SPIDERMAN

Looks like the only thing he has been fighting lately
is the urge to get off the couch

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/motifake/~3/l53OXuHkjZo/index.php

How Twilight Should have Ended

The Prodigy - Keith Flint's Camping Guide

The Prodigy - Keith Flint's Camping Guide - YouTube: Keith Flint's hilarious guide to the world of hunting: appropriate camping footwear, caribou hunting and wearing a plastic Canadian goose on your head. Contains excessively strong but hilarious language.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I've loved these guys for years, took a while to warm up to Keith Flint, though. I thought seeing him introduce us to large game ammunition was a riot.

And death shall have no dominon

by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominon, from the Solaris rehash

BBC Radio One's Essential Mix of the Year - Above and Beyond

The top listener-voted Essential Mix of 2011 comes from Above and Beyond. Just listen and you'll understand why.

It's Radio 1's Essential Mix of the Year, as voted for by listeners of the show. This show contains some strong language.

Music played

1. Sebastian Ingrosso & Unless — Calling

   Refune

2. Cliff Martinez — Is That What Everybody Wants

3. Parker & Hanson — Arabesque (Original Mix)

   Anjunabeats

4. Cosmic Gate & Andrew Beyer — Nothing Ever Lasts

   Black Hole

5. Mat Zo — Loop

   Anjunabeats

6. Mat Zo — Superman (Original Mix)

   Anjubeats

7. Andrew Bayer — Counting The Points (Club Mix)

   Anjunabeats

8. Matt Lange — Bad Year Blimp (Original Mix)

   Revolver Label/ Anjunadeep

9. Edu & Cramp — Human Turbines (Original Mix)

   Anjunabeats

10. Massive Attack — Teardrop (Bart Claessen's & Tom Fall Bootleg, Above & Beyond Tweak)

11. Maor Levi & Raul Siberdi — Infatuation (Original Mix)

    Anjubeats

12. Above & Beyond — Formula Rossa

    Anjunabeats

13. Above & Beyond & Richard Bedford — Thing Called Love

14. Arty — Around The World

    Anjunabeats

15. Creep Feat. Romy Madley Croft — Days (Super8 & Tab Remix)

    Young Turks

16. Super8 and Tab — Slow To Learn (Maor Levi Club Mix) (feat. Jan Burton)

    Anjubeats

17. Above & Beyond — You Got To Go (Feat Zoë Johnston) (Kyau & Albert Remix)

18. Arty & Mat Zo — Rebound (Original Mix)

19. Above & Beyond — Sun & Moon (Feat. Richard Bedford) (Bart Claessen's Lost Dub)

20. Above & Beyond — Prelude

21. Andrew Bayer — From The Earth (Album Mix)

    Anjubeats

BBC iPlayer - BBC Radio 1's Essential Mix: The Essential Mix of 2011

Ode To Joy

Ode To Joy - YouTube

Starbucks, Starbucks in Starbucks

Starbucks - Very Demotivational - The Demotivational Posters Blog

Don't Panic and Carry On

DON'T PANIC:

An 18"x24" poster, designed around Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A quick personal project to keep myself busy over the summer.

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

This also makes me think; If the Battlestar Galactica carried an encyclopedia, would it have been the Encyclopedia Galactica?

Dilbert On Green Goals vs Corporate Security

Dilbert comic strip for 12/23/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

The Streets - Blinded by the Light (Nero Dubstep Remix)

The Streets - Blinded by the light (Nero dubstep remix) (HQ) - YouTube

Paul Kalkbrenner vs. Deadmau5 - Faxing Gebrünn [PaulTM Mashup]

Paul Kalkbrenner vs. Deadmau5 - Faxing Gebrünn [PaulTM Mashup] - YouTube

2Raumwohnung - Wir Werden Sehen (Paul Kalkbrenner Remix)

Wir Werden Sehen - Paul Kalkbrenner Remix - YouTube

Fringe Returns in 2012

Fox's Fringe will return with new episodes in 2012. I'm on the edge of my seat in anticipation. The episode Back to Where You've Never Been will air on 13 January, 2012. It's on my calendar, and I won't miss it. In a way, keeping this show on the air almost makes up for Fox cancelling Firefly. Almost...

