Good Morning, World

Posted via email from brainreleasevalve’s posterous

Time Lapse from Orbit

A NASA astronaut on the Space Shuttle Endeavor brought space back down to Earth. Astronaut Don Pettit took over 85 time-lapsed videos of Earth from his stint on the International Space Station to highlight features of the changing planet.

“There is phenomenology that happens on a timescale that you can’t see in real time,” he said. “It occurred to me that making time-lapse movies on the space station would bring out things that you normally don’t observe.”

Pettit also wanted to capture what it feels like to be in space. “You feel like you’re on a frontier,” he says. “I like to define a frontier as a place where your intuition does not apply. It’s a place where the answers are not in the back of the book. As a result, a frontier is a place that’s rich in discovery.”

From WIRED. There are a bunch more orbital time lapse videos over there, too.

Ultraman’s Kaiju Monsters

A pair of action-packed Ultraman Monster paintings by Toshio Okazaki were published in Shōgakukan’s 1979 edition of Ultra Kaiju (Shōgakukan Nyūmon Hyakka Series #97).

From the incomparable Pink Tentacle, which you should visit immediately to see these in full size and in detail with each monster named.

COMMONPLACE: Sinbad vs Cthulhu

As a child, I loved Ray Harryhausen movies. Absolutely adored them. From his early work in Mighty Joe Young to Jason and the Argonauts to the original Clash of the Titans, I watched them ravenously. If there was a Harryhausen marathon on AMC, you could forget getting me to do anything. My ass was planted in front of that television, watching impossible things come to life. I actually wanted to do visual effects for years. Build models, make monsters, create fantasy. But then computers ruined all of it and I moved on.

I realized over the weekend that some of Harryhausen’s bigger movies are streamable through Netflix, so I watched Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger a few nights ago.

It got me wondering…why the hell isn’t anyone doing anything with Sinbad? He’s an established cultural touchstone, and one with lots of wiggle room. People know he’s a pirate-y type, but they don’t know much more than that. Which is perfect, because it lets you get away with what ever the hell you want to.

Which is why I want to have him fight Lovecraftian horrors.

Think about it. Sinbad travels the sea, looking for adventure, what happens if he stumbles across, say, R’yleh and inadvertently wakes up a sleeping Eldritch God.

You could have him spanning the world trying to put the cosmic horrors back in the box.

And there’s a scene in my head. A fucking amazing scene.

Sinbad standing on the prow of his ship. Cthulhu or something similar rising from the waves towering dozens or maybe hundreds of feet over him. Sinbad’s crew is going mad, clawing at their eyes. Their captain, shockingly, is smirking. At which point Sinbad procedes to deliver one of those “FUCK YOU, EVIL THING! I’M SINBAD! I’VE DONE XYZ!” Where he enumerates all the fucked up things he’s seen and why the big scary insanity monster isn’t going to make him blink.

Anyway, that’s the idea at least. Tossed away into the COMMONPLACE.

While you’re here, watch the opening minutes of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, one of my favorite Harryhausen flicks.

Fixed, for the first time in years

My car is finally back to normal after eight long years of looking like it had its front teeth knocked out.

But more importantly, my A/C works again!

Posted via email from brainreleasevalve’s posterous

I am going to be a published author

Late last week, Pat reminded me about this project called 48 Hour Longshot Magazine (they got sued by the TV show, don’t ask). The concept is simple: create a magazine from start to finish in 48 hours. Post a theme, all content is due 24 hours later, and then 24 hours after that, a print on demand magazine is posted for sale.

This time around, the theme was Comeback.

Here’s what they said about it.

Interpret it how you want. After all, comebacks are morally neutral. Disgraced politicians, the Taliban, and Whooping Cough have all come back. But beautiful babies have too, their little kumquat hearts restarting just in time.

You can come back from anything, even death.  This is a hilobrow concept. Sports teams stage comebacks. Skirts stage comebacks. Ideas stage comebacks. Even Lassie. Lassie always comes back home again. It is all theater, in a way, with very specific requirements. The preconditions are forever the same: you have to lose before you can win; it has to vanish before it can return; you must have faith.

