"the mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."
i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes. i thought what id do was, id pretend i was one of those deaf mutes.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
“It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.”
Gone are the times when protesters carried signs with messages written on them.
Now they write their messages on the shields they must carry, to protect them from police forces.
Protesters were bombarded with flashbangs, rubber bullets and tear gas in oakland today, before 400 were arrested.
Mayor Jean Quan, this is a message for you. You are going to lose Oakland. Theres nothing you can do about this because you are fighting instead of embracing a change that is coming with or without you. You will fail, and so will everything you and your ilk stand for.
It seems to me that sending packs of dogs out to attack unarmed people will inevitably lead to these people arming themselves for protection, which you will then call terrorism.
So ive got an obscene amount of things to do this week including a shit ton of sketches for Zombie Beach Patrol, a miniseries comic project im working on with a chap named Matt. also firing up the olde inkflow cannon and getting that fucking beast up and running with a little help from space lightning and monster fire, so that should be so time consuming that i take my own life.
but its all for the love, isnt it?
also against my better judgement for said week, i have decided to abstain from all of my vices. no cigs, no alcohol, no drugs, no reefer, no coffee, no orgasms and no internets.
i assume this will be terrible, but terrible things make nonterrible things even better, so 2 weeks from now will probably be awesome.
anyways heres a quick rant ive been meaning to rant about and i might as well get it done before i fast from the wired.
its about twitter announcing that they intend to systematically censor tweets based on different governments requests.
im going to keep it short because i feel like with all the things happening everywhere rants like this tend to sound similar, since they are in fact all connected in a lot of ways.
ok so this social platform called twitter, which owes its immense success on quite literally, freedom of speech in two areas: hollywood celebrity culture(the repulsive, empty side), and the recent arab springs/ows protests(the positive, potentially lifechanging side).
see it has this ability to connect everyone on earth in an instant, and during the protests it was a huge force in 'up to the second, feet on the ground, UNEDITED, crowd sourced news', which allowed people on the streets to coordinate and communicate on the fly, which is really an amazing thing to witness in action.
see this happens all the time when a company gets giant, they fall into the "too big to fail" mindset, like netflix did when they decided to split its services into two separate entities, or when bank of america decided to charge for having a debit card or when mcdonalds food processing techniques were found to be completely repulsive or when the government tried to censor the internet as a whole.
these 4 examples also have something else in common. they were all met with extreme, crowdsourced protests. as a result, all of these policies were quickly changed, suggesting that this is, in some ways, still a buyers market.
something like twitter has a purpose. its a laserfocused version of facebooks status update and introduced hashtags en masse to further its cause and become the infohub it is today.
see with businesses that start laserfocused, it starts out as something pure, and everyone notices how well it does at what its supposed to do. its the best of the best, 100% pure ideologies, theres nothing better for its intended purpose.
kinda like reeeeeally good meth.
but a lot of these companies dont have the strength to stand their ground like walter white up there does it terms of product quality, and they begin to get greedy. they then begin to cut their product with inferior ingredients and ideologies to maximize their output, and thus profits.
i believe that twitter will backpedal, as google eventually did with chinas censored search engine, but well see how it goes. it could easily be a publicity stunt to get people talking about twitter and its future as things move forward in time. i think its important to remember that while we all fought to keep the internet free from immediate censorship from the u.s. government, companies like google and twitter and facebook are NOT small companies. their focus, as with all corporate entities(especially publicly traded ones) is on continued growth and branching out, indefinitely.
spiral out, keep going.
to trust these companies fully is to misstep. they all have ties to politics and are more powerful and worth more than some countries, which is something to be watched of course, but they also revolutionized the world and are largely to thank for the way the world works now in terms of connectivity and information generation, as well as, on the downside, data collection.
the future will deal purely in information.
heres an excerpt from "The Mindscape of Alan Moore", a documentary on alan moore, the writer of watchmen and v for vendetta. yeah, hes the one responsible for the guy fawkes explosion over the past ten years and assumingly the reason anonymous uses the mask to represent their (un)organisation.
