Monday, December 31, 2007

Conversation entre des "illuminés"

Rupert Sheldrac, Terrence McKenna & ralp Abraham - The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination and Spirit

Stimulating and often startling discussions between three friends, all highly original thinkers: Rupert Sheldrake, controversial biologist, Terence McKenna , psychedelic visionary, and Ralph Abraham , chaos mathematician. Their passion is to break out of paradigms that retard our evolution and to explore new possibilities. Through challenge and synergy they venture where few have gone before, leading their readers on an exciting journey of discovery. Their discussions focus on the evolution of the mind, the role of psychedelics, skepticism, the psychic powers of animals, the structure of time, the life of the heavens, the nature of God, and transformations of consciousness.

Chaos theory (wikipedia) : In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

The Amazing Screw On Head

The Amazing Screw On Head
Première épisode de la série animé d'un personnage crée par Mike Mignola (Hellboy).

Shynia Tsukamoto - Filmographie

Twitch - Shynia Tsukamoto
Une collection de bandes annonces de films de Shynia Tsukamoto (Testuo, Bullet Ballet ...).

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Social Networking = Social Advertising

Facebook is marketing your brand preference (with your permission)

Facebook says that many of its 50 million active users already tell friends about particular products or brands they like, and the only change will be that those communications might start to carry ad messages from the companies that sell them. Facebook is letting advertisers set up their own profile pages at no charge and encouraging companies like Blockbuster, Condé Nast and Coca-Cola to share information with Facebook about the actions of Facebook members on their sites.

[...]

Facebook users will not be able to avoid these personally recommended ads if they are friends with participating people. Participation can involve joining a fan club for a brand, recommending a product or sharing information about their purchases from external Web sites.

Sarkozy et les americains

Congress warms to France's new president

In a speech to a joint meeting of Congress — a rare honor for a head of state — Mr. Sarkozy seemed to strike all the right notes. He spoke of his love of the American dream and cultural icons of the 20th century, from Elvis Presley to Ernest Hemingway. He expressed admiration for American values and for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He thanked the United States for saving France in two world wars, rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan and fighting Communism during the cold war.

[...]

“It’s safe to say that you’ve impressed a lot of people here on your journey,” Mr. Bush said, calling Mr. Sarkozy “the kind of fellow I like to deal with.”

[...]

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said of Mr. Sarkozy’s performance: “You just heard a Ronald Reagan speech from a president of France. It was an almost out-of-body experience for all of us.”

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Derek Miller - Fin de Stylus Magazine

2007 Year-end thoughts

Before Stylus, I’d never have believed you could become so close to people you’d never met. In space that lacks physique, you kind of meet as avatars. The board was a way for so many of us to piss away empty time at work or late at night, to gossip and needle and call-foul at music, sports, our jobs, drinks of choice. I think we all came to a persona of our own more than perhaps we were ourselves. A dress-up, extroverted place for what I expect are really a room-full of introverts (spoken like one. . .) It was dreamspace, the most virtual of realities, but it was also a place where those of us who’d been around for a while began to feel we could come, first-coffee in the morning, to put some kind of steady perspective back in place. But it only worked because we came to know at least a bit of something about each other by what we’d read and written. There was a frankness gained by putting so much of ourselves in pieces about music—or pieces about music which often had nothing to do with music. We pressed and confined each other, in turns, with a challenge of putting something in writing, formally or informally

Buddha Machine

FM3 Buddha Machine
La création la plus populaire de la scène underground electronique chinoise.

New York Times

The Evangelical crackup
Les mouvements d'opinions au sein des communautés evangelistes après les différentes défaites de George W. Bush et ses promesses non tenues.

These days, Westlink has found less confrontational ways to oppose abortion, mainly by helping to pay for a medical center called Choices. Housed in a cozy-looking white-shingled cottage next to Dr. Tiller’s bunkerlike abortion facility, Choices discourages women from ending pregnancies by offering 3-D ultrasound scans and adoption advice.

[...]

Of these, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, stands out in the polls and in his rhetoric. [...] On the campaign trail, he criticizes chief executives’ pay and says his faith demands environmental regulation. “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car,” Huckabee said in a recent debate. “We shouldn’t be satisfied that elderly people are being abused or neglected in nursing homes.”Huckabee told me that he welcomed a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he said, repeating a campaign theme.

But the leaders of the Christian conservative movement have not rallied to him. Many say he cannot win because he has not raised enough money. Perkins and others have criticized Huckabee for taking too soft an approach to the Middle East. Others worry that his record on taxes will anger allies on the right. And some Christian conservatives take his “gestation period” line as a slight to their movement.

[...]

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

[...]

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year.

Rudy, the values slayer
Did we do that ?
par Thomas Friedman

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

La revanche du nounours rose

Charlie White - Adicolor pink
Un clip d'une minute vingt sur un ours en peluche qui transforme sa patronne en poupet. Vous avez dit inquiétant ?

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Warren Ellis - Threat status

somedays, MySpace would be the very ironic image of stark existential loneliness within a sea of people if it wasn't for the users whose profiles have been hacked to send out waves of spam. Somewhere, a lonely boy's eyes are welling up with joy, his heart filled near to bursting with the feeling of someone wanting to communicate with him. Yes, he says. I do need a bigger cock that plays ringtones and ejaculates restaurant vouchers. Just keep talking to me.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami sur Wikipedia
Fondateur du mouvement Super flat au Japon. Un de ses élève les plus connu est Yoshitomo Nara. Takashi Murakami - Murakami sur Amazon

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Alan Moore - Pornographie, magie et Promethea

Alan Moore - the Wondeful wizard of Northerhampton

'The basic stance that we were taking in Lost Girls is that the sexual imagination cannot be policed, you cannot shut areas of it off and I think that if you do, it actually becomes dangerous. I think that if you shut off parts of people's sexual imagination then that part becomes a dark space in which they can fester and become something generally appalling.'

What we wanted to say with Lost Girls was there's a big difference between pornography and art. Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings. Pornography does the exact opposite: it's an isolating thing. Everybody thinks, ''I bet it's only me who has had these thoughts. I bet there's never been anybody as low as me in the entire history of the world." We wanted to say, "Look, it's OK. It's OK for you to have these thoughts.

[...]

The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along.

[...]

