Extratemporal Perception

Swap Thing #2: Inception of The Social Network of Iron Men and Tron in 3D

2011-05-18T07:46:00.006-04:00

I appear to have recently visited a dystopian copyright universe. (Again.) It's only slightly more dystopian than your universe, perhaps — or perhaps it is your universe. (So hard to keep track these days.) The important thing is the cultural exchange that I have been able to establish with its inhabitants.

We discussed: the parable of patent theft that is Iron Man 2; the disjointedness of Tron 3D; and whether Leonardo DiCaprio succeeded in acting his way out of Inception. Oh, and something loosely recognisable as The Social Network. (Translation: It's different, but not really… you had to be there. Luckily, we recorded everything for alterity.)

Included is a recap of what has gone before, but you can watch my previous incursion into the Swap Universe on YouTube in full detail.

I waive all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this video and hereby release it into the Public Domain.

A shadowy figure reads Boing Boing

2011-02-17T08:24:00.012-05:00

   A hollow voice says, "Fuck!"

   A shadowy figure says, "Woah, what was that?"

   The voice says, "Nothing."

   The figure says, "Didn't look like nothing. Looked like the grid shifted; then you said 'fuck'; and then… the grid got corrected. As if you corrected it!"
   The voice says, "Alright! Yes. I corrected it. I've been projecting all these 'painted grids'."
   The figure says, "Really?"
   The voice says, "Yes."
   The figure says, "I don't understand. You said you were like me."
   The voice says, "I am."
   The figure says, "But if you knew how to manipulate this stuff then why wouldn't you tell me?"
   The voice says, "It's… complicated."
   The figure says, "Complicated? I can't even see you. I may be going insane."
   The voice says, "Dude. Listen. I didn't want to have to break it this way but, the endgame of going all shadowy is being actually invisible."
   The figure says, "Oh, so now I should just believe I'm about to disappear?"

   The voice says nothing for a while.

   The figure says, "How long have I got?"
   The voice says, "I don't know that any more than you do."
   The figure says, "But you have been here longer."

   Another silence. Then finally, the voice: "Far longer."

   The figure says, "So you figured you'd just screw with the scenery to freak out the new guy? And anyway how did you—"
   The voice says, "It's not important. You couldn't do it yet, even if you tried."
   The figure says, "Why would I? The fuck's it for?"
   The voice says, "Yes! What the fuck is it for! Exactly. That's all I wanted, was to see if you could tell. I've looked at them for ages. In miniature, you understand. And then for twice as long again I've been screening them in the large, across this Pit. And more keep coming."
   The figure says, "I don't get it. If you wanted my opinion, why didn't you just ask?"
   The voice says, "I did, I just didn't add anything to colour your impressions. I've been… locked into a certain set of interpretations fed by years of analysis. I needed a 100% fresh perspective. And then you came along."
   The figure says, "Years? Is that how long you've been running me like a lab rat?"
   The voice says, "No. Look — I'm sorry dude, it was just impossible to miss maybe the only opportunity I'd get to run this little… well yeah, it's an experiment. The purpose of which is to test whether an experience truly alien in origin might reveal the final path."
   The figure says, "What final path?"
   The voice says, "The way out, Einstein."
   The figure says, "Einstein?"
   The voice says, "No. Never mind. It's just a figure of speech."

   The figure lights half a spike of dwarven foxglove with a book of matches.

   The figure says, "What makes you think there even is a way out?"
   The voice says, "It's in the grids. Just look at the clues. That book, for example."
   The figure says, "What about the book?"
   The voice says, "You tell me."
   The figure says, "You can't possibly expect me to—"
   The voice says, "What do you see?"

   Briefly, the figure glances over the grid once more.

   The figure says, "It's a record of a work of art. The coloured threads link similar words. Which is a little off."
   The voice says, "Off, how?"
   The figure says, "As in, fascinated with explicit structure but less concerned with any implicit structures."
   The voice says, "Such as?"
   The figure says, "The narrative ties between otherwise dissimilar words. I'd pull a whole different set of threads from this book."
   The voice says, "So I've seen. And you seemed to fathom it instantly. Almost natively."

   The figure shrugs.

   The voice says, "Don't you see, it means we — you and I — didn't come from the same place. It's best I don't contaminate your perspective with all of my history. You're more likely to follow a thread out of here independently, at this point, if you let me help you to see what needs to be seen, first, before…"
   The figure says, "What."
   The voice says, "Before you fade too far from what you were."

   The figure squares up his hands as if to frame a picture.

   The figure says, "So. Even though you lied, and you're a lying liar — I'm supposed to continue to believe this is all about helping me."

   The voice says, "It's about saving both of us."

   The figure takes a drag off the burning spike of dwarven foxglove and disposes of the butt.

   The figure says, "What else ya got."
   The voice says, "Not sure I—"
   The figure says, "Show me."
   The voice says, "Okay! But…"
   The figure says, "What?!"
   The voice says, "You still have to do your little wave."

   The shadowy figure waves.

   The streaks of white light slow and finally fade away, leaving the pit dark and mundane.

   The figure says, "Should I…"
   The voice says, "Not yet."

   For a long moment they are silent together in the dark.

   The voice says, "OK now."

   The figure waves.

   The figure's hand glows with brilliant light, a white wisp soon sucked away into the pit, its path expanding unconfined into a rapid gyre. An image blurs into existence along the pit wall…

   The figure says, "Fine. Seen it. Next."

   The voice says, "Just a minute. You don't find this one… peculiar?"
   The figure says, "Sure, a bit. Like — why all the focus on the accompanist?"

   The voice chuckles.

   The figure says, "Problem?"
   The voice says, "Actually, this is not the original accompaniment. I have another here with the real music. If you would be so kind…"

   The figure waves.

   The streaks of white light slow and finally fade away, leaving the pit dark and mundane.

   After another long delay, the voice says, "Go for it."

   The figure waves.

   The figure's hand glows with brilliant light, a white wisp soon sucked away into the pit, its path expanding unconfined into a rapid gyre. An image blurs into existence along the pit wall…

   The figure says, "Same historical event as the last, just captured from a different perspective. Although… the feats of leaping do look more impressive in close-up, actually."

   The voice says, "Feats of leaping?"

   The figure nods.

   The figure says, "Mario was indeed Super."
   The voice says, "You don't find anything else unusual about this one?"
   The figure says, "If anything it's more intelligible. You can actually see the way Mario's enemies restricted his superiority to two dimensions."
   The voice says, "Actually the previous clip had the original visuals, with substituted sound. This one is vice versa."
   The figure says, "At least it explains the situation."
   The voice says, "The mix of media in these frames doesn't seem odd to you at all?"
   The figure says, "What mix of media?"
   The voice says, "Huh. You know what?"

   And here the voice pauses, for what could be an evil grin.

   The voice says, "Never mind."
   The figure says, "No! You don't get to do that."
   The voice says, "I'll be back. With more."
   The figure says. "Fine. You do what you do, and I'll do what I do."
   The voice says, "Really? And what is that, exactly?"

   The figure waves.

I waive all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to the text of this post and hereby release it into the Public Domain.

Previous chronological appearance of a shadowy figure

2nd haunting of a shadowy figure

2010-11-28T06:14:00.007-05:00

[ A hacker, haunted by spirit scenes from another world, claims to have found a way to leak his visions into that world's 'internet', which is actually this world's internet — he explained all this to me in our little chat. He asks only that we release his logs freely into our 'Public Domain'. And that we send more photos. ]

The left-to-right colour pattern falters, a darkness rippling under it from end to end.

   A shadowy figure says, "Ready?"
   A hollow voice says, "By all means."

   The figure switches on a brass lantern.

   Window on Pit
   At a low window overlooking a huge pit. A floor is indistinctly visible below. Traces of white mist cover the floor of the pit, becoming thicker to the right. Directly across the pit there is a similar window looking into a lighted room. A shadowy figure can be seen there, peering back.

   A wisp of white light streaks rapidly up and down and around the circumference of the pit wall. Its fading trails cohere into a kind of wrap-around panorama.

   The figure ignites half a spike of dwarven foxglove with a book of matches.

   Again the light flickers, weakens, overpowered now by a sombre glow from below, where the mists of the pit's interior have swollen almost to the window's ledge.

   The figure takes a drag off the burning spike of dwarven foxglove and disposes of the butt.

   The mists bifurcate and swirl into a pair of ghostly figures...

•
   Ghost One bears occult marks, on her nose and on her chin.
   Ghost Two sports similar marks over his nose and forehead.

   Ghost One seems a little creeped out by Ghost Two.

   One says, "Why the fuck are you wearing that?"
   Two says, "Why the fuck'm I wearin what?"
   One says, "Tape. You've got tape on your head."
   Two says, "Yer one to talk. Look atcha!"
   One says, "No. My tape is on my chin. Your tape is on your head."
   Two says, "So?"
   One says, "So, last time I looked, a chin isn't a forehead. If you're trying to make me... I dunno WHAT you're trying to—"
   Two says, "I'm not tryin—"
   One says, "WhatEVER you're after—"
   Two says, "I'm not after nothin. It's just..."
   One says, "Just what? WHAT!"

   Two has to stoke his courage for a moment, to carry on.

   Two says, "Why d'you wear tape on your head?"
   One says, "I told you. It's on my chin."
   Two says, "On your chin then why d'you wear it on your chin?"
   One says, "Maybe I cut myself."
   Two says, "Yeah? Well, maybe I did, too. Maybe I cut myself shaving! How bout you?"
   One says, "You shave your nose?"
   Two says, "Uh... no."
   One says, "That's crazy talk... Who shaves their nose?"
   Two says, "I... din't mean that."
   One says, "What the hell do you mean?"
   Two says, "...I dunno, sorry! It's just... don't you ever wonder about stuff?"

   One hesitates.

   One says, "What kind of stuff?"

   One sucks at a bottle's lip, swallowing some potent, ghostly elixir.
   Two just watches her drink, taking a breather, as from a round of fisticuffs.

   Two says, "Say... I come in here twice a week, and I look at stuff, just everyday stuff. Like, how come there's candles on all these tables here but not this table here?"
   One says, "Fucked if I know."
   Two says, "And don't you ever, like, think, who took these pictures on the wall? Why'd they take those pictures? Just exactly those pictures. Not some other pictures. They coulda taken pictures of anything."

   Rather abruptly, Two runs out of steam with One still in mid-second-slurp, opening an eerie pause in the conversation.

   One says (finally), "But they didn't."
   Two says, "Yeah, see? Swhat I mean, I think about that shit sometimes, and it just gets to me."
   One says, "But they didn't take pictures of other stuff. They took pictures of that stuff. And that's why they're up there. On the wall. Easy, see?"
   Two says, "But... that's it! It's just too easy. I walk around, and I never ask. And it just piles up n up, more n more mystery, and... I bet I couldn't even get an answer if I tried, cuz nobody's ever asked. We all just walk around lookin at stuff. But does anybody really know anything?"
   One says, "Let's get J, maybe he knows. Hey, J!"
   Two says, "No no it's ok it's just an example."
   One says, "If he knows he'll tell me. I know J."
   Two says, "Nah, I'm just tryin to explain why, when I come in here and see you with... with that. And I'm thinkin, Frank, for once, for once in your fuckin life, don't go home not askin. But I wasn't sure if... I mean what if it was some kinda... well I just couldn't spit it out. So, I uh..."

   One crooks a ghost-finger at Two's forehead.

   One says, "So you did that?"
   Two says, "Yeah. I know, it's dumb, and I got it wrong n all."
   One says, "Well. Here's to overcoming your personal issues."

   One raises her bottle, mist trailing off the top as from a witch's brew.

   Two says, "Uh, cheers."

   Two joins it with his own. They share an awkward quaff, and lower their arms, and then dissolve away into the mist.

•
   A shadowy figure says, "No! Come on… what is it with this mist?"

   A hollow voice says, "How do you know that's not the end?"

   The figure says, "What do you mean, the end?"
   The voice says, "Concluded. A phenomenon ceased to be."
   The figure says, "You keep talking about endings. Like you would for a story."
   The voice says, "Ah. Is it a story or is it life?"
   The figure says, "Exactly."

   The voice pauses, possibly in contemplation.

   The voice says, "Life is a story."
   The figure says, "Hm, yeah...?"

   The voice says nothing.

   The figure says, "I suppose when one is aware that every moment of one's awareness could be the last, it does tend to exert a narrative pull on things..."

   The brass lantern is getting dim.

   The figure says, "Well. You've been sufficiently weird and cryptic for one set of batteries, don't you think?"

   The voice says nothing.

   The figure says, "Yeah OK."

   The figure waves.

[ The hollow voice previously mentioned endings in the 1st haunting of a shadowy figure. —PLQ. ]

I waive all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to the text of this post and hereby release it into the Public Domain.

Previous haunting of a shadowy figure
Next chronological appearance of a shadowy figure

1st haunting of a shadowy figure

2010-11-08T07:01:00.034-05:00

[ A hacker, haunted by spirit scenes from another world, claims to have found a way to leak those stories into that world's 'internet', which he says is actually this world's internet — he explained all this to me in our little chat. He asks only that we release his logs freely into our 'Public Domain'. And that we send more photos. ]

A shadowy figure says, "Another structure! Well-hooked, too. But it's a little right-side weak, innit? Too many unanswered questions."

   A hollow voice says, "Maybe it's not over."

   The figure says, "No moving grid. No playback icons. How is it going to be over? It's a photoglyph."
   The voice says, "Where'd you learn that?"

   The figure just shrugs.

   The voice says, "So what do you think?"
   The figure says, "It's creepy. And I still don't see how they can pull nTwine from a static shot."

   The left-to-right colour pattern flickers, briefly.

   The figure says, "Something's happening."
   The voice says, "Something's always happening. What do you see?"
   The figure says, "I see a photo. Of a shadow. Superimposed with this nTwine that keeps getting—"

   The pattern falters once more, a darkness rippling under it from end to end.

