, roughly three years after I initiated my effort not to be a real nerd. I bought a pair of black Elvis Costello/Malcolm X glasses. I cut my hair from a bass-player volcano to a midlength floppy mushroom shape. I was supposed to be an attractive parody of my old self. For being a fake nerd, like being a white Negro, can be a way of putting even more distance between yourself and the object of your imitation than there was before. In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage. Going through life making the exertion of affecting noble savagery makes you feel even less a noble savage than you did before. Being a fake nerd leaves you less of a nerd. Which is why it’s an excellent strategy for former nerds. You can both acknowledge your past (obeying the teenage principle of don’t-reinvent-yourself-or-we’ll-call-you-a-poser) and distance yourself from it (I am so indisputably un-nerdy I can wear accessories and even pants that are nerdy and not be a nerd). This is why when you go to a party full of young music studio engineers, or arts journalists, or book editors, you look around and see a fake nerd uniform (bulky glasses, floppy hair, sweaters, low-top canvas sneakers useless for athletic activity).
You hear fake nerd conversation. It follows a model. You bring up an “obsession” or “total fascination” with a purportedly unfashionable subject. “I am such a dork about old Hawaiian slide guitar. I actually have every King Benny record. I’ve so got a problem.” “Dude, you want to hit In-N-Out burger? I basically live on their Protein Burgers when I’m in LA.”
This is a way of whipping out cultural capital, but not in the same way as leaving guests in the living room to retrieve a hollowbody guitar or a first edition of To The Lighthouse. The Gretsch and the Woolf say, “I am creative and educated, so I have an understanding of the blues and the Bloomsbury Group.” The Hawaiian slide recordings and the In-N-Out Burger, which are both low-end consumer products, say, “I love the things I love because I am guided by some untamed voice within me that causes me to have random obsessions. I will follow my individualized obsessions, not trends, and be transparent about those obsessions, even when those obsessions tell me to like things widely considered ugly and cheap.” It’s the cultural capital of quirk.
(…)
It’s also just barely possible to think you make a statement about gender when you work a fake nerd look. While nerds, as everybody knows, tend to be male more often than female, dressing like a nerd rejects conventional ideas about what a hunky young man looks like. Since conventional notions of what makes a young man look handsome are so bound up with conveying power and wealth and the capacity for punching somebody out, making yourself look like a nerd on purpose is a gesture that says, “I renounce the privilege of being a young swinging dick.” At the very least, it’s a refusal to make your outfit a monument to your own authority. For a woman, dressing up as fake nerd is a refusal of plumage. In an androgynous paradise where adults of both sexes look like enlarged spelling-bee champions, it’s easy to forget for a moment, or even an entire night of drinking beer, that privilege is unevenly distributed between genders. At least, it’s easy if you’re male.
Write code that takes the three parameters named “complexity”, “intensity” and “disorder”, and makes something you deem appropriate in your medium of choice. Each parameter should take a floating point value from 0 up to 1.
The previous proposition is conceptually even more challenging:
“Composition 1960 #10″ by La Monte Young consists of the single instruction “draw a straight line and follow it”. A fitting minimal starting point to instructionset. Please contribute your implementations.
“Take yourself for example Phallicity - what social mobility do you have as a blood elf priest?” - Karl Marx (lvl 72 dwarf) asks me, in WTF? - “Your class position is pre-determined for you from day one, as soon as you gain entry to this world.” The rhetorics and educational effort ranged from the very boring to the hilarious, as my elf priestess (I didn’t try playing with the dwarf) battled the phallocrats.
Makibishi Comic - takes forever to load, then you play for 2 minutes and it takes forever to load again. Gameplay is also itself very slow: but simmer down, turn IM clients off, and enjoy the creative puzzles and the pretty, pretty graphics.
Faith Fighter, a fight game (in the classic style of sf2) whose characters are Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Ganesha, Budai, God, and a seventh, surprise character. Gameplay is weak, but the special attacks (”turn the other cheek!” “holy cross!” “karma wheel!”) had me laughing for a few hours here.