The 'tarot stuff' is the issue entitled 'The Magic Theatre', a history of the universe from pre-Big Bang to the present day told through the major arcana (the picture cards) of the tarot. Moore did it in rhyming verse. He gave each page a title and all 21 titles were anagrams of 'Promethea' ('Pa Theorem'; 'Ape Mother'; 'Me Atop Her'; 'Heart Poem'; 'Meet Harpo' etc). Gags and puns abound, and at the bottom of each page a long, rambling joke is told in segments, which will, we are told, if properly understood, explain magic. 'The Magic Theatre' is a virtuoso demonstration of what an Alan Moore comic can do that novels and films can't get near – provide multiple strands of simultaneous narrative and visual information that wind around each other in dizzying fashion, echoing and commenting on each other.

'It was one of the best things we've ever done. I was dead pleased with that. I was smug for months…' (Gebbie is quick to attest to the smugness.) 'We were haemorrhaging readers, but the ones who stayed behind had presumably sustained such neurological damage that they were no longer capable of cancelling their subscription – a hardcore readership who stayed with us right to the end and really appreciated it and really enjoyed it.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Mark Briggs - Guide du journalisme moderne

Journalism : How to survive and thrive
Un guide à l'attention des journalistes pour manipuler les nouveaux outils du web. 132 pages disponible en pdf. A imprimer pour un meilleur confort de lecture.

Blackwater : Des mercenaires en Irak

Hired gun fetish

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely consistent with many other documented incidents involving security contractors.

[...]

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren’t the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren’t for the hatred such incidents engender.

Deux mots de vocabulaire : Blackwater et I.E.D.

Blackwater shooting site was chaotic

“It raises the first question of why didn’t they just stay in place, since they are safe in the compound,” the official said. “Usually the concept would be, if an I.E.D. detonates in the street, you would wait 15 to 30 minutes, until things calmed down,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.

Blackwater : Entreprise de "mercenaires" employé par le gouvernement américain dans le conflit Irakien.
I.E.D. : Improvised explosive device

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Moebius

Moebius redux
Un reportage, co produit par Arte, sur le dessinateur Moebius, aka Jean Giraud. Sous titré en anglais.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Suicide par pénétration de crayon dans l'oeil

Suicide by ballpoint pen

An unfortunate, but amazing case: a 25-year-old schizophrenic man shoved a 14.5-cm-long ballpoint pen through his eye socket, all the way to his cerebellum (in the rear of the brain).

[...]

Its amazing that, with a 14 cm plastic pen stuck in his brain, the patient was still conscious enough to discuss his injury with hospital staff. What was he thinking as he slowly pushed that pen further and further into his brain?

Monday, September 24, 2007

Warren Ellis' Bad Signal - Nemo

I first encountered the idea of
Monty Cantsin around '88, though
he was created around '77. Monty
Cantsin is a Neoist construct: an
open pop star. Because in '77 they
didn't have the term "open source."
The idea being that artists could
choose to record under the name
Monty Cantsin, thereby generating
a fake oeuvre for a fake pop star,
confusing the fuck out of the
uninitiated. (See also "Karen Eliot,"
"Luther Blissett")

There's no derogatory side to
Monty Cantsin - he doesn't do the
work of, say, Alan Smithee, or
Harlan Ellison's damning Cordwainer
Bird pseudonym (a name he applies
to work that's been fucked over,
allowing him to retain rights and
royalty payments regardless).

Monty Cantsin is an artistic joke.
Anyone can be Monty Cantsin.

And while having a drink or two last
night, the notion came to me: it'd
be amusing if comics had one of
those. If music has a Monty Cantsin,
maybe comics should have a
Nemo Woodbine. An open source
comics creator. Sometimes she's
a cartoonist. Sometimes he's a
writer.

And the best thing about Nemo
Woodbine might be that she's
granted her copyright and royalties
in perpetuity to the Comic Book
Legal Defense Fund or something.
Anything he earns beyond his page
rate, and the rights to whatever
she did, live with the Fund: her
gift to the medium.

Just throwing the idea out there for
someone to do something with, or
not.

Friday, September 21, 2007

This is youtube material

The monkey-hanging legend is the most famous story connected with Hartlepool. During the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the Hartlepool coast.

During the Napoleonic Wars there was a fear of a French invasion of Britain and much public concern about the possibility of French infiltrators and spies.

The fishermen of Hartlepool fearing an invasion kept a close watch on the French vessel as it struggled against the storm but when the vessel was severely battered and sunk they turned their attention to the wreckage washed ashore. Among the wreckage lay one wet and sorrowful looking survivor, the ship's pet monkey dressed to amuse in a military style uniform.

The fishermen apparently questioned the monkey and held a beach-based trial. Unfamiliar with what a Frenchman looked like they came to the conclusion that this monkey was a French spy and should be sentenced to death. The unfortunate creature was to die by hanging, with the mast of a fishing boat (a coble) providing a convenient gallows

Cette charmante anecdote concerne la même ville où cet autre fait divers a eu lieu

Man urinates on dying woman declaring it youtube material

Shouting, "This is YouTube material!" a 27-year-old British man urinated on a dying woman who had collapsed on the street, the BBC and local Hartepool Mail and Northern Echo tell us. He also doused her with a bucket of water and covered her with shaving cream.

The woman, 50-year-old Christine Lakinski, died at the scene of pancreatic failure.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Hunter S Thompson - Son influence

Hunter S Thompson films
Un symposium, résumé en 19 videos, sur l'effet de Hunter S Thompson sur le journalisme et la politique américaine.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Des livres sculptés

Brian Dettmer - Book autopsies
Cet artiste sculpte des livres pour réveller les illustrations intérieurs. Très très impressionant.

Richard Dawkins on Book Club

Richard Dawkins - Interview
Parce que je suis un fan boy et que, sérieusement, le type est interessant a écouter.

Jesus camp

Jesus Camp
Un reportage sur un camp de chrétien qui apprend la religion aux enfants.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Comment finissent les super tankers ?

End of the line
Un photo reportage au Bangladesh sur le desassemblage de super tankers.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Hilary Clinton milite pour un système de santé plus efficace

Clinton calls for universal health care

She called for a requirement for businesses to obtain insurance for employees, and said the wealthy should pay higher taxes to help defray the cost for those less able to pay for it. She put the government's cost at $110 billion a year.

[...]

Addressing a crowd at a medical center in the early voting state of Iowa, Clinton laid out her proposal, with the centerpiece a so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance - just as most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Rival John Edwards has also offered a plan that includes an individual mandate, while the proposal outlined by Barack Obama does not.

Clinton's plan builds on the existing employer-based system of coverage. People who receive insurance through the workplace could continue to do so; businesses, in turn, would be required to offer insurance to employees, or contribute to a government-run pool that would help pay for those not covered. Clinton would also offer a tax subsidy to small businesses to help them afford the cost of providing coverage to their workers.

