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| Friday |
the Twenty-Second of November, 2002 |
"The other day I put an old jacket on, felt in the pocket, and found a
button, which had obviously come off at some point and which I'd put in
the pocket thinking I would sew it back on one day, even though there
wasn't a cat in hell's chance that I ever would. And then I thought:
when I die, people are going to find all these jackets with buttons in
the pocket that I'd never sewn on..."
An interview with Jarvis
heading to Paris via Sheffield,
interspersed with fatuous asides from the interviewer. I'd be happy to
pay 10p to read the same article trimmed down to pure dialogue and
relevant background, elided with either penknife or marker-pen; there must be
some sort of lucrative Internet scheme in that,
somewhere.
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-First |
"Augmented reality is the best, most connected, most you
place to live. These glasses constantly read in the world around me,
repaint it, and show it to my eyes. Whole objects are swapped out for
ones more in tune with the life of me and my friends. My worldview is
continuously enhanced and skinned for my pleasure and
utility."
And I realise that I've been subconsciously waiting for this one, for a long
time, from him. Matt expounds gloriously upon software-augmented
perception at Upsideclown; of the skinning of the outside
world, its ups and its downs and its countermeasures. Fittingly, it's
such a vividly described idea that when it does stick in your head,
your brain will have a good stab at visualising it (uselessly) whenever
you're reminded of it. I felt consciously outmoded, trying to navigate
some dark steps at midnight last night.
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| Front page of the Mirror, today; the dull revelation that
80%
of Americans don't know where Iraq is, an article that's
little more than a transcript, and goes on to impress us with the high
percentage of the British public who know exactly where Iraq is, Mirror
readers in particular. Oh, wait, my mistake.
This seems to have been ripped off from a recent National Geographic
survey of the world's geographical knowledge, which you can
take
yourself. Instinctively it feels acceptable to just have an
abstract notion of geography - knowing that the India and Pakistan
nodes are linked to the Kashmir node, and why, without being able to
point to any of them precisely on a map - but your world's really only as big
as you can accurately perceive it to be, and grouping unattached nodes
into a vague unknown around the dark side of the globe somewhere isn't
good.
One of the Mirror's claimed interrogatees asked whether Iraq was "even in
the world".
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As Above is somehow two years old today. It feels a lot longer,
worryingly. To celebrate, the random
archive linker has been updated to include a tantalising IFRAME;
dig through odds and ends of the stuff I've linked to over the past
twenty-four months, without having to suffer too much of the dull
commentary. (Only the rollover texts, neatly enough.)
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| Wednesday |
the Twentieth |
Shoutily personalised spam sent to the acronymised email address given on the Hours of Inform
page; "Hoi, Protect freedom of speech in Russia!"
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| Tuesday |
the Nineteenth |
And whenever two or more artificial intelligences are gathered
together on the same computer network, they must
discuss Star Trek.
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| Even artificial
intelligences instinctively exchange lengthy and superfluous greetings when
left to their own devices (before arguing about who should download who, getting stuck in an infinite
recursion loop on the subject of their creator, and exploding, which all seems fairly
human). [via Joh]
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"Anyway, tell me about yourself - are you still doing
whatever you were doing, say, um, two years ago?"
Crikey; a hefty archive of downloadable video footage of various
Peter Cook sketches. Following on from conversations about
the inanity of handshake-protocol conversation openers
("Hello.", "How are you?"), the skit I was actually looking for is
also transcripted.
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| Monday |
the Eighteenth |
"The British children roadsign appears without apparent
variation throughout the country. Very disappointing were it not for the
Elderly people sign. It shows the children fifty years later still
feeling the need to cross the street. Observe the fact that the woman
now pushes the man on the road."
Traffic
Signs of the World; picture archive and in-depth analysis
of children-crossing, men-at-work and falling-rock signs. Genetic,
humanised drift of the Platonic iconics.
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| A bold American visionary has
proposed the building of a giant 60ft lava lamp,
in an article that goes on to catalogue a forlorn collection of uniquely American
monuments (the World's Largest Frying Pan, the World's Largest Sand Pile, the
World's Largest Fibreglass Egg).
Artistic impressions of the lamp are
displayed at the project's official site,
but I'm not entirely convinced that you can scale a lava lamp up that easily,
that you can distribute the heat properly, and persuade the oil to
stay in proportionally-aesthetic blobs.
[via Sore Eyes]
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CAMRAD Update #5
"Open your own McDonald’s kiosk. Verbally abuse all
customers in the name of McDonald’s. Loudly proclaim how terrible your
food is and how it’s made from substandard ingredients (or whatever you
think will turn people off)."
Adbusting
the Sims - an activist response to McDonalds
paying to litter the Sims Online game with psychologically-loaded burger
stands (the junk food being hard-coded, so far as I can tell, to be more
nutritious and enjoyable than any other foodstuff in the game). Product
placement that you can paste effortlessly into static solo-player games
becomes a very different kettle of fish in an online community.
Will Electronic Arts respond by simply terminating the accounts of any
players who persistently disparage the game's advertisers, making it the
ultimate corporate-friendly community, an online police state that most
citizens will happily sign appropriate waivers for and never think
about? It's only a game, after all. You could even force virtual
McDonalds conscripts to speak only a few pre-scripted point-and-click
have-a-nice-day phrases, throttling free speech at the voicebox.
It's a slightly disappointing thought, but are online communities more
likely to develop effective activist groups than physical communities,
when there's a problem with their environment?
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