Underworld’s “Oblivion With Bells” album
“Beautiful Burnout,” “Boy, Boy, Boy,” “Faxed Invitation,” “JAL to Tokyo (Live From Tokyo)”… I believe I’m officially Underworld’s bitch.
Cinematic/tech artist & filmmaker. Online since 1999.
Underworld’s “Oblivion With Bells” album
“Beautiful Burnout,” “Boy, Boy, Boy,” “Faxed Invitation,” “JAL to Tokyo (Live From Tokyo)”… I believe I’m officially Underworld’s bitch.
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The 1982 Siberian pipeline sabotage incident is something I’ve been meaning to do a bit of research on. Yes, every bad or even mixed story in the U.S.S.R. was hushed up as best it could be by the Soviets — witness C.J. Chivers’ recent problems tracing the history of the AK-47 in The Gun — but did the incident actually happen?
For years, the CIA is said to have fed defective “stolen” technology to the Soviet Union, including gas pipeline controllers programmed to eventually trigger an explosion. I’ve seen the Siberian incident reported as the largest non-nuclear manmade explosion in history, but every source is weak and third-hand. Obviously the CIA’s and NSA’s files from the time would still be classified. It seems the best way to establish the veracity of the incident would be by speaking to senior physicians in the surrounding cities. Even if there were no deaths, the casualties from the event — if it did occur — would have been high. Burst eardrums alone would have radiated for miles.
Has anyone come upon a strong source for this story, or does it remain hidden somewhere between Soviet coverup and CIA blowback?
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You arrive in the town. You check into an inn. It’s on a back street. Out of the way. You’re wanted criminals, so best not to draw attention to yourselves.
You’ve been trying to find Tintmere since the airship crash. She should be in this town. But where?
Porcelain and little Night set off with a shopping list. You and Kell head upstairs.
There’s a window. The room overlooks an equally rickety row of buildings. Fourth floor. Lots of crisscrossing clotheslines and rising steam, people milling about below. In the distance over the rooflines: the Lightning Tower. Your ultimate goal.
Concrete pebbles fall discretely into the drowned, weedy flower pot in front of you. You crane, look up.
A bounty hunter tromps silently across the rusty pipes on the roof. The shadows of two more flit between the eaves.
You lean back in, smile, head gesture to Kell. A row of shurikens materialize in his hand, and he melts into the shadows. Hazard another glance out.
There’s a bamboo-like pole caught between your building and the one across the street. One floor down. It looks tenuous. But you have been working on your balance.
The next room? The walls can’t be too thick.
Nah. More fun to hide in the ratan basket.
Moments later, light feet land on the windowsill. Simultaneously, the door flies off its hinges. Two bounty hunters race into the empty room. They look around, walk to the center of the room. Suddenly a basket and a shadow burst to life, and both bounty hunters are flung out the open window with hardly a cry.
The ceiling caves in. It’s time for the big daddy bounty hunter. You exchange blows, and are both parried and thrown back. Not good. He hasn’t even broken a sweat. You grab Kell, flip him up onto the roof and climb out. The wall explodes. You make a grab for a drain pipe, swing out across sickening open space, and — Kell’s throw line jerks the pipe up toward the roof. You land. Smile. And RUN!
Rooftop chase, as the overpowered bounty hunter hurls force blasts after you, shredding the ancient stone. Chickens squawk. Cisterns topple. An adorable little girl tends a lovely three foot square rooftop garden; you scoop her up as you run by, and apologize, as the bounty hunter smashes her four flowers.
You give the girl to Kell, saying you’d like to try something. You insult the giant. A lot. Kell breaks left, sliding down the side of a building. You break right. It worked! He’s following you.
Crap.
Fight! Fighting doesn’t work. Escape! He catches you in midair. The bounty hunter sneers that the fee still gets paid if all your limbs have been pulled off. This is it.
Shwunk! The bounty hunter shakes you, looks around indeterminately. He reaches back. A magic dagger wrapped in lace protrudes from between his shoulder blades. He topples, turning to wood. The wood bleaches, hollows, cracks, shatters — poof! Nothing but dust.