[...]

Her speech came nearly 14 years after her first attempt at a universal healthcare plan that was highly criticized by Republicans as a socialized medical plan that eventually fell apart and left a stain on the former First Lady's record, reports CBS News reporter Fernando Suarez. Despite her failed attempt in 1993 Clinton assured the crowd of about 150 doctors, nurses and patients that she grew from her experience.

Alterati

Hidden elements - the dark side of alternate reality games

Post modern apocalypse - Another look at how to market the apocalypse

Post modern times

Welcome to Postmodern Times, a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Toward 2012", introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality, and a host of other subjects. We are currently looking for investors to take this project forward.

Bruce Sterling - Mediadefender 0 - Hackers 1

Seven hundred megabytes of leaked internal email

Peer-to-peer (P2P) poisoning company MediaDefender suffered an embarrassing leak this weekend, when almost 700MB of internal company e-mail was distributed on the Internet via BitTorrent.

"The e-mails reveal many aspects of MediaDefender's elaborate P2P disruption strategies, illuminate previously undisclosed details about the MiiVi scandal, and bring to light details regarding MediaDefender's collaboration with the New York Attorney General's office on a secret law enforcement project.

Alterati

I wanted to link to http://jrwr.hopto.org/msg01968.html, where Media Defender was instructed to track down and block the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero torrents, and that included ftp data to Interscope servers as a way to illustrate the fantabulous trainwreckery that is this case.

Alterati - Débat entre deux théoriciens branché UFO

War of the future worlds

The gist of Daniel’s argument is that one can never know for sure what is going to happen in the future, and our thoughts create reality, so that promoting negative future scenarios instead of more healthy and positive ones is irresponsible, especially when one has a platform that reaches as many as Whitley’s.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Plusieurs liens

Modern day Da vinci
Un homme qui réalise des machines en bois fonctionnant sur le mouvement perpetuel et dont le but est d'en construire qui pourrait avancer eternellement.

Z Machine - Wikipedia
The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. It is operated by Sandia National Laboratories to gather data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons. The Z machine is located at Sandia's main site in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

La situation desastreuse du Zimbabwe continue et risque de continuer

Zimbabwe's precarious survival

It is a situation that suits the governments on both sides.

Among the refugees, there are doctors, engineers, agricultural experts, just the kind of people who are needed by South Africa's growing economy


Zimbabweans have long since given up hope that the South African leader - Thabo Mbeki - will put pressure on his old friend, Robert Mugabe, to reform.

And as for Robert Mugabe, an opposition politician in Harare says: "This makes him a very, very happy dictator.

"He gets rid of his opponents and they in turn send back money to their families in Zimbabwe and that keeps things ticking over."

Anyone expecting a swift conclusion to Zimbabwe's agony will be disappointed.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

The other side of outsourcing - Thomas Friedman

The other side of outsourcing sur youtube
Un reportage de the Discovery Channel par Thomas Friedman (auteur de the World is flat) que Wikipedia définit comme tel :
In "The Other Side of Outsourcing" (2004), he visited a call center in Bangalore, interviewing the young Indians working there, and then traveled to an impoverished rural part of India, where he debated the pros and cons of globalization with locals (this trip spawned his eventual bestselling book "The World is Flat").

Monday, August 27, 2007

Jenkem - Une nouvelle drogue ... particulière

African children high on sewage

They are manufacturing "Jenkem", a disgusting, noxious mixture made from fermented sewage. It is cheap, potent and very popular among the thousands of street-children in Lusaka. When they cannot afford glue or are too scared to steal petrol, these youngsters turn to Jenkem as a way of getting high.

"It lasts about an hour", says one user, 16-year-old Luke Mpande, who prefers Jenkem to other substances.

"With glue, I just hear voices in my head. But with Jenkem, I see visions. I see my mother who is dead and I forget about the problems in my life."

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Zimbabwe - Mugabe

Mugabe hold's on African
Pourquoi Mugabe est soutenu par ses pairs.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

the Invisibles - Spank the monkey

the Invisibles
Une chronique de la série. Inclu, pour ceux qui ne connaitrait pas encore, l'anecdote fameuse du rituel demandé aux lecteurs de la série par Grant Morrisson.

La vie d'un garçon employé comme mascotte par les nazis

The secret history of the nazi mascot

In newsreels, he was paraded as 'the Reich's youngest Nazi' and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities.

But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.

"They didn't know that I was a Jewish boy who had escaped a Nazi death squad. They thought I was a Russian orphan."

[...]

Young Alex saw action on the Russian front, and was even used by the SS to lure Jewish people to their deaths.

Outside the cattle trains which carried victims to the concentration camps, he handed out chocolate bars to tempt them in.

Wet artificial life - Wikipedia

Wet artificial life - Définition wikipedia

Wet artificial life or wet alife refers to research efforts to safely synthesize self-sustaining new cellular life forms from abiotic components such as pure chemical substances. The name derives from the assumption that liquids are required for the new cells to be viable. This research involved experiments with chemical substrates in water. If such a research goal were accomplished, it would be comparable to the synthesis of urea in 1828, which discredited the concept of vitalism. As of 2007, some scientists were optimistic that a genuine fulfillment of that goal is achievable within the coming decade while other experts in the field, such as Francis Collins are pessimistic about that timeframe.

In biology, Abiotic components are non-living chemical and physical factors in the environment. These may be classified as light, temperature, water, atmospheric gases, and wind as well as soil (edaphic) and physiographic (nature of land surface) factors.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Warren Ellis @ 2006

Another day down the mines of our lives. We drink 'til we stink and smoke 'til we choke because that's how we get things done, you and me. Spending our lives making things and making things out of our lives, because anything else would be dull as hell and we're damned if we're going to sit at the other end of whatever years we get saying, well, what the fuck was that for?

Years of scars, lipstick and tears, and every day the dawn comes on we turn our eyes up in surprise, saying, "There's that goddamn sun again."

Thursday, August 16, 2007

La contrepartie de la pillule miracle enerve les pro lifes

Pro-life groups put brakes on improved contraceptive pills

It sounds like a dream ticket for women: a safer contraceptive pill that also treats a range of health problems. But the drug's development is being delayed because in high doses, it is the abortion pill reviled by the anti-abortion lobby and the government of George Bush, says David Baird, a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, speaking on Monday at a press briefing in London. "Lack of investment in these compounds for use in conditions other than contraception has stemmed from the Bush administration and its policies," he says.

