Death of the Proto-Geek

http://www.newsarama.com/film/120806-ForrestAckerman-RIP.html

Literally, my hero.

The Ctizen's Power

Here's a good one for speculation,

Vermont towns vote to arrest Bush and Cheney.

From the site:

"State lawmakers have passed nonbinding resolutions to end the war in Iraq and impeach Bush and Cheney, and several towns have also passed resolutions of impeachment. None of them have caught on in Washington."

According to Amazon.ca, impeachment is speculative enough. The site lists The Impeachment Process, one in a series of guide books to US government, under Science Fiction / Fantasy. I acknowledge it doesn’t happen much but it shouldn't be relegated to myth. Democratic governments are making high level commitments without consulting their people, like with the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Citizens need to know the power they hold in resisting authoritarian decision making like this.

Over at The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy, Harry Turtledove and Bryce Zabel, are posting an ongoing novel about Kennedy's life being worse for not dyeing in Dallas, 1963. The story draws most of its inspiration from the lesser known side of the beloved Kennedy administration. The storyline from inside their alternate universe: "John Kennedy cheated death in Dallas only to face a fate that for him might have been even worse – the public revelation of his private double life. Learning the truth was just as difficult for many Americans. We loved him when we knew him less well. Being forced to face the whole picture – for Kennedy and for the nation – was something no one ultimately was prepared for..."

Changing the status-quo with open insurrection is all too common in stories these days. Do you know of any science or speculative fiction that has impeachments or other non-violent changes to government?

A wiki for you can cite.

"Truth is my best friend", Isaac Newton once said. The website SourceWatch.org is good news for anyone who just wants the facts. Wikipedia is full of information, but its only good for getting familier with a topics - learning some keywords - its unciteable. Now you frustarated academics have a quick and easy way to fill in the gaps of your research projects.

The site is monitored with a light touch, mostly by avaerage contributors but has "active participants monitor the recent changes page and make copyedits and corrections to the content, format and policy problems they see. " (Source Watch - Policy).

Discussions, portals and other tools help contributors discuss and focus their collective efforts. These are just a few of the site's features. The best function is obviously the random button. Hit it enough times and you too may find out who Pisit Charnsnoh is.

SourceWatch's sub-project, Front groups, has already triggered an inquiry of a global warming skeptics groups that ran bipartisan ads durring the 2006 Canadian Election. The group, Friends of Science, was found to be funded in part by a University of Calgary trust account. According to SourceWatch.org the major Canadian Media Company, CanWest News-Wire reported, "facing embarrassing questions raised by the online SourceWatch.org encyclopedia, the university conducted an internal audit over the past year which concluded that its trust account had been used to 'support a partisan viewpoint on climate change.'" While the university closed the trust account, it has refused to make its full audit report public. "

The Arms Trade report I am writing is going to cost me less eye-ball hours infront of academic databases because of this, me thinks. Put any projects of yours this might benefit into the comments.

YouTube Docs Show Identity Research with Lego.

A new pair of YouTube documentaries by David Gauntlett, a Professor at the University of Westminster and the author of Creative Explorations, provide a visual representation of his book's study: identity expressed with Lego pieces. From the site:

"How do you picture identity? What happens when you ask individuals to make visual representations of their own identities, influences, and relationships?"
"This leads to an innovative project in which Gauntlett asked people to build metaphorical models of their identities in Lego. This creative reflective method provides insights into how individuals present themselves, understand their own life story, and connect with the social world."

They gathered people from diverse backgrounds and familiarized them with Lego, metaphorical thinking and expressing their identities with metaphors. This is the focus in Part One: Methods. The first video also gives profiles on the study's participants and shows the free-play representative architecture they produced.

The second video looks at the book's findings: 11 conclusions on how people think about themselves, human complexity, time as an element of thought, among other observations.

Gauntlett says also that metaphorical identity models can be created with anything that lets you be expressive.

If you want to play the home version but don't have the blocks, the Lego sim on the official site will get you going.

Anyone who metaphors their life in Lego (or with a Photoshop collage, mini-comic, in crayon, etc) is welcome to post it to comments. It would be interesting to see what people end up learning about them-selves.

Metaphorical-thinking information or guides would also be much appreciated in the comments section.

The Speculative Life of Philip K. Dick.

The life of Philp K. Dick was peppered with strange events; much like his fiction. He believed he was possessed by Christian ethereals; later, communicating with V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). With his great mind for speculation, he would eventually fill tomes with his thoughts, publishing some as novels even. Dick worked to interpret them until the end of his life in 1982. An interview Dick gave where he described these miraculous events was illustrated by R.Crumb and is available on-line here:

These events would tie into the very topics he liked exploring with science fiction: "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" They gave him a lot of thought fodder, which lead to books like V.A.L.I.S., a small portion of a tome like notebook Dick filled with his speculations. The longer version, Exegesis, has been made available on-line by Dick's estate. Fans have shown much interest in uncovering the secrets of this book for years and they may get their chance. It's available at the official PKD website.


Dick's analytical quest was not a fruitless labor. When asked for a one sentence answer to "What is reality?" he famously stated, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Grant Morrison's mind-bending epic, The Invisibles, draws influence from Dick's VALIS concept. He also inspired Discordianism with his analogy of the Black Iron Prison:

"Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”

We only have the man's thoughts now, but they've already inspired and challenged the next generation of dreamers and speculative artists. To learn more about Philip K. Dick in his own words, there is speech he wrote (available here) wherein he discusses many of his thoughts and interests.