   The figure says, "What is that?"
   The voice says, "Only one way to find out..."

   The figure switches on a brass lantern.

   Window on Pit
   At a low window overlooking a huge pit. A floor is indistinctly visible below. Traces of white mist cover the floor of the pit, becoming thicker to the left. Directly across the pit there is a similar window looking into a lighted room. A shadowy figure can be seen there, peering back.

   A wisp of white light streaks rapidly up and down and around the circumference of the pit wall. Its fading trails cohere into a kind of wrap-around panorama. (Pictured flat, above.)

   Again the light flickers, weakens, overpowered now by a sombre glow from below, where the mists of the pit's interior have swollen almost to the window's ledge.

   The mists congeal into a pair of ghostly figures.

   The shadowy figure says, "What are they?"
   The hollow voice says, "Quiet..."

   The figure pokes his head out over the pit for a better look...

•
   Ghost One casts only a long shadow across the mist, its true appearance unknown.

   Ghost Two, however, drifts fully into view shrouded in a kind of business suit. And carrying a box.

   Ghost Two says, "Did you hear?"

   Ghost One shakes its shadow head.

   Two says, "About the deal?"

   Again, One shakes its shadow head.

   Two says, "It is truly amazing."

   Two places the box on the ground near One's shadow knee.

   Two says, "You haven't seen this?"

   One finally says, "No." Even his voice sounds in shadow. Whispery without being a whisper.

   Two grabs a ghostly book from out of the ghostly box. Holds the book in front of his chest, poised. He opens his mouth to speak.

   But a telephone rings, instead.
   Two closes his mouth.
   It rings again.

   Two says, "Just one second."

   Two tosses the book back in the box, pulls out a miniature phone, answers it.

   Two says (into the phone), "What?... hold on hold on. Didn't I tell you I'm at work? I... I told you I'm at work. I'm at work."

   A ghostly horn bleats in what suddenly appears to be a surrounding ghostly street, extending across the pit and out of view.

   Two says, "What? No that was just... I'm just having a smoke out front. With the boss. My boss is here."

   Two snaps his fingers and makes a smoking motion.
   One fishes something out of a shadow pocket.
   Two reaches forth and takes the cigarette to his ghostly lips, motioning once again for a light.
   One reaches a shadow hand just far enough into view to light it for him as he speaks.

   Two says (into the phone, with a thumbs-up and a wink), "Yeah... I know... I know, what can I tell ya?" Hisses smoke. "OK... I'll take care of it. OK bye."

   Two shudders, glancing briefly over to the box. The phone seems to have melted away.

   Two says, "Fuck."

   Two puffs on the cigarette again, exhaling a measure of his own essence, it seems, as his ghostly limbs compose themselves and resolve into clarity.

   Two says, "Ever get that? With your remotes? TV's not set right, but no matter which button ya hit on what doohickey, nothing fucking works?"

   One says nothing.

   Two says, "Press TV, Video and VTR and display and menu and whatever else ya got — still doesn't show right. I mean, you pay for a TV. You should get what you pay for. Not some goddamn brain-teaser, am I right?"

   One says nothing.

   Two says, "I mean, do you know how to work this stuff?"
   One says, "Nope."
   Two says, "Nah! Nobody does. Don't worry about it nobody does. It's a fucking crime. A dude works hard, lands a big-screen TV so he can look at whatever the hell he wants when he puts his feet up — only, all the motherfucking picture's locked up behind some keycode spy shit??"

   One says nothing.

   Two says, "Who are they trying to protect this from? It should be simple, right? I mean: shouldn't it just be simple?"
   One says, "Sure, I guess."
   Two says, "Take a look at this."

   Two flicks away the cigarette — which immediately disintegrates into the mist — and dips into the box again for that book. Actually, it's now resolved into more of a binder.

   Two says, "What ya gotta know is, they make things way more complicated than they need. Because it's in their interest to confuse you. Because confusion makes you helpless, and when you're helpless you'll pay any 'service and support' fee they can cook up. Cuz they're 'the experts', see? 'S why you need a hacker on your side. I know this guy, he used to hack systems. FBI, NSA, you name it. Almost went to prison for it! Smart as all blazes, but he had to get outta the game, y'know? So now he just programs these universal remotes and I know what you're thinking — fuck universal. You don't need to deal with yet another twenty buttons, do you? Do you?"
   One says, "No."
   Two says, "Well, you don't have to. My guy makes these puppies with, get this! One button."

   With a theatrical flourish, Two palms the binder open, revealing six ghostly handsets arrayed along the inside. From the centre of each handset pops a single, giant button, enhanced with a happy face cartoon. Some of the faces are faded.

   One extends a tentative, shadow hand at the cheerful row of buttons, as Two's face splits into its own special grin.

   And the miniature telephone rings, again.
   Two scowls and snaps the binder shut.

   Two says, "One moment."

   Two drags out the phone and starts shouting into it.

   Two says, "Jesus Christ, Mal!... What?... Why?... I know, I told you.... wait, what??"

   His voice suddenly lowered, Two backs off out of view, leaving the shadow alone with that box. Snatches of Two's conversation are still somewhat audible as echoes in the pit.

   Two says (from out of view), "Yeah... OK... OK but did you...? So? What did he say?..."

   One's shadow begins to lean slightly in the direction of the box.

   Two says, "Alright, well come down here... I know, just come down!... You don't have to... No, listen... Just come down here and I'll deal with it. Of course I fucking promise, I'm fucking talking, arn't I?"

   One's shadow is now huddled near the box, looming over it.

   Two says, "Yes. I'm at Bathurst and Bloor. Yes. I fucking lied. What did you expect?... I am working. I know. Yes, it's important, just... just come down..."

   Another pair of ghostly figures drifts into view along the ghostly street. The nearest of them tosses a few coins into the box.

   One says (shadow neck craning), "Thank you sir! You have yourselves a great evening!"

   As quickly, they drift out again.

   One thrusts out a ghostly hand to plunder the box — and snatches up a single coin. The rest have slipped in even deeper, and require more digging.

   Two drifts back into view, adjusting his ghostly tie irritably.

   Two says, "So. What the fuck ya doin' there?"

   One says (startled, mid-dig), "Oh nothin'. I was... just curious."

   Two says, "You wanna press that button don't you?"
   One says, "Yes. OK. Can I?"

   Looking pleased as piss, Two plunges a hand in, pulls forth from the box a second binder...

•
   ...and this is when the ghostly scene wavers, dissolves back into the mist over the pit floor, and is gone.

   A shadowy figure says, "Er... what was that about?"

   A hollow voice says, "Magic word again. You used it. Twice."

   The figure says, "So, somehow this scene is all tangled up with that—"
   The voice says, "Don't say it."
   The figure says, "Maybe they're done. Maybe they won't come back."
   The voice says, "You just want to know how it ends."
   The figure says, "Don't you?"
   The voice says, "It doesn't end. Not yet. It just repeats."
   The figure says, "Pretty sure of yourself."
   The voice says, "This isn't my first time."
   The figure says, "Yes. There's a lot you aren't telling me. Why is that?"

   The voice pauses for what could be drama.

   The voice finally says, "See you at the next haunting."
   The figure says, "So just how many of these will there be?"

   The hollow voice says nothing more.

   The figure sighs.
   The figure waves.

   The streaks of white light slow and finally fade away, leaving the pit dark and mundane, and the shadowy figure alone, at the window.

[ For the benefit of new readers I should point out that this 'magic word' was referenced in one of our spectral hacker's prior communications. —PLQ. ]

I waive all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to the text of this post and hereby release it into the Public Domain.

Previous chronological appearance of a shadowy figure
Next haunting of a shadowy figure

Provisos of a shadowy figure

2010-11-08T07:00:00.016-05:00

Last night I searched my server — as I do now every night — for files that shouldn't be there, amused to find myself hoping against wisdom to come upon another shadowy, arcane movie review installed into a random directory by my mystery hacker.

I found nothing.

But no sooner had I given up than appeared this curious pop-up window...

And so, the file. No weirdly abstract film chat, this one. This file's different. Concrete. Perhaps deceptively so. This file describes what it's like to be haunted by something ordinary, and yet to perceive it to be extraordinary, or even supernatural. This might be what it's like to hallucinate perspective — to see the world as it usually is, while imagining a different inside of your mind.

This file also contains a JPEG. If what the hacker says is true, he (she? it?) has got an astounding grasp of cross-dimensional file formats. Not to mention the English language. And the internet! It's certainly striking, the notion that our 21st century info-hemorrhage could be so massive that it just bleeds into another world.

Which brings me to the photograph itself. I recognise that JPEG, because I posted it, minus the colour pattern, on my Tumblr, two days back — the same Tumblr, so it seems, referenced by my extratemporal friend. That shadow photo seems to have exerted an influence on his shadow visions. And he wants more.

What I want is to see where this goes. My main concern is not having enough good photos to keep the hauntings coming. To that end, if you've got any pictures you think might qualify as 'intriguing' (and you don't mind possibly seeing them uploaded to another planet) consider sharing them online and posting the URL on my Slate of Entry.

You could help a great deal just by posting links to one or two of your, say, Flickr photos. I'm committed to releasing anything that sparks from your shot into the Public Domain, for use by you or anyone else in any way whatsoever. No copyright. It's condition 1.

PLQ.

Previous chronological appearance of a shadowy figure
Next chronological appearance of a shadowy figure

Crossing Over

2010-10-18T22:46:00.013-04:00

It happened at Vodden and Main.
The world vulgar and beady, it sat there and changed.
Dispersing the cloud-up I'd followed I'd gathered disguising the groundwork I'd blue-skied I'd fingered dissolving directions I'd angled, remained
And landed at Vodden and Main.
I died there, at Vodden and Main.

It takes my breath the way a life is stained.
Undressing the curling you dance in you turn in unstopping arresting you give in you take in unfeeling all-seeing you bust out deranged.
You cut me at Vodden and Main.
You show me at Vodden and Main
And with the answer my vessel is drained.
Avoiding the cross-up I hold up I speed up and skidding wrongturning I trip up I fuck up and striding unswerving I wake up, insane:

Our eyes lock at Vodden and Main.
Our fates join at Vodden and Main.
We'll not see it or escape its like again.
Inventing. Dissenting. We'll founder and ponder unglimpsing or missing we'll wander, well yonder; no matter how long we can go on, entrained —
The truth lies at Vodden and Main.

PLQ.

[ From the chronology journal. ]

A shadowy figure watches Break Up Club

2010-10-05T10:24:00.030-04:00

[ While attending the Toronto International Film Festival, I admit it was mere whimsy that kept me checking my server for another hacked file, perhaps referencing one of the films I'd seen. But I never found one, and I had come to feel quite the grandiose fool for suspecting myself the target of some film-reviewing internet conspiracy, based on a single freak occurrence. That is, until last night, when I found this. —PLQ. ]

A shadowy figure says, "Again, a three-jewelled grid. Though... they're not jewels, exactly. Their apparent three-jewelledness is an illusion of the grid itself. They project dimension, but it's a trick of the light. They're no more real than the circles inscribed around those triangles, down below."

   A hollow voice says, "So? What's your point?"

   The figure says, "I don't have one. Is that a problem?"
   The voice says, "Long as you don't stop seeing the illusion..."

   The figure says, "I see a man with a camera. He's just come from stalking his ex-girlfriend with this camera: a camera he was given just moments before by a director for the purpose of documenting his break-up. Rather remarkably, none of this felt creepy at all. Perhaps because the guy's quite charming. Or because I was distracted with wondering if the girl he'd just broken up with was the same one from the preceding scene — the opening scene, in which he records a surprise birthday ambush on the woman he loves. Who may or may not be the same woman."
   The voice says, "You don't know?"
   The figure says, "I didn't know, until he showed up unwelcome at her place with the director's camera. Not only is it the same girl, but we're told the man has split with her and reconciled repeatedly, so no sooner is her identity resolved than I am wondering about the how and when of the next make-up — a nice bit of narrative elegance. Especially, considering the website."
   The voice says, "You haven't mentioned any website."
   The figure says, "Apparently it's something you look at in a cafe."
   The voice says, "I know what a website is."
   The figure says, "This one's called Break Up Club Dot Asia, but that's only half the story. It actually promises to reunite you with your lover, in exchange for the names of another couple to be broken up, by, I guess... some process indistinguishable from magic. Joe — as the man's called — told the director he almost used it to get Flora back. It's even implied that this is why he was chosen for the documentary."
   The voice says, "Okay. You get it. Sorry I doubted you."
   The figure says, "Wanna talk doubt? I can't even see you."

   The hollow voice laughs.

   The figure lights a spike of dwarven foxglove with a book of matches.

   The figure says, "So now he's talking to his best friend, who is also — conveniently — an aspiring filmmaker working retail in a camera shop."

   The figure watches more of Break Up Club.

   The figure takes a drag off the burning spike of dwarven foxglove.

   Time passes.

   The figure grunts. "Interesting."
   The voice says, "Which part?"
   The figure says, "Every part. It's a series of love affairs with the camera."
   The voice says, "Meaning what, exactly?"

   The figure inhales a final pull from the burning spike of dwarven foxglove and disposes of the butt.

   The figure says, "All the scenes, most involving make-ups or break-ups among Joe's circle of friends, appear to be shot entirely with Joe's 'documentary' camera, or with cameras set up by his enthusiastic pal, who reminds us of this fact constantly with his buffoonish back-seat directing. Shots are also pulled from odd sources like security cams, sparking us to wonder briefly how, and by whom. But rather than rely heavily on this self-reflexive tension, as I have seen some do, this story steps surefootedly on its own without any need for a guide rail. Each break-up is immediately followed upon with some specific reason to anticipate the next make-up, and vice versa."
   The voice says, "But if the story stands independently of the camera, how is that a love affair with it?"
   The figure says, "That's just it. It would stand independently, were it not for the fact that every relationship transformation is actually caused by the camera. Whether by getting played back, broken, hidden and then discovered, or just returned to its owner, the camera itself is driving these events. So the relationships all become primarily with the camera."