In high doses, progesterone receptor moderators (PRMs) like mifepristone (RU-486) terminate an early pregnancy by halting development of the placenta. In much smaller doses, they could combat endometriosis, fibroids and even brain cancers, because they block the action of the hormone progesterone.

PRMs given as contraceptives would also stop periods altogether - dramatically cutting monthly exposure to oestrogen and progesterone, hormones also linked with breast cancer.

Monday, August 13, 2007

MS13 - Histoire d'un gang

The most dangerous gang in the world
Reportage de 52 minutes sur le MS13.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Neige - Interview

Interview avec Neige sur Pitchfork media
Neige, musicien français de black metal, joue dans Amesoeurs, Peste Noire et Alcest.

Playing in such different projects gives me the opportunity to explore different sides of my personality and of my tastes. I am not someone close-minded; I can appreciate many sorts of music and artistic processes. My purpose is to get to the bottom of things. I wish to push the opposites of my personality in order to develop them until their very end; it really raises the spirit and helps me to understand myself better.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Des groupes de soutiens pour anorexique

Seeking thinspiration

The popularity of social networking websites has opened up a whole new world of interaction, but with it, darker trends are emerging. Groups which appear to extol grave eating disorders as a glamorous lifestyle choice are appearing on sites which claim tens of millions of active users.

Members of such groups post pictures of painfully skinny girls for "thinspiration", compare dangerously low goal weights and measurements, and team up to "keep each other strong" in their quest to lose weight.

They swap stories on how they vomit until they cough blood, are often too weak to get out of bed and how they're scared family or friends will find out and force them into recovery.

[...]

Many girls in these groups, aged from about 15 to 30, claim their goal weight is below seven stone (45kg), and for some it is as low as five stone (32kg).

"We always want to be the thinnest," Andrea says. "'Thinner is the winner', that's a quote that we live by."

Zeitgeist - Autre reportage conspirationiste

Zeitgeist - the Movie
Un nouveau documentaire portant sur le 11 septembre, la réserve fédérale et la religion chretienne. A vue de nez, Illuminati power !

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Occam's Razor - Définition

Occam's Razor - Wikipedia

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"):

Bertrand Russel - Wikipedia

Bertrand Russel - Wikipedia
A relire. Homme très interessant mais théories complexes (ou mal expliquées).

John Stuart Mill - Un homme bien

John Stuart Mill - Utilitarianism

Mill distinguishes between "happiness" and "contentment," claiming that the former is of higher value than the latter, a belief wittily encapsulated in his statement that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

[...]

Mill's argument is that the 'simple pleasures' tend to be preferred by people who have no experience with high art, and are therefore not in a proper position to judge. For this reason, in his life Mill supported legislation that would have granted extra voting power to university graduates, on the grounds that they were in a better position to judge what would be best for society. It should be noted that in this Mill in no way devalued the uneducated as people, and he certainly would have advocated sending the poor but talented to universities; it is the education, and not the intrinsic nature, of the educated that Mill believed qualified them to have more influence in government.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Victory Records - Témoignage d'un ex employé

Behind the scenes at Victory Records
Témoignage d'un ex employé de Victory sur les pratiques du label et la personnalité tyrannique de son directeur.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Warren Ellis - Sur les medias

the Sunday hangover

Which makes it, in its way, the perfect object lesson of American news. Given the time, CNN and their kin can present the news in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone, and increases no-one’s understanding of current events and the times they live in. I spent nine days in America this time, and it felt like I was in a bottle lost on the tide.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Warren Ellis - Ruins

Ruins #01
Ruins #02
Série culte de Warren Ellis avilissant l'univers Marvel.

Warren Ellis interview William Gibson

William Gibson discusses spook coutry and interactive fiction

Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I?discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site — readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about "the possibilities of interactive fiction," and they seem to have no clue how we're already so there.

Ben Templesmith à propos de Ashley Wood

Ashley Wood speaks

From Ben Templesmith about Ashley Wood: ”Ash is a force of nature. Artistically, he's incorporated the best of many great artists and then infused them with his own demon seed to make an all together different animal. Truly unique now. Just talking to him these days it's scary to see the sheer amount of ideas and creativity coming out of him. This man will not stop!

Ashley Wood - Interview

Design is kinky - Ashley Wood

What are your main influences?
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, John Singer Sargeant, Bob Peak, Bernie Fuchs.

What materials do you use to produce your work? How much is done on the computer?
Depends on the piece and what it's for. The painted pieces all start off as oil paintings, some I work until they're complete oil paintings, others are used as a step in a computer aided process. As for the materials that I use, a lot of oil paint, digital photography and tons of Staedtler Calligraphic Duo markers.

Prêcher l'abstinence ne sert a rien

"No-sex" programmes not working

The Oxford University team reviewed 13 US trials involving over 15,000 people aged 10 to 21.

They found abstinence programmes had no negative or positive impact on the rates of sex infections or unprotected sex, the British Medical Journal said.

[...]

However, such groups have so far failed to gain the foothold they have in the US where a third of the President's HIV budget is given to abstinence programmes.

The latest study, which included trials comparing young people attending abstinence-only programmes against those receiving no sex education, raises questions over whether they work in developed countries.

Researchers found none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Les vegansexuals

Carnivore sex off the menu

A new phenomenon in New Zealand is taking the idea of you are what you eat to the extreme.

Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals.

[...]

Another Christchurch vegan said she found non-vegans attractive, but would not want to be physically close to them.

"I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance," she said.

Christchurch vegan Nichola Kriek has been married to her vegan husband, Hans, for nine years.

She would not describe herself as vegansexual, but said it would definitely be a preference.

She could understand people not wanting to get too close to non-vegan or non-vegetarians.

"When you are vegan or vegetarian, you are very aware that when people eat a meaty diet, they are kind of a graveyard for animals," she said.

Jeremy Fish - Concepteur graphique de None shall pass

Silkybunnies
Site officiel de Jeremy Fish, graphiste qui s'est occupé, entre autre, d'un projet avec Aesop Rock et du dernier album de ce dernier.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Wikipedia - Tatouage en prison

Wikipedia - Criminal tatoo
Les tatouage en prison, et plus spécialement leur signification, en Russie.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Noam Chomsky - Conférence

Noam Chomsky - Distorted morals
Une conférence de Noam Chomsky à l'université d'Harvard sur la guerre contre le terrorisme mené par le gouvernement des Etats Unis.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Cedric Delseaux - Photographie inspiré de Star Wars

Cedric Delseaux
Un photographe français présente une série de clichés inspiré de Star Wars ou des personnages et des situations sont reproduites dans un environnement réaliste. Le grain de la photo est particulié, très doux et riche. Du très beaux travail présenté sur un site à la navigation agréable.

