Laptop was on the blink, so it’s catchup time again.
Remember that scary robot thing (big dog) that looks like something that’s escaped from The Fly 3, and is dying for a piss?
Well the military have said “Yes, ok, make us a big one“.
What could possibly go wrong?
I like this one because it has a built-in compost collector, so you don’t have to keep taking the rubbish out as much. I’m not sure about the virtues of having plants in boxes that shut out so much light, but I guess they can cope.
I have a feeling that at some point down the line we’ll have some sort of algal-driven composter, that takes any household waste (including cellulose/paper etc) and enzymatically breaks it down into useful components… or at least useful component soup – which might increase the demand for organically grown stuff, because people will be confronted with the witches-brew of toxins that pass for food today.
The ideal of course would be something that can process human waste… at the household level, rather than being pumped miles into ponds to be processed. What we’d actually use the “ingredient soup” for I don’t know, but it’s got to be better to be producing ingredients than… well, shit basically.
3) Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe
This has been around for years of course, but I’ve only just started watching it… religiously. All of the episodes are on Youtube – and it’s not proper piracy if you also read the Guardian (he writes for the Guardian) and somehow get sucked into the $75,000,000 that they make in advertising every year. You’re helping, no really you are. Tell other people about it.
He’s a really entertaining writer – and every once in a while, breaks the wall (so to speak) and exposes the mechanics of TV making, and how much of it is needlessly expensive bollocks because of retarded IP law.
If you’re in the UK you’ve probably seen this before – if not, possibly not because UK TV blocks non-UK viewers… because of retarded IP law.
Yours for $500-$700 million. You could pay for it with the proceeds from Avatar. An Avatard funded moon-shot.
You could actually fund a fairly big chunk of it, by going up and retrieving the former moon-shot vehicles and selling them on ebay – especially that one that was designed (in part) by Damien Hirst… his stuff sells for arms and legs etc. He’d be like all “that’s miiiiine” but you’d just go all “Nah, fuck you Damien. Rights of Salvage, LOL. Look it up”. He doesn’t need the money anyway – he could probably pay for a moon-shot on his own. He made this thing recently – a 30ft long wall containing 30,000 lab diamonds
and a dead cow’s head with some sort of Egyptian hat etc
Which I could have probably done if I’d thought of it… but to be honest, I’d rather fund an open-source moon-mission.
Anyway, I bought a black lab-diamond of ebay once, for about $20. Looks/feels a bit like sculpted coal. They’re quite light are diamonds. A bit insubstantial. Rubbish really. If they didn’t look like bling, no one would like them. They’d just be lumps of stuff.
5) Laser-cut street-map clocks
Deceptively simple. There’s quite a lot of quite neat stuff on their site, which is alas, down right now. There’s got to be something more useful than this than making clocks though. Maybe something like a making an ant-farm in the shape of your neighbourhood. No… ok, that’s pretty useless as well. How about making a suntanning template so you can suntan a map onto your back like that little pixie thing off Waterworld? Ok. Bad idea as well.
6) iPod/iPad/iPhad
Yea, yea… the most over-examined, over-hyped bit of plastic on the planet right now… but like… if Aliens discover this blog 16 million years from now and try to use it to reconstruct what exactly did go so badly wrong in the early 21st century, it would be remiss to leave it out… even though (now I recall) I did actually go on about it myself, the day before it launched – though in terms of a wider trend.
So… iPad thoughts #2
It’s a killer app from 2 different directions/markets.
a) it’s a killer app for old-media producers (producers producers producers)…
… who want to put Glossy Magazines, or textbooks or movies out in a digital form while retaining the “work once, get paid forever” model… which is (now that physical replication/distribution are no longer required) is what they have become. They are trying to carry on charging for value that they no longer provide.
It’s a god-send for top-down control. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it doesn’t have flash or USB or whatever – these are strategic emasculating decisions.
b) it’s a killer app for couch-spuds who only want to consume content passively, without having to deal with menus and such – there’s always money to be made in reducing/eliminating a learning curve. Every manual is an opportunity.
Someone once said, “there is no such thing as fate, just demographics” – and there’s this law of the jungle that states that if a niche exists, then something will rapidly fill it.
The anti-open web… The Evilweb is a niche. There is money in it, and a fair amount of biomass in it (in fact the passive-web might be bigger than the contributing-web)… so I think that this idea that the new wave of open-source Neo-Protestantism is going to completely dissolve the old, top-down tyranny of content-popery is possibly a mistake. This war is going to go on and on. It’s an attempt at reconciling two mutually exclusive modes of human organisation, that appear to be hard-wired into us.
Two killer-apps have evolved on either side of the iPad/iPhone vs Android/Linux/Personal-Computer line – one is the ability to enforce top-down control over ideas, the other is the ability to ignore top-down control. These are the same patterns that shaped the reformation… Mary Queen of Scots granted a monopoly of printing to The Stationers (thus creating copyright), to crush dissenting protestant opinion. Our copyright laws are based on a (failed) 500 year old attempt at religious censorship.
Copyright originated in an attempt to burn books before they were even printed… and it failed, but we’re still fighting over it… or at least there are still conflicts that divide along Christian religious lines. It didn’t get resolved… although I notice that the Pope is now allowed to visit England, whipping up a load of good old fashioned homophobia, which may or may not distract from the child-molestation scandals that have wracked this venerable abomination institution so much of late.
Sorry – Forgiveness is a Christian virtue, and I’m not a Christian. Ah see you wee man.
Anyway, back to open/closed tech : These two killer-apps are at their cores, mutually exclusive – but top-down never goes away… and there’s still a lot of money in passive consumption.
So with any luck the two can exist side by side – which means the old school will need to accept that it can no longer control something that’s uncontrollable… without creating the instruments (and worldview) of police-statehood…
… and its worth noting that Apple has already waded into a mire of legal fuckups over “ownership” of “ideas” surrounding the iPad. It’s unworkable people. It’s unworkable even if you believe in it.
Intellectual property law a Self-tying Gordian Knot. In the long-run you’re upfucking yourself. This tendency towards legal convolution is getting worse.
6) Gear ring
Kinekt Design’s Gear Ring from Glen Liberman on Vimeo.
Oh that’s just fucking marvelous isn’t it… not for the fact that it’s being done, or that someone would actually want to shoot scuba divers, but for the cold-war era photo-quality and styling. It’s all about paranoia people.
For 24 hour plastic party people.
It’s got a laser-beam in it for shooting other robo-balls, or for fucking up the 24 hour plastic party people.
Fortunately, it’s a kitset, so you’ll be able to put your own 1st-person POV camera inside it and fill it up with liquid binary explosives and LSD-laced glittery confetti etc. And then what? I don’t know really, but it will make you feel kindof special driving it around. Like you’re in some sort of movie where the guy has an explosive glittery acid bomb, but doesn’t really know what to do with it.
YES!!!
I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for the last week or so, before this turned up… only I want to make mine out of bamboo, because I want to make everything out of bamboo… because bamboo grows on trees. Bamboo trees. There’s loads of them down by the river in my home town – I sometimes drive down in my car and sit there watching the ducks, wondering what the fuck I’m going to do with my life
BUT NOW I KNOW!
I’m going to blow up ducks with a remote controlled, LSD-laced glitter bomb. Existential crisis solved. I’ve finally found my true purpose. It’s a full moon quite soon as well. Where’s my lippy?
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender