I'm randoming in XKCD, because, you see the thing is, yeah that's why.

And I want to live in xkcd world:

http://xkcd.com/150/
http://xkcd.com/462/
http://xkcd.com/96/
http://xkcd.com/249/
http://xkcd.com/227/ (the hover to this one makes me cry tears of joy :P)
http://xkcd.com/171/
http://xkcd.com/340/
http://xkcd.com/343/
http://xkcd.com/45/ (hover r00ls again)
http://xkcd.com/144/
http://xkcd.com/140/ (amg, life... explained...)
http://xkcd.com/162/
http://xkcd.com/165/

Ok I'll stop now. *sigh*

Ever so often I check Post Secret (I forget a lot - someone help me remember!)
But I did today. And this one had serious aww-factor:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_a7jkcMVp5Vg/SRY6sc4rlaI/AAAAAAAAHRI/z5R082-cANw/s1600-h/laughlines.jpg

Interestingly, today before my job interview I was waiting and I was given a newspaper to read, the Guardian. And there was a little article/comment by Joan Bakewell who writes the column Just 70, and has recently been appointed the Voice of the Older People by the government, and I think she is assum. Oldness. I can't wait for it.
Actually, here is the text: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/10/ageism-joan-bakewell-voice-of-older-people-pensions

One day I thought of a really good secret to send, but I can't remember it anymore. It may have been the "I don't like it when people like me, but I like it when people just sort of tolerate me" -thing (I worded it much better) but I'm not sure. But yes, if you didn't know that about me, then now you do.

As a result of last Sunday, when exciting things happened, and I got to spend a fair bit of time with someone I'd like to spend quite a bit more time with, I had an inspiration of sorts - which in turn led to this:

http://writersco.com/207.Human-People.15%20Minutes%20Early

Now because everything happened so suddenly, I haven't yet read that thing enough many times to think that it sucks and therefore shall never see the light of day - and therefore it sees the light of day and people are welcome to read it. Feel free to take advantage of this rare occasion of new iippo-writing being presented to the public (and feel free to be as harsh as you want in critiquing it. After all I'm an adult and can handle it).

This concludes the business.

Punk 'N Roll
I have this compilation CD of classic Finnish punk, and I finally got off my arse and ripped it in order to share it with Viking and Punk (rest of yous are welcome to it too).
My favourites are 10 (Apulanta: Aurinkoon) and 16 (Lehtivihreät: Tunne Tietää). And 3 (Ne Luumäet: Onnellinen Perhe), 5 (James Puhto-Ren: Helsinkiin vai Helvettiin), and 13 (Luonteri Surf: 30 Vuotta) are awesome too. Rest of it isn't bad either, there's a couple really HC ones that I'm not so keen on, Klamydia's songs are mostly funny (so that doesn't work for me at all times either, sometimes it's good), and one particularly depressing one where the lyrics are very good - just very very depressing :P Oh, and Pelle Miljoona is from my home town, woot. Not that I was even alive when he was around (he's not dead yet, just famous), but still.
If you want translations, says so.


Oh, RapidShare said it can be downloaded 10 times only. So if it doesn't work, you might try to be number 11. I dunno, should be fine, I can't imagine most of you being interested in Finnish punk. I'm only sharing it with Viking and Punk as a curio.
http://rapidshare.com/files/161508191/Punk_n_Roll.zip.html

Samuel Beckett's Not I
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=otjKETciw2c
What a powerful... thing. o.O Watch it.

http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
The newsmap. What a fantastic thing. I hope all news in the future will be delivered in this format.

NumberPedia is still relevant to my interests.


Thank you.

24 Hour Psycho review. I'd waited for this for yonks, and it came and it went - slowly. This was probably the highlight of my year so far (but then again both my birthday and Christmas are still to come, and I can't remember anything beyond three weeks ago...) So yeah, it was awesome!

and yes, I'm trying out this review thingie. It's nifty, and I think so because I have lots of opinions I want to impose on share with other people :3

But, as my diary is kinda more private than a review, I'll tell you all how that went:
I got the bus to Brum (and someone I know from uni happened to be on the same bus so I sat with him and chatted til he got off - and I never get to just sit down and chat with him <3), I got lost on the way to the gallery (not a wholesome activity in Birmingham city centre on a Friday night after dark on Halloween!) but got there in the end half an hour late (standard mormon time). My teacher George was there and one of the new MA students, talked with them for a while, checked the work, and George bought me soup, because I am that broke. They left, I stayed. And stayed and stayed. I saw a lot of really slow driving, a lot of really slow conversations (without sound), a car sinking into a swamp (slowly, but I think that might have actually been real time swamp-sinkage; I'd imagine they'd fast forward it a bit for the real movie), and one really slow murder. For a lot of the time there was no other visitors there, and the gallery staff were chatting to me because they were a bit bored. They also gave me free soup and hot chocolate :9 I was really freezing there. And I fell asleep a few times <_< At around 1pm the next day I said "ok, I have now experienced enough of the 24 Hour Psycho, and will now go home." I got out of the gallery, and the gallery assistant asked for my contact details because I had stayed for such a long time :P And she told me that the Bullring in town had been evacuated (in case that'd affect my traveling). I thought it wouldn't but it did - the bus was really late, I waited for about an hour and a half for a bus that goes every half an hour >.< Cold. And no familiar faces on the bus either.
I am very tired, but happy.

If I did some of the things I want to do (art-wise), I'd be in fact abandoning and selling my ideals and principles. Other people make work that I wish I'd made, but I can't make stuff like it, because of the expectations of artistic integrity in me (whether I expect it of myself or others do is not relevant).

* * *

Conceptual artists shunned the art object because it was a mere pawn in the art market (Picasso realised this also, so he wished that after his death all the work still in his possession would be released to the market, causing the demand and supply of his work to crash, making it possible to buy a Picasso for a fiver - his family didn't fulfil this last wish -_- It would have been the greatest blow on the art market). But I sort of agree with the conceptual artists (I am, after all, somewhat kind of almost one with the exception that I do actually make work too :P), but I agree in the principle: I don't want to make stuff that can be bought and sold. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the art object is always in that position (although that guy selling the wall that Banksy graffitied on... was a pretty bad blow on the whole non-selling-non-buying art thing >.<) What I mean is that I don't mind the art object so much. I do, after all, love treasure (I'm related to pirates). And while I am mostly obsessed with the replication, reproduction, no-original, infinite copies -thing, at the same time I yearn for tactility, especially tactility over the internet (cyber tactility, digital tactility). It does exist, I have experiences it before. And objects are good at tactility (tactility is key to treasure, y'see). Because treasure is more than just objects or expensive stuff. There is importance in how the treasure is acquired and where it is kept (three months' wages on your bank account is not treasure, no matter how well-paid your job is). This isn't to say that treasure comes easy, nor that money can't be treasure (your first ever pay slip might be treasure etc). Treasure can come easy or you can work hard for it, and money can be treasure - but it's not treasure because of its monetary value. Treasure has other value: emotional (tactile) value. Not just the usual sort of emotional value that someone gave it to you, or it belonged to someone you love (although that is one kind of tactile value), but there's also other emotions than love that make value for treasure: adventure, excitement, fear, faith... Anything can be imbued with emotional value from any emotion.

I fixed this thing, so it finally works (I hope):
<URL:stuff/Steadily-Constantly-Always.swf>

My final MA exhibited thingie.

Reading an Oscar Wilde play on the internets, and it made me lol:

MRS. ALLONBY. Don't find yourself longing for a London dinner-party?

HESTER. I dislike London dinner-parties.

MRS. ALLONBY. I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.

HESTER. I think the stupid people talk a great deal.

MRS. ALLONBY. Ah, I never listen!



Continued, the secret of life defined by English upper class prats:

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. I do not, Lady Hunstanton. I think there are many things women should never forgive.

LADY HUNSTANTON. What sort of things?

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. The ruin of another woman's life.

[Moves slowly away to back of stage.]

LADY HUNSTANTON. Ah! those things are very sad, no doubt, but I believe there are admirable homes where people of that kind are looked after and reformed, and I think on the whole that the secret of life is to take things very, very easily.

