digitaldust

Spurred on by the movie of the same name (which by all accounts is crap and I have no intention of seeing) I typed fear.com into my browsers URL bar and curiously waited to see what would happen. The results were a lot more interesting than I expected. Fear.com is almost an amihotornot for neurosis, a collaborative fear polling site. Go there and see what people are afraid of and you can also take part… make a difference by sending in your own personal paranoias and agree with particularly common collective fears.

Here’s a few that I took while on a day out with the folks from work. There’s a few candid pictures of them on rollercoasters at Alton Towers. Mostly though it’s me being distracted by the stuff around me.

Also I scanned in some of my analog black and white photos of Barcelona. I’m pleased with these. I didn’t even take a full roll, nearly 30 I think, and there’s 6 I’m proud of. They achieve a high level of contrast which is an effect I’m really looking for. I like the ability to change hte colour of the sky from blinding white to a dark dark grey. This one is my favourite from this roll due to the nice reflections and the simple composition.

W00t! W00t! This is a great flic. I have to say it’s definitely in my top 5 for the year so far, quite probably up there in the top 2. I have to decide if it was better than City of God (which I just noticed I never actually wrote anything about). Anyway George Clooney goes on to prove himself more than just a handsome face by pulling together an incredibly polished film.

The script is great and fast paced, Charlie Kaufman wrote it and it is far and away better than Adaptation (which I’ve also written nothing about yet, naughty). If you have a choice between the two see this one, adaptation is just a build up to one big and, by the end, one very tired joke. The dialogue sparkles and slips off the actors lips. The cast is superb, including many amusing cameos… camera slips by Brad Pitt in the dating game. Rutger Hauer does some scene stealing, posing for a Polaroid while silencing a skier.

But possibly the best is that it is visually stunning. It’s beautiful to watch, filters and over exposure are used to great effect, giving some scenes weight by blowing them out completely, other scenes being dreamlike due to the filters or film used, dreamlike and like a film shot by some kind of Lomo (now wouldn’t that be a great idea). The cinematographer was Newton Thomas Sigel, who also worked beside Bryan Singer on both X-men films and the Usual Suspects. I wonder if it was him pushing the visuals or Clooney. Some of this may have also been down to Stephen Mirrione, who edited also on Swingers, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven.

And I like the fact that they didn’t try to interpret the story in a is-he-crazy-or-is-he-not indeterminate fashion.

The US government is scared of a non secular regime in post war Iraq; they keep saying (in the sub-text) that they’re worried about the middle east turning into a bunch of religous nutters. How about back home in Boston where 25,000 people turned up last weekend to see the Virgin Mary in a dirty hospital window.

Sometimes synchronicity just kicks in grabs a hold of some of your current thinking remixes it with a whole other dimension and then takes it to new level.

I’ve been thinking along a whole bunch of lines recently, network theory, cybernetics, cellular automata, complexity, etc. Also I’ve been doing some reworking of my work on reputation, trying to put together a more general theoretical structure. Allowing predictions to be made off it as well as hopefully allowing some openness so that it could even evolve into an even more general theory about social networks. Then I read about a presentation given by Wil Wright of Sims fame about his work on modelling. Yet to read the transcript but this key slide from his talk screams sense. It really brings it together for me.

The coming together of all systems thinking.

I found this while having a poke around on Interconnected today. I read the original Giuardian review and two pieces resonated, one was the same as his.

To enable this, there is a surge of grey matter aptly called an “exuberance”. This overload of capacity and possibility is why teenagers can read a Russian novel a day, hack into military software, steal a car or want to save the world. It also causes a heightening of experience and emotion for which they are not fully equipped - like a rollercoaster setting off before every nut and bolt is in place.

The other still seems to affect me and seems to be my natural order since before I was a teenager to now. Takes me back to when my days precessed. I used to find my natural cycle was to stay awake for 18-20 hours and sleep for about 9. The 8/16 cycle just seems to leave me permanently tired.

There are chemical explanations for why they stay up all night, get drunk, trash your home and drive too fast. A lag in their melatonin cycle prompts them to go to bed at two and sleep until 12. High dopamine levels make them crave sensation and risk. This helps and yet it doesn’t, as we still need to get them up for school and to keep them more or less safe.

I find it very interesting that blogging is becoming very professional. The bloggers that seem to devote an awful lot of time or are paid to spend an awfully large amount of time filtering and condensing other media are the ones that get all the attention. A good example is Corante which seems to have co-opted a bunch of bloggers, writers and commentators to work in it’s blog mine. Also the bigger collective blogs seem to have either incredibly gifted multitaskers or poor sods working full time out of their bedrooms.

There’s a lot of talk about blogs being a new form of media, that they are revolutionary or even that they are a new form of community software. That’s all crap!
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Wow!! Man did I get a real treat last night. I went to fabric to see adam freeland play with his new live band Free*Land. I was expecting some really hard breaks… that they would be playing something like his DJ sets. Dance music, repetitive beats, deep bass and droney sounds. But oh no, they had guitars and used them to full effect and a real live drummer too.

The mix of music was really weird but good. It started with some great industrial tinged stuff, industrial breaks and industrial dub, crazy I know but it sounded excellent. Towards the end they softened up, the hard edge had gone, and they had some chick on vocals. I can’t remember exactly what the end was like as I was a little mashed at the time, but I was pumped by the end of their set and that kept me going till 5am.

Overall the rest of the night at fabric was excellent too. It’s not the bastion of house music that it used to be. This entire night was hiphop, drum&bass and breakbeat. All very exciting.

Wow!! This is great. The comparisons with Tolkein are not completely undeserved. This is a unique and different fantasy that doesn’t have an elf in sight.

His previous experience as a children’s author do show through and this would be a great book for kids to read. I know I would have loved reading it when I was in my early teens.
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I do think Greg Egan’s writing is amongst the most imaginative and challenging out there. But again I will have to say that I think that his short fiction is better than his novels. His stuff is strong on ideas and short on people, especially when in most of his work the characters aren’t human but computer simulated people of one type or another.

This book is the same. I never got into the characters; they were there purely to perceive the story through. Their relationships were weak and the attempt at dramatic opposition between the protagonist and his long lost love/hate/friend/enemy figure is just weak and petulant. I’ve never seen more immature 10,000 year olds. The main character has nothing to love or hate about him, and neither do anyone else. The future for Egan seems to be full of bland drones. Maybe will be.

His explanations of the physics are wonderful pseudo science but he does spend too long trying to explain it and gets a bit esoteric in both real physics and his new stuff. Hard to escape from when the book is about a new universe with a massively more complex physics, but he could have cut it bit shorted in places. I just read and didn’t try to understand much of it. Just let the sound and feel wash over me. I do think some readers want to understand everything but it is after all a fantasy and one must suspend belief and just read the story.

The end feels fairly predictable and most of what happened I saw chapters in advance. A few good ideas, but many not fully thought through, and when you’re always one step ahead of the characters who are super intelligent computer programs or centuries old humans the book becomes much less exciting.