Maybe some comebacks don’t seem so serious to you. What is significant about a basketball team coming back from 16 points down in the fourth quarter to win? It reminds us to hope. What is meaingful about the fashionability of the length of a skirt? It’s in the mechanics. Inch by inch, we get to witness change. It may seem like you’re analyzing hem lines, but they are just a stripped down and convenient model for how the world happens.

And there’s another definition, too. (Your mama probably knows it.) Maybe one time, someone said something to you that was real mean, and as you stood there, stinging, the most perfect retort rose into your brain and flew out of your mouth. It landed flush, and your opponent was staggered. You walked away proud, even though you don’t like violence. There are those comebacks, too.

About the only thing that unites all these things is that the best comeback is the least statistically probable. Comebacks are a reminder that weird stuff happens in the world! Norms are made to be deviated from.

So what did I do with that?

The nerdiest fucking thing possible. I wrote about game design and video games. Specifically about fungibility. A term that refers to how easy it is in a game to jump from last place to first, or fall from first to last. A metric of flexibility, sort of. I started writing Friday night, conked out around 1 or 2, woke up and finished the bit, shipping it off to Longshot at around 11am local time.

At about 11:10 local time I decided what I’d written was probably just a nerd game theory wankery and went on with my weekend.

But, low and behold, about 28 hours later, guess who’s name crawled up on the list of accepted submissions.

What? No. Mine, you assholes.

And here I am on page 24 of Longshot Magazine, #1.

I’m curious to see what they’ve done with my bit, because it looks like they’ve copy edited it down by about 300 words. And that’s probably a good thing.

So, yeah. There you go. My first published work.

If you want to buy it (which all of you should, the project looks awesome, I’m probably the low point of the whole thing), you can find it here.

I know a lot of you are printheads. This is the sort of project you should be looking at. Using new media to make relevant and interesting old media.

Me Right Now

The sky is so blue outside. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, it isn’t skin searingly hot.

The Four Punks – Notes

Putting together a piece about the asteriskpunks (*punks) sub cultures/genres that are out there. Focusing primarily on the cultural impetus for their appearance in the zeitgeist.

Dumping loose notes here so I can have a web-based reference point.

Attacking 4 *punks as the best examples of this

• Cyber
• Steam
• Diesel
• Wind

Clockworkpunk, Atomopunk, et al are really just narrow slivers that don’t really attack things in new ways. Effectively like working at a hotdog restaurant, then spinning off a new restaurant that serves everything with extra relish and calling it a new cuisine. It isn’t, and they aren’t.

Need to establish definition of PUNK as a whole. Speak to nihilistic, dead-end leanings. Something is lost in punk, a death is coming, and this is the raging before the long quiet.

All *punks pull something from previous forms of literature. Pulps, etc.

Cyberpunk

• Original *punk. Came from the rise of instant digital communication, personal computing, and the potential of unlocking the human gene as a tool.
• Also of note is the ever present megacorp. Massive employer/producer/state that is more present than the national entity.
• Essentially it’s about the loss/erosion of individuality through technology and the corporate system
• Oddly, Cyberpunk is positioned against the current Nerd Cult of Singularity.
• Pulls from Noir tropes for stories in a lot of cases.

Steampunk

• The Big One right now. Really just sort of an updating of what Jules Verne was doing 100+ years ago.
• Reaction to the lack of heirlooms in modern life. Coveted, saved for possessions are iDevices, laptops, game systems, TVs, etc.
• Desire is to go back to a point where the artisan could still craft something that hold modern functionality.
• In past, man would buy a pocket watch with his first check (example). That would get passed down, build history/story. Current things are trashed for newer versions.
• Parallel to Arts and Crafts movement that came as a rejection of Industrialization
• Irony? Devices used to build community are the things they are railing against.

Dieselpunk

• Newer, but building in relevance.
• A swan song to the internal combustion engine. The device that powered trains, automobiles and planes.
• The engine that shrunk the world is now dying, replaced by electric
• Examples of electricity powering the villain is common. Robots, lasers, etc.
• Pulling from the classic 30s/40s stories of air combat.

