Quote Of The Day
August 18th, 2006 | researchmaterial
links for 2006-08-17
August 17th, 2006 | Uncategorized
-
For the first time in the history of Latvian medicine, doctors sewed back on the reproductive organ of a man, which he had cut off himself
-
Two women attempted to experience sexual pleasure from an intimate contact with a cat. The weird endeavor ended rather sad for one of the women: she was hospitalized with severe genital injuries
-
Cancer survivor says that a local doctor told her she had been cured by the devil
-
Caer Caradoc at Mynydd y Gaer, Glamorgan, is one of the most important locations in all of ancient British history
-
Hezbollah is not a state within a state, but rather “a state within a nonstate.”
-
HBO has released one of its original documentary films, Too Hot Not to Handle, in its entirety as a podcast
-
See Mike Skinner turn into Gary fucking Barlow.
-
A Japanese fisherman has been shot dead by a Russian patrol boat near a chain of disputed islands, the first fatality in 50 years
-
US Republican Senator George Allen has apologised for calling a man of Indian descent by a name which means monkey
Second Life Sketches
August 17th, 2006 | researchmaterial
Why on earth would anyone in Second Life need a simulated suitcase nuke? There are areas in SL designated for combat simulation, it’s true. But a suitcase nuke? (Along with a note asking you not to detonate it in one of the creepy Gor sims? I envision a pile of burnt collars and singed, disturbingly stained loincloths.)
(People have been roleplaying Gor pretty much as long as there’s been message-boards on the Web. There used to be an AOL chatroom full of housewives sitting around waiting to “serve” men who entered the chatroom and spoke in top Gorean tones.)
Some of the stuff in this armory — one of dozens in SL — looks like a collection of old CIA wet dreams given form. Take this: inducing a bad acid trip.
Â
Â
In Transylvania, the One Blood group are selling an SL-readable magazine. I’m in Goun, looking through a digital art gallery. I mean, why not? I use the web to read magazines and look at art all the time. Though I have a feeling the erotic art I’m looking at is actually the artist’s SL avatar with no clothes on. The Klimt-inspired work by Erin Talamasca, though, I’d be as happy to see on a webpage as I am to see in here in this gallery (with the unfortunately-located teleport point that has you materialise knee-deep in a pond).
Fabbing — personal fabrication, rapid prototyping, 3D-printing — has reportedly recently attached itself to Second Life. Which is very interesting to me from the perspective of SL-as-germ-of-future-OS. Many of you will doubtless recall fabbing being touted as a leak from the future over the last couple of years. According to the Second Thoughts blog, there’s a guy out there using three-dimensional printing to output avatars, with a high level of detail, in styrofoam. The guy apparently said “everything in SL is copyable.” Which is a deceptively huge statement, really. It means that, in theory, anything in an entire 3D-simulation virtual space can be output back into the physical world. It’s the reverse of scanning.
Outputting an avatar is essentially not very useful, of course. But as an experiment, it points out huge potential. As fabbing gets cheaper and more sophisticated (and uses better output materials), people can spin more practical and clever objects into SL — and a virtual world becomes a traffic conduit and searchable storage space for literally millions of Useful Objects You Need Right Now. And that right there is a piece of Future.
Of course, right now, the best you could do is a plastic version of a Gor loincloth with simulated semen stains. But you have to start somewhere, right?
Warrenelliscom official meeting place on SL is Integral Castle, at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rogla/174/120/124/ — which is to say, Integral Castle, Rogla (174, 120, 124). Switch your music control on if you go in, I’ve got an old Apparat Programme podcast streaming to that location at the moment.
ROCKET PIRATES Update: SUBMISSIONS CLOSED
August 17th, 2006 | comics talk, researchmaterial
I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’ve now received something over 600 submissions, which is more than double what I expected. It’s insane. Twenty more appear every time I open Gmail. And it’s now preventing me from getting on with the business of opening the site.
So I’m declaring a temporary but open-ended closure on submissions. I’ll open submissions again in a few months, probably, but I’m in danger right now of losing crucial work time to sorting through submissions, and, with half a dozen comics projects and two tv projects of my own, I can’t afford to do that.
This doesn’t apply to people I’ve already spoken to individually about work. Everyone else, I’m afraid, is going to have to wait until I’ve got the place up and running.
I’m aware there are a few hundred people still waiting for responses from me — I’ll get to you eventually, I swear. In at least ten cases, it’s your own fault for sending me 15-meg zipfiles. But now I need to get on with the process of assembling the site and proceeding towards launch. Which is the point, after all.
Please spread this far and wide.
links for 2006-08-16
August 16th, 2006 | Uncategorized
-
Russian space officials say they will launch two orbital laboratories to conduct experiments involving zero gravity, materials in space and biotechnologies
-
30-year-old Tapan Dey of Chandigargh, India, who uses his four limbs to write simultaneously in four languages — Hindi, Assamese, English and Bangla
-
“five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because it shows her bare shoulders and might offend Muslims”
-
The book written by professor emeritus at Claremont School of Theology in California accuses Bush administration of carrying out the attacks as pretext for expanding America’s “demonic” imperial power
-
The grisly affliction is known as human myiasis, a rare disease that results from flies infesting wounds or sores
-
Supposing that the ancient people were observing the unfolding catastrophe (the explosion was visible thousands of kilometers away), it would doubtless leave a lasting impression on their curious minds…
-
another Second Life-style metaverse system
-
another SL-style metaverse system
-
“executives, however, will also realize that ComicCon still has a lot to teach them about the significance of fan support, particularly in economic terms”
-
A reporter for a Singapore newspaper went on trial in China Tuesday for espionage… detained in China in April 2005 and charged with spying for Taiwan
-
Researchers are launching a project to discover how certain people, dubbed “elite controllersâ€, are successfully able to fend off the HIV virus without using drugs
Buy This Book
August 16th, 2006 | people I know
Don’t mess me about here. My old friend Marie Javins (not coincidentally, the first person at Marvel to get me work) finally has the book of her bizarre world travels released at the end of this month. Just go and buy the bloody thing. I command you. You will not regret it.
Porn2Mainstream: French Fashion House Uses Porn Stars As Ad Models
August 16th, 2006 | researchmaterial
Jeff Lanctot, vice president of Seattle-based ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish, said Shai’s Web strategy shows that advertisers are no longer looking for hit shows like “Friends,†to sell their products. They are now looking to replace A-list actors like the sitcom’s Jennifer Aniston with a porn star…
(Which would make sense in some instances, as I don’t see Ms Aniston wanting to publicly model things like Miko Exoticwear’s new steel buttplugs, for example…)
@mynet 15aug2006
August 16th, 2006 | people I know
Charlie Stross boils down the bullshit surrounding the supposed terrorist threat of last week.
Jean Snow has a friend who is, I swear to god, bottle blogging.
Gillen shows off Jamie McKelvie’s new art print for sale.
Jeffrey Rowland does not understand the suit.
Melissa has instructions for Bay Area readers.
Doomwatch
August 15th, 2006 | researchmaterial
What’s the worst that can happen? If you often ask yourself that question, then you’re probably an emergency planner. And perhaps you should note the maxim of Mike Granatt, the former head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat: “Believe it might happen.”
The centre of Britain’s emergency preparations is the Civil Contigencies Secretariat, based in the Cabinet Office. This employs ten civil servants to look for trouble. They monitor the waxing and waning of about 120 potential threats, from terrorism to extreme weather, from security of gas supply to industrial fires like the one at the Buncefield oil depot.
“The key thing we learnt was that we live in a very connected world, a network society,” says Mike Granatt. “Nothing happens on a big scale that doesn’t affect lots of other things. What caught us out was a lack of understanding of how the UK functions.”
Granatt says that while lesssons have been learnt, the thing which still worries him most is “indecision in government”. He adds: “The worst thing that can happen is that a danger manifests itself, it starts to grow and the people who are aware of it do not move fast enough to take the steps to deal with it.”
…While Whitehall’s doomwatchers are mainly focused on the near term, a longer term perspective is taken by Rear Admiral Chris Parry. He runs the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre at the Defence Academy in Wiltshire, and sees himself as the MoD’s horizon-scanner. He tries to look a long way ahead.
“Al-Qaeda is a passing phase,” says Admiral Parry. “It’s an expression of grievance. It will either mutate into something else, be part of a bigger political process or just fade into the light of common day.”
Admiral Parry seems to take a rather bleak view of matters. “If peace breaks out tomorrow I’d be very happy to be an archaeologist,” he says, “but in my experience war is the normal nature of mankind…”
Bára
August 15th, 2006 | people I know, photography
I just really like this camphone photo of a slightly drunk Bára, sent from a party in Reykjavik. I hope you escape a hangover this morning, sweetheart.
links for 2006-08-15
August 15th, 2006 | Uncategorized
-
A major Brazilian TV station has aired a video from a criminal gang after the gang kidnapped one of its journalists
-
(via Melissa)
-
“The man is evil incarnate. His vision is to destroy, not to salvage life. He is surely under satanic spell”
-
“I just want to know if it is a healing tree or blessed water,” she said. “That’s God’s water. Nobody knows but God.”
-
Hundreds of Katrina-themed videos are hosted by YouTube and other video sites, ranging from montages of storm-damaged streets days after the hurricane to more recently created works that show that life is still far from normal
-
temporary “wolverine” piercings
-
Christina and Vlad @ AMC were raving about MAD MEN when I saw them last month. This is a very, very good sign
-
A proposed US system to protect satellites from solar storms or high-altitude nuclear detonations could cause side-effects that lead to radio communication blackouts
-
Gunmen have abducted two journalists working for the US Fox News television channel in the Gaza Strip
-
Lebanese Cartoonist and musician Mazen Kerbaj