"If we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50 000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up with in that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled.
As it turns out, after the first 50 000 year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we had twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up, between 1960 and 1970 human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months.
Further to this, there is a point somewhere around 2015 when human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in every thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."
this doc was released in 2003.
googles CEO has been quoted recently as saying that human information is doubling now every 2 days. even people criticizing this statement come up with something like a doubling every 7 or 8 days instead. the point is its really moving now, compared to 2003s 18 month doubling, which is on par with, funnily enough, moores law(different moore), which basically states that transistors in a circuit, and thus technology as a whole, get twice as fast every 18 to 24 months due to mans ability to shrink technology using technology.
steam culture. telescopic evolution reaching some kind of peak and the speed in which information is produced superheats our already boiling lucid culture, leading to an eventual change in the way we must process our information.
once this happens, as moore says, "all bets are off."
you never know, maybe like kurzweil says well have a supercomputer in 2040 or so that will rival the brains redline capacity. maybe that supercomputer will be able to analyze all of this information weve been collecting ever since we created hard drives. maybe something like twitter will become some sort of collective human thought database to be bought and sold, copied and torrented. we found out the world wasnt flat, its entirely possible that well find out that creativity is another dimensional reality, or that our universe is just a drop in the bucket of something much, MUCH bigger.
no one knows whats going to happen, but thats what makes it so important. it will affect every one of us.
things are heating up on this little rock of ours.
anyway, the point is that information is and will continue to be mankinds most important resource, and any attempt to censor, bottleneck, manipulate or otherwise compromise this informational substrate will inevitably fail, and fail hard.
it is our job, as humans, to wonder and wander, in the darkness, try to make sense of it, always moving forward.
wherever forward is.
so get out there humans, there is much to do. -human
this is the first book ive read in a long time. told from the point of view of 4 girls and a boy that murdered his moms. a lot of their thought processes made me uncomfortable, what with all the other stuff ive been putting in my head recently. it all feels connected, new threads of realization. anyway i liked it.
Ok so between my first post about the world and this one, lots of things have been happening.
on january 18th wikipedia, google, flickr and thousands of other web sites had either gone dark or added additional pages to protest and bring attention to the SOPA/PIPA bills being strongarmed through congress. it was the largest recorded infonets protest ever, the presence was pretty intense.
on january 19th, feds brought down megaupload.com without so much as a whisper of due process, arresting people in new zealand and confiscating u.s. servers in virginia. within minutes the internets troops began rallying. for the remainder of the day and all the way through right to this minute, hacktivist group anonymous has been dropping government and mpaa web sites using thousands of anonymous ddos attacks from all over the world. theres a program called LOIC(low orbit ion cannon) that anyone can use to help anonymous etc flood servers.
i spent part of the day in an anon-run irc chat coordinating attacks and constantly receiving updates on the operation.
i watched as they systematically took down the department of justice website, fbi.gov, mpaa.org, universal, etc etc etc.
it was messy but vaguely organized, with people from all over the internet chiming in to let everyone know what was up or down. "mpaa down in lithuania, fbi.gov down in brazil, mpaa chugging in u.s., down in canada, fbi.gov back up in argentina, etc."
the chatrooms caption changed depending on the prime target at any point, which changed every half hour or so. it was a mix of noobs like myself figuring out how to use LOICs and HOICs and skilled cats using all kinds of things i didnt understand, but it sounded like they had a lot more power to work with than i did on my toshiba tablet.
aside from this, the supreme court on the same day had ruled to make re-copywriting public domain works legal, which essentially gives corporations yet another way to own things they shouldnt. this affects anyone using public domain works to make a living, such as orchestras now being forced to pay licensing fees to play certain songs they could legally play a week ago.
also there was a rather large protest at UC riverside, on again the same day, in which occupy l.a. joined students protesting the constant enrollment fee hikes. several hundred if not thousands of people eventually pooled, as did roughly 200 police officers. rubber bullets were fired into the crowd injuring a few, and a professor was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer. the UC regency meeting was soon after closed to the public.