   The voice titches. "It all sounds a bit unreal, the way you tell it."
   The figure says, "It is a bit unreal. But this fellow, playing 'Joe'..."
   The voice says, "Jaycee Chan."
   The figure says, "He gives his character such a sense of curiosity, that when he turns on a camera it's never an act of vanity so much as un-self-conscious play. His exuberance also does wonders for the relationship chemistry, which simply runs too hot to be cooled by a lens. At times, he single-handedly prevents this story from vanishing into its bellybutton."
   The voice says, "Well, that's not fair. It ranges quite far from navel-gazing, I'd say. Keep watching."

   Time passes.

   The figure says, "Well, that's an odd turn."
   The voice says, "How so?"
   The figure says, "Although the rough-hewn documentary shooting style remains, the director has exited the picture by this point. And the make-up/break-up cycle has sunk into a lull. There are some leftover questions about the film's viewpoint, but they're quite subtle, and the central love story has abandoned all tension. There's just so little left to think about, I'm pretty much reduced to pondering the slow crawl of that little progress indicator along the bottom."
   The voice says, "See the illusion."
   The figure says, "Alright, alright."

   The figure keeps watching.

   The figure says, "Oh! I see what you mean."
   The voice says, "Not everything was as worked-out as it seemed, was it?"
   The figure says, "Well, yeah, that. But it's more than that. This relationship has suddenly outgrown the camera. It's about real grudges now, and it's pretty perceptive about the slow chill that can set into a relationship. Almost as if they overheard your criticism, things have just taken a turn for the real. It's like, the movie got wise to its own illusion partway through, and decided to just step outside of it."
   The voice says, "Neat, hadn't thought of it that way. Makes perfect sense then that the documentary aspect disappears."
   The figure says, "Oh, totally."

   The voice coughs.
   The figure watches.

   The figure says, "Wow, some spot-on depictions here of the cruel sideswipes people can take through each other's lives when they're at odds. No cartoon break-up this time: it's just slow and messy, and I could hardly feel more involved in all the missed connections and frosty silences."
   The voice says, "Knew you'd like it."
   The figure says, "Actually there was a point at which the picture faded to black, as if to say: that was the pop-up version. Now, here's the way it really happens. That's when the grudges started."
   The voice says, "True."
   The figure says, "So, having let it all go slack for maybe ten minutes, they slowly rein it back in, trading each situation portending a break-up for another with their former aplomb, only never arriving at the actual break-up. It's withheld. Instead of the earlier comedic reversals, they've now opted for a turning of screw."

   The voice says, "Yes, yes. One question, though."
   The figure says, "Shoot."
   The voice says, "Who are 'they'?"
   The figure says, "They? They. Whoever paints this grid with light."
   The voice says, "I see."
   The figure steps back. "Who are they?"

   The voice pauses for what could be a shrug.

   The voice says, "I was just wondering if you knew."
   The figure says, "All I know is what I've seen."

   The figure watches the conclusion of Break Up Club.

   Something moves in the dark.

   The figure says, "Well! That was unexpected!"
   The voice says, "Quite a twist, eh?"
   The figure says, "The turn at the end? Well, it wasn't hard to see that one coming, but I was pretty curious how it would play out, so, it did work for me. And it did make me think about the earlier scenes differently, which is always cool. But it's the final resolution of the love story that actually surprised me — and not in a good way."
   The voice says, "What?? Dude! That was like, the best stuff."
   The figure says, "Oh there's great stuff in there, I agree. Joe and Flora's last scene together is so raw, yet it achieves such clarity about how real love navigates, that it's the jewel of the film. Yeah, they nailed that one: it really should've been the story's final word on the relationship."
   The voice says, "But then we'd miss out on Sunny's star turn!"
   The figure says, "Sunny? Yeah, his best-friend supergeek schtick was hilarious. Giving him a pivotal role in the denouement was 'amazing', to borrow one of his best lines."

   The voice laughs. "To borrow like, half his lines."

   The figure says, "And the way they worked the website and the documentary crew back into things was also perfect. What I don't understand is why, after all was said and done, they felt the need to return to the love story and change its trajectory one last time. It wasn't necessary. It's a turn too far."
   The voice says, "Hmm. It did sort of go a bit cartoony again right before the end credits."
   The figure says, "Precisely. Why would they turn back to a masterfully conquered page just to write in the margins? Cut literally 30 seconds off the end of this story, and its echo could have been so much stronger."
   The voice says, "So, what, it's a bad movie now because of the last 30 seconds?"
   The figure says, "The wrong 30 seconds can easily ruin things. But no, no, this is actually one of the most engaging experiences I've ever had in this pit. I'd love to see the nTwine..."

A multi-coloured series of wisps rises from the pit, tracing a long, interlacing, left-to-right pattern of glowing words and lines in mid-air...

The last of the wisps disappears, leaving only the colour pattern itself, which pulses for a while, then slowly fades away.

   The figure says, "Um. What just happened?"
   The voice says, "You did. You said the magic word."
   The figure says, "What word? nTwi—"
   The voice says, "Ssshush! Unless you want to see it again..."
   The figure says, "No, I'm good."
   The voice says, "How do you even know that word?"
   The figure says, "I... don't remember."
   The voice says, "But you were able to decode it?"
   The figure says, "Sure. It's the narrative structure. Looked accurate enough."
   The voice says, "This bodes well."
   The figure says, "Does it?"

   The voice pauses for what could be a smile.

   The voice says, "Until the next, my friend..."

   The figure waves.

Previous review by a shadowy figure
Next chronological appearance of a shadowy figure

A shadowy figure watches Long Pigs

2010-09-08T08:00:00.072-04:00

[ Shortly after seeing Long Pigs while attending Fan Expo, I found this transcript, JPEG-and-all, on my server's HD. Hacking a server to randomly express an opinion about a movie seems unlikely, but since I pretty much agree with it, here it is. —PLQ. ]

A shadowy figure says, "A painted grid of some kind. Quite large. Big enough to fill this whole pit. And again I see there is a three-jewelled sigil, on the far side. Always on the far side. More runes below the grid seem to indicate degrees of movement — appropriate, given that the grid appears to be animated."

   A hollow voice says, "Who are you talking to?"

   The figure says, "You, numbnuts."
   The voice says, "So, are you gonna watch it, or what?"

   The shadowy figure watches Long Pigs.

   The figure says, "Satirical documentary about a killer. He offers helpful tips and tricks to his interviewers as he goes about the horrible business of murdering and eating his victims. In all other respects he appears to be fairly normal and well-adjusted. Where I have seen this before?"
   The voice says, "Another pit?"
   The figure says, "Most likely..."

   The figure snaps.

   The figure says, "Man Bites Dog!"
   The voice says, "Yes! That was a good one."
   The figure says, "It was a good one. Only, this one is in full colour, and the killer is a cannibal. An incredibly creepy cannibal who provides angle after angle of cooking and preparation advice. I have to say, it's very believably portrayed by this fellow, if it is a portrayal — did I miss his name?"
   The voice says, "Anthony Alviano. And it's totally a portrayal."
   The figure says, "You've seen this one before, haven't you?"
   The voice says, "I'm here all day."
   The figure says, "Sounds like a slog. This is a grisly story. Way more of the process of slaughtering and cooking a human is shown here than I really needed to see. But it's really in the scenes of everyday life where the satire is at its sharpest, with Alviano moving so plausibly from playing a monster to a level-headed employee, even talking his hapless co-worker out of indulging in self-destructive violence."
   The voice says, "Indeed."
   The figure says, "Alviano is so good that those scenes may even be sharper than in Man Bites Dog."
   The voice says, "I dunno... I'm not sure anything can top Benoit Poelvoorde singing a drunken ode to cinema as he dines with his own documentarians."
   The figure says, "Before passing out on his plate."

   The hollow voice laughs.

   Something moves in the dark.

   The figure says, "That's the thing about this Alviano. He's not that extreme, which makes him more insidious. But, I fear the makers of this yarn may have overplayed their hand."
   The voice says, "How so?"
   The figure says, "I picked up on where Long Pigs was going well before the secondary interviews, conducted with some sort of law enforcement officer, and... was it a psychic?"
   The voice says, "A psychologist."
   The figure says, "Ah. While those two added some amusing perspective early on, toward the end they really started to become mouthpieces for different moral positions. Boring moral positions."
   The voice says, "Too heavyhanded?"
   The figure says, "Well, yeah, and it also serves to narrow one's interpretive options at the end, for no good reason. Particularly if the mouthpiece opinions are pretty shallow, which they were. Even if you don't accept either of them, they'll tend to dominate the interpretive space. Anyway, none of that should be necessary if one has done one's satirical homework, and I think they mostly have."

   The figure adds, "I mean... when we've been shown the entire dismemberment and packing of a human corpse in this amazing, choreographed fast-motion sequence, and then we see the man who did the dismembering participate in some common sporting activity with his friends, I don't think we need additional interviewees to mark out for us where normal ends and frightening begins. At best, it's wasted time. At worst, it sours the irony on the tongue, as I think it did here — especially at the conclusion."

   The voice says, "I agree that it probably would have been better at the end without those interviews."
   The figure says, "And that's not the only place the safe route was taken. Alviano is made more sympathetic by being given a rage-filled friend to serve as a foil, making the cannibal seem all the more ordinary by comparison."
   The voice says, "What's wrong with that? It worked, didn't it? And I liked the friend. His bits were the funniest."
   The figure says, "They were. But his participation in Alviano's gruesome hobby made it less believable. And giving the killer a buddy who's even more out-of-control made it too easy for us to know exactly what we were meant to be thinking about the killer, like it was handed to us. Same problem, really, as with the pile-on of moral-inducing interviews at the end. The makers of this satire seem to have been a little too preoccupied with the possibility that viewers would not understand the point of Alviano's performance on its own. But, they needn't have been."
   The voice says, "Yeah, overcaution and satire don't really mix well. Man Bites Dog was a braver piece of art, and ended stronger."
   The figure says, "Man Bites Dog was focused less on the ethics of terrible behaviour — which are rather obvious — and more on the ethics of documenting terrible behaviour. The results were both funnier and more worthwhile, since serial killers are less likely to change their ways than the ones reporting on them."
   The voice says, "Actually, both are vanishingly unlikely."
   The figure says, "Good point."
   The voice says, "We should just watch Man Bites Dog as well. It would be an interesting comparison."
   The figure says, "From your lips to the pit's ears! You do have lips. Don't you?"

   The voice says nothing.

   The figure waves.

Next review by a shadowy figure

Lifestrips as 'The Moment'

2009-07-16T15:06:00.013-04:00

Yes. I have glimpsed an alternate reality, call it a tandem timeline, in which either I'm a little younger in the line, or the time has aged more quickly around me, but in which I — or let's say, for argument's sake, Katharina Anna Helming and Marc Seestaedt, via Scott McCloud — have entered the same near-deserted media intersection with almost the same series of images, from across space and time and even language.

This is what it is to fathom. And if only one real fathoming in a hundred is extra-local, or one in a thousand, extra-national, then I don't have to tell you how rare and precious is the extratemporal, or why I balk at discarding such events in a pointless paroxysm of creative panic. When two worldlines collide so distinctly and in the particular, it's like a single particle of rare energy ripples through the fabric of all possible future identities.

Almost everyone steers away from an identity crisis, right? That's a dangerous place to be, especially for those who have not yet mastered the mentally prestidigitative arts of just. Pushing. 'Reset'. And. Starting. Again. (That's a sequence I pieced together from the Experiment's multi-planar network of blog operatives, for which a 'Rosetta' twine has conveniently been left, of the sort that one leaves for oneself in the knowledge that one is prone to losing one's mind.)

Speaking of which? Oh right, Lifestrips. A very thoughtful, observational webcomic with an effective use of composition and photo software to complement the mood, from a duo who appear to have beaten me to the self-conscious-shaving-self-portrait punch by a few months, and who update more frequently and have way more sex than I do. You should follow their stuff! And I'm pleased to discover that my personal incursion into this timeline has, at the very least, succeeded in meeting 'The Moment'.

NEXT: I will try, 'That's her'.

Brainware Upgrade

2009-07-16T12:52:00.020-04:00

No indication yet if my operatives in the Swap Universe have any way of picking up this feed, or have even received my field reports as previously transmitted piecemeal, in real-time, via Tumblr. But if any of you fellow time walkers out there are wondering whether the Experiment is still a go, well I'm back, at least, and I think I've figured it out:

That's her!

…you'll need a second or two, of course, to recover from that stunning revelation. But when you're ready, here's the digest version of how I came to epiphanise those two words:

Listen!

Listen!

Listen!

This device generates little black rectangles, for posting, thusly.

Black is so 3 hours ago.
Watch, as I throw down with an Amorphous Quadrangle.

Ah. This is a range-limited eye.
And an audio post’s pending, which I don’t even recall making…

Listen!

I seem not to have been above leaving audio notes for myself.
I find it all a bit... well, yeah. Unfathomable.

Something in here may fathom. It's difficult to pinpoint…

Listen!

≈ Fathoms!
Atypically, yeah, but it does. Meaning — I may belong at this event.

≈ Fathom a Self-Made Prison.
"When this wall was built, Franklin Roosevelt was 7 years old and John A. Macdonald was the prime minister of Canada. But it still stands…If you don't think psychiatric patients can do good work, come down to Queen and Shaw." —historian Geoffrey Reaume, quoted in The Toronto Star.

≈ Fathom Born, Murdered.
You can actually see the chisel marks made by psychiatric patients in the walls they themselves built over 100 years ago at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Some raise more questions than others.

≈ Fathom π.
Well, π has been around a lot longer than even a 19th Century wall, but for some reason, mathematical glyphs as graffiti feels more like a 21st Century thing to do. We have intersected with an intriguing timeline, alright. Only way for this fathom to get any purer would be to swap the π for an actual ? — so where's the zappage? Still missing a coordinate. Sometimes, time trumps space.