You pick yourself up, squint into the sun. A lace-adorned figure steps toward you through the haze, waving. Tintmere!
—–
Now imagine that the preceeding had been generated: The overall plot. The long separation from a comrade. The clues that led you to her. The streets. The repetition of the larger goal. The foreshadowed tip-off at the flower box. The personally appropriate strategy options. The easy mini-bosses. The unstoppable mega boss. The setback getting onto the roof. The dramatic save. The comic timing. The race. The moral choice. The losing battle. The last minute save, leading into the storyline completing reunion.
As flashy as today’s RPGs are, they’re still not true Role Playing Games. In them, players are rewarded for figuring out how the game engine works and finding ways to best it, not — as the name would suggest — for immersing themselves in the role of the character.
How does a game engine implement literary devices? How do you reinforce the players’ choice to have more fun with the story, rather than the choice to simply learn better chess positions? Printed paper+pencil+friends role playing games have invented some interesting story game concepts, but digital RPGs still rely largely on grinding in the final analysis.
I’m not suggesting that hard work shouldn’t bring character improvement, but I sanction it only because that too is a literary device. It’s not, however, the only literary device. In the early days of computer games, perhaps it was the only trope that could be realistically implemented. Are we at the end of the beginning of computer games yet?
Those looking for something a little more crunchy may enjoy my RPG Stats Comparison Chart.
The Common, Union, ME.
Stitched together in Hugin from 21 camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.
Bertrand Russel: Why don’t I know this?
G.E. Moore: Because philosophers think it’s mathematics and mathematicians philosophy!
~Logicomix
French musician Émilie Simon. Writes and performs in English and French. Writes and performs her own songs. Massively popular in France, released in the U.S. Wrote the soundtrack for the French release of March of the Penguins. Sweet, biting, smooth, electronic. Why don’t I know this?
Aside: The video for “Flowers” itself is brilliant; as near as I can tell it was directed by a collective called No Brain (viciously crap website here). Whether it’s a hybrid of stop motion and computer animation or just computer animation with far too much work put into making it look like stop motion I can’t decide from the YouTube video. Obviously the website is no help.
Click around on YouTube a bit. These songs are viciously good for French pop music. Why don’t I know this in the U.S.? Why haven’t my tracking cookies surrounded me with this? Has Simon been shuffled into the same hole all electronic music seems to fall into right now? Do we really need that much more room for Stefani Germanotta’s particular brand of gaga desperation?
I expect a response from high-level authorities.
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Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.
Dozens more captioned YouTube videos, including several complete feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.
“The Remix Game” by Bitter:Sweet
Each track on “The Mating Game” remixed by a different DJ, including Thievery Corporation, Yes King, Solid Doctor and Nicola Conte.
If there actually is a child chapter book or band named after any of the following, I stand behind my opinions.
Speed composition of a book cover for C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia (if numbered correctly).
Assets are “Tambako the Jaguar’s” CC licensed photograph of a lion from Flickr, and Henningklevjer’s CC licensed cloth weave texture from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Charlemagne and Mona Lisa Solid.
Under 111 minutes? No, but with the template established, the rest of the series should go faster.
Click image for 300dpi.
Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great
[Emphasis from original. Ellipses mine. Page numbers refer to the first edition Twelve Books hardcover.]