Alright, so where are we? what kind of a place do we live in right now?
jesus, where to start?
the place is crumbling, and although its all connected and dependent on its pieces, lets take it one piece at a time.
theres a bill thats been causing a lot of noise in america called the SOPA bill(stop online piracy act), and another getting less attention, but is ridiculously similar, is the PIPA bill(protect internet protocol act).
what these bills will do is allow the u.s. government to block any web site on the internet from its citizens, for any period of time. its backed by huge entities like coke, viacom, wal-mart, sony, the entire music and movie industry, and hundreds more big name holders and at its face it allows the feds to block sites like thepiratebay and the like, but it goes way deeper in that it would make mediahubs like youtube and facebook responsible for every single copywritten thing posted on its site, which means every corporation will begin suing google, facebook, tumblr, twitter and everywhere else to take down ANY video with copywritten music or video, think about that for a second. they want to own everything, we cant even create new things with old trash anymore, they want it all. aside from this terriblly though out copyright clusterfuck, theres another bit that much MUCH worse. the ability to legally block any website is an opening to controlling the only remotely reliant news source that exists currently: mobile internet, crowd sourced, feet-on-the-ground-in-the-middle-of-it, news.
it means the news can be controlled again, like it is on television. to those who arent sure, every news organization is owned by a huge corporation like general electric or disney, thus all of the news are tilted a bit from the perspective of someone feeding information, keeping its veneers shiny while doing so. why would a corporate-owned news organisation release bad news about its parent company? it doesnt.
have you heard about the occupy movement in a while? no. me neither.
see what happened was something huge was happening in america, people were starting to catch wind of what was really going on here with the gov and business and how bad itd gotten, they took to the streets in vast numbers but the sheer numbers were rarely shown or heavily edited on the news, camps were put up everywhere to protest the banks crushing the world economy for the housing bubble among other things, but the police destroyed the camps and beat people up, which was shown, again, heavily edited on the news stations. they even killed a few. 300 people were arrested when the l.a. camp alone was shut down.
its already getting complicated, the worlds a complicated place. so essentially these bills will eliminate u.s. citizens from effectively communicating with one another at a basic level artistically and informationally, making americas citizens easier to control by separation.
in the year 2012 this is unacceptable.
this part is even more interesting though, some of the companies opposing the act are google, facebook, ebay, amazon, wikipedia, 4chan and craigslist.
if you take a step back and really look at this situation, this is about old versus new. its about brick and mortar and old business and old government trying to remain in control of an environment they can no longer evolve quickly enough to digest or compete in, but why digest or compete when you can stamp them out, old school style?
everything about every way this place is run is horribly outdated; our fuels, our attitudes, our education, our banks, everything. the thing is though, that the flow of information cannot be stopped now, not ever.
which brings me our next piece: where we are technologically as a species.
i remember hearing something once along the lines of, "youll know youre in the future when things move too fast to keep track of."
i believe that time is very close.
the track of telescopic evolution is leading us somewhere and were going to see where weve ended up pretty soon, i can feel it. i was listening to a talk by jason silva the other day and he brought to my attention a bit of a mind blowing concept to me. this is a reoccurring theme of human hallucinations, the ability to get a glance of the big picture, a life changing lens that many will never know and many will.
there is, undeniably, something bigger than ourselves.
ok, think about evolution. atoms and stardust to ooze to amoeba to bacteria to fish to mammals to humans, right? so when you think about it, a near infinite space full of loose atoms, gradually begin to combine, and through physics and billions of years, eventually became what it is now. by itself, by universal forces. by heat and gravity and magnetism and time and chemicals. what if this universe had been growing brains all along? suddenly, theres intelligent, sentient beings here trying to figure out how the universe works, and we are, quite literally, the biproduct of the very thing were trying to understand. we are the apex of known life and we are becoming something else via a world wide informational substrate that weve created, again, as a biproduct of evolution and hallucinogens.