Windpunk

• Smallest of the *punks I’ve chosen. But, still has a clearly defined message
• Key points of this talk about giving people the kind of mobility/life they have now, but without environmental impact
• Survivor’s guilt seems to play into this. Guilt that the world is in this state, so imagine a better one.

Try to work 4 elements angle.

End with noting that this is the year NASA dies. And that I expect Spacepunk to be the next big thing. Akin to Atomopunk, but goes further.

All of these is through a non-academic, personal filter. Meant to bring up discussion and talk directly about the metaphors *punks are conveying.

The Birth of Supermassive Black Holes

From Wired.com

Supermassive Black Holes Formed by Colliding Primordial Galaxies

Astronomers have solved the mystery of how supermassive black holes formed early in the universe’s evolution by modeling the collision of giant primordial galaxies.

“This the first work that demonstrates the formation of a supermassive cloud that is big enough to form a supermassive black hole,” said physicist Lucio Mayar of the Institute for Theoretical Phyics in Switzerland, lead author of the study published Aug. 26 in Nature. “Other simulations who have tried to do this have started with only one galaxy. But we know that in the early universe galaxies were rapidly colliding.”

Supermassive black holes have masses hundreds of millions of times that of our sun, and are at the center of almost every galaxy, Mayar said. In the study’s mathematical simulation, one was formed when two primordial galaxies — which contained much more gas relative to galaxies today — collided with each other. During the collision, the gas in the galaxies was pulled towards the center by gravitational tidal forces — like water on Earth gets pulled towards the moon — forming a dense, massive cloud that would quickly collapse into a giant black hole.

“It has been perplexing how such black holes with masses billions of times the mass of the sun could exist so early in the history of the universe,” astronomer Julie Comerford of University of California Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “These simulations are an important advance in understanding how those supermassive black holes were built up so quickly.”

The new simulation has important implications for finding gravitational waves — ripples in the space-time continuum predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

“When you have the creation of these supermassive black holes you have enormous bending of space time, and we think these will be the strongest gravitational waves that you can detect in the universe,” Mayar said. “If you formed these massive black holes in the early universe you should detect lots of these gravitational waves from the very early universe.”

Space is so big. So fucking big. We try to shrink it down to little pictures from x-ray telescopes, but it really isn’t anything like that at all.

For hundreds of millions of years that’s going to be nothing more than a mass of perpetually exploding suns. Then it’s all going to go dark for trillions of years. And ultimately it’ll bleed away all of the matter in the black hole as background radiation and disappear.

And we’ll barely be around to see a fraction of a fraction of it happen.

It still gets to me that black holes can die. These ancient, impossible massive, near omnipotent creations of nature will eventually wither and die. All of that matter they’ve sucked in, bled slowly out as tepid cosmic noise. A cycle, billions of years in the making, to evenly distribute the base elements of the universe.

The machinations of God, if such a thing exists, are so far beyond the scope of human conception, we have no hope of grasping even the edges of it.

Requiescat In Pace, Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon passed away yesterday at the age of 46. He directed and created high concept animated feature films and television series.

His directorial debut was the beautifully twisted Hitchcockian thriller Perfect Blue in 1997. I saw it my sophomore year of college, and it’s stuck with me, like broken glass jabbed into my brain, since then. The way he dealt with the concepts in that movie, especially the creation and destruction of celebrity, are incredible.

He followed up his debut with award winning films like Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. They’re less scarring, but still just as intriguing as his first film.

After those two, he took a break from the big screen to bring the bizarre Paranoia Agent to the small screen.

His last release was Paprika, which won him the most exposure for his mind bending works.

Kon was a visionary and an advocate of his medium. There were decades of work ahead of him, and the world is diminished by his passing.

Fuck You, Twitter

This morning, like every morning at work, I ran my mouse over the icons in my dock, click the six that always get turned on every morning. Thunderbird, Chrome, Cyberduck, iTunes, Adium, and lastly, Twitterriffic.

Except this morning something went pear-shaped with Twitterriffic. It spit out some yellow 404 error message that I’d never seen before. I shrugged, shut it down and then opened it back up. Same yellow error message. I shrugged again and then downloaded the most recent version of the Twitterriffic client (I was 3 or 4 out of date). This time I didn’t even get the yellow error message. It would pop up, ask for my password, think for about 5 minutes then give me the finger and shit all over itself.