David Lynch - Courts métrages

David Lynch - Rabbits
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7

Friday, July 27, 2007

Autopsie de l'alien de Roswell

Area 51Military top secret Roswell Autopsy
La fameuse autopsie de l'extra terrestre qui a tant passionné les conspirationistes. Bien sur le document est faux et un groupe de type a avoué l'avoir réalisé avec les moyens d'un autre film lors de son tournage. Marrant et court, a voir pour le principe.

Reportage de la BBC - Ventes d'enfants en Bulgarie

Laying bait for baby smugglers

The aim of the report was to expose Bulgaria's criminal trade in babies in all its cynicism.

Apart from Harry, the BBC team met relatives of the children. A grandfather turned up with a photograph, trying to sell his "jewel of a granddaughter" without his daughter's knowledge.

How did it feel to operate in an environment of such moral squalor?

"You have to control your emotions because it is quite a tense situation," says Craig.

"You have to put them aside and worry about them when you've finished the task in hand.

"I'm a parent myself and I was just happy when it was over."

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

William S. Burroughs (1984)

Burroughs
Un documentaire sur la vie de l'auteur William S. Burroughs (Le festin nu, Junky ...) datant de 1984.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Alex Jones et les Illuminatis

the Order of death
Le baroudeur des théories de conspiration raconte l'histoire du supposé groupe de conspirateur et son action dans le monde à travers le monde. De la parnoïa a haute dose.

Reportage sur les consommateurs de poupées gonflables

Guys and dolls
Un reportage de 45 minute sur des hommes qui couchent et vivent, litterallement, avec des poupées.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Wizard Rock

Trailer d'un documentaire sur le Wizard Rock
Le Wizard Rock a déjà engendré une centaine de groupe et provient d'une obsession pour Harry Potter. Le concept du fan prend donc place maintenant dans le cadre de la musique et dépasse donc les fans fictions et les fan arts. Maintenant, vous avez aussi la fan music.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

9/11 revisited

9/11 revisited v.2

Un reportage assez interessant sur le 11 septembre et la fameuse théories des bombes et de la démolition du WTC. Toujours a prendre avec des pincettes mais l'argumentaire est plus convaincant, mené par des intervenants spécialistes, scientifiques et autre. Tout ce qui concerne le Batiment 7 est, a mon sens, le plus interessant et le plus troublant, bien que l'ensemble du reportage pose des questions pertinentes. En tout cas, je le recommende plus que 9/11 mysteries (precedemment posté) qui est plus orienté Illuminatis.

Deux artistes: Trevor Brown et Edward Gorey



Trevor Brown
Edward Gorey sur Wikipedia
Deux artistes affiliés au monde de l'enfance mais avec deux attitudes très différentes mais très originales. Le premier peint surtout des enfants tandis que l'autre semble surtout avoir illustré des livres pour enfant. Ce qui les rejoint est leur attitude asymétrique par rapport a ce qu'il représente.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Documentaire sur le shoegaze en préparation

Fallen not broken

"With nearly two years of filming under his belt, filmmaker Eric Green of L.A.-based Hypnagogia Films is nearing completion of his documentary chronicling the 1985-91 shoegaze movement of Great Britain. Titled Beautiful Noise, it’s about the influence of the Cocteau Twins, Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine and the subsequent rise of outfits such as Ride, Curve, Slowdive, Lush, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver, Pale Saints and Boo Radleys, as well as more ambient-inclined and experimental artists like Flying Saucer Attack, AR Kane and Seefeel."

Autechre - Recommendation

Hamilton (Genghis Tron) parle de Autechre

Yeah, Squarepusher is one-of-a-fucking-kind, that's for sure. He is his own entity and category, like Autechre or Boards...there's no one like him. Or actually, lots of people try to sound like him now, but no one really can.

Hororo and Zesty, where to start with Autechre all depends on what you're into. Confeld is definitely one of the most confrontational/difficult recordings they ever made, so I definitely would recommend trying other albums. Here are some of my personal favorites, as well as recommended tracks from each album. But they have so many other albums which are amazing too, so don't let me suggestions limit your explorations...

Inculabula (1993) -- Their debut album...very "classic" early 90's sounding in the synth sounds and the techno song structutres. Definitely their simplest and most melodic/accessible album, but still very creepy and cold. As they went on in their career, they chose to be much more restrained in how melodic their albums were, but this one puts their ability to write amazing melodies at the forefront. Easy to get into. Recommended tracks: "Eggshell" and "Bike"

LP5 (1998) -- This was the album which really god me into Autechre. It's a good starting point beacuse it's mid-way through their career, so they've really hit their stride at this point in terms of creativity + weirdness...but it's not AS weird and abrasive as the stuff they'd start doing a few years later. Recommended tracks: "Acroyear2" and "Rae".

EP7 (1999) -- It's an "EP" but it has 11 songs and is an hour long...anyways, this might be my favorite Autechre release. Similar in style to LP5, perhaps a bit weirder and more alien. Recommended tracks: "Rpeg" and "Dropp"

Untilted (2005) -- Throughout the 2000's, Autechre released several really abrasive and difficult albums...they're awesome, particularly Draft 7.30 and the Ganz Graf EP, but they were incredibly fucked up and pretty difficult to digest regularly. Untilted (make sure you spell it right) is plenty strange, but I think it represents a new stage for Autechre. The drums are much more repetitive and hard-hitting, spiraling around in looping patterns while gradually shifting with each repitition. And they are even some killer melodies as well. Recommended tracks: "Lcc" and "Ipacial Section"

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Un peu de Bukowsky

CB
The history of a tough motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said, 'not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off...'

I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough

one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.

'you can make it, ' I said to him.

he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.

you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left...

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say, 'look, look
at this! '

but they don't understand, they say something like, 'you
say you've been influenced by Celine? '

'no, ' I hold the cat up, 'by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this! '

I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows...

it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.

he too knows it's bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

Friday, July 06, 2007

Appel à la prière pour tout les chrétiens le 7 Juillet 2007

Prayon777

Please devote this day to the Father and his son. Let’s give our Heavenly Father a day he will cherish. A day where his chosen children who really love him, or those who need help kneel down and thank him and plead for his grace and mercy on our failed and failing world. The ManChild Team feels that there will be more time before the Visible return of Christ. This is for the sake of spreading the Gospel and turning the wicked and misguided from sin. 777 will most likely be a day of warm happy feelings; spiritual excitement and we pray some healings. Of course we'll take a miracle, but accept what happens as the Fathers Will.

