Archive for March, 2010

Wisdom of the Crowds.

Two Things.

(1) Crowds are only wise in the sense of generating a statistical bell-curve around an absolute point. Crowds have no ‘wisdom’ about subjective things, like whether or not high-collars will be fashionable in 2012, or whether or not the world will end in a mayantechosingularityclusterfuck.

Crowds are not wise, nor are they even tolerable most of the time.  Picture it, Rose: two nights ago, packed into Austin’s still-newest gaybar, so close to so many other people there was barely room to lift my glass and drown my sorrows, trying to finagle my way off the dance floor spill-over and out into the open-air smoking corale (aka patio), one can’t help but eavesdrop in situations like this.  And there I am, listening to throngs of inane blatherskite (did I mean ‘blather’s kite’?  Who the hell is blather and why does shle have a kite?), feeling like a creep.

It served my solipsistic Saturday night needs.

Tonight the pendulum has swung back around and I’m alone at the laundry mat, washing dog piss from my bed-clothes, the only other soul on the entire block a sad-faced guy in some faux-russian tee-shirt and a NAVY hat.  I’m betting his name is Darren… or John.

Tonight there will be (ass shot, hello! …Darren John bends over to collect his fallen socks; his face may be pocked and tearful, but his ass is not).  Tonight there will be no sourcing of the dirty-clothes crowd, just the quiet hum of my overworked laptop and Darren John’s inevitable eventual finger-drumming to the 2010 male-equivalent Shania Twain song stuck in his head.

But back to the point; crowds are not wise.  Crowds can tell us a lot of things– who’s going to win an election, who’s the more attractive potential mate, whose ox weighs closer to a metric tonne, who’s the most likely scape-goat in the next does of media-hysteria– but crowds can’t predict the future.  And that’s what grinds my gears, business people/trend analysts thinking that crowd-sourcing will do a single lick of good in the mobile-global economy of the future.  Use your head, man.  If crowd-sourcing could predict the future then we’d all have our jetpacks by now.

I dunno, it’s just an idyl rant.

Oh, and the second thing?

Misogyny rankles me more than anything else, even homophobia (and of course you can’t have one without the other).  The only thing worse than misogyny is misogyny masked as something else:

Katha Pollitt, in The Nation:
“I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny.”

And female misogynists… wow.  They might just be worse than homophobic queers.

So yeah, that’s what I got for this update.  Sorry for the negative vibe.  I’m in kind of a mood.  I’ll be better next time.

♥doug

Dork Dork Dork

I like the term “8bit.”

I think I’m going to re-appropriate as a general catch-all for the traditional definition of nerd/dork/geek (rather than the new “Everyone’s a geek!” weak-ass interpretation).  It’s got all the caché of those other terms with none of the pejorative implications, plus, it’s esoteric enough to maintain some sense of sub-cultural cool.  A winner all around.  Let’s do it; we’re 8bit.  I’ll do a webcomic about it and I’ll rewrite the novel to birth the 8bit literary genre.  Totally sounds like a plan.

With that in mind, I continued my dork-by-dork-west themed festival week.  My musical SXSW experience kicked off Wednesday with Datapop 3.0 at the Highball here in Austin.  While I knew of the 8bit music scene, I didn’t expect the hardcore aspect of it… sets that began with basic dance-pop techno beats would end in some beautiful cacophony of digital speed-thrash.  It was glorious.  I captured most of it (in parts) on my phone, yet again disappointed by the Droid’s microphone and camera options.  meh.  If you’re new to the 8bit scene, Je Deviens DJ en 3 Jours part 5 is a fantastic example of both the music and the crowd atmosphere.  After that, check out the other vids I took; all uploaded to YouTube:

Starscream

Henry Homesweet

8BK-ok : part 1, part 2, part 3, & covering Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance

Je Deviens DJ en 3 Jours (who not only did an amazing set, but was adorably drunk and chatty in the bathroom beforehand…): part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

In other  8bit linknews…

They forgot the most important joystick of all… my penis when I’m in the bathtub.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/06/from_joystick_to_brainwaves_a_visual_history_of_the_game_controller-2/

TRON!  Tron Legacy (aka TR2N) has been viral for a while at the Flynn Lives! website, and until recently it’s been the same viral trash—content that a 12 year old could put up during the commercial breaks of Saturday Morning Cartoons—but this name-the-game puzzle was a step above.  It’s not only total dorkcore, but damn fun and beautiful to look at.