Which, I think you’ll agree, was a bit rude.

Fine, I thought, I’ll do this the hard way. Off to the website I go.

And this is what greeted me there:

Oh.

Fuckity.

Glad to know you rolled out that feature without, you know, telling anyone you were doing it.

But, who am I kidding? Twitter isn’t a business. It’s a grift that exists to con venture capitalists out of their money. We’re a few years into the thing, and they still don’t have a business plan or a network that’s more stable than a used Kleenex.

Ah well.

At least I can take solace in the fact that a recent market survey only showed that 2% of the current user base would pay for the service.

We are the Reason Scott Pilgrim Failed

22 of us, in custom-made action hero t-shirts, went to see The Expendables this weekend.

I’m sorry, moving going audience, we’re the reason you can’t have nice things.

Death Kappa

Coming to DVD and Blu-Ray July 27th from Tokyo Shock!

The kappa, in Japanese folklore, are water goblins that are closely associated with a certain town in the country. Unfortunately, the area is also home to a militant splinter group of researchers dedicated to developing amphibious super soldiers based on the kappa of legends. When their experiments result in murders by some escapees, the appearance of an actual kappa, and the triggering of an atomic bomb, the consequences are of epic proportions. A monster arrives in the midst of the nuclear fallout, and Japan’s defenses are helpless against it. Mankind’s only savior is an irradiated water goblin that is on the rampage with death in its eyes.

Yes, this exists. And yes, it is already sold out on Amazon.

FastFiction – The Green Docket

Title: The Green Docket
Word: Juice

Submitted by Shane.

With this, I wanted to play with structural things. Dialog, bizarre formatting, etc. And I’ve been pushing hard on a bunch of new things that I needed a break from. FastFictions are perfect for that.

200 words about coming to terms with what you’ve done:

“This’ll never work, you know. Some one will catch on. It’s gotten to big, there are too many people involved. Secrets like this don’t keep.”

Here we go again.

“Oh will you shut up? You worry like a fucking fourteen year old girl. Boo-hoo, will he ever call me? Boo-hoo, will people find out what we’re doing? Of course they will! And so long as we hold our shit together – you hold your shit together – we’ll be fine, be protected, when it all comes out.”

I’m almost to my breaking point.

“We promised them free energy! Green energy! And we lied through our teeth, smiling like snake oil salesmen when we took their money.”

He never had the backbone for what we’re doing.

“So long as we keep giving them the juice, they aren’t going to give a damn where it comes from. And you know it. People are greedy. Greedy and selfish. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a Walmart in every town in America. ”

Was too much of a hero.

“I just wanted to change the world. Make it better.”

Too much of a dreamer.

“Hey. You did.”

Need to remember to make it look like an accident.

Follow this link to offer up more Fast Fiction suggestions.

“Became a Living Buddha”

Via BBC News:

He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo – but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.

Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.

They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he “doesn’t want to see anybody”.

Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.

Welfare officials had tried to meet Mr Kato since early this year. But when they went to visit, family members repeatedly chased them away, according to Tomoko Iwamatsu, an Adachi ward official.

Authorities grew suspicious and sought an investigation by police, who forced their way into the house on Wednesday.

They discovered a mummified body, believed to be Kato, lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.

Mr Kato’s relatives told police that he had “confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha,” according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower’s pension payments via Mr Kato’s bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

The pension fund had long been unable to contact Mr Kato.

“His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened. It’s so eerie,” said Yutaka Muroi, a Tokyo metropolitan welfare official.

I love comparing/contrasting crime in the States vs crime in Tokyo. In America, stuff like this happens every day. People keep cashing social security and pension checks for dead relatives long after they’ve been stuck in the ground. But at least we know you don’t have to hang on to the body. Only in Japan would you keep the body around and tell people that he was both still alive, and transcendent like the Buddha.

You almost have to respect them for that extra mile they go. We just dump the deceased in a hole in the ground. The elevate them to near godhood.