Aaron Koblin had 10 thousand people on the Internet draw sheep facing left for him; this guy is asking people to draw prostitutes. Go and add your own. ^^
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elsewhere: My Lonesome Cowboy (yeah, that sculpture) has been sold for 15.2 million. Not quite a fat lady’s painting, but hey.
Wunderblogs RIP
Yesterday I was introduced to Processing, a java-interpreted programming language targeted at rendering graphics, music and video. My first experiment with the language (which is actually delightfully easy and straightforward!) was to code a Julia-set fractal.
Half forgetful and half out of sheer laziness, however, I left out an important step of the algorithm - normalizing the inputs to a reasonably small range (I finally settled, later, for [-0.5, 0.5[). Instead, I let my x and y range between 0 and 599, and I realized other values had to be set to much higher, or otherwise nothing would really show. On the other hand, these numbers were very large, the variables were declared int or float, and, I realized after a while, many operations were resulting in buffer overflows. Processing, I learned, does nothing when faced with a buffer overflow: it happily moves on, with whatever value the operation happened to land on.
So, the algorithm was bogus, and from the description above one would expect the output image to be sheer static noise. Not so. Sure, I was expecting this:
and got this, instead:
One can see the “randomness” of the buffer overflows in the noisy look of the fill areas; still, some pattern survived, or emerged, out of the overflow operation, and I thought the picture was kinda cute. ^^ As I tweaked the parameters, the image would change into radically different patterns, such as:
The changes from a pattern to the other were smooth as the parameters were slowly increased or decreased, which resulted in a pretty trippy animation. I wonder if this phenomenon is documented somewhere and there is a name and all that. But still, it’s cool when this stuff happens. ^^
I was skimming through a Body Art book earlier today. (Later, the news of Lucian Freud’s 33 million dollars worth nude portrait of an obese woman). If the model is beautiful, it figures, it’s no longer art. :/
Where in the World is Loira do Banheiro?
Agora falta conteúdo, só. (&)
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
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Moma’s exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind included a leather jacket made out of stem cells from mice. This is what happened:
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
A Million Penguins, the open collaborative novel in wiki format run by Penguin Books, has finally been “finished” and editing is closed. Alas, I haven’t read through it, but probably will, shortly - hypertext fiction being one of my main concerns these days - but I can’t say I’m excited about it: penguin books, when it tries to be too modern, most often misunderstands…
at The Telegraph:
The world’s first exhibition of ‘extinct and impossible’ smells is under way, from the metallic fallout of the first atomic bomb to the aroma of cloves and oranges from first aid kit of a medieval plague doctor.
The acrid reek of a blazing meteor impact, the sweaty bouquet of a space station, the hothouse aroma of a Victorian greenhouse are also there for the smelling at the Reg Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland.
(…)
One extraordinary fragrance is the aftermath of the first atomic bomb, dropped on Japan on August 6, 1945. “The Hiroshima smell is quick and pungent, very metallic,” says Blackson.
(…)
There is also the smell of Cleopatra’s hair, based on an incense that was popular among ancient Egyptians containing raisins, an evergreen called Cassia, and wine.
The Soviet Mir space station, which burnt up in the atmosphere in 2001, smells of formaldehyde, charred material (the space station caught fire) and a strong pong of astronaut BO.
Among the stranger smells is the “surface of the sun.”
“It is hard to sum up. It is an atmospheric smell, like walking into a room when the sun has been pouring in,” says Blackson. “It gives a freshness, a sun kissed feel with a bit of metal. If you can say something smells hot, this is it.”
“There’s also some extinct flowers,” adds Blackson. “Some have been gone for hundreds of years, whilst others have only been extinct for the last 30, due to things like deforestation.”
A wearable massage interface that turns a video game player’s excess energy into a back massage for an innocent bystander
Playing Massage me requires two people, one who wears the jacket to receive the massage and one who massages the person wearing the jacket. Soft flexible buttons are embedded in back of the jacket so that wearing it turns your back into a gamepad. All you need to do is to sit or lay down in front of a video game player and you will be able to enjoy a back massage while the game lasts.
blends pop-art and ukiyo-e.
I don’t know about the book, but the site for Then We Came to the End is pretty fun.
Spread the word.
bookmark: resource center for cyberculture studies