These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago…. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness. (7)
As for consolation, since religious people so often insist that faith answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends. In any case, the critics of religion do not simply deny that it has a painkilling effect. Instead, they warn against the placebo and the bottle of colored water. (9)
[Quoting John Stuart Mill:] “He looked upon [religion] as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies–belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind–and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard or morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.” (15)
It assures them that god cares for them individually, and claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god. (74)
In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson. (110)
It was not until after the Second World War and the spread of decolonization and human rights that the cry for emancipation was raised again. In response, it was again very forcefully asserted (on American soil, in the second half of the twentieth century) that the discrepant descendants of Noah were not intended by god to be mixed. This barbaric stupidity had real-world consequences…. The entire self-definition of “the South” was that is was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. (179)
But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago, are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time. The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting tyranny is even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous in the detection of error. Most of humanity, throughout its history, has dwelt under a form of this stupefying dictatorship, and a large portion of it still does. (212)
In order to be a part of a totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform and carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters sexual, and in denunciation and punishment–“for their own good”–of those who transgress? The sexual element is probably decisive, in that the dullest mind can grasp what Nathaniel Hawthorne captured in The Scarlet Letter: the deep connection between repression and perversion. (232)
[Quoting Blaise Pascal:] “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”
(“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid.”) (253)
Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent…. Modern vernacular describes conscience–not too badly–as whatever it is that makes us behave well when nobody is looking. (256)
Paine’s Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state. Almost all of the American founders died without any priest by their bedside, as also did Paine, who was much pestered in his last hours by religious hooligans who demanded that he accept Christ as his savior. Like David Hume, he declined all such consolation and his memory has outlasted the calumnious rumor that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end. (The mere fact that such deathbed “repentances” were sought by the godly, let alone subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based.) (268-269)
The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concept of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. (283)
Just time this week to check in on the Times Best Sellers List…
Hardcover Fiction
1. | THE LORDBURN REPETITION, by Kluey Part Smith. (Niffen, $26.00.) Super spy Rex Coulter must stop a large thing from happening. |
2. | THE PERSPICACITY OF DOUBT, by Lucy Blovine. (Scor/Delfine, $26.50.) Summering on Wild Horse island, recent divorcee Hailiey McElle-Saphire meets an otherwise perfect man with a dark secret. |
3. | CHURNED, by James Patterson and Olivia Sciatica. (Buffet, $28.00.) Ribald O’Makepeace will stop at nothing to avenge his carpool. Patterson Vermeers his name onto an eleventh USA Original-grade potboiler this year. |
4. | ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BOURNE BORING, by Eric Von Lustbader. (Taipei Holdings Corp, $24.99.) Renegade agents delve underground as Von Lustbader continues to serve out some karmic purgatory inside the long-dead corpse of Ludlum. |
5. | PIECES OF A LIFE ONCE LIVED, by Katherine Loft. (Shumberg, $26.00.) Nothing much happens. |
6. | A MURDER IN THE COLON, by Dee Brettfield. (Snorium Mystery, $23.95.) Questions must be answered when bodies begin turning up outside homicide dick-turned-doc Rue Level’s Hollywood practice in Brettfield’s latest colonoscopy-flavored opus. |
7. | HEART OF THE HEART, by Lisette Poe. (Snaf Books, $26.00.) A story about sisters in which they don’t just plain hate each other. |
8. | STAR WARS: QUORUM OF THE JEDI: THE FORCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS, by Callista Quing. (DF, $24.00.) A whole galaxy at war and it’s the same ten goddamn planets and cast members. Followup to Star Wars: Quorum of the Jedi: Lodgers of the Force. |