think about that for a second, it takes a second to digest.
when was the last time people were hallucinating en masse? the 60s.
modern technology is a direct effect of this period of human history.
a modern smart phone is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than the most advanced supercomputer in the mid 60's, an exponential growth that will not stop until the line points directly up. this is not limited, and applies to every discipline of technology including biotechnology, meaning that we are on the cusp of becoming gods ourselves, something which i had a profound hallucination about on my birthday of last year via powerful drugs.
im losing focus, the drugs are wearing off and theres still much to say. ill be back in a bit with more focus rather than the full circle ramble this has become.
listening to an awesome song by an awesome band that was in an awesome game about awesome things(namely graffiti, music, art and magic in general) while i work on a new awesome header for this awesome site
and heres humming the bassline, just because its awesome also
the birdman lucid is not a bird nor a man, but an experimental cloud of nanoparticles packed so tightly that they condense and become a nanoparticle liquid substrate which is then used as an exoskeletal suit that adapts and morphs depending on its pilothosts situational needs. it gradually drips off old, dead nanobots so must replenish its particlecount by breaking down its surroundings at a molecular level and absorbing them.
the prototype disappeared along with over 10 years of research material involving it and one other project dealing with soul flashing, or the act of downloading ones consciousness onto a drive or series of drives.
both missing projects were run by a single researcher, also currently missing.
the jelly seaspacespike inhabits most spaceoceans in this and 3 of 8 adjacent octrants in the sector. its head is actually a helmet of very strong urchin-like shelling housing its soft, meaty head and brain. it moves quickly in short bursts using centipede-like leg precision with its stretchy, piston-like tendrils, which it also uses to digest and absorb its food on contact.
its existence is said to be unnatural.
rising plasmastar tenticlehead is a bounty hunter on companion planets taw and raw. originally hailing from earths japan, he tends to sport its sun on his gear. lab grown using earth octopus base cells, tenticleheads entire body is robotic, his legs were also modelled after japans gundam, which house thrusters to get around in space, as do his shoulders. he enjoys pursuing death bountys, bringing back only plasma melted flesh paste which dna is pulled from to prove the kill.
i havent seen silva around since i scoured the infonets for a release date for his documentary, turning into gods, a few months back, but i like the guy very much.
i understand the doc is coming out soon, but heres some little dittys to check out what hes all about.
another experiment with color reflection and markers.
her heart escapes her chest and makes its way down to her knee, of all places. never on your knees, it says. never vulnerable. it sets up shop and sends reddish coils grasping up her body to form a life support system for itself, forcing exhaust through her pores as it does so. she slides fingers across the panel in her chest where her love used to lie, only to find an amazing blue glow and a cold apathy.
maybe, if she can get her heart back into the right place, it can be reborn in magnificent blue light.
done with some of my new markers, working on using color and light in different ways and overlapping techniques, like his flame and lasercurves and their reflections
future hipster clubkid, check out his owl themed collar and his beak throat-paint ;)
been drawing for days, got a bit of a buffer that ill be posting through all week, heres a couple on the lower end timewise.
movemans done with these really amazing colored pencils(which im obviously not very good at using yet). the pencils are little tree branches, with bark and everything, with colored lead inside.
my sistar got em for me, theyre super rad.
also theres some ink and watercolor and ballpoint pen in there.
moveman is a streetkid, a survivor.
the word MOVE is printed across his tunic. he moves fast, and any distraction is completely unacceptable.
moveman
u.s.k.o.s just a little glimpse into this year, when the u.s. finally gets a big, fat, messy domeshot and knocks out, like an olde boxer.
it will wake up a different place. this will be a big event.
![[bonesandrobots]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMu95PMXmk1TD_-KrRDYzNGz_NzkakE38rS0m9YPNaTpEenxrzl74d0oK6PGvpADRnYgXODoDrAju2E0TnbezhpW_PzvyDyt_y4kNRbb8Rdf6k-np981IILB5V4AS0STGj4tk7QxEIS2M/s1600/header4resize.jpg)
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