Trippy Star Trek Music Videos

There's appx. 1 trillion Anime Music Videos according to madeupnumbers.com. Star Trek may not be keeping up, but here's a few noteworthy videos from youtube that alternate between the surreal and ridiculus.

White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane).

This video would have been a lot better had they matched the clips for style instead of picture-hitting words.

I was hoping to find more videos like this but all I could find was a clip with that song from Rocky Horror everyone knows; it plays at high school dances.

You could likely find the episode of Star Trek with the characcter from Alice in Wonderland on Tvland.com. Unfortunatly, it doesen't work in Canada or something, so i loose out. Same for the Cbs.com on-line Star Trek episodes. All I get is a learing voice denying it's availability.

Time Warp (Rocky Horror Picture Show).


Not fit to post: BONES/STAR TREK music video by B. Brain and P. Bernard
DeForest Kelley lives (kind of) in this 3d music video. The audio is a mash up of some of Star Trek's best dialogue and bland techno music. Tripping the Rift style character design and production.

When sci-fi hits too close to home, Pt 1.

The Road Warrior.

"Poison Wrecked Machines"
Plot: In the post-apocolyptic Australian wasteland, a cynical drifter agrees to help a small, gasoline rich, community escape a band of bandits. (Imdb.com)

Issues: Dependancy on Oil.

Homefront: This film was partially inspired by the violence against vehicular culture during Australia's fuel shortage in the 70's. World oil production having peaked, it's not unreasonable that a similar crisis could hit again, but on a grander scale, if resources become too scarce before a viable alternative is found. Many alternatives to oil are ether in existance or development. None have been given the same attention as crude oil; leaving them not as applicable for now.

The website freeenergy.ca has some good articles on this including:

• how green energy can save jobs
• vertical agriculture
• a flying carpet?

All of which sound like really good ideas. Today.

Notable Cultural Influences: The South Park episode, "Proper Condom Use", where a final showdown between girls and boys is played out between a small fort and vehicle gangs. Butters leads the merauders wearing the Humungus's iconic hockey mask and speaking in his husky-voice over a booming loudspeaker.
Fallout, one of the best damn PC-RPGs of all time, period. Ask anyone.

DeviantGallery:

Road Warrior. by ~paranoimiac on deviantART


Road bot warrior... by ~nancynismo on deviantART

Artist Comment: " And this, my friends, is what happens when you watch too many Mad Max flicks when you are growing..."

Merchants of Misery by ~Bungle311 on deviantART
Artist: " I was in the mood to do a piece remeniscient of the Road Warrior wihtout it actually being the RW. The video game screen idea just kinda happend toward the end."

Fallout by ~hunqwert on deviantART

Digital human billboards not far now.

Everyone's used to being a billboard by now. Brand name clothes have turned us all into walking ads. People okay with this can sell patches of their bodies over eBay as billboards, letting any company (within reason) mobily showcase their brand or product. These opportunists may soon be able to sell patches of skin by the minute.

An entrant in the Greener Design Competition is taking steps in this direction. Gizmodo explains it thusly, "it 'works' by changing the color of smart-ink pixels tattooed over the implant. It also acts as a touchscreen input device, so you could manage your cellphone calls by tapping on your arm. Most creepily, there's potential for a 3G video call to be shown on your skin." The pitch is geared towards skin PC's and displaying medical information from the personal robot army that will be swimming your blood stream when this becomes main stream, but it would be immediatly adaptable to product whoring.

Attractive people who're comfortable with their bodies would make a killing with this. If people already want to look at you, why not make some cash for stopping and posing? A whole industry of sexy-people covered in ads standing on curbs selling to pedestrians and drivers both would spring up. The amount of ad space they could sell would be limited only by their modesty (and local exposure laws) The modeling business would shrink as wannabes decided to forgo being on someone else's billboard for being their very own.

Animator Gina Miller has been working on this for a couple years. She created a short video to show how the technology would look. It can be seen here, courtesy of a NanoGirl article.

Clever ad firms like HandvertisingUSA have already been marketing on skin, but with entrance stamps, etc.

There's no doubt people would be lining up to cash in on these innovations. Companies shouldn't wait though as there are people who make themselves into billboards for lulz: cosplayers. Anime producers should be shelling out the green for these kids. They give a franchise presence, something it can't do on any screen or wall.

DeviantGallery: People giving franchises presence.

Demyx cosplay by *Keysha-chan on deviantART


COSPLAY-FFVIIAC:YAZOO00 by ~yolkler on deviantART


ChrowX Kankuro Cosplay by ~Mechy-Chan on deviantART


Princess Zelda by ~Lillyxandra on deviantART

Brawl the world! Super Smash Bros.

The first two Smash Bros. games only allowed you to to find out who's the best in your area. Brawl makes the world your arena!

According to a recent interview with Masahiro Sakurai, a Brawl developer, the game will not have leader boards or communication between players in random matches (Ign.com). Even though you can fight mostly anyone, your bragging will still be kept to people you know and message boards. Sakurai says they've done this to make the on-line experience as pleasant and psychologically healthy as possible.

He also says downloadable content probably wont happen.

Of the overall game and play experience he says, "I really, truly feel that this is a game that I'm really not tired of yet. I'm really enjoying it. I feel relieved in knowing that this game has [...] staying power for myself and I'm very proud of that."

I hope so and can't wait to play.

Full interview at Ign.com

Deviant Gallery:

Super Mario - Life is a Game. by ~PeterPan-Syndrome on deviantART


Brawl Group by ~OneEyedMe on deviantART


Super Smash Brothers Brawl 1 by ~Neoriceisgood on deviantART