9. | JEREMIAH’S SWORD, by J. Luke Taper. (Swaggart Press, $23.99.) A young man’s flaming sword thrusts the spirit of God into the backs of the unrepentant in Taper’s post-Rapture Christian allegory. |
10. | DEAD IN THE FAMILY, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) Sookie Stackhouse is exhausted in the aftermath of a Fae war. |
11. | PROFOUND TONE, by Paulo Coelho. (Shiv/Livertoot, $27.95.) The author of The Alchemist pads out another child chapter book plot with his trademark Buddhist Monk Voice. |
Hardcover Nonfiction
1. | THAT WEBSITE: THE BOOK, by Stu Borgen et. al. (eBooks iPublications, $22.99.) That website, in book form for some reason. Destined for the can. |
2. | IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO HAVE SEX WITH A GENERATION, I WOULD HAVE SEX WITH THE GREATEST GENERATION, by Tom Brokaw. (Culthouse, $24.00.) Further wankery on the generation that beat the Depression, World War II, blacks and women. |
3. | MR. EIFFEL’S AWFULLY BIG TOWER, by Snake Morley. (B&W/Weege, $29.99.) New revelations on the temporary unpopularity of the monument, from the archives of the Parisian Ladies’ Anti-Berber League. |
4. | STEPHENIE MEYER: CREEPY, SEXUALLY-REPRESSED MORMON BROOD MARE, by Deedee Copenham. (Salt Press, $22.00.) The authorized biography. |
5. | FAILED GOVERNOR, by Mitt Romney. (Tankard, $28.50.) The one-term Massachusetts executive explains why he’s somehow relevant to national politics. |
6. | I’M A CELEBRITY… FUCK!, by some chick or other. (Tarpaulin Books, $23.00.) Yet more reminiscences by the woman who has the routine about- Wait am I thinking of the other one? The one who was always drunk. |
7. | MY MONEY IS IN MY SHOE, by Lou Dobbs. (Milli Press, $27.00.) Something about immigrants, something about gold, and other stuff it’s getting increasingly hard to classify from the former pundit. |
8. | IN LEAGUE WITH DEVILS, by Gordon Bott. (Walden Press, $29.50.) It doesn’t matter what it’s about, the crappy university publisher didn’t expect it to do any business and it’ll be backordered for a month. |
9. | WHEN WE DIE, WE DON’T DIE, by Premaketuur Jones. (Shambhala, $24.50.) Deep meditations on the large “Continue? 10… 9… 8…” screen that appears over our heads when we die if we properly practice spiritual quantum mindfulness soul vibration wellness. |
10. | …AND HE PROBABLY HAS A TINY PENIS, TOO!, by Laura Ingraman. (John Birch Books, $24.95.) Ann Coulter takes us on another tour of vitriol, crackpot research and insinuation. Laura Ingraham. Whatever. |
11. | COUNTERFACTUALS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Greengreen, $24.99.) Sixteen more hilariously surprising bullshit essays, including “Reevaluating Ethyl,” “Anyone Could Teach Elementary School” and “Caesar Invented the Typewriter.” |
And properties that make interesting use of them.
1. Frankenstein Creations: Powerful, perhaps immortal confusions of once-dead human parts reanimated by Dr. Frankenstein’s (always) secret method. Not to be overly confused with James Whale’s 1931 film with its constricted, single-location plot, dim bolt-necked creation, and memorable use of Nicola Tesla-inspired electrical equipment as the (revealed) method of cell reanimation.
Franken Fran: A manga series about a loveable but somehow unmistakeably monsterous patchwork girl who inhabits a mansion full of equally bizarre creations, “helping” people as she sees fit, and awaiting the return of her creator.
2. Dopplegangers: Classically, a mute apparition of oneself that appears to warn against impending danger.
Arcana: Another manga, slow to start, in which a girl matching no missing person’s report is found by the police, and by her ability to see ghosts proves useful in investigating a series of brutal murders.
3. Former Tenants: Beings who inhabited the Earth long before humans, and who want their world back.
The short stories of H.P. Lovecraft: Lovecraft lived in the era when man was pushing into the final dark corners of the map. His dominant theme was a fear that the dark corners would push back. The double-switch Lovecraft plays in “At the Mountains of Madness” is particularly impressive. (Cthulhu, despite his fame, is a relatively minor player.)
4. Sirens: Beautiful female creatures, often with the aspects of seabirds, who lure men (and women?) to a watery death with an irresistable song.
There is a Japanese survival horror videogame series called “Siren,” but it appears to have very little to do with the western myth.
5. The Motif of Harmful Sensation: Related to the siren, a broader term for the idea of a piece of sensory input that can cause a physical effect on the victim. (Well explained in the finest deleted Wikipedia article I’ve ever come across.)
BLIT: David Langford’s remarkable short story revolves around the discovery of a class of images that “crash” the human brain, killing anyone who views them.