I only recently realized there was a pattern to the glyphs in the breaks, more at Fringepedia.

The retro 1985 intro was probably one of my favorite twists in the series so far.

Here is an amazing combination of all four variations together at once.

Star Trek vs Dr. Who by ~Summerset on deviantART

Star Trek vs Dr. Who by ~Summerset on deviantART

Happy Birthday to Philip K. Dick

I share a birthday with my favorite author, Philip K. Dick. I am, however, blessed with a lack of that psychosis which may have contributed to the unique style which brought us so much prophetic work from the author. Here is one of his essays in part, giving us a perspective on the author as another human, not just a name on a dust jacket. He lived in the real world, interacted with it, and made observations about it.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
by Philip K. Dick, 1978

[...]

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say me, "But are you writing anything serious?" meaning "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels—and immediately we made idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?


It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans.


Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?


In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.


Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.


I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.


It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.


But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.


So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

[...]

Philip K. Dick - Introduction to Essays & Other Published Works 

Google

I have it on good authority that if you type Google into Google, you
can break the Internet.

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis

I haven’t posted anything about the release of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick because I assumed that anyone who likes Philip K. Dick knows about this because of the importance of this release.

I have a copy of the first release of the Exegesis and have only read parts of it because it is difficult to choose to read it over reading VALIS which is my favorite book and one that explains parts of the Exegesis so I get my fix from that.

I haven’t picked up my copy of this yet (I’m sure I will soon). I tend to buy all of my most desired books on the day of release. If anyone would like to post mini-reviews in the comments or send a full length review, I will post (or allow) them here.

Exegesis Is Here! « Book Editions « Philip K. Dick Fan Site

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

    The unbilled costar of Paycheck, the latest Hollywood thriller from the battered typewriter of Philip K. Dick, is a bullet. A crack engineer named Jennings, played by Ben Affleck, finds himself in a jam, as Dick's characters invariably do, and the bullet is headed his way. Spiraling through the air in superslow motion, it pierces his chest in a plume of red and bores into his heart. Or does it? Though the image recurs throughout the film, it's hard to tell whether it's actually happening or not. Philip K. Dick liked nothing better than to toy with the fundamentals of human existence, reality chief among them, so what better for the movie than a bullet that may or may not be tearing through the main character's flesh? Like other Dick protagonists - Tom Cruise in Minority Report, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, Harrison Ford in Blade Runner- Affleck finds himself struggling for equilibrium in a world where even the most elemental questions are almost impossible to answer. Can the senses be trusted? Are memories real? Is anything real?

    Paycheck, directed by John Woo and set to open Christmas Day, is the latest in a run of films based on Philip K. Dick stories that began 21 years ago with Blade Runner. The writer's hallucinatory tales make for suspense with an epistemological twist: full-bore action pics that turn on questions of perception versus reality. Having agreed to have his memory erased after completing a super-sensitive job, Jennings learns that he apparently signed away his $4.4 billion paycheck in exchange for an envelope of trinkets. Armed men are chasing him, but he has no idea why until he teams up with Rachel (Uma Thurman), whom he vaguely recalls meeting just before he started the job. Jennings, it turns out, is a man who has seen the future but can't remember it.

    Dick died shortly before Blade Runner's release in 1982, and, despite a cult readership, he spent most of his life in poverty. Yet now, more than two decades later, the future he saw has made him one of the most sought-after writers in Hollywood. Paycheck, based on a 1953 short story Dick sold to a pulp magazine for less than $200, will bring close to $2 million to his estate. And movies based on more than a half-dozen other stories and novels are in the works - among them "The King of the Elves" at Disney, "The Short, Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" at Miramax, and A Scanner Darkly at Warner Bros.