Faithless people may start getting a little nervous about 777.

Christians please don't fight other Christians over belief issues when non-belief is rampant in young people and neglect for righteousness has become the norm.

[...]

Friends this is bigger then big. Our Father has surprises.

Scripture states that it has not even dawned on the saints or man what God has planned for them.

Everyone look! We will stop dying soon...

Father gave our country to be the light of the nations. Taking Jesus Christ out of anything only brings hell. Just look at the Muslim world or deep superstitious parts of Africa and you can see that. Our Country no longer has been using prayer but force. When we bring Christ into our thinking or our families, or nation's thinking then, blessings have to follow. On 777 all who will pray are bringing Christ into the focus and mind of the world. Evil will retreat somewhat and righteousness will be fed and grow.

Brother President Bush; please support prayer.

[...]

Sing, Dance, clap, or shout to the Lord. Set off your best fireworks on July 7. But just let the air be full of Praises, Gatherings in every place we want or just alone.

Pray on "the Washington Mall" or places that were or are special to your Christian church.

Don't you think Angels will love this and may visit some people?

Eastern promises - David Cronenberg

Eastern promises
Trailer du nouveau film de David Cronenberg

Les connaissances scientifiques déplorables des americains

1 in 5 americans believes the sun revolves around the Earth

"American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century." Said Jon D. Miller, a political scientists who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, he regularly surveys Americans for his clients which include the National Science Foundation on the public’s knowledge and attitudes towards science in general.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

La mort de Chris Benoit et son traitement médiatique

The circumstances surrounding (and fallout of) the Benoit family tragedy
Un résumé des événements qui entourent la mort du catcheur Chris Benoit et le meurtre par ses propres mains de sa famille.

"The religion of one age is the litteray entertainment of the next"

Wikipedia - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Référence trouvé dans the God delusion de Richard Dawkins.

Liberté de la presse aux Etats Unis

Our rotted press, a division of "camp victory"
Un article de Salon.com sur l'attitude des médias américains vis a vis des informations officiels de l'armée durant l'actuel guerre en Irak.

Richard Dawkin - the Root of all evil

The Root of all evil
Reportage de Channel 4 (Angleterre) par Richard Dawkin, l'auteur de the God delusion. Un reportage en deux parties sur l'inexistence de Dieu.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Des conseils pour survivre en tournée

American touring rules
Leon a fait partie de Impaled, Exhumed et fait partie de Intronaut. Ce post comprend des conseils sur la vie en tournée qui s'adresse surtout aux americains mais qui peuvent très bien s'adapter à tout le monde. A lire même si on est pas musiciens car cela donne une bonne idée de la vie des groupes une fois sur la route.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Peeters parle de mise en page des cases

Four conception of the page

The conventional use of the box and the page is however far from being limited to this period of the history of the comic strip. One encounters it in the work of many authors who never were subjected to the requirements of daily publication by strips but in which, nonetheless, the page is divided into a certain number of lines of the same height (often four), themselves divided into a certain number of panels (from two to five). The overall arrangement of the page thus creates the conditions for a regular reading (from left to right and from top to bottom), very close to that of a page of writing (figures 3 and 4). This is what André Franquin has aptly named "the waffle iron."

[...]

The most interesting uses of this principle are in any case those which, far from minimizing it, push this constancy of the framework to its limits, until a kind of fixed plane unfolds on the page. Cartoonists like Schulz, Feiffer, Brétécher, Wolinski or Copi gave remarkable examples of sequences in which the least modification in the gestures or facial expressions takes on a considerable significance because of the regularity of the units.

[...]

Obviously, the page was designed as a concrete object which was to be made as harmonious as possible. In both cases, too, as soon as one observes the real page and not just its geometrical configuration, one notices that the effect concerned is of a simply aesthetic nature. The narrative hardly arises as a consequence of this particular arrangement; it is inscribed within a more or less predefined framework
Many spectacular effects, such as inset panels and violations of panel borders, obey a logic of this kind: far from corresponding to a true invention, they often function as simple degradations of sequential continuity, even as compensations for its poverty. It is not certain, thus, that the prodigious graphic upheavals of many comics of the Eighties and Nineties profoundly renewed the relation to narration

[...]

It is never in itself that a page can be described as modern, it is according to the relations that it maintains with the entire comic. It is not thus a question of wondering whether a page layout is extravagant or banal, it is a question of examining the way in which a work benefits from the apparatus that it sets up.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Le dernier diplomate américain à Baghdad

Our latest man in Bahgdad

When he finally unpacks, though, the U.S. ambassador will take out a battered calendar from 24 years ago and hang it in his office. It was on his office wall in Beirut when a suicide truck bomb destroyed the U.S. Embassy there on April 18, 1983, killing 64 people. Slammed against a wall but not seriously hurt, the young diplomat immediately began clawing barehanded through the rubble, searching for his colleagues. The calendar has traveled with him ever since, bearing the scars of that day: "a little bit of glass, a little bit of blood, a little bit of spilled coffee." His voice gets quieter: "It reminds me of my responsibilities to the mission. And that in diplomacy, as in the military, you're playing for keeps."

Orson Welles - Film postume

Orson Welles - the One man band
Un film / documentaire réalisé par Oja Kodar, un ami proche de Orson Welles, qui l'a monté à partir de document d'archives de Welles après sa mort.

CIa - Family jewels

Family Jewels
Le document de 700 pages est disponible directement sur ce site. Pas de possibilité d'impression a moins de tout copier / collé ce qui serait une perte de temps. Il y a un système de navigation correct sur la même page pour aller directement a une page et ne pas avoir a tout survoler. A parcourir au moins.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Conspiracy theorist of the world unite !

CIA to revel decades of misdeeds

The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s.

The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.

Many of the incidents are already known, but the documents are expected to give more comprehensive accounts.

[...]

These detail government discussions in 1975 of the CIA abuses and briefings by Mr Schlesinger's successor at the CIA, William Colby, who said the CIA had "done some things it shouldn't have".

Among the incidents that were said to "present legal questions" were:

  • the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s
  • assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro
  • wiretapping and surveillance of journalists
  • behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens
  • surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971
  • opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China

The papers also convey mounting concern in President Gerald Ford's administration that what were dubbed the CIA's "skeletons" were surfacing in the media.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

BBC - Articles de 21/06/07

Who are the taleban ?
Afghans schools tries to make new start
Blair's last stand

Une poignée de blog

Blissblog
K-Punk
Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy
Poetix

Future ruins - Le futur détruira notre présent


Michelle Lord - Future ruins

Ballard often described the beckoning future of the modern metropolis in terms of the utopian ideology of Brutalist concrete architecture. Brutalism was an architectural movement originally associated with social idealism that is now criticised for disregarding the communal, historic and surrounding built environment. Set against a backdrop of Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures such as Spaghetti Junction, Central Library and New Street Station signal box, Future Ruins aims to highlight the temporality of our landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself.

Derrida et l'hauntology

Hauntology revived

Along the way, Derrida coined the term "hauntology" as a pun on "ontology." Ontology is the study of being, of what exists. Derrida wants to say that our ideas of reality are "haunted" by the stuff we exclude—the things we don't want to remember or acknowledge. The Holocaust, for example, or the slave trade. Our sense of Western history as the progressive march of "freedom" and "civilization" is haunted by genocide and enslavement.

Un critique rock parle de la culture pop et de J.G. Ballard

"Magisterial, precise, unsettling" Simon Reynolds on the Ballard connection

I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by some pretty ambivalent, sometimes outright antisocial or malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers and Nietzsche, also from certain rock writers. And also just listening closely and honestly to my own responses to music. Still you could see that idea of music as fitting a Ballardian worldview to some degree. The idea of human culture as fundamentally perverse.

[...]

Well I think it was me who first broached the idea of ‘hauntology’ as a rubric for this loose network of contemporary bands who were playing with the cultural imagery of ghosts, spectres, the uncanny, the return of the cultural repressed, memory, and so forth, while also trying to make genuinely eerie music. But I didn’t particularly intend for there to be a tight correlation between Derrida’s concept of hauntology and what these bands were trying to do. It was just a convenient and cute term, ‘haunt’ referencing ghosts and ‘-ology’ suggesting the image of crackpot scientists working in the sound laboratory. There are certain affinities with Derrida’s ideas as elaborated in Spectres of Marx.

The word ‘hauntology’ has got a lot of traction, though, because it chimes in with things that are going on in modern art (the trend for work based around the concept of the archive and dealing with questions of collective memory) and in academia (with the boom of studies related to the spectral and uncanny, work on ruins, remains and rubbish, mourning and memory work, nostalgia for the future). Even just on the level of the word ghost or its homonyms popping up across popular culture in countless band names, album titles, novels and non-fiction books, et al - something is going on. With the ghostified bands specifically, I think what has grabbed some of us (apart from the music, which is fantastic) is that these are musicians who have tons of ideas both musical and non-musical. They tend to be very well read and thoughtful, real autodidacts with a passion for esoteric knowledge and bizarre historical arcana. They are making connections between music, film, books, TV, the occult, history, design… and their records also have a highly developed visual aesthetic.

Literay criticism - Wikipedia

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Bruce Sterling (auteur de science fiction) - Wikipedia

Bruce Sterling
Mirrorshades anthology : Receuil de nouvelles d'auteur de Cyberpunk. Receuil à l'origine de la définition du genre. A lire en VO, la VF est chiante a mourir.

Shaper/Mecanist : From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the solar system is colonised, with two major warring factions. The Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic engineering on a massive scale. The situation is complicated by the eventual contact with alien civilizations; humanity eventually splits into many subspecies, with the implication that many of these effectively vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of The Singularity in the works of Vernor Vinge.

[...]

He has been the instigator of two projects which can be found on the Web -
  • The Dead Media Project - A collection of "research notes" on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s. The Project's homepage, including Sterling's original Dead Media Manifesto can be found at http://www.deadmedia.org
  • The Viridian Design Movement - his attempt to create a "green" design movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design.[1] The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors include many of the original members of the Viridian "curia".

J.G. Ballard (auteur de science fiction) - Wikipedia

Jg Ballard
Auteur de Crash

The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary. [1]


Friday, June 15, 2007

Dopplr - La carte de vos amis

Dopplr

Un système qui n'en est encore qu'a sa version beta mais qui permet de créer une carte avec les noms des personnes. Très utile pour des personnes voyageant souvent et rencontrant beaucoup de monde puisque cela permet de clarifier en quelques clics les allées et venus de ses contacts.

Des transferts de données a travers les os

Bones could allow data swaps through handshakes

YOUR backbone's connected to your shoulder bone, your shoulder bone's connected to your neck bone - and your neck bone's connected to your cellphone.

Something along these lines is what Lin Zhong and Michael Liebschner at Rice University in Houston, Texas, envisage. They want to use the human skeleton to transmit commands reliably and securely to wearable gadgets and medical implants. Their research, funded by Microsoft and Texas Instruments, could also lead to new ways for people with disabilities to control devices such as computers and PDAs.

[...]

They then measured how well bone conducted these signals when they were generated in places on the body where devices are normally worn: the wrist for watches, the lower back for cellphones worn on a belt, and behind the ear for headsets. They found the skeleton conducted even low-power vibrations from one location to another with surprisingly few errors. "This is quite amazing because all the links involved multiple bones and many joints," Zhong told a conference on body networks in Florence, Italy, this week.

The researchers suggest applications such as a vibrator in a wrist receiver/transmitter that could tell an implant placed near a bone to release a drug dose, with the implant then sending back data from its sensors. Similarly, tooth clacks or finger clicks could be interpreted by a receiver to activate, say, functions in a phone.

For Liebschner, the great benefit is security. "All data transfer is contained inside the human body, and it can only be retrieved through direct physical contact," he says. People could even swap information between devices via a firm handshake, Zhong suggests.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Relapse - Cocaine

Relapse - Mr Budd on the effect of cocaine

Energy rush + euphoric feeling + shamelessness + weight loss + being really stupid and shallow + willingness to suck cock for another bag.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Une election de miss univers troublé

Japan wins troubled Miss Universe contest

In another hitch, Miss Mexico was made to change her outfit for the regional dress contest after her original dress, decorated with brutal images of rebels in a 1920s religious uprising being hanged or shot, drew accusations of poor taste….

This year, [the pageant] attracted protesters wearing white dresses splashed with fake blood and sashes proclaiming “Miss Juarez,” “Miss Atenco” and “Miss Michoacan” in reference to places in Mexico made infamous by killings or sexual abuse of women.

