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As you can see, Google has finally data-mined my deepest interests with pinpoint accuracy.

Of course, none of this matters as the internet has been won.

Can you stomach the success?

I'm reminded of New Year's Eve 2000: As midnight edged closer it became crushingly obvious to everyone that the symbolic rollover wasn't going to effect much practical change at all, and the mood quickly turned sour.

I think I prefer this present iteration of the theme, actually; watching the trainwrecks is strangely soothing. Why, look over there, that's the same "citizen-soldier" who was one of the few to get an interview with John Bolton, two years ago.

Ugh, what is it about Austrians.

The closest thing to prefiguring this would be Seidl's Dog Days from 2001. For all the times that film was called smutty and "ruthlessly nihilistic," apparently he didn't go far enough. One critic who thought otherwise said:

In the end, I think Ulrich Seidl belongs to a different school altogether. He’s the Austrian Todd Solondz. He’s telling us yet again that life in the suburbs is pretty boring and mean and meaningless and frankly I don’t believe him.

Always believe the voice of moderation, right?

We accept the fundamentalists' view of their religions as being the most accurate, because we want to nail down what religions are, and their versions are black and white, we can understand them, even if we understand them only to disagree, even violently so.

"...idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times."

...recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends.

I think I'm going to call that last one the 'Rage For the Machine' effect. It might just be the inevitable end station of commodified dissent.

Lost in Translation is on. It looks like it would have been mind-blowing in 1996 at the latest.

Stereo illusions

Via the other person who thought he was clever by playing on "Memex," I finally found Ted Nelson's Way Out of the Box (temporarily down, see Google's cached copy). It's an informed rant against the predominant desktop metaphor that's staring you in the face at this very moment:

But these ideas have a plausible air that has set like concrete into a seeming reality. Macintosh and Windows look alike, therefore that must be reality, right? Wrong. Apple and Windows are like Ford and Chevrolet (or perhaps Tweedledum and Tweedledee), who in their co-imitation create a stereo illusion that seems like reality.

[Transquote]

So if Douglas Engelbart is Moses and Xerox PARC Judaism, then the Mac would slot neatly in as Catholicism—it's always had icons and a pope—and the PC as Protestantism, together creating an illusion of a deeper truth where there's really only memetic mutation.

Whereas Ted Nelson is like Diagoras chopping up an image of Hercules to boil his turnips, which would explain why I'm so fond of him. In particular, I love his insight about interface design:

One result is office software that's incredibly clumsy, with slow, pedestrian operations. Think how long it takes to open and name a file and a new directory. Whereas video-game software is lithe, quick, vivid.

Why is this?

Very simple. Guys who design video games *love to play video games*. Whereas nobody who designs office software seems to care about using it, let alone hopes to use it at warp speed.

(I've been waiting six years for someone to make an interface based on Bullfrog's excellent game Dungeon Keeper 2, which is just about the only real-time strategy I can stand.)

Contrast with Wordie Errata's comment on the state of hyperfiction:

At least since HyperCard debuted in the late 80s people have been talking about how electronic media enable "new forms of storytelling." That phrase (along with "non-linear") has introduced so much plotless tech-wanking, so much storytelling that wasn't so much new as simply unbearable, that I tend to become hyper critical whenever I hear it.

Aw, I think he just made Chris Klimas cry.

Is it real or is it Memex

Going on a tangent about that piece of art which gave rise to some sentences you don't often see, I wound up on the Dimensions blog, reading:

The internet age has elevated the non-event, the fantastic, to the status of the real. Not surprisingly, performance art has thrived in this environment. Shvarts' formal ingenuity speaks for itself.

And then just the next day on the (unrelated) Wordie Errata blog:

Slice is told through two fake intertwined blogs. I'm so up to my eyeballs in what I think are real blogs that this just seemed like more of the same; I couldn't really tell the difference between it and the tripe you come across on LiveJournal et. al. every day.

What I think are real blogs.

Given this, what can I do other than declare this blog decidedly not real? This is not my beautiful blog! I am not keeping it real in any shape or form! I have been faking it from the very first post! Turn off your computer now!

But concept art was not dead

Aliza Shvarts, an art major at Yale, issued a press release that she's due to present a project consisting of the blood and potential 1-2 weeks gestated embryos expelled when taking abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself.