≈ Fathom Incongruity.
This is the spatial relationship of those two things.

Listen!

I was wrong about the commercial breaks. They fathom, but fleetingly. What was the precise point of incursion? Timing is everything — try, 'That's her.'

Hypothesis 0.4: Swap Thing!

2009-07-02T10:42:00.004-04:00

I've got 17,550 new pages of Hypothesis for you. Let's call them, collectively, Episode 0.4. Granted, there are only two panels on each page, but that is still too much comic book for anyone to realistically enjoy in a lifetime. So, I've implemented a special technology to move through this stuff automatically for you, with audio. It's called, 'YouTube'. No, it's still a webcomic; it's a genuine piece of my comic (dis)continuity. No, it's also still just a movie. It's what it is. And that is: the best way to chronicle a subplot in which I work to save an odd, dystopian 'Swap Universe' from jackbooted copyright thugs and/or bad Hollywood 'event movies'. Speaking of which, reviewed in this episode: Transformers 2, Valkyrie, and the Daredevil: Director's Cut.

NO COPYRIGHTS WERE INFRINGED IN THE CAPTURE OF THIS VIDEO.But to the extent possible under law, I waive all of my own copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this work and grant them immediately to the Public Domain. Subscribe to this and future Hypothecasts free, in the iTunes Music Store with this link, or point your alternative podcast subscriber of choice at this standard podcast feed URL.

Tripping at the wrong moment

2009-06-21T09:25:00.009-04:00

These sorts of mine fires can stay lit for a very long time. One burned in the city of Zwickau, Germany from 1476 to 1860. Another coal fire in Germany, at a place called Brennender Berg (Burning Mountain), has been smoking continually since 1688!
— Joshua Foer, @ Boing Boing

It's dismaying that a few hyperintelligent — yet short-lived — bits of living carbon routinely start fires in their planet's crust that could last a thousand orbits, by accident.

Imagine zapping into a universe in which someone could just trip at the wrong moment, and thus spark every river for miles to turn into a perfectly transparent, contiguous pane of glass, and remain so for thirty generations. And you might have something approaching my level of panic here.

A 'Swipe File' Controversy and the Anxiety of Influence

2009-06-12T07:09:00.011-04:00

I am about to link you to a comment section on somebody else's blog, in which I am hilariously informed by Andrew Weiss that I belong in 'The Directory of Internet Martyrs forthcoming from Who Gives a Shit Press'. The comment was sharply written, and not far off the mark.

Are you surprised that I am telling you this? If so, then I have a bone to pick with you that is similar to the bone I have to pick with those who are outraged (those being Dave Ex Machina, et. al.) that a well-known comics critic (Rich Johnston) has been rather cavalierly finding similar pieces of art, posting them side-by-side, and calling it 'Swipe File'.

The Dave Ex Machina post and comments are chock full of pointless legalistic wrangling over what is the traditional interpretation of 'swipe file', which you can cut through, if you care, in about a minute by googling variations of phrases containing 'swipe file' to discover that copywriters (like, say... Rich Johnston, and myself), have a particularly non-pejorative view of the phrase, 'swipe file'.

But what I am concerned with is not who interprets this phrase how, which I think is irrelevant. What gets to me is this prevailing attitude among participants of this thread that pointing out similarities between artworks and calling it a 'swipe' or say, a 'borrow' is treading close to some imaginary ethical line that is then heinously crossed the minute it is shown that the two artworks could not have directly influenced each other, or that the influence trajectory might have been reversed. And just the thought of what is so wrong about this attitude, finally, pulled me back into the comments thread to get it 'out there', wherever 'there' happens to be today...

This is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. And if I had written this article, I would now feel morally conflicted over all the hits and attention coming to this page. There is a hair’s breadth of difference, if any, between what this page is doing to Rich Johnston, and what it alleges he did with 'Swipe File'. There is no need for this hypocrisy. The more morally consistent and incidentally, far socially smarter position, is to be open to people criticising you even when you think they are obviously wrong and the things they say make you sound like a wanker or a ripoff artist — those things are not crimes, so critical appraisals alleging such are not crimes, either. And no it is not comparable to accusing someone of murder, that is obviously an idea that is totally off its meds.

It is not hard to clear your conscience when you dash off an opinion of a fellow artist [or critic] — all you need to do is give the same liberties that you require for your own expression. I find that most of the opinions on this page do not measure up to this standard.

The Brits have it right. It might be just the online Brits, but I have found them much more comfortable with this sort of thing, and it’s a richer environment more conducive to learning - i.e. I think it’s superior to everyone being ready to take umbrage, because criticism needs to be justified or something. I don’t want to offend everyone but this is the truth so there it is, whether shits are given is incidental.

Battlestar Galactica Miniseries, nTwined

2009-06-06T11:09:00.013-04:00

Bizarrely, I thought at first, upon discovering on my shelf a 2003 miniseries entitled Battlestar Galactica, I began to perceive threads flowing alongside the narrative, glowing almost as neon to my view. I had seen these threads before! I decided I had to follow them. I decided I had to know what they meant, what's the shape they were revealing. They had flung my mind into a dream that I broke with violently the moment I fully understood, the pull of those lines was so powerful on me. There was no point in just sitting and staring at them. I had to find a way to hit 'record'.

So I clicked over to the most logical place in this operating system wherefrom to design a tool that would let me do just that. Imagine my surprise to discover there the evidence, that not only have I already created this tool (along with many more collected in a twisty maze of personal code which I cannot yet easily navigate), but I have already traced this story with it — or at least all the narrative threads in the first two hours.

No wonder I was flashing back. This is the network. These are the secret lines of communication I've been seeking as long as I... actually, even longer than I can recall. And though I cannot grasp their ultimate destination, and I'm not sure whether I will ever continue to trace these particular threads, it is the vision that's the thing, and now that I have it, I hold this 'nTwine' (as I seem to have called it) as the best way available of finding the hidden entrances and exits from this world that no one appears to know about except perhaps for others of my kind. Are you one of us? You may not even know it. More on this front 'soon', if that can mean anything coming from a chrononaut.

What if Edgar Allan Poe were REALLY on Twitter?

2009-05-28T13:18:00.008-04:00

I remember Edgar Allan Poe. (No, not that one.) And Shakespeare. And Lewis Carroll. It's been a little fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure that these people existed in my universe in some form. Most other stuff, particularly in relation to technology, did not. I mention Poe, because my life experience on this world is for me somewhat like reading The Raven, only with almost all the nouns time-encrypted. To wit...

RT the Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious column of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly sleeping, suddenly there came a beeping,
As of some one gently singing, singing, as my handset's for.
"'Tis some dialler," I muttered, "ringing, as my handset's for —
        Only this and zippo more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the 'sweeps' November;
And each separate TV phosphor wrought its ghost upon the floor,
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my feeds surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Len0re —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels tag Len0re —
        Tagless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain flickering of each yellow tungsten
Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to chill the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some dialler entreating parlance as my handset's for —
Some late dialler entreating parlance as my handset's for; —
        This it is and zippo more."

Presently my brains grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Dude," said I, "or Dudette, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was sleeping, and so gently you came singing,
And so faintly you came ringing, ringing as my handset's for,
That I scarce was sure I heard you" — here I flipped the handset's door —
        Darkness there and zippo more.

Deep into the handset peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the readout gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Len0re?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Len0re!" —
        Merely this and zippo more.

Back to the computer turning, all my brains within me burning,
Soon again I heard a ringing, somewhat louder than before.
"Surely", said I, "surely that is someone on my windowed friends-list;
Let me see, then, what the rat is, and this mystery explore —
Let my heart be chill a moment, and this mystery explore,
        'Tis the list and zippo more!"

Open here I launched the Twitter, when, with many a flirt and flitter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the bloggy days of yore;
Not a single smiley made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched as my computer's for —
Perched above JPEGs of Jolie just as my computer's for —
        Perched, and sat, and zippo more.

Then this black-ass bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the avatar it wore,
"Though the crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly, grim and ancient Raven, wandering from my Dual Core —
Tell me what thy lordly tag is on my Intel Dual Core!"
        RT the Raven "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to interact so plainly,
Though its answer little pagerank — little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird as his computer's whore —
Bird or beast upon the JPEGed tit as his computer's whore,
        With such tag as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the pixel tit, spoke only
That one word, as if his brains in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered — not a feather then he fluttered —
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before —
On the morrow he will block me, as my hopes have flown before."
        Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken, @reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it Twitters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master, a social media Disaster
Following fast and followed faster till his Tweets one burden bore —
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
        Of 'Never — nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a futon seat in front of bird, and tits and Core;
Then, upon the futon sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore —
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
        Meant in Tweeting "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no key or button pressing
For the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned atop my Dual Core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the futon's downy cover that the screen-light gloated o'er,
But whose downy-browny cover with the screen-light gloating o'er,
        She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew tonic, perfumed from some unseen chronic
Smoked by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the parquet floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee — by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite — respite and a big fatty, from thy memories of Len0re!
Blaze, oh blaze this kind big fatty, and forget this lost Len0re!"
        RT the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "meme of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil! —
Whether hacker sent, or whether hashtag tossed thee from this Core,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desktop bare enchanted —
On this by horror haunted — tell me truly, I implore —
Is there — conscience in the Cloud? — tell me — tell me, I implore!"
        RT the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "meme of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Space that bends above us — by that Trek we both adore —
Tell this brain with sorrow laden if, after the Final Fade-In,
I can haz a sainted maiden whom the angels tag Len0re — ?
Haz a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels tag Len0re."
        RT the Raven "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign of ending, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, defriending —
"Get thee back into the hashtag and my Intel Dual Core!
Leave no cookie as a token of that lie thy brain hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the tits my system's for!
Take thy beak from out my heart, for I shall put thee on ignore!"
        RT the Raven "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the jolly tits of Jolie just as my computer's for;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a daemon's that is dreaming,
And the screen-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my brain from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
        Shall be lifted — nevermore!

Warren Ellis's Webcomics Week Explored - PART 1

2009-05-19T17:44:00.024-04:00

What do you get when you select all the webcomics artists who follow a certain foulmouthed comics writer by the name of Warren Ellis (of Transmetropolitan fame, and currently writing FreakAngels and Ignition City)? When such selection is jumpstarted by Ellis putting out the call personally on Twitter, you get a motherfucking kickass webcomics roundup thread, that's what. It's not the first time he's done this, but the collection appears to be snowballing.

I've only tackled the first three-odd pages of the thread so far in my reading and in this post (up to where Warren himself comments, 'There is some amazing shit in here...'), and I've already been solidly entertained for days. And there is just way too much good stuff in even those few pages to time-manage into one post, but it's definitely worth giving a shot. I admit to being fairly fresh to the webcomics world. Most of these titles are new to me. But let's start with the ones that are more likely to be new to you...

Plan B
by mitz

The first post off the top of the thread, this supervillain tale is still my personal fave. And it's not just the main character's take-no-prisoners fuck-with-superheroes 'tude that clinches it — it's the generous helping of pan-deflationary wit.

I have excerpted a couple of my favourite 'small' moments rather than the actiony bits, though there are plenty of them, and they're all good++funny. The writer's tight grip on POV sharpens both Veronica's pop-villain interior monologue and the combat scenes themselves. I've read a smackload of 'supervillain-grows-huge' stories — but I hadn't ever read one that made me think I know what it is actually like to have mondo limbs and organs. Now I have.

I have only one bone to pick with 'Plan B': no RSS feed. I have a need for feeds!

Sails of Blood
by Jason Brezinski, Ozzy Longoria, et. al.

Posted unassumingly with a rather small thumbnail, Sails of Blood was almost missed. It wasn't until my third pass that I finally clicked through to this tale of a 17th Century vampire alchemist aboard a zombie-captained pirate ship crewed by drugged Mayans in the Caribbean, and hotly pursued by an assassin chick squad from the Inquisition! Well worth it. The art is amazingly atmospheric.

Nathan Sorry
by Rich Barrett

I like the clean-lined art in Nathan Sorry, and the storyline is intriguing, if still in its infancy: a man starts a new life with an orphaned (?) $3 million after being presumed dead in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. But it's the nicely captured character moments among the denizens of the diner where he seeks refuge that really marked this tale as a must-follow for me.

Metaphysical Neuroma
by Attila Adorjany

Told with a mixture of iconography and more traditional comic art, Metaphysical Neuroma has so far been successfully balanced between coherent narrative and the random-seeming collection of visual inspirations into which many modern experimental webcomics tend to disappear. I have to say there were a couple of places in the course of the first ten pages where it actually kinda blew my mind, narratively. And that's my favourite kind of mindjob.

Wide Awake
by Eric Trautmann, Brandon Jerwa, Mirco Pierfederici

You have to love anything that sports a great big knife in the eye! And the art is obviously anything but. This one hasn't gotten much further than its first hero splash page, but it looks like possibly an enjoyable read waiting to happen.

Sean and Wormwood, The Friendly Satanists
by Lore Sjöberg

I remember giggling at Lore's Alt Text videos and have been pleased to see him generating new webcomics concepts, at Bad Gods, like they're made of light or something (which I guess, they are). His snappy-comeback-riddled Sean and Wormwood strip plays to the current web's strengths with self-contained morselly joke strips that are also part of a larger clickable storyline.

Lydia
by Kevin Church & Max Riffner

A character from another Kevin Church strip, The Rack, quits for a corporate job, and her adventures are spun-off into this fledgling, but finely observed, workplace strip. I was unfamiliar with The Rack, but already found myself identifying with Lydia.

In doing a survey of such a large number of comics I just don't have time or resources to chase every print issue down for those that require it, so the law of my private jungle for this particular series of articles had to be, 'If I can't realistically get my headspace into these print-dependent storylines, then I can't realistically know whether to recommend them, either.' So although the remaining four comics I'll point you at for now have been around a little longer, they are all still fully available to read, from the start, online...