    Dick's anxious surrealism all but defines contemporary Hollywood science fiction and spills over into other kinds of movies as well. His influence is pervasive in The Matrix and its sequels, which present the world we know as nothing more than an information grid; Dick articulated the concept in a 1977 speech in which he posited the existence of multiple realities overlapping the "matrix world" that most of us experience. Vanilla Sky, with its dizzying shifts between fantasy and fact, likewise ventures into a Dickian warp zone, as does Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. Memento reprises Dick's memory obsession by focusing on a man whose attempts to avenge his wife's murder are complicated by his inability to remember anything. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey discovers the life he's living is an illusion, an idea Dick developed in his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint. Next year, Carrey and Kate Winslet will play a couple who have their memories of each other erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memory, paranoia, alternate realities: Dick's themes are everywhere.

    At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a nerve. "People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."  

Wired 11.12: The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

Starbucks

Batman Double-Ended Knife

Okay, this is just awesome. A double-sided Batman-themes assisted opening knife.

11" LENGTH - DUAL BLADES

This Batman folding knife features two very sharp blades. Both blades are spring assisted allowing you to open the blades quickly and efficiently. Each blade can be opened independently so the knife can be used as a single blade knife as well as a dual blade knife. The handle is in the shape of the Batman logo, and the logo itself is stamped on the handle. Comes with a belt clip for easy portability. A must have for any Batman fan.

11" SPRING ASSISTED DUAL BLADE BATMAN FOLDING KNIFE Pocket Assist Opening Switch | eBay

Explaining Philip K Dick's Exegesis

Philip K Dick rewired my brain when I was a mere lad, after I plucked Clans of the Alphane Moon at random from a shelf in my local library. This was in the 1980s: PKD had not yet become a multi-million dollar industry and his best endorsements came from counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary or fellow denizens of the SF ghetto such as Michael Moorcock.

It was exciting to be a PKD reader back then. Lots of secondary material was being published, such as Paul Williams's interview book Only Apparently Real, or Lawrence Sutin's excellent biography Divine Invasions. Soon it was obvious that not only were PKD's books – with their combination of metaphysical speculation, social satire, bad relationships, and fantastic ideas tossed out as mere afterthoughts – bizarre and wonderful, but that Dick the man was Seriously Weird.

Sure, there was the paranoia, his prodigious appetite for amphetamines, his obsession with Linda Ronstadt and his fear that either the Black Panthers or FBI had raided his house – enough eccentricity for any lifetime, you might think. But that was all eclipsed by what happened on 20 February 1974, when a pink laser beam filled his mind with arcane and beneficial knowledge.

Where had it come from? God? Aliens? A healthy vitamin solution he had quaffed hours earlier? Dick loved to speculate, so much so that this event inspired not only his late "VALIS Trilogy" but also a private work he called The Exegesis. When he died in 1982 it ran to approximately 8,000 pages of analysis, hypothesis and self-questioning.

For some, the pink laser beam is mere lunacy. I recall a TV documentary in which Brian Aldiss dismissed it as the result of neurochemistry gone awry. Others have argued that it was temporal lobe epilepsy. For still others, an unsavoury whiff of L Ron Hubbard hangs over the event. After all, Dick was heavily into theology. Was he starting a cult? If not, would his fans do it for him?

Probably not: Dick's approach to 2-3-74 (as he called the experience, since the cosmic mind invasion was most intense between February and March) was not dogmatic but critical, and he was the first to suggest that it might have been a neurological event. But then again, the light had diagnosed a potentially critical illness in his son which doctors had missed, and he had received information in dream states in dead languages he could not speak. "It" knew things he did not. So what was it?

Dick never intended The Exegesis for publication, and aside from In Pursuit of VALIS, a tiny selection of extracts from the book that was brought out in 1991, it has remained a thing of legend only. Until last month, however, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt brought out a huge 900-page volume, co-edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson. It's still only about one tenth of the whole thing, but it's a start. But what, if anything, does this text have to offer people who are not Philip K Dick?