In another quirk for 2007, the long, twisted dreadlocks of Miss Jamaica, the contest’s first ever Rastafarian participant, and the close-shaved head of Miss Tanzania stood out from the lacquered manes of the other contestants.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Un accro des chats porno serait en fait dépendant

Us sex addict sues over firing

James Pacenza, 58, says he was addicted to online chat rooms and that IBM should have offered him sympathy and treatment instead of firing him.

The Vietnam War veteran says he has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder since 1969.

He argues that he used the internet to control his psychological problems.

[...]

The stated reason was that he visited an internet chat site for a sexual experience after he had previously been warned.

James Pacenza's lawyers will argue in court that their client was using the internet to self-medicate as a way of controlling his post traumatic stress disorder.

They will also argue that Mr Pacenza's claimed addiction to adult internet sites should be treated in the same way as other employees' addictions to drugs or alcohol.

The case, which has been postponed until 29 June, has potential implications for employers across America and their attitude towards regulating how employees use workplace computers.

(Non seulement ce serait un changement au niveau de la régulation de ce que peux et ne peux pas faire un employé sur son lieu de travail mais en plus cela voudrait dire que des avocats "aideraient" des psychologues a définir une addiction a Internet.)


Thursday, May 24, 2007

Quelques références biographiques autour de Freakonomics - Wikipedia

Gary Becker - Idole de Steven Levitt (Freakonomics). Economiste a l'origine de travaux sur la vie en société et le crime, entre autre.
Steven Levitt - Auteur de Freakonomics, théoricien de la vie quotidienne comme les matchs de sumo trafiqués ou le commerce du crack.
Robert Rosenthal - Psychologue auteur de la théorie de l'effet pygmalion (les attentes des professeurs par rapport a une copie d'un élève).

Gravity's Rainbow - Wikipedia

Gravity's Rainbow de Thomas Pynchon sur Wikipedia

Gravity's Rainbow
is an epic postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.

The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertaken by several of the characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the "Schwarzgerät", which will be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000."

Frequently digressive, the novel subverts many of the traditional elements of plot and character development, traverses detailed, specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines, and has earned a reputation as a "difficult" book.

In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene." The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and won the National Book Award in 1974. Since its publication, Gravity's Rainbow has spawned an enormous amount of literary criticism and commentary, including two reader's guides and several online concordances, and is widely regarded as Pynchon's magnum opus.

Nagi Noda - La publicité mène a tout

Nagi Noda
Designeuse et publicisite japonaise au premier abord obsédée par les pandas. Elle a travaillé avec un peintre, Mark Lyden, sur une gamme de vétements sous le nom "Broken label". Leur travail est vendu chez Colette sur Paris.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Le journalisme musical et les chroniqueurs de comics

Warren Ellis - On magazines about comics

Now, obviously, I'm an old guy. My notion of what makes a good comics magazine comes from the 80s, pre-net. In fact, I worked on a comics magazine back then, Speakeasy, which was very informed and influenced by music papers. It was a monthly, and we didn't have a huge problem getting stuff reviewed within a month of its release. Obviously, we weren't affecting things within the week of their new-release cycle. But, hell, even the music paper came out every two weeks. It was a slower time. That said, you could still find the comics being reviewed, as indeed you could now.

Music papers were the grail of arts writing, back then. There was a period in the 80s where the best cultural writing anywhere was being done in the music inkies. And the majority of this was happening in the reviews sections. These weren't enthusiastic amateurs who thought that ten years of reading superhero comics (or skimming them behind a desk) qualified them. These were people who were hired (very important) because they lived and breathed and understood music and who could write and communicate brilliantly.

And what they did was write with passion and in an informed manner. These were people who knew what they were talking about, and who could contextualise what they were feeling about the work at hand, be it excitement or disappointment.

Des faits sur les agressions sexuelles sur des adolescents sur internet

Just the fact about online youth victimization

Un ensemble de 9 videos sur une conférence où quatre intervenants spécialistes des agressions sexuelles et des relations entre adolescents sur le réseau internet parlent de ce qu'ils connaissent et démontent les mythes autour des abus sexuels sur Internet. Les 4 premières vidéos laissent la parole, chacun a leur tour, aux intervenants avant de passer aux question du public. Je n'ai vu que ces quatres la et je recommande leur visionnage car elle renseigne efficacement et les intervenants sont comprehensible et sympathique.

En résumé, il se dégage plusieurs points essentiels :
Les adolescents ne proposent pas tous un profil sur Internet
Ils ne proposent pas non plus souvent des informations personnels sur leur profil et choisissent même de ne donner que des fausses informations ou très peu.
La plupart des victimes de prédateur adulte sont faites sur des adolescents et pas des enfants. De plus, la majorité de ces agressions sont comis par des adultes qui révèlent leur age véritable a leurs enfants et ont une relation suivit avec eux. Les spécialistes parlent même alors d'une sorte de relation amoureuse entre l'adulte et l'enfant (ce qui peut rappeler en partie le livre Lolita de Nabokov).
Le réseau internet sert d'amplificateur a des conflits ou a des relations qui existent déjà dans la vie réel. Les adolescents ne se servent pas spécialement de leur profil pour rencontrer de nouvelles personnes qui ne font pas partie de leur réseau direct d'ami mais pour se faire connître de personnes qu'ils fréquentent déjà dans la vie réelle.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Un nouvelle drogue dans la région de Dallas - Le Cheese

Stopping a kid killer

Cheese is made by grinding up cold medication and mixing it with black-tar heroin, which is typically smuggled in by Mexican drug cartels. A $30 purchase of heroin can yield 40 to 50 cheese hits, each costing about $2—more affordable for users and more profitable for mixers. The drug, which is snorted, derives its name from a supposedly Parmesan-like appearance, though in reality, it looks more like coarse sand. Because the amount of heroin in cheese is sometimes small—as little as 3 percent—the drug rarely shows up in field tests. But the heroin quantity can be inconsistent. "Kids will be scoring 3 percent and all of a sudden, they get 9 or 10 percent, and you are dead," says James Capra, Special Agent in charge of the DEA's Dallas field division.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the cheese phenomenon is the users' age. Dallas police have arrested kids as young as 12—and in one case, the Dallas school district nabbed an 11-year-old. In fact, dealers use the drug's inoffensive moniker to market it to youth, says Capra. "Put yourself in that kid's mind," he says. " 'It's got a funny name, and it's only a couple of bucks'." The users' youth also complicates treatment. "Cognitively, they don't understand consequences," says Michelle Hemm, director of the Phoenix Academy of Dallas, a residential treatment facility for teens that's seeing a growing number of cheese cases. "This age group is developmentally hard to deal with."