Note to everyone: When I die, I want you to preserve me, then build in an animatronic skeleton. You know, so you can trot me out every holiday and have me wave at people. Should be a hoot around Halloween.

Vintage Tokyo Subway Posters

There’s a whole series of these, all of them referencing pop culture and classic art.

And all of them are awesome.

I’m telling you, Pink Tentacle is absolutely amazing.

Friday Frequency – I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

Not simple a frequency this time. I couldn’t find just the audio of this interview, so you get to look upon the face of a brilliant, but shattered man.

Sixty five years ago today, the Enola Gay, a United States Airforce bomber out of Tinian in the West Pacific dropped a nuclear gravity bomb, called Little Boy, on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. The Japanese had seen the Enola Gay and her two escort planes coming. They had even raised the air raid alarm. But after seeing that there were only three bombers, the raid was called off and no fighters were scrambled. The Japanese felt that it would be a waste of gasoline to engage the bombers, and three of them could do no serious damage to the city.

At approximately 8:15 local time a second sun exploded over the Hiroshima.

The world was never the same again.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

This has been your Friday Frequency.

FastFiction – Our First Kiss

Title: Our First Kiss
Word: Monumental

Submission by Laurel.

200 words about what happens when you share secrets:

In the woods north of where I grew up, we both stir, half-dreaming, in our sleeping bags. The morning light works its way through the walls of the tent. The cool dew is held back.

We camp in a grove of ancient trees, not marked on any maps or linked to any trails. This is my secret that I have let you in on, a place that no directions can find.

Those trees, towering over us, their boughs buttressing the sky, are the monumental supports to this, nature’s church. The singing birds proclaim it my sanctuary

For years, I would come here to believe I was the only person the whole world. My every act legendary and timeless, immortal. But now that you are here, I am mortal once again.

You roll over, and we lay face to face for a moment. I hold my breath, unknowingly. Craning your neck forward, ever so slightly, your nose brushes my cheek. You slide your mouth over mine, and we kiss. I still don’t breathe.

You retreat back into your sleeping bag, pulling it up around your face and letting out a contented sign.

“G’mornin’.” You mumble.

I finally remember to breathe.

Follow this link to offer up more suggestions.

Western Russia has become Hell

Russia is experiencing probably its worst heat wave in history. A place that normally freezes people to death is now boiling their brains in their skulls. Moscow hit 113 last week. And summer is still roaring along.

This heat coupled with a lack of rain is drying out Russia’s forests and fields, turning one of the greenest (in terms of wilderness space) countries on the planet into on giant tinderbox.

A tinderbox which erupted into flames late last month. Fires that have spread so far and so fast that the threaten to burn the world’s largest country in half. Fires that have completely obscured the view of the planet from space. Fires that are threatening critical infrastructure locations – like a nuclear power plant.

Fires that are producing scenes like this:

Video via Coilhouse

Post Script – I’m sure there’s a post in here about the feedback loop that amplifies global warming. Hot temps causing more people to use energy to cool, leading to more greenhouse gases, leading to hotter temps, leading to wild fires, leading to more greenhouse gases, leading to hotter temps, leading to more cooling, etc, etc. But I don’t have the time to hash it all out for you right now.

Meet the Future of Sex

That’s a demonstration of the Telenoid R1, a telepresence communication robot…thing.

The idea is that the R1 will act as a physical, minimalist representation of a far, far away person sitting in front of a computer. Through a webcam, the R1′s software tracks the physical movements of said person, and moves the R1 robot accordingly. That’s the rationale to blame for the creepy as shit movements of the wormbot that you see in the video.

Right now, porn’s tech heads and lawyers are exploring the real time, peepshow-esque things that came be accomplished with the iPhone 4′s Facetime application. Just think of what they could do with the R1′s hardware slapped into something like a RealDoll. Dial into a pay per minute/pay per act service and have a real human being digital service you through nothing more than a webcam and a broadband connection.

Who needs a virtual sex doll when science is bringing real ones to our doorstep?

The worst part of this?

The really creepy people are the ones that want fuck the damn thing as-is.

Story is everywhere today, but give Pink Tentacle your traffic. They are awesome.