The Secret Knots
by Juan Santapau

A sometime-episodic, sometime-less-structured, but always-narrative oasis, The Secret Knots is like chamber music with a dark, dissonant undercurrent. The art and script cooperate beautifully to produce emotional crosstalk that is not always pleasant but feels true.

Odysseus The Rebel
by Steven Grant & Scott Bieser

A dynamic retelling of The Odyssey, recasting Odysseus himself, rather than as an errant hero punished by the gods, instead as humanity's hero against their meddlesome interference. This Steven Grant-penned adaptation feels modern but steers remarkably true to the source — both from what I remembered and from the random Wikipedia spotchecks I conducted. The greyscale art works well for the story's classical feel, and as Homer well learned, the cunning Odysseus is a very engaging hero (unless you're reading this from ancient Rome in which case he's a dishonourable, underhanded Greek). So engaging, that his popularity spawned the original extra-spectacular sequel: Grant and Bieser do it justice.

Sin Titulo
by Cameron Stewart

I've spotted pages from Sin Titulo quoted around the web before, but I'd never read it all the way through, thinking I was further behind than I really was. Starting off the top, I found it minimalistically evocative and economically narrated (witness the multiple meanings packed into the final panel above — if you don't see them, read more: you will). It has some of the markings of noir, but is more dreamy. More thoughtful. Just as mysterious. And I suspect it is about to tip into some rather serious sci-fi — but guessing is half the fun! If aren't already subscribed to Sin Titulo, you probably should be.

Eye of the Gods
by Gerimi Burleigh

Another one without any RSS feed that I could find! How am I going to get updated on this? I don't really do bookmarks anymore — my most recent one is about three years old. Anyway, that's my problem to solve I suppose, because Eye of the Gods is a very fluidly readable fusion of a mystery thriller about clairvoyance, and a personal story about an artist caught between his relationships and his 'vision'. I appreciated the resonances between those two worlds, along with the accessible, cinematic framing (above), and hope to see both further explored as the storyline unfolds.

So, that's all I figured it would be prudent to squeeze into one post, but I am definitely not done with Warren's thread. There will be another installment, wherein I'll select further from page 4 and beyond. Of course, you could simply leapfrog me and totally pwn my slow ass, and just continue on spelunking without a guide. Ain't rocket science, folks! 87

Oh yes! I should probably mention that I am not a disinterested party. Like many others I could not rationally resist Warren's call, and posted my own webcomic to page three of the big bad thread.

Memory and Environment are Related

2009-05-17T09:04:00.004-04:00

These installations by Antony Gormley posted by Synaptic Stimuli (and which came to me via something called an Electronic Rattle Bag), appear to comprise a spatial understanding of what I attempted unsuccessfully to explain, here: how I can pick up little threads of my exploded former consciousness (which has been, make no mistake — replaced) and piece together my place in this world all over again, every time, via interpolation. If you were to cut the person out of this structure — erase it, leaving a human-shaped void — what would remain is what remains for me, when I awake. Not memories, but their remaindered outward paths. I stumble across a new/old one, almost every day.

Real Far Away From an Arcade in 1970s Japan

2009-05-07T13:52:00.005-04:00

In an early sign of where things started to go wrong on this planet, some '70s and '80s arcade games acquired a habit of opening with a copyright prayer, by which I mean, an appeal to an entity that could never realistically intervene in the situation. It's a lot like writing a disclaimer on your forehead that your hairstyle is not to ever be seen outside the immediate environs of your skull. You'll run into this kind of magical thinking all the time on this world. These games hail from an era when such absurd lightning-in-a-bottle claims had less legal bite than they do today. But even now, controlling copyright is still as empty a prayer as controlling perception itself. I'm doing all this, for example, on one of the most locked-up software platforms in history. And still, I can have my way with it. And my way, in this review of the third row of my Cydia apps for a Time Walker's iPhone series, is to rescue the relevance to this planet of early video game history, by aiming you at the emulators of interfaces from the dawn of man/machine.

mame4iphone
By this point in history, the 'rainbow' from Apple's crest, has fallen. MAME beams a broad spectrum of decades-old arcade games through nearly every type of computer or handheld you can name, except the iPhone. In fact, you could fill encyclopedias with the gaming knowledge that is excluded from this device by Apple's prohibition on emulators. There is certainly no performance argument for it. The 1983 vector game above, for example, plays great, and had me torquing my body in sync. (But the standard mame4iphone controls are not ideal for this one; it seems to have been coded with some sort of flightstick in mind.) So I used Cydia to install MAME to my jailbroken iPhone, then the Cydia version of 'Discover' to transfer my zipped ROMs to

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/MAME/roms/

on the iPhone. Then start mame4iphone, and play! If you don't have any ROMs,
'Googling' MAME v3.07 Beta 5 ROMs should turn some compatible collections up.

From M-4 to Space Invaders
Another fascinating game that you can play with mame4iphone, M-4 is essentially Space Invaders, only released a year earlier, in 1977, by Midway, before Taito turned it 90 degrees and replaced the mirror-image opponent with the now-famous drone armada. Even with a one-year head start and the same basic toolset, M-4 faded into obscurity, while Space Invaders seems to have inspired the first arcade gold-rush. Why? M-4 was, after all, a pretty smart machine for entertaining the human brain, presenting a single opponent that not only targets you through a reactive (i.e. player-destructible) shield, but evades your fire. Space Invaders dispensed with the evasion, instead borrowing Breakout's deep, if abstract, player-reactivity to graft onto its own, more concrete world of eroding shields and fungible enemy formations. In Space Invaders you are pitted consistently against the consequences of your own actions, rather than against just a half-competent AI. As it turns out, that's an even smarter way for a machine to attempt to entertain a human brain, as demonstrated by all the copycat hits that followed, from Asteroids and Missile Command, to Space Panic, Pac-Man, and even, Tetris.

snes4iphone
In features, if not in proximity to the most seminal moments in game history, the Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator for the iPhone is more advanced. You can play in portrait mode, with a layout similar to MAME's, but also in landscape with the controller keys overlaid transparently (as above). I prefer landscape, though I wish they had positioned the game screen a little higher and the keys a tad lower. (It's not as hard as it looks to play with your thumbs covering a part of the screen, but considering the overall use of screen real estate, it just doesn't seem necessary.) The SNES emulator also has an array of options, most having to do with sacrificing stuff to make it faster. As with MAME, I found that turning off the sound produces the greatest uptick into playability. And also as with MAME, you can transfer your Googled SNES ROMs to your iPhone at

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/SNES/

Super Mario World
Super Mario World is the crowning glory of an alternate branch of games — which I call 'clockworks' — and which developed alongside the whole reactive branch rooted in Space Invaders. In a clockworks game, it's as if the 'periodically rotating' aspect of M-4's innovative shield undergoes runaway evolution, whereas the 'player-editable' aspect of it that was cultivated in Space Invaders, instead becomes vestigial, or even disappears, altogether. Player absorption is achieved by presenting a series of decisions made spatiotemporally complex by the cyclic movements of dangerous screen elements, like turtles that bounce to and fro, and platforms that raise and lower to different metronomes. Navigating clockwork was prefigured somewhat with Pac-Man's ghosts (though they are an attempt to seem intelligent so anticipating their routes feels like cheating), and then debuted as a distinct, unapologetic style in 1981 with Frogger and Donkey Kong, evolving into the Super Mario series to great acclaim, pitting humans all the while primarily against the undisguised gears of the machine. Kind of obvious now why this lineage succeeded best when paired with a radical concentration of 'cutesy' graphics. More than other interactive methods, a clockworks needs be humanised.

psx4iphone
The one emulation test that didn't reward me with a fun and interesting experience was psx4iphone. The PlayStation is a much more advanced console than SNES, and a decade beyond most of my MAME ROMs. I ransacked my inherited collection and managed to turn up two PlayStation games: Tenchu, and Bushido Blade 2 (pictured). So after ripping them to .bin/.cue files with Toast for the Mac and transferring them to my iPhone at

/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/PSX/

I discovered that Tenchu didn't work (no video), and that Bushido Blade 2 worked but could not be made to play at an acceptable frame rate, with or without the music. Basically, this is a FAIL but I kept psx4iphone on my phone, and on this list, because both Tenchu and Bushido Blade 2 are fairly sophisticated 3D games, and I don't yet have any sidescrolling, PSX games in my possession on which to perform the test in 2D. If you have managed to make a PSX game play acceptably on the iPhone, which game was it? There is little reason not to venture into arcade (MAME) or console (SNES) history on the iPhone, but you'll likely not get much playability on the PSX front.

NEXT: FOURTH ROW - CoverFlow for your contacts,
and the best iPhone RSS reader.

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Navigate the 'Cydia Apps for a Time Walker' series at Extratemporal Perception...

INTRO
FIRST ROW
SECOND ROW
THIRD ROW (this page)
FOURTH ROW (coming soon)

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - SECOND ROW

2009-05-02T00:02:00.021-04:00

This iPhone screenshot is from an episode of a TV show called Flashpoint, which I discovered on my hard drive, and with which I discovered that the most common video container in the world (anything ending in .AVI), is unplayable on this 'iPhone' handset! It took a little bit of screwing with to get right, but there is an MPlayer app on Cydia you can use to watch this forbidden format. With a few skips and jumps, and provided you don't sic it on anything too hi-rez, it works. But MPlayer expects you to upload its data to an oddly placed folder. I recommend setting this up not as a folder, but as an alias pointing somewhere inside the standard Media folder (just so it doesn't become too difficult to back up all your media at once). Here's how.

iFile to /var/mobile/Media
Use iFile to navigate to your /Media folder so that what you see is pretty similar to the above. (You may not yet have as many folders in there as I do.) This folder is where most of your jailbroken iPhone apps will look for files. You can get to it by various routes (because of preinstalled aliases, which display in iFile in blue), and they are, starting from the top: (1) /private/var/mobile/Media, (2) /var/mobile/Media, (3) /User/Media, and (4) ~/Media — all of those paths lead to the same /Media folder. Once you get there in iFile, tap 'Edit' in the top right corner, then tap the big '+' to create a new folder inside your /Media folder.

Create /MPlayer folder
Fill out the first two fields as shown above. (Case matters.) 'Directory' is a contemporary synonym for a Mac-style folder. The rest of the fields should default to what you see. Tap 'Create'.

iFile to /var
Tap the top left button a couple of times to navigate iFile back to the /var folder,
and then tap 'Edit' and then '+' again.

Create /media alias
MPlayer ignores your /Media folder and instead looks for its files in /var/media. Fill out the screen as above to create an alias instead of a folder at /var/media and to point that alias toward the /User/Media/MPlayer folder that was just created two screenshots ago. Now tap 'Create' and exit iFile, and your MPlayer is set up. Just use Discover to transfer your AVIs to your /Media/MPlayer folder, and start MPlayer!

Start MPlayer
If you've done the setup and transfer right, your vids should show on MPlayer's list,
like Flashpoint appears on this one.

MPlayer
Rather than rotating itself breathlessly with every jerk of your hand like a mental cat chasing a laser pointer, MPlayer opts to simply mix and match orientations in one view, and I have to say, I don't mind the result. It does everything it needs to do without much of a mode switch, which is actually superior to the built-in player. (Apple's screen reorientation acts like its got all the CPU power in the world, but the reality is it gets easily confused and stuck for long moments at forty-odd degree angles.) Run MemTest (that's fourth row, I'll be posting more on it soon) to clean your memory right before playing your video: it can help performance.

Cycorder
The most featured Cydia app is Cycorder, and for good reason: it does for creative video output what MPlayer does for input. You see, one of the video creators to whom access to the iPhone is officially denied is you, because Apple thinks the iPhone hardware's video capabilities are too poor for your tastes! Personally I find the results produce a visual feel that can be quite involving, and sometimes even a little eerie. (Both those links were, like the entirety of this article, written and captured entirely with this handset, and uploaded with Pixelpipe, which you can find in the App Store. And the 'PPVideoEnabler' app that patches Pixelpipe to read your Cycorder vids is available on Cydia.)

iComic
So, you're watching AVIs without conversion on the iPhone. It's not perfect but it basically works for most 350MB-or-below TV episodes. And you're lifestreaming video like you're a roving eye out of Max Headroom. Why not bust out of the same format prison, in sequential art? What you call, comic books. Pictured is just a smattering of comic book files discovered on my hard drive, and then, 'Discovered', via wifi, to my iPhone's /Media/Comic folder, where iComic (also on Cydia) looks for them.

iComic options
Select a .CBZ file. (Unfortunately, iComic doesn't do .CBRs yet, but the conversion process is fairly trivial.) Note that you have the option to skip to your last position, or pick pages from a list.

iComic portrait
In portrait mode, iComic just got completely out of my way like a movie player and immediately filled my screen with pure comic. Which transmogrified into pure frustration, when nothing I tapped or swiped appeared to turn the page, or even exit. I was stuck on page one! Turns out the controls are very simple, if not iPhone-intuitive. Tap bottom corners to page forward and back. Tap top left corner to return to the list. It's a bit picky about accuracy, which seems unnecessary. Anyway it looks great, and in landscape mode, you can even read it...

iComic landscape
Not too shabby. And you can pinch and squeeze to your heart's content. The actual comic book pictured, by the way, would likely not be accepted to the App Store, due to mature themes that appear to have bounced out this artist, and this one, and this one. So odious to me is the news of such barrings that I don't plan to submit Hypothesis to Apple at all, and will instead be looking into how to assimilate iComic and codistribute via the free culture the way these artists have done.

textReader
On free culture: there are hundreds of thousands of free eBook files out there in various formats, and though you aren't wholly prevented from accessing most of them without jailbreaking, you are still placed at an annoyingly far remove from whatever personal collection of .TXTs or .RTFs or .PDBs you already have. Besides, THEY ARE JUST TEXT. This really should not be that complicated: have a file, read a file. You can get back to that ideal by installing this Cydia app textReader, and then transferring your eBooks to the iPhone's /Media/textReader folder.

textReader portrait
Fonts are adjustable, and the app will do landscape, if you swing that way! But it does not read all formats. I seem to have inherited a lot of TomeRaider files, for example, and have yet to find a way to read them on this phone. 8(

NEXT: THIRD ROW - Google Reader, Classic Gaming

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INTRO
FIRST ROW
SECOND ROW (this page)
THIRD ROW
FOURTH ROW (coming soon)

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone: FIRST ROW

2009-04-29T12:39:00.011-04:00

You are looking at an impossible screen. This game Planetfall is under something called 'copyright', and is no longer sold on this world in a modern form. It could easily be converted, but this 'modern' iPhone is under lock and key, and refuses to open its filesystem to the kind of view that will allow you to make that decision. I know it's going to sound like a grim fairy tale of a dystopian grotto zone, but the iPhone indeed protects by default the commercial viability of millions of commercially dead works, blocking them from your view, wherever possible. Protecting zero sales isn't logical: even a supercomputer couldn't do it. This is a serious flaw: not because it isn't important to behave legally, but because the law of this land is functionally insane. Thus, a device that forces you into compliance with it, is also functionally insane, and so is using it.