MRS. ALLONBY. The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

LADY STUTFIELD. The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

KELVIL. The secret of life is to resist temptation, Lady Stutfield.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough. I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.

Note dumpage again.
Last thursday I went to Hereford and back on the train, because my lecturer George needed me to do that (had o take some kind of parcel to the art college there -- no, the place didn't blow up shortly afterwards). Anyhoo, it's pretty far away (hour and forty minutes on the train) so I had a lot of headspace during the train journey, and here's the results:

The train is the only thing you can travel backwards in.

Great Malvern has a mountain. A real one. Outside the train. And the station is gorgeous. The place has the pull of adventure. I was really close ditching George's parcel-quest and going to meet the mountain, and only because I love him dearly did I not do that. So the adventure will happen another time. And it'll only cost £15. I could take the earliest possible train there, go explore, then take the latest possible train back... It'd be a nice day of trains, old places and mountains (and some more trains). That place has the pull.
I can't comprehend the mountain. It's such a strange thing to me. But I want to comprehend it.
The town is next to the mountain.
Then the town is on the mountain.
And then the train went inside the mountain.

***

Waiting for the train back in Hereford. The trainstation becomes the central hub for a tribe of feral teenagers living in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future world. They worship the faulty PA-system, where the gentle female voice erratically (but with perfect iming) repeats words from its pre-recorded phrases: "please do not leave any luggage unattended or it might be confiscated, damaged or destroyed by the security team"; or "please note that skateboards, roller blades or bicycles are not permitted on this train station" (and therefore the tribe all use those things, because the PA frequently reminds them of skateboards, roller blades or bicycles.
And one day, it'll start repeating "please" over and over again.

***

This Girl I Saw On The Train

She looks like that mouth never smiles.
She looks like that hair never comes out of that ponytail.
She looks like those earphones only play music that hates, violates the ears, and fills the mind with a bitter poison.
She looks like those boots would march over anything and anyone without regard.
She looks like those nails, those claws, those talons would get her through any material if she just scratched long enough.

She looks a lot like me.

Joker Fanart.
Another unfinished drawing embarkment.

One more totally awesome thing.

Cult Of Color: Call to Color a ballet in the Ballet Austin.
http://www.balletaustin.org/email/flash/season07-08/CultOfColor/index.html

Seriously, you want to click that link. Check out the "pictures and music" and "meet the characters" -sections in particular. It's one of those incredibly delightfully weird, bizarre, surreal things. It makes me sad not to be a Texan, that's how awesome it is.

http://www.balletaustin.org/cultofcolor/music/A%20Black%20&%20White%20World.mp3
http://www.balletaustin.org/cultofcolor/music/Building%20the%20Miracle%20Machine.mp3
http://www.balletaustin.org/cultofcolor/music/Sesom's%20Dream.mp3

One more diary.

This guy is made out of money



Mark Wagner. Currency Collages.
http://www.smokeinmydreams.com/

Note dumpage
^{I write notes. A lot. Obsessively. When I read. When I watch stuff. When I think. All the time basically. And soemtimes I have a piece of paper with all these notes on that I need to get rid of. So I type them up.}

From the book Myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford.

197
Machine work can be done only by machines. These workers {who built the pyramids} during their period of service were, stripped down to their reflexes, in order to ensure a mechanically perfect performance.

It was king who alone had the godlike power of turning men into mechanical objects and assembling these objects in a machine.

230
The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable. Until real machines of wood and metal could be manufactured in sufficient quantity to take the place of most of the human components, the megamachine would remain vulnerable.

234
Those who designed the {mega}machine were of course unconscious that it was a machine: how could they identify it as such when... {there were} no clues? ... Because the motive power of this machine required a great assembly of human prime movers, it could flourish only in... urban civilisation...

238
Wherever tools and muscle power were freely used, at the command of the workers themselves, their labors were varied, rhythmic, and often deeply satisfying, in the way that any purposeful ritual is satisfying. Increase of skill brought immediate subjective satisfaction, and this sense of mastery was confirmed by the created product. The main reward of the craftsman's working day ws not wages but the work itself, performed in a social setting. ... In identifying himself with his work and seeking to make it perfect, the worker remolded his own character.