Afraid that the answer might be "not much" I started in on it immediately lest it sit on my shelf unread for 20 years like In Pursuit of VALIS. The first thing I noticed is that Lethem et al assume that anyone reading this book already knows what it is, and will only come to it after deep immersion in PKD's fiction. And indeed, Dick himself begins with a discussion of 2-3-74 through the prism of his novel Ubik, where many of the characters are dead bodies lying in "cold-pac", while their ex-employer Glen Runciter seeks to communicate with them from the world of the living … maybe. Was the pink laser beam likewise an invasion of a dead world by something alive?

That PKD had published Ubik four years earlier was not a problem; he writes as if his book might still have related the truth behind appearances. But Ubik doesn't work, as the world is not visibly rotting around him as it was in the novel. However, Dick immediately conceives of another possibility, and I can't help but wonder what his friend Claudia Bush thought when she received a letter in which Dick speculates that a dead bishop named Jim Pike was invading his mind, before suddenly switching to the theory that it might be an ancient Greek named Asklepios. Asklepios's ignorance of Christ suggests something else: did the world go wrong around 2,000 years ago? Is the goal of this higher intelligence to restore man to a pre-Christian path?

A few pages later, however, and Dick confides in Ursula Le Guin that it's the prophet Elijah. Or at least that's what Thomas M Disch (a great SF writer of the 60s and 70s) had suggested. But there is precisely zero possibility that Disch was serious – his take on PKD was that the great man liked to play with his own mental illness. Disch always kept an ironic distance – which is something I miss in the ultra-reverential contemporary introductions to Dick's work written by fanboys with PhDs and MFAs.

These ideas rush past and are discarded within the first 40 pages or so. John Denver also pops up. The Exegesis is dizzying, bewildering, exhilarating, and more or less as strange as it sounds. But again, should you read it? It doesn't contain the answers to all things; it doesn't even contain the answer to what happened to Dick.

Lethem suggests that the reader must simply "surrender". I suspect he's right – but that won't work unless you've read at least 16 of Dick's novels, plus his biography, and love metaphysics. At that point, The Exegesis will bring you extraordinarily close to his unique mind, with its mixture of doubt, wild invention, minuscule detail, grandiose theory and wry humour. Reality collapses and is then remade, over and over again – but what is real?
Who cares? That's part of the game.

In short: if you want to know what it's like to have your world dissolve, and then try to rebuild it while suffering mental invasions from God, Asklepios or whomever, you should read The Exegesis. Then again, you could always try one of Dick's novels, like Ubik, or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or even a minor book such as Galactic Pot-Healer. That one's a lot of fun – and considerably less of an investment of time and energy.

Explaining Philip K Dick's Exegesis

Roll over, Frank Miller: or why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans | Contrary Brin

A few days ago, the famous comic book writer and illustrator Frank Miller issued a howl of hatred toward the young people in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well, all right, that’s a bowdlerization. After reading even one randomly-chosen paragraph, I’m sure you’ll agree that “howl” understates the red-hot fury and scatalogical spew of Miller’s lavishly expressed hate: “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.“

In fact, I need do nothing more — in order to reduce that individual’s public esteem — than simply point you all to his bile-drenched missive. Please. If you must choose between reading that or my detailed, cogently-argued response (below), by all means let his words suffice! I cede the floor. Let him express the maturity and thoughtfulness of his side.

Well, well. I’ve been fuming silently at Frank Miller for a years. The time’s come, so get ready for steam! Because the screech that you just read – Miller’s attack on young citizens, clumsily feeling their way ahead toward saving their country – is only the latest example of Frank’s astonishing agenda. One that really needs exposure to light.

Roll over, Frank Miller: or why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans | Contrary Brin

Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs) - YouTube

Best white noise machine ever. (Caution: May induce cravings for tea, Earl Grey, hot.)

One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise are all the great ambient sounds that represent the engine noise on the various ships. My favorite ambient noise from the whole series is the engine idling noise in TNG. I have cleaned up a sample from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. Great for ambiance and imagining that you're in deep space.