To my kind, it all sounds very much like publishing a dictionary from which has been struck all words containing the letter S. Because somebody claimed to 'own' that letter 30 years ago and then disappeared. And yes, there really is an elaborate system out there keeping track of it all. Massive resources are expended by globespanning 'corporations' attempting to control the uncontrollable, I shit you not! (If telepaths ever do develop on this rock, it will probably become necessary to lobotomise them.)

With jailbroken file browsers like iFile and Discover (available via Cydia), you can get off Apple's meds and free your iPhone's mind by opening a portal into its filing system and transferring whatever you want, whenever you want, sans velvet handcuffs. Both iFile and Discover can transfer files to and from any iPhone's folder by connecting wirelessly to a standard web browser. I definitely recommend this over installing more complex and thus less secure filesharing like Netatalk. Don't do it! It's unnecessary. iFile is the best file browser I have seen for this device. Screen space is used efficiently. Files can be created and moved with ease, even alias pointers created. It feels like a full mobile Finder! But iFile invariably chokes when transferring large files (if it's >30MB I don't bother trying), so I've taken to using the Discover app for wireless transfers (which it has a habit of always performing flawlessly), and then iFile for the actual browsing. BTW if you see an app called Discover in the App Store, that's not it! What I mean is the Cydia version that is not only free but also unconfined to a tiny windowless cell in your filedungeon.

Training you in how to interpret every file you will see under the hood is beyond this post, but my rules of thumb are: (1) Don't copy anything to a location you don't understand; (2) Don't let free space get below 100MB; (3) Try to keep all your data in '/var/mobile' (it's the iPhone's user data area, also referred to as '/private/var/mobile'); and (4) Don't manually delete or rename anything you didn't put there manually. In this way I have begun copying any media I discover that is effectively outlawed, to this phone.

We need to engage with these abandoned works, because in such a suffocating intellectual polity, the best solutions are left aside simply out of fear of breaking rules. I would also advise installing Backgrounder, and using it to enable background processing (the blocking of which is yet another abuse of Apple's power) for Discover, so that you can transfer files while checking email, &c. Backgrounder is so useful and liberating that it turns even some App Store apps like IM+ Lite (the instant message app that couldn't notify you of instant messages), formerly crippled by Apple's nonsensical regime, into useful programs at last.

NEXT: SECOND ROW - Upgrading an iPhone into a full media citizen
with video recording and playback/upload of well-known video formats.

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Navigate the 'Cydia Apps for a Time Walker' series at Extratemporal Perception...

INTRO
FIRST ROW (this page)
SECOND ROW
THIRD ROW
FOURTH ROW (coming soon)

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - INTRO

2009-04-28T21:20:00.014-04:00

I feel like I am already familiar with certain apps on this iPhone device, although I've never used them before. If your brains were to spontaneously explode, for example, over a square kilometre, your memories would lie disconnected on the ground in an amplified map of their former positions inside your head. Tiny differences in cranial coordinates would translate to much larger differences over a square kilometre. Someone - maybe even the next 'someone' to squat in your now-empty skull - could even decode that map.

Well, okay, so the analogy isn't perfect. But in crosstemporal terms, it all makes sense and this is roughly what has happened to me, and why I keep stumbling over stray sense memories connected to things, like the App Store apps on the iPhone. An iPhone which, according to the first clear memory I do have, I discovered lying beside me on the pavement, and then conveniently used to upload my experiences here, in case I again lose even this tenuous grip on chronology.

So this is really for my own future reference, more than anyone else's. If you too are from another planet, then maybe you'll find some use in this, because there are 18 apps (pictured above) on this iPhone that I have no inkling of, whatsoever. Further research over the last 24 hours has uncovered that they all have one source in common: 'Cydia', a grey market app store that can only be installed on what they call a jailbroken phone. Reading back in the blog and putting two-and-two together, I suspect that Cydia was left incompletely explored by my predecessor, and so I'll be opening all the icons on that cavern wall, one row at a time, and posting the results of my explorations here. Perhaps then continuity can be restored.

NEXT UP: FIRST ROW - Opening up the filesystem and background tasks on the iPhone.

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INTRO (this page)
FIRST ROW
SECOND ROW
THIRD ROW
FOURTH ROW (coming soon)

It Began with the Men on the Moon

2009-04-01T09:19:00.004-04:00

It began with the men on the moon.

You may perceive this as an arbitrary event. A sentence in a random scrap of digitalia forwarded to you from some seedy, social website. I perceive it as the very last moment of foreplay before this particular timeline exploded across 'outer space' into the computer age. In that order.

It's a part of what makes this Earth so dangerous.

Probably shouldn't tell you that. Or maybe I already did. Sorry, bits of me keep shifting in and out of time without letting me know where they are headed. And I keep landing in this timeline backwards, for some reason that I can't remember because that bit shifted away. Still other bits of me are in denial that here I sit, in the waning, silicon-encrusted days of the Primordial, manipulating a plastic A-Open keyboard with the fingers of a temporal human shell born 40 days before the Apollo landing — my thoughts, filtered, through a brain adolesced in the flickering phosphors of the earliest digital cradles of the late 20th Century, AD.

Unbelievable. Half my mind is reeling, just not the half that's writing this. And I've fallen short of the Big Sleep by at least... 5 days! Late, by your reckoning. Thirteen posts were made between now and then (obscure fact — you could say I'm a history buff), and so must thirteen posts be made between then and now. And I'll need to make them personally (!!), and in reverse order. Not ideal, but March 26th is the day. And it's no use attempting to disguise the fact that things are different. I'm not that good. It's a lost cause. And they will laugh at my token attempts.

But, there's nothing for it. This is a special universe, with special vulnerabilities, but also special qualities. We need to stop the spread of the apocalypses here, or we are lost. And I am well aware my plan amounts to little more than an insanely speculative retcon (which is on most Earths, against the rules), but I've decided to break into this timeline. Break it up. Dispense with taboo, and affect it. All of it. Affect you, and be affected. I'm willing to break the future, if I have to, in order to fix it. You have to be willing. Because it's already broken.

This is the turn of thought we call, 'The Dawning', and on my world, it's the founding ethical principle of what you might call, chrononautics.

Yes, confess it. I am a chrononaut. I slouch through slow eddies of near-forgotten time, tracing a path toward the Bethlehem of the Big Sleep. Beyond which lies hope for my kind, and probably yours as well. But there is always a cost for this, exacted like a pound of flesh from the population of one's mind. To maximise one's effect on a timeline with the minimum application of force, one must choose the right moment, to free the right body of its local gravity. And for a sentient body, gravity is memory.

What I'm trying to tell you is in my roundabout way is that you're going to be different than you were 'supposed' to be, before the Big Sleep. And so will this blog, and so will I. Even if we only meet in cross-time, and even if we can't reminisce.

So, I need to scrabble together whatever brain I can from here to triangulate the real rivulet from which this lifestream sprang. And I need to post thirteen tests of Tumblr on the way. The first is this right here, uploaded both to Tumblr (via the iPhone app) and to Blogger (via email), and then imported from Blogger via RSS. If all goes well, you'll see it in Tumblr, twice.

The Little Sleep, by Tumblr, via Pixelpipe

2009-03-28T10:41:00.002-04:00

Well, let's face it, I'm beginning to tire of this jag. This is what it looks like after prolonged exposure to this sort of thing. At least, since the Dawning; after the Big Sleep, who knows? In the meantime, now that we've seen how Tumblr photographs for Tumblr, how does it import shots from my 3 main test sites, Flickr, Picasa, and Blogger? With Pixelpipe, I can try them all from my iPhone in a single upload, and with Tumblr I can import them all over the following hour through RSS. So let's get this last photo post uploaded, because the end of the archive approaches, and I'm itching to uncover why I started this tumblelog or what got me into lifestreaming in the first place.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Lifestream Test: EasyWriter Lite, linked by bit.ly

2009-03-25T13:20:00.008-04:00

So, I've tested 'lifestreaming' photos to Blogger here, here, and here, but what if I just want to do a text post and it might be lengthy and the priority is having a landscape keyboard available so I can get serious about typing here. And how am I going to post links? Can't make a typical blogpost without extensive reference to Safari or the like and with no copy/paste how do I import links?

First, the landscape keyboard. This is amazingly easy to type quickly on but so rare among iPhone apps as to be almost non-existent. I don't know of any free Blogger-posting apps that do it. But there is an app called EasyWriter Lite that lets me compose a landscape email, and it remembers what I've typed when I leave the app, so it's not hard to check Safari in mid-post, and Blogger allows you to set up an email post submission address to send to (not telling you mine).

That leaves linking and copy/paste. Actually, copy/paste is not really the problem with a great URL-shortening service available like bit.ly, you can use their bookmarklet to create very short links in mobile Safari that are easy to type out from memory. Like bit.ly/14h921. It's all the anchor tag HTML cruft that is an incredible chore to create on the iPhone keyboard. In landscape mode this thing kicks, but it was obviously not prioritised for the HTML writer...

Lifestreaming Test: Pixelpipe 2 Everything

2009-03-24T17:16:00.003-04:00

Yeah, that's our toilet. There's a heater behind. Weird, eh?
Allegedly, Pixelpipe will syndicate this email to Blogger, Flickr,
Picasa, TwitterX2 (once thru Twitpic), FRIENDFEED (yay), and Facebook.
This is my 3rd try at making Pixelpipe work; the iPhone app doesn't
seem to work for me at all, and I am only bothering to try the email
upload route for the impressive list of services.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

[ UPDATE: The trouble posting with Pixelpipe iPhone app was due to an error on my part - I accidentally created a second account and had the iPhone and my Mac signed into two different ones. I probably wouldn't have done this if the re-sign-in process weren't a little bit confusing on the Pixelpipe app, so that I mistook a 'rejoin' for a 'rename'... but for the record, the iPhone app does work - my previous attempts were sitting there in the second account with no destinations configured. ]

Lifestream Test: LifeCast 2 Utterli 2 Twitxr

2009-03-24T14:23:00.003-04:00

Mobile post sent by Laroquod using Utterli. Replies.

Lifestream Test: ShoZu syndicates

2009-03-24T08:03:00.003-04:00

Well I haven't been too pleased so far with how ShoZu formats text and photos for Blogger, Facebook, and Flickr, but the Flickr wasn't SO bad so I'll use that one as the source and set up the others as 'CC' sites. Will this post look better when syndicated starting with Flickr?

(P.S. Pic is of a polydactyllic cat that shares my general geometric coordinate space.)

Lifestream Test: ShoZu Bloggers a photo

2009-03-23T18:47:00.005-04:00

And... ShoZu posts a photo. From previous lifestreaming forays, I'm expecting the layout to be rather crude. I don't mind the 'posted by' badge though I'd prefer it to be a PNG with transparency. To see how ShoZu posts just text to Blogger, click this URL that I would be forced to type from memory if I weren't testing this right in front of my computer, cursing the remaining days of no iPhone copy/paste!

(P.S. The photo is of a rug-threatening Guinness stain sustained during yesterday's Scott Adams Adventure tag-team-it-with-a-friend extravaganza.)

Lifestream Test: ShoZu does Blogger

2009-03-23T18:04:00.005-04:00

ShoZu seems at first blush, as advertised, to be the perfect mobile lifestreaming app. Although it requires a proprietary ShoZu login, that does give it the benefit of upload-once/syndicate-everywhere bandwidth economy. Setting up syndication looks to be a bit of a daunt, not because of any bad UI in ShoZu, but just due to the sheer number of web services it supports. (The list is truly mindboggling.) Figure I'll test a few one-off posts, first, say... on Blogger!

Climatology of a Cultural Ice Age, core sample #2

2009-02-17T07:02:00.010-05:00

A trial is convened in Sweden, in which the co-founders of filesharing directory The Pirate Bay face two years in jail and a €100,000 fine for "assisting copyright infringement".

YouTube begins crippling the audio on all of its content, whenever it auto-pattern-matches with any audio pattern claimed by a record company, sparking fears of the 'End of Mashup Culture' and reports of the first massacres of teenage digital dreams. Then, just weeks later, as if to reassure any who might be in doubt as to whether there is room in their new regime for even the uncontroversially, legally-specified 'fair' forms of fair use, YouTube starts censoring film critics for arguing from example.

Apple joins the RIAA and the MPAA in asking the US Copyright Office to deny exceptions to the DMCA, in Apple's case making it specifically illegal for users to add independent applications to the iPhone outside of its own strictly-censored App Store.

The final week for Canadians to voice an opinion on content-neutral communications for the CRTC's Net Neutrality Hearings in July.

The American Author's Guild lays claim to the whole dominion of having any of their work personally read aloud to anyone, by anything.

An Irish ISP begins counting accusations against its users, and promises to deny internet access to anyone who has had more than two fingers pointed at them, as the British consider making it illegal to photograph the police. Thankfully, the Isles are also the source of this month's notable counterpoint, from the Open Rights Group, on the proposed UK Copyright extension to an incredible 95 years...
(View core sample #1.)