The maker and the object reacted one upon the other...

Every part of work was life-work. Archaic attitude to work...

Metal carries with it the dangers of its origin: the mine. The heavy labour as a curse, and war that consumes the mined metal.

253
Aesthetic invention played fully as large a part as practical needs in man's effort to build a meaningful world; and because of the demans it made it was also a major stimulus for technics.

{an indecipherable word} technical audacity, brought into play not by satisfaction of physical needs or the desire for material wealth, but by the more fundamental pursuit of significance.

253
This mass of aesthetic invention compares favorably with the total mass of mechanical inventions during the last few centuries. But so far from suppressing technics, as our current economy suppresses art, these two modes of invention interacted.

254
The reciprocal relation between art and technics was maintained, to their common advantages, through all the ages of small-scale handicraft production.

In short, it was in the decorative, the symbolic, and the expressive arts that progress was maintained, even in ages that, in retrospect, otherwise seem stagnant.

255
...there was no enmity between handicraft and the machine itself. Just the cntrary; under personal control, the machine or the machine tool was a boon to the free worker.
...the advantage of an advanced technology... for restoring the intimate human scale and with it the communal cooperations of the face-to-face community.

256
...the handicraftsman's freedom could not survive an authoritarian economic system, based on the organisation of complex machinery that no single worker could buy or control, and promising 'security' and 'abundance' only in return of submission.

Wow. My university computing systems things have done some kind of updates. and they are retarded. I keep getting errors about not being allowed to view some pages because - well, who knows why. It's really hyper-sensitive. For example, I can't open Foot Photo Reference because apparently that page is pornographic. There's a posting in one of the forums that I can't read because this damn thing thinks I shouldn't be viewing it. Just... dub tee ef.

This annoys me so very much. I think my day couldn't get worse - but having said tha of course it will :)

Today I'm a bit of a grump, but I have to share this bit with you before I fall back into anti-society:

I watched Princess Bride this past weekend with a friend family that I know from church. And you know in it they have that Spanish character Inigo Montoya, who is this amazing swordsman. There's a scene where he has a bit of a rough spot and he's drunk and the brute squad come to kick everyone out of thieves' forest. And this guard-guy shouts at him "ho there!" and he replies "keep your ho there" or "ho there yourself" or something like that - except with his Spaniard accent it sounds more like "keep your ho der" (aka the spanish word 'joder') My mouth dropped open, I couldn't believe he'd just said that! But I couldn't express my shock to the other people there, because obviously they hadn't got it and I didn't want to start explaining it because there were children present, etc... I hate when that happens, when you catch something that no one else does, and you can't explain it either.
But otherwise an assum film. :)

Derek Hrynyshyn: Globalization, nationality and commodification: the politics of the social construction of the internet (in New Media & Society vol 10, no 5, October 2008)

Discussing social structures and power structures on the internet, especially as illustrated by the domain name system. He makes several interesting points about governance and administering of the internet, but I was most interested in the semiotic aspects of the topic. He explains the basics of the domain name system - first there were 7 top-level domains: '.com', '.org', '.net', '.int', '.mil', '.gov' and '.edu' and later the country codes were implemented - and that the reason for the DNS is not technical (computers do just fine by knowing each other by numbers). It's to make it easier for humans to remember how to get where they want. Words are easier to remember than long strings of numbers, because we give meaning to words. So for example, it's hard for us to associate something like "543.432.65.43" with an internet community about fantasy - giving it a name that suggests fantasy and community makes it infinitely easier for us to remember where it is and how to get there. All we need to learn is the suffixes, dotcom, dotorg, dotnet, dotcodotuk... and what they signify. Easy as pi. :)