Flynn Lives! , Arcade Challenge and just in case you haven’t seen it yet, the Tron Legacy trailer.

Flynn isn’t the only one with secrets: 10 things you didn’t know about Mario Bros.
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmentality/video-games—humor/ten-things-you-do-not-know-about-super-mario-bros/

And, just in case you’re wondering, non-gamers do hate you.  Here’s why:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/107/1076963p1.html

I am the Modern Man.




Oh, modernity.

Machines to read our minds!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100311123520.htm

This weekend was all about the modern. Updated the blog-novel and the webcomic just in time to head to SXSWi’s Screenburn Arcade and promo-push my creative endeavors…. I left my ‘business card’ promo’ing the sites on tables, set the homepages of all the ‘connection center’ computers to my pages, flooded public twitter feeds with my bit.lys… y’know, general DIY getting-the-word-out.  Cross your fingers for success!

Went to the ‘Visions’ Digital Media show at Mohawk on Friday.  That was fantastically fun.  Live digital artists projecting their work, in real-time, on giant screens all over the bar, traditional-media artists drawing burlesque horror strippers, deep synth dubs rattling the outside, live bands behind the scare-queens inside, no price-gouging for drinks and a super-short line.  Very pleased.

Went to the io9 TimeBender party on Saturday night… it was lame as hell.  For a party billed as ‘Stormtroopers & Sword Fighting‘, there was a scant amount of either.  Should have gone to Diggnation instead.  Whatev’.  I at least enjoyed MC Frontalot…  as much as I ever enjoy nerdcore, that is (which is… I dunno.  I really love nerdcore in theory, but in practice it always comes off less interesting than it should.  Maybe the culture-jamming with that genre just swings too many ways).  And I returned to my yearly habit of drinking Sparks Caffeinated Malt Liquor, my only drink during SXSW.  That’s right, every year, I willing suck down all the free Sparks people are willing to throw at me, even though it’s disgusting as hell and I wouldn’t dream of ever paying for it.  My first SXSW corporate house-party was sponsored by Sparks, the year the drink made it’s debut, so I’ve created a nice little associate there.  Worst part of the io9lame?  They ran out of Orange Sparks at like 11pm.  Gah!  Still, I love me some io9 blog, so I’ll forgive Gawker for the lame this year.




In other robot-news…

•Our brains appear to be hardwired for the coming wetwire, so I’ve found yet another way to do nothing but sit in an ergo-chair all day:
http://io9.com/5472619/brain+controlled-devices-work-eerily-well

•Cory Doctorow did a great short-story about the implications of 3-D printers on copyright law.  It’s called ‘PrintCrime’ and I found it in his Overclocked collection.  Regardless, the future is now– 3-D bio-printers, ready to give me a 13-inch dick (portrait or landscape?):

http://io9.com/5479662/a-device-for-printing-body-parts

•But if you’ve already got the exoskeleton, maybe you just need the top-coat:
http://io9.com/5481885/robot-skin-is-on-the-way

•And how much of my body can be manufactured before I’m no longer a person, before we starting asking: “Machine or mannequin?”? I mean, when I got my first cavity filled as an adult, I ran around for days claiming to be TrapJaw.  And what will you call such a mecha-embodiment? (btw… in the article is the phrase “PC term for Robots”… the meta-implications [/double entendres] are too much for me… uh… what about the Mac term for Androids?  Oh god… that’s meta, too!)
http://io9.com/5479700/is-there-a-politically-correct-term-for-robot

•Now… what to do with all this new tech?  Oh yeah!  Sex-slaves!  Well, I suppose as long as he’s got a pulse, I won’t care how much is mecha and how much is organic.

http://io9.com/5475844/science-fiction-teaches-you-how-to-create-a-male-sex-slave

•Finally, in random news…cigarettes aren’t *just* little sticks of evil sticking out of morons. They’re also witches that ward off Parkinson’s Disease:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100310162823.htm

Later party people.
-doug

Inspired.

Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles Number II”




Points of Order
1.) The Apophenia of Modernity re-launches this week (today, in fact! Check it out!). Due to some issues with RSS I’ve had to migrate from LiveJournal to WordPress, which actually bugs me a lot. I mean, LiveJournal is the ur-blogging tool– if I’m going to write a blog-novel, I want to give proper respect to LJ, the tool that got me blogging to begin with. And this RSS problem isn’t even their fault, it’s the feedburner people’s fault… whatever. What’s done is done. Regardless, the novel is not only now on WordPress, but has been fully edited to get rid of the typos, bad dialogue, and untenable plot devices in the initial launch. Also, I’ve decided that since it’s a blog-form novel, I’m launching it like a blog, updating three times weekly, one “day/entry” at a time. Serialization rules! Makes sure to click the RSS link at the bottom of the page so you never miss a ‘chapter’!

2.) Life After Ph.D. – Yet Another Webcomic update today!

I think the webcomic needs a few minor revisions before/during the SXSW promo blowout (by ‘promo blowout’ I mean that if I get time, I’ll print up some 3×5s and litter the streets with them… y’know, to generate traffic). These revisions are: (a) I’m going to start adding titles, but like, real titles, with words. (b) I’m going to try to switch to a 2.5x/week update schedule. (c) I’m going to be doing more ‘exposition’ about the panels, either by citing their inspiration-source (like I did here: Nine.), or just telling a fun little story to go with them.




Why the push? What’s the inspiration?

Well, as far as the blog-novel goes, y’know… I’ve been sitting on this thing, writing it on and off for a couple years now (I think I started it in summer 2007 or 2008), deeply inspired by, among other things, Jackson Pollock’s fractal paintings, the notion of recursive systems, a whole ton of stuff I’d been reading on chaos theory (Gleick’s Chaos), network theory (Buchanan’s Nexus), emergent systems (esp. Dennett’s Freedom Evolves), the development of the Internet (mostly via random links from the web), and Hauser Chomsky & Fitch’s (2002) article that basically says the only interesting thing about language is recursion. And I got to thinking, what’s stopping a new consciousness from emerging? And, given the massive amount of connectivity through the Internet, why couldn’t the Internet develop a consciousness? So, that’s where the basic idea for the novel came from.

But I let life happen and the desire to write the novel died away… blah blah blah.
Then, about a year ago, the jump-drive that contained my novel got fried and I freaked out! My mind-baby was gone! I was able to recover most of it and that near-death gave me the kick I needed to get it back up and running, but I procrastinated some more, blah blah blah. Anyway, long story short, I turned 30 and decided I needed to get this done, see if I could make something of it, and move on. So, there you have it.

As for the new push with the webcomic… that’s a direct result of going to the STAPLE! Independent Media Expo! last weekend. There were some bigger names there (like Joel Watson, the guy who does Hijinks Ensue, which I used to read on LJ, and then forgot all about, and now I love it again) but there were also a TON of people there hocking their line-drawn, back-of-a-napkin-based webcomics (some of which are really good, some of which are complete crap) and I thought, ‘heh, my stuff is as good as at least half of this… what fools’. But then that night I ran into Logan, King of All Media, and he told me about his 3-Phase Plan to conquer the world (or something like that) and one of his points was “I’m okay at stuff. I’m not great, but I’m okay. I think there’s a market for that.” And I thought, hell, me too. I’m okay… why not just let this baby fly and see what happens?

So that’s where I’m at now.

Later Party People,

-d

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