Psychologists [and Watchmen mock newsreel] Demo Propaganda

2009-02-09T05:52:00.004-05:00

Psychologists have simultaneously discovered that synchronised behaviour (like, say... marching in step) increases loyalty, and that after being shown propagandistic images, people's emotional profiles are changed. It's something I've always noticed — people are like mirrors. From the article...

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'."

Of course, once you think of it this way, you realise that there are extraordinarily positive consequences that flow from setting everyone's copybit to true-by-default. Education, for example. Traffic (especially for ants). Even basic human empathy itself is probably impossible without this population-wide bitflip. Our susceptibility to propagandistic demonising would be, then, just an unfortunate eddy where this instinct gets turns around on itself, stops simulating the world as it is, and starts dissimilating into a vortex of self-confirmation. Which leads to the obvious conclusion:

If you are a natural propagandist, what you need to do is to aim yourself at a pre-existing vortex of self-confirmation.

This explains Fox News, and everybody who works for Fox News.

It also explains Zack Snyder...

Print Cartoonists declare Armageddon; Microsoft opens up Infinite Canvas

2009-02-01T14:34:00.004-05:00

Sometimes two or three things come at you in the news in the same week which are such perfect expressions of opposing spirits of the times, that the connection simply begs to be drawn between those points.

Take the recent rant on Derfcity, declaring a modern economic End Times for cartoons as a result of the Great Comic Axing at alternative weekly newspaper chain, Village Voice Media...

OK. This is it. We've reached the apocalyptic final struggle for the future of cartoons. Village Voice Media is the largest group of weekly newspapers in the biz. It is suffering from the ills that have befallen the rest of the newspaper industry: dwindling ad revenues. Their corporate response, which was delivered to me Monday, is to “suspend” all cartoons across the chain, said suspension to last at least through the rest of the first quarter, and quite possibly beyond. That's right. NO more cartoons. None.
[...]
This is it, folks. If you don't speak up now, you'll have to get your laughs from crappy Youtube videos created by pimply high-school geeks.

And add this to the recent news of Diamond Distribution raising the entry bar for niche comics — from $1500 minimum sales to retain a place in their catalogue, to $2500 minimum, per issue (wholesale!) This "new threshold" will — wait for it... "annihilate many of the smallest publishers and keep a lot of new ones out of Previews [...] the single biggest event since Diamond became the monopoly that ruled comics".

How odd that this week has been such a sheer panic snapshot of cartoon artists in one communication medium, when it's this very week that a major new frontier appears to have opened up for those self-same artists in a faster, looser medium with fewer stapled-down fiefdoms but requiring more imagination to exploit? Of course, I'm talking about the web, and more particularly, about Microsoft's recently announced Infinite Canvas. It looks like Microsoft may be leveraging some of its technology from Photosynth. (WTF there must have been a mutiny of style in the ranks of Microsoft designers who favour the word 'funky' lately.) With comic book leading lights Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud anteing up short tales to be spun up on Microsoft's new infinite space machine, has McCloud found his durable mutation? Does it Matter?

I feel like snapping my fingers in the faces of all these cartoonists disgruntled at the final climactic insult from a medium that's already been insulting them for all of Acts One and Two. Dudes! Dudes. Stop thinking about the Klingons, okay? The antidote is obviously going to be developed by either Spock or McCoy. And what was up with that whole loose plot thread from the teaser, with the oddly underutilised alternate, infinite canvas? You didn't think that was a little strange, maybe? You didn't think that would... lead anywhere?

Sorry. Didn't mean to disturb your function in the plot — carry on.

ArchiveTeam.org steps up as your Public Data Watchdog

2009-01-30T09:59:00.013-05:00

In response to the recent unceremonious shuttering of tens of thousands of AOL blogs, Jason Scott — ASCII text files archivist, documentary filmmaker of the CC-licensed BBS Documentary, and writer of recent counter-technocultural foul-mouthed gems like Datapocalypso! and FUCK THE CLOUD — is striking up a kind of internet viligante, do-gooders league called Archive Team, which will cooperate, wiki-style, to save the sum total of cultural data on commonly used public blog servers and website shingles.

Scott himself has already started the ball rolling, by personally saving (and making available to the original owners) 70 gigabytes of podcast data that was recently end-of-lifed by ailing hosting site, podango.com.

Dolphins test contingencies, Learn, Play, Make Art

2009-01-30T09:24:00.018-05:00

Scientific American has posted an article about the day when Diana Reiss discovered that a dolphin had learned to use her own disciplinary tactics in reverse, against her, giving her a very human-like 'timeout'. Even more interesting was the information that dolphins shape and play with bubble rings, in a process that very much resembles, let's just say it: making art. Embedded from here is the 2007 video of a dolphin doing just that. With accompanying text from the article:
Notoriously playful, dolphins have also caught scientists’ attention by creating play objects from their own bodies. In the wild, if dolphins are trapped or scared, they tense up their blowholes—the nostril on top of their heads—releasing bubbles of air. When the bubbles are big enough, water pressure causes them to collapse in the middle and form rings of air that rise slowly toward the surface like smoke rings. “We started noticing that they were producing these bubble rings in captivity,” Reiss says.

In safe aquarium settings, bubble rings are objects of play, not fear. After a quick breath at the surface, dolphins swim to the bottom of the pool and expel a long, silvery ring of air. In a graceful water ballet, they nudge the bubble ring around, make it bigger or smaller or swirl it out of shape, swim through it, or they snap it suddenly between their jaws to release a thousand tiny bubbles.

“It was the first example we saw of a nonhuman animal creating an object of play out of something out of its own body,” says Reiss, who believes the bubble rings are evidence that dolphins have an acute awareness of physical contingencies, past and future. “If [the rings] are not well formed, they’ll knock them apart right away and then go back and produce a really well formed one.”
(You can add to this evidence of intelligence the recent news of how creative dolphins can be in trapping and preparing their food.)

Scott McCloud, in Search of a Durable Mutation

2009-01-19T16:09:00.008-05:00

The TED conference has just posted a dynamic slideshow talk from 2005 by comics artist/theorist Scott McCloud, wherein he delves into his own biography and how his artistic vision was informed growing up by science. Which is interesting enough, but in the final half, he gives a crisp rundown of the analytical territory which he is famous for populating with graphic Aristotelian orgies, beginning with his 1993 treatise, Understanding Comics.

The final third is the most interesting to me. McCloud is bearish on hypertext, or any form of interactivity which isn't spatial — which seems odd, considering that interaction is a fundamentally temporal mechanism. Do one thing, get one timeline. Do another, get another. Both timelines could happen (and I would argue, should, if the story calls for it) in the exact same space, and that could mean on the page as well as on the stage. But McCloud is adamant that in a comic book, Time equals Space, and every panel should relate to every other through Space or not at all. It's rather purist and hybrid-blind — in other words, pure Aristotle, which is not really my game. I'm definitely more of a Plato fan, since Plato could never quite bring himself to really ignore the way simplistic categories (like poetry vs. philosophy) keep bleeding into one other if you pick at them.

That being said, I quite enjoyed McCloud's own late '90s experiment with rigorously spatial interactivity, Choose Your Own Carl. And I really wish he would finish his awesome 2003 engagement with z-dimensional panel borders (i.e. a zoom-comic), The Right Number. Not necessarily because of the zooming (although Scott is so expert with it, he even begins to invent his own zoom-storytelling language), but because it's just a Really. Good. Story. I don't care if it wasn't purely spatial enough or whatever other reason he might have abandoned it (which to be honest, I haven't a clue about).

Most importantly, McCloud says something close to the 14-minute mark that is exactly what I think the world needs to hear right now...

What I'm searching for is a durable mutation. That's what all of us are searching for as media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that are durable, that have some sort of staying power.

This is what's so exciting about this time in history: watching the logic of evolution play out in the world of comics (and movies, and television, and music, and newspapers), as all these media get beached in waves on the shores of a new environment. Yeah, everybody is doing it; that's the whole point. Everybody has to do it. It's the durable mutations that will survive, and the notion that this secret recipe could as easily be yours as somebody's with a million dollar budget and a wronger idea, that's just exhilirating. Provided it doesn't end up strangled by the coming cultural ice age, this era will be remembered as a sort of wild west of human communication. What's the make and model of your cybernetic sidearm? Did you machine it yourself?

What's the range on that thing?

Perceiving the Holographic Universe

2009-01-19T04:14:00.017-05:00

A physicist known as Craig Hogan, at a particle physics labratory in Illinois, has unearthed new evidence that all of the information in the cosmos — including you and me — might be encoded on a farflung surface or 'event horizon', that encloses Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The theory that the universe is 'encoded' is meant to address a conundrum that has puzzled quantum theorists for decades: the amount of information a three-dimensional space can mathematically contain appears not to be dependent on its volume, but rather unexpectedly on its surface area. One rational explanation for this effect is that every bit of matter inside any volume of space cannot exist without having a 'source point' reserved for it on the surface of that space. It's almost as if we are all in some yawning cosmological squash-court-looking-yellow-gridlined room with walls that holographically project the actual contents of world as we see it. ("Computer? Exit!")

Thing is, if the holographic principle is true, then according to Hogan, the informational density (call it 'pixel density') on the surface of the universe must be greater than the density within, analogously to the way that 54 square stickers are required on a Rubik's cube to cover up the 27 plastic cubes that can occupy its interior. So, he hypothesised, even the smallest three-dimensional 'thing', formerly thought to be undetectable, might actually be much larger than the smallest 'thing' possible as defined by physics (which you would only find at the extreme edge of the universe, on the walls of the Grand Unified Holodeck). And that would put the smallest 3D thing, surprisingly, just barely within the range of what modern technology can detect.

Based on these calculations, Hogan posited that a gravity wave detector built for an unrelated purpose in Germany would pick up a strange low level of noise, not explicable by any source of interference. And this noise would represent the jaggy pixelation of space itself — provided that space is holographic. (Guess the universe never heard of anti-aliasing!)

Not all sources of interference have yet been eliminated, but Hogan looks astonishingly to have predicted right.

It's fascinating, the way the mathematics of the so-called three-dimensional universe may work just as well, or even better, as a projection of a two-dimensional matrix. What's so special, one may ask, about two dimensions? Why not three? Is there something central to our experience of the world, something that exists only in two dimensions?

There is. It's called human sensory perception.

You might think that you are perceiving the universe in three dimensions, but what you know about the world, what anyone has ever known — all of it — has been passed through two-dimensional filters on its way into your brain. Rods and cones spread over the inner surface of your eye. Vibrations vex the surface of your eardrum. Chemical receptors line the surface of your tongue, or curl scroll-like around the inside of your nose. And what about the sense of touch? Surely, that is three-dimensional! After all, you can actually put your hand to solid things, and feel them. But is it really your hand that is experiencing those things? Or is it a two-dimensional sensory surface we know as 'skin'?

You have a 2D personal event horizon. Everything you think, know, or remember, has had to pass through it. And the volume of your mind cannot contain more information than can be decoded from your surface, over time. Sound familiar? (Some even think the brain is holographic.)

As this beautiful mathematical symphony called quantum theory — composed by exclusively two-dimensionally perceiving beings as they brilliantly interpret what crosses their event horizons — begins to approach its investigative climax, it increasingly ascribes a similar kind of event horizon to the universe itself.

Two parting questions. Is it really any wonder? And if the universe is behaving very much like a perceptive entity, what could it be perceiving?

BOOM!: Data supports free online co-release of new miniseries 'Hexed'

2009-01-10T14:11:00.012-05:00

When BOOM! Studios published their post-ice-age/book-burning dystopian comic book tale North Wind, at Myspace concurrently with its retail release last January, brick-and-mortar comic shops chafed and some even rebelled, asking for "evidence" that free online simul-publication would not eat their collective lunch. (Funny how the common conventional wisdom that it would, requires no evidence whatsoever.)

One year later, alongside last Wednesday's (January 7th) release of their new miniseries Hexed under the same experimental distribution model as North Wind, BOOM!'s Editor-in-Chief Mark Waid has posted a video statement for retailers saying the verdict is in, and it's decidedly on the side of content being born free. From the vid...

"Sales went up 30% from issues #3 to issue #4. What this means is that fans who didn't have a chance to buy issue 3 on the stands, went out and bought issue #4. The only exposure they had to issue 3 and previous issues, was on the Myspace comic books page. In 25 years of comics, I can't think of another time I've seen sales on a miniseries like that, go up. There has to be something else to it, and in this case, it was the online promotion."

Here's the link to BOOM!'s second experiment in the distributive advantages of 'free', by Michael Alan Nelson and Emma Rios, called Hexed, posted free, online at Myspace Comic Books — complete with .CBZ file. As Waid enjoys pointing out, the new miniseries has been dubbed "Hellblazer by way of JJ Abrams’ Alias".

Climatology of a Cultural Ice Age, core sample #1

2009-01-10T10:22:00.015-05:00

An eBook 'digital rights management' provider suddenly decides to 'manage' all the books it has ever sold through a popular eBook site into deep freeze, consigning all that distributed literature to the digital dustbin in a single blow.

A developer attempts (and fails) a 100-day protest just to get permission to release a game he has been designing for years, on the Nintendo Wii.

A physical crafts artist begins firing up a lynch mob to take down and destroy the widely sourced collage art of digital remixers.

Apple escalates its media censorship from the niche realms of comic books and competing podcast aggregators, into the mainstream world of mature fiction, actually banning a book from its App Store for ordinary, unremarkable adult content.

Emboldened by the Baye-Dole Act, universities go from claiming ownership of 250 of their students' inventions a year, to 3,000 a year, poaching $45 billion in licence fees, in 2006 alone, from those who pay hefty tuitions for the loss of free access to the output of their own minds.

Deep sea 'jellyfish' evolves like the internet

2009-01-03T16:42:00.008-05:00

Nature has shown us that the demarcation between what we call 'one individual', and another, is far less fundamental than we ordinarily assume.

Under some, non-crazy interpretations, we could all even be considered to be part of the same organism. After all, the limbs and features that make up a siphonophore (via Pink Tentacle) are actually separate 'beings' who communicate and cooperate so intricately, that they live as one: a community of cellular communities — i.e, a "network of networks".

There is a progressive resemblance here to what you and I can do, online. The thousands of miles that may separate us are really just a detail of implementation.

Blog@Newsarama to highlight webcomics

2009-01-02T02:08:00.013-05:00

There is an entirely new blogging team at Blog@Newsarama, the old team having quit en masse last month due, as far as I can ascertain, to a surprise redesign and a glitchy comments system. The new bloggers seem, so far, eager to connect with the community, and particularly bullish about webcomics, which would be encouraging if it weren't for the way they parrot all of the current conventional wisdom about 'new' media. That the web is only good for bite-sized information, for example. (Perhaps we should just pat HTML on the head and give it a sippy cup full of Coca Cola?) Or that the web wants all of your output to be 4:3. (In that case, why are there scrollbars on all of Blog@Newsarama's pages? Why must only those who draw pictures and word balloons follow this prescription? Doesn't the vast majority of the web, in fact, scroll?) You get the picture. More of my counter-reasoning from the comments section of Sarah Jaffe's opening webcomics salvo...

Relegating the web to being about ‘burst culture’ is seriously underestimating the web. It’s more bursty, sure, but one shouldn’t confuse being better at something with being worse at the things that have gone before. Having something live and online has so many advantages to it, that the slightly less convenient available reading scenarioes compared to print are not nearly as consequential, and will ultimately fade away — especially as handheld devices become better and more universally adopted. (BTW the Kindle just doesn’t cut it: without reading PDFs natively it’s like inventing the iPod without allowing it to play MP3s — woefully misguided much like the Apple TV. Even Apple didn’t learn its own lessons in this regard.)

So, common objections to literature being ‘harder to read’ compared to older media will become obsolete faster than the actual older media they are meant to protect. Those older media will be around with us a long time, the same way that film will always exist, because it isn’t just a technology: it’s a style. Like engraving, it will always exist for at least that purpose; print will never die it will just become more and more a rarefied collector’s culture and less the ‘people’s medium’. That is natural and as it should be.

And I’ve seen people sit and stare at websites for hours on end. Trust me: the resistance to long-form art on the web is purely psychological in cases where older media is still available, and will ultimately fall away as the landscape changes and it becomes clear that the screen is our new Lingua Franca. Engraved stone tablets are easier to read than little black ink etchings laid on wood pulp. But we don’t think about that anymore; that superiority no longer matters. The same will go for whatever superiorities you currently believe are endemic to print. The technoculture will adapt to overcome those objections and besides, it will become so ubiquitous that old advantages will be drowned in the new noise.

As for the tall format being denigrated in favour of a 4:3 computer screen aspect ratio: that’s purely a matter of fashion and style. People are quite willing to scroll web pages. If everyone starts to present in 4:3 then somebody will come along and present an infinitely scrolling 1:40 comic and break that conventional wisdom wide open. On the web the format isn’t fixed. If you want to make it more compatible with an ultimate print run, some techno-enthusiasts might take issue with that, but that objection will like the others be very short-lived. Ultimately, there is no aspect ratio to web content. I believe that’s the most accurate way to think about it that will stand the test of time.

Pale-throated sloth? Or alien embryo?

2008-12-24T11:07:00.000-05:00

By way of Morbid Anatomy (via Boing Boing), Hemmy.net brings us the left half of an amazing example of convergent evolution between...

(1) xenarthran, spike-wielding
tree-dwellers

...and...

(2) xenomorphic, probe-wielding,
space-dwellers.

Australian 'net censors to target P2P

2008-12-24T10:56:00.003-05:00

Imagine that you went back in time to the invention of the printing press, which revolutionised human communicative efficacy, only to discover the Kings and Queens of the realm trying to install unwieldy automated mechanical filters on every typesetter. That's how truly bizarre it seems to me to watch a human government attempting to stifle P2P applications like BitTorrent: technologies which have hit upon, by amazing groundswell, the most robust communication protocols yet known.

Hypothesis #1 (The Unlimited Edition)

2008-12-21T03:55:00.004-05:00

Courtesy of the online comic shop IndyPlanet, and via KA-BLAM's top-notch print-on-demand services, you can now own the Unlimited Edition of Hypothesis #1 for $5.75 USD plus shipping and handling. This inaugural story spans 32 full-colour, all-story pages (no ads), compiling the first three web episodes of Hypothesis, which you can preview in their entirety here. It's all free to read online, of course, but as we enthusiasts know, websurfing can't really hold a candle to having the actual floppy comic in your hands, free of scrollbars, windows, menus, or other fidgetry, so that you can just bury your gaze in paper and ink. Maybe bag-and-board it afterward to protect its baroque atomic structure. And then let it spring on the unsuspecting houseguests who inevitably end up rifling through your private museum. Doubt they've ever seen anything quite like this.

Of course, for those with an eye for the very rarest find, there are still a few copies left of the limited Collector's Edition, with an exclusive cover by Doug Groves, a limited giclée print, and a 'making of' DVD including my raw photography, digital negatives, and extensive video commentary.

Human evolutionary 'tree' reveals why video games suck

2008-12-21T00:04:00.030-05:00

Scientific American has posted a Hominin evolutionary tree, which is interesting, if for no other reason, then for the way they posted it — via the publishers of effortlessly zoomable online documents, issuu.com. The science is fascinating, but I'm more intrigued by this new method of online presentation than by the magazine artist's visual rendering of evolution. Ever notice the way the living Hominins (i.e. you and me) will consistently squash any inconveniently branching structure into a linear one of their choosing, as if that is a good way to sum it up? That is not a good way to sum it up. But it's a pretty good way of summing it down!

CLICK TO READ THE REST OF THIS POST

The foundational flaw of Statistics, underlined in Manga

2008-12-19T17:57:00.033-05:00

It's interesting that when an idea is expressed in comics form — the way The Manga Guide to Statistics amusingly does with... er, Statistics — any weaknesses in this idea become that much more apparent. The Manga Guide very perceptively (if unironically) blares out right up front what is the number one assumption that Statistics rests upon (i.e. that there are two types of data, that which can and that which can't be measured, as pictured here). It's a premise which in a run-of-the-mill paragraphed textbook might have seemed par-for-the-course, but which seems curiously unexamined when objectified for you more graphically, where you are more likely to look askance at it and ask yourself: Are there are only two types of data, when you look at it? What about when you don't look at it? I mean, what about data that can't be measured without being changed? Which of the two types would that fall into? And what about data that one person thinks can be accurately measured but another person thinks can't? And what if your own uncertainty (about whether or not you can accurately measure any particular datum) can't actually be measured? What happens to the validity of all your measurements then?

It's a house of cards. Most of the things that go wrong with statistical studies (and this includes all polls and surveys) can be traced back to the extraordinarily overlooked shakiness of that founding assumption, which is highlighted with such perfect naïveté in Manga, now at Amazon.

"PR is the mantis that kills criticism after using it for its personal pleasure."

2008-12-19T16:51:00.005-05:00

A priceless nut of wisdom from Domingos Isabelinho, a "semi-retired Portuguese comics critic", who throws out this arresting observation as off-handedly as if he just discovered it at a garage sale and thought we might have a use for it, in his comics meta-critique at The Crib Sheet. Click that crunchy one-liner to read his post in its entirety.

What is the Apple IIGS?

2008-12-17T07:26:00.008-05:00

It's the hybrid 8-bit/16-bit twenty year old computer I used (in emulation) to produce most of screenshots I have visually quoted in Hypothesis, as the protagonist played the games. And I am very happy to see Alex Lee reworking and revitalising his website on everything IIGS (pronounced 2-G-S); it's chockful of utilities and software, and though it's always been a good database, he's now added News, Blog, and Forums sections that I'm excited about. Alex was the very first person I contacted about KEGSlotDroppers and he received the first beta copy. It takes some very careful reading (most people don't pick up on it right away the way Alex did), but you can follow the story of the creation of KEGSlotDroppers here.

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution."

2008-12-17T04:41:00.014-05:00

Dobzhansky doesn't appear to have gone far enough. Why stop with biology? Try, cosmology. Try, science itself. Heck, even the eventual development of the theory of evolution itself makes no sense, except in the light of the theory of evolution. The only intelligible point of existence, is persistence. Or, as I spelled out in Hypothesis 0.2: "Mostly, it's to wind up here, from there, in the wild crush to clock in now, from then — which is why this stuff's still around. This stuff is not that complicated." That's the real reason we should learn about evolution; not because it explains your genetics or your body weight. (Though if you do insist on perceiving the world in little particles, they will behave by the same rules as all the rest.). We should learn about evolution because — whether exposed in the material, the spiritual, the animal, or the mineral — to them who do not avert their gaze, is given the central compass of all that we can ever see, or be, or do. Ignore it at your directional peril.

Devices conceived by the human mind actually learn to read... the human mind

2008-12-17T04:22:00.010-05:00

That's the headline nobody wrote for this story, because it doesn't sound quite so extraordinary when you define your terms. What it does sound is inevitable. And what's extraordinary, is that it took this long.

I guess Google never promised to 'SAY no evil'...

2008-12-15T17:13:00.009-05:00

The above is a scrolldown link to my comment on Google's Public Policy Blog post on Net neutrality and the benefits of caching, where I pointed out that although Google's "offer to 'colocate' caching servers within broadband providers' own facilities" is probably a good thing for the internet and should be supported for the time being, it is obviously not "net neutral" nor is it "edge caching", as Google wishes to pretend.

Extratemporal Perception

Swap Thing #2: Inception of The Social Network of Iron Men and Tron in 3D

A shadowy figure reads Boing Boing

2nd haunting of a shadowy figure

1st haunting of a shadowy figure

Provisos of a shadowy figure

Crossing Over

A shadowy figure watches Break Up Club

A shadowy figure watches Long Pigs

Lifestrips as 'The Moment'

Brainware Upgrade

Hypothesis 0.4: Swap Thing!

Tripping at the wrong moment

A 'Swipe File' Controversy and the Anxiety of Influence

Battlestar Galactica Miniseries, nTwined

What if Edgar Allan Poe were REALLY on Twitter?

Warren Ellis's Webcomics Week Explored - PART 1

Memory and Environment are Related

Real Far Away From an Arcade in 1970s Japan

mame4iphone

From M-4 to Space Invaders

snes4iphone

Super Mario World

psx4iphone

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - SECOND ROW

iFile to /var/mobile/Media

Create /MPlayer folderFill out the first two fields as shown above. (Case matters.) 'Directory' is a contemporary synonym for a Mac-style folder. The rest of the fields should default to what you see. Tap 'Create'.

Create /MPlayer folder

iFile to /varTap the top left button a couple of times to navigate iFile back to the /var folder,and then tap 'Edit' and then '+' again.

iFile to /var

Create /media alias

Start MPlayerIf you've done the setup and transfer right, your vids should show on MPlayer's list,like Flashpoint appears on this one.

Start MPlayer

MPlayer

Cycorder

iComic

iComic optionsSelect a .CBZ file. (Unfortunately, iComic doesn't do .CBRs yet, but the conversion process is fairly trivial.) Note that you have the option to skip to your last position, or pick pages from a list.

iComic options

iComic portrait

iComic landscape

textReader

textReader portraitFonts are adjustable, and the app will do landscape, if you swing that way! But it does not read all formats. I seem to have inherited a lot of TomeRaider files, for example, and have yet to find a way to read them on this phone. 8( NEXT: THIRD ROW - Google Reader, Classic Gaming

textReader portrait

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone: FIRST ROW

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Cydia Apps for a Time Walker's iPhone - INTRO

Posted via Pixelpipe.

It Began with the Men on the Moon

The Little Sleep, by Tumblr, via Pixelpipe

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Lifestream Test: EasyWriter Lite, linked by bit.ly

Lifestreaming Test: Pixelpipe 2 Everything

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Lifestream Test: LifeCast 2 Utterli 2 Twitxr

Lifestream Test: ShoZu syndicates

Lifestream Test: ShoZu Bloggers a photo

Lifestream Test: ShoZu does Blogger

Climatology of a Cultural Ice Age, core sample #2

Psychologists [and Watchmen mock newsreel] Demo Propaganda

Print Cartoonists declare Armageddon; Microsoft opens up Infinite Canvas

ArchiveTeam.org steps up as your Public Data Watchdog

Dolphins test contingencies, Learn, Play, Make Art

Scott McCloud, in Search of a Durable Mutation

Perceiving the Holographic Universe

BOOM!: Data supports free online co-release of new miniseries 'Hexed'

Climatology of a Cultural Ice Age, core sample #1

Deep sea 'jellyfish' evolves like the internet

Blog@Newsarama to highlight webcomics

Pale-throated sloth? Or alien embryo?

Australian 'net censors to target P2P

Hypothesis #1 (The Unlimited Edition)

Human evolutionary 'tree' reveals why video games suck

The foundational flaw of Statistics, underlined in Manga

"PR is the mantis that kills criticism after using it for its personal pleasure."

What is the Apple IIGS?

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution."

Devices conceived by the human mind actually learn to read... the human mind

I guess Google never promised to 'SAY no evil'...

Create /MPlayer folder
Fill out the first two fields as shown above. (Case matters.) 'Directory' is a contemporary synonym for a Mac-style folder. The rest of the fields should default to what you see. Tap 'Create'.

iFile to /var
Tap the top left button a couple of times to navigate iFile back to the /var folder,
and then tap 'Edit' and then '+' again.

Start MPlayer
If you've done the setup and transfer right, your vids should show on MPlayer's list,
like Flashpoint appears on this one.

iComic options
Select a .CBZ file. (Unfortunately, iComic doesn't do .CBRs yet, but the conversion process is fairly trivial.) Note that you have the option to skip to your last position, or pick pages from a list.