Brilliantly, she now says she didn't do any tests to confirm whether or not there were actual embryos present. Judging from the reactions, this is one of the most successful instances of denying catharsis for artistic effect in a long time.

To really drive the nail in further, consider that embryos this early in gestation are likely to be too small to be reliably detected, so even if there is an exhibit of blood and someone buys it (for a hefty sum, I can only hope) to have it examined, there will be no definitive last word in the matter. She has not only succeeded in getting attention, she has succeeded in making pretty much everyone afraid, desperately screaming things like "GAME OVER" to make the bad thoughts go away.

Via Bitch PhD. There's a blog of the 'Dimensions' journal.

Drugs are behind some of our greatest art

The army of pharamaceutical-fundamentalists marching under the banner of just say no to drugs must be stopped. After all, hasn't the taking — or abuse, as these fundamentalists would have it — of mind-altering substances been an essential help to all truly great artists, even if it sometimes made them seem desperately unhappy and drove them to the brink of destruction?

Will this unreasonable denying the glory of being totally zonked out of your head not end until the art that defines our culture has become bland, boring and completely alienated from the truth that becomes evident when you drop acid?

It's a great tribute to our age that a scientist can still be greeted with more adulation than a pop princess.

Observe the context: They're Dr. Who fans.

Can an interactive web site produce false memories?

The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product -- potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can't.

Via Hack Real.

...movies which celebrate the same lifestyle of surface, built on a foundation of violence...

Music to my ears, of course.

Say, could this have been the inspiration for the Voldemort for president campaign?

Speaking of cultivation in tubes

Breaking: In vitro meat.

For the next couple of days, I'm probably going to walk around muttering "tubemeat" to myself while giggling like a madman.

At long last, after combining this interview with this review, I've realized what it would take to enjoy the Matrix trilogy: You have to be Catholic.

(The one true interpretation is of course the Marxist one. In fact, the blissful ending resembles nothing so much as the obligatory socialist utopia at the end of a sixties Chinese film.)

Hangunteaux

Watch as freelance comic adventurer extraordinaire, Ryan Estrada, releases new portmanteaux (¿Que?) into Korean.

I think this is one of the most subtly strange and wonderful things I've seen on the net all year.

Tibet and so on

Proving that false dichotomies are not exclusive to the right, your friendly local chapter of diehard communists may present you with the choice that you're either with Beijing all the way or you want Tibet to revert to the old feudalism.

On the bright side, I'm better off for having discovered Beijing Newspeak, Imagethief and the lovely expression volunteer security. (via)

And wouldn't you know it, the Chinese are crying about the lies of the liberal media (in this case, CNN).

Sticky love notes

I've seen not one but two instances of Post-it^® love notes today. Is this some sort of alternative Valentine's sponsored by 3M?

(Although this would appear to be the month of the Post-it, it'll be two more years before it turns 30.)

Don't blame me

...I voted for the atheist apocalypse.

Those are clearly Dawkins and someone familiar as the harbingers of science and reason, but I completely fail to recognize progress and equality.

 —no, wait, I mean—

Ban Ki-moon apparently denounces Geert Wilders' film about how the Quran is a recipe for TERRORFASCISTONAZISM (pulled by Network Solutions, then pulled from LiveLeak, now hosted on Google Video).

It really is little more than a PowerPoint presentation with video clips in it, really. There's also little to distinguish it from your average piece of internet paranoia: It's remarkable mostly for the sheer amount of shit it's managed to stir up, being protested by entities as diverse as the UN Secretary-General, Afghanistan, the World Council of Churches and Slovenia. There's also this report of a cute campaign to "smother it in apologies."

The backlash against all this makes supporting the video the internet-hip thing to do. This should be good news, if it means that blasphemy becomes a thing to be cherished and protected: Unfortunately, you can always count on people's exceptionalism to make them think that it's only okay to blaspheme against that one religion with the scary towelheads in it. After all, Jesus is such a universally good guy, it's not like anyone would ever even need to blaspheme against him. Me, I can only hope this will usher in an age of comprehensively desecrating all that's holy; given enough blasphemers, threats become futile.

Lastly, let's not forget who wears the pants in this relationship: If the question of insulting Islam became big enough, OPEC would only have to threaten to cut everyone off and there would be no shortage of Western governments willing to hand over the blasphemer's head on a silver platter. And don't get me started on the several thousand volunteer hostages we've placed in Central Asia for easy access.