But. Some of the suffixes evolve to mean something else. So while every country in UN's ISO-3166 list got its own countrycode, not all of them were able to put them to use (for obvious reasons of material imbalance on our planet) as they were intended - that is, to signify which information originates in which part of the planet. As these codes are not technically tied to any physical location, nothing really stops a person in Moscow from getting a .ca domain - except the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. Their minimun requirement for someone registering a .ca domain is Canadian citizenship or registration of a corporation in Canada. Basically you are not allowed to have a .ca domain if you have nothing to do with Canada. Bad news for Marica in Moscow, for mari.ca would be a really cool name for her website. But this is not the case with all country codes. Some countries do sell their domains to people from other countries. But why would anyone want a website with a countrycode that has nothing to do with their nationality? The reason is semiotic - that is, the countrycode has a meaning aside from just signifying the country. The obvious and famous example is '.tv', the country code of Tuvalu, but there are a few others. So the question is, should there be country codes at all if they are not being used in the way originally intended? Or should this different way of use be restricted, so that the country codes would only apply to content relating to the country? What happens to meaning of those country codes? What happens to the internet as a national and as a global space?

Interesting :)

Easterling wants to see Viking's balls.

Yesterday we did a trip to London to the galleries. Went to the British Film Institute and the Hayward Gallery.

This is of particular interest to [deeterhi]
The BFI had an installation by Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, The All-Seeing Eye (The Hard-core Techno Version), which was utterly awesome.
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/exh_gfx_en/ART60898.html
So it's a room, in which there is a revolving projector in the middle, which is projecting a video of a panorama of a room (so the camera was turned 360 in the middle of a room several times) and on every revolution some objects go missing from the room, with the only thing that never disappears is the tv set that is playing a scene from the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - even when we don't see the TV (when the camera points to the opposite side of the room) we can still hear it.
What a fantastic idea and a fantastic installation.

One thing I hate about going to galleries with other artists, especially to see new media work with other media artsist, is that we fall into the trap of "how is it made, ah yes, they did that and then they did this and that made that happen and now the magic is gone -_-"

The Hayward had a massive Andy Warhol exhibition, focusing on his films. It was a really humongous exhibition with far too many things to see them all. Some of my favourites were the Factory Diaries where he'd just filmed the people he hung out with, like making home videos. There was one of Candy Darling singing, and another one where someone showed polaroids to the camera while gossiping about who was at a party. I really liked the audio recordings too, they had these little cushioned benches built inside the walls with a set of speakers inside, and each bench played one of Andy's tape recordings. I listened to the one of Man Ray talking to them about photography, and by the sound of it they had some kind of photoshoot too. I love Man Ray's voice, it was really lovely. Then they had all the Andy Warhol's T.V. episodes in one room, and I chanced by the one with Pee Wee Herman in it <3 Seeing Pee Wee Herman beat Andy Warhol on the head with a toy hammer (while Andy is wearing a pirate hat)... that alone was so worth the admission fee to the exhibition :P Then there was a room with, what, 19 big screens each showing one of his later, better films. Including Empire (which is a 24 film of just the Empire State Building), Blowjob (which is a 40 minute film that shows nothing but the face of a young man, while someone gives him a blowjob off-camera), Sleep (another really long film of someone sleeping) and Inner And Outer Space was a two-screen projection of Edie Sedgwick (one general shot where we see most of her and some surroundings, and one closeup where we only see her bust and the TV behind) in front of a TV, smoking and talking and laughing, and on the TV was a film of her in profile. This last one was my favourite, but the layout of the room was so busy and confusing that it was impossible to focus. I'd say they'd work better in single-screen cinematic projections. Ah well, to be able to say that you've seen any of Warhol's video work at all is pretty special in itself, the Warhol Foundation is pretty anal about not sharing them >_> And lastly, they had the Silver Clouds (silver rectagle balloons filled with helium) in a room too. So that was quite awesome.

Another thing in the Hayward (that place is gigantic) was this artist (can't remember the name, Rhode was the last name I think) who uses chalk-drawing and photography/video to make things that have an element of illusion (like he'd draw a chalk skateboard ramp on the floor and pose in skateboarding poses on it and display the pictures upright so it looks like he's actually skateboarding on a drawn ramp). A bit similar to blublu.org 's video (Muto is it called? The one that everyone loves) with the animation by wallpainting.

This is of particular interest to [Delladreing]
They also sold in the Hayward shop chocolate stilettos. I wanted them so badly.

Enough rambling.