Here is a download link for any interested in the original sound file for the video. Its saved as a .ogg: http://www.mediafire.com/?p8p70p8od51700c

Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)

Winning at Nerd Bait

WINNING AT EVERYTHING

I love the comments:

Aren’t you a little stacked to be a Storm Trooper?

I’d bullseye her womp-rat.
.
I’d herd her nerfs.
.
I’d fall into her Sarlaac pit.
.
I’d…….I’ve never been with a woman.
.
.
.
.
“MOM!!! ARE MY HOT POCKETS DONE YET???”

Golf Tours, Tournaments & Leaderboards | Golf Channel

Really? A whole channel? What? An hour a week isn't enough?

http://www.golfchannel.com/tours/

Rock Paper Scissorhands

Edward Scissor Hands vs The Thing in a rock paper scissors match comic

Edward Scissor Hands Rock Paper Scissors | WeKnowMemes

Ridley Scott on 'Prophets of Science Fiction' and Philip K. Dick ‎

Ridley Scott is the executive producer of a new television series, “Prophets of Science Fiction,” which premieres on Discovery Communications Inc.’s Science Channel tonight.
“Prophets of Science Fiction” explores how visionary authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.G. Wells accurately predicted future scientific advancements such as medical research, virtual reality and civilian surveillance techniques.

Scott is a host on each hour-long episode, which includes commentary by experts such as theoretical physicists, biographers, and film directors. “Because I have a television company, we gradually have evolved into doing documentary television and reconstruction documentary, so this is how we found our way into this,” Scott told Speakeasy. “They said to me I seem to be a natural fit to be one of the spokesmen on the show. So that’s how it came about and how could I say no? I am a science fiction enthusiast really, deep down.”

Scott has directed two sci-fi films that helped define the genre and cemented his legacy among sci-fi fans for more than three decades: “Alien” (1979) and “Blade Runner” (1982). He just finished his third sci-fi movie, “Prometheus,” shot in 3-D with CGI, which will be released in June 2012, and he told the Journal recently that he plans to direct a “Blade Runner” sequel.

The premiere episode is on Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.” Others who will be featured in the season are Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein and George Lucas.

Scott’s film, “Blade Runner,” was inspired by a novel by Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” about Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter searching for sophisticated, rogue androids.

“I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don’t know what demons drove him,” Scott said in the interview. “I think he was a little bit paranoid and you know how people become obsessive about deterioration or disintegration or growing older? I think he was very conscious of the way the world was going into an area of negativity as opposed to positivity.”

“What science fiction enables us to do is look into those futures from where we are now to where we are going,” Scott continued. “Certain kinds of movies do that and what’s interesting is a lot of them lean very much toward decay. Decay in the metaphorical sense of the world of not getting better but getting worse. People have found the romanticism in that.”

Ridley Scott on 'Prophets of Science Fiction' and Philip K. Dick

1984 and V for Vendetta

A lot of people compare world events to 1984, and sometimes it's frightening how similar they appear to be. After finally reading it, though, I'm inclined to say the level of oppression present in the book just isn't possible. In piecemeal, it serves warnings, but the aspects outlined are required to be present all at the same time, some of which just seem so unlikely as to be impossible (such as the reduction to 3 nation-states, the rounding up of all first generational dissenters, the acceptance of lack of privacy, doublethink, the technological infrastucture necessary for the telemonitors, the tracking and changing of all literature, etc...).

1984 posits that power is its own goal, but I have a hard time believing that there is even one person that wants power for only power's sake; that there is a person who would be wholly satisfied lording over his fellow man while living in filth and squallor (does anybody remember the line "my kingdom for a horse"?). In that sense, 1984 does address something that I've pondered, and that's the need for stratified goods and services between the classes. Hopefully I'll write on it at a later date, but the basic idea is that there's no point to being rich if it doesn't get you something better than someone who's poorer. Taken down the logical path that 1984 itself proposes, even the highest class citizens would eventually have a very meager quality of life. True, a better one than their inferiors, but a poor one by the standards of what could be.

However, more than anything, and probably because of V for Vendetta, I'm inclined to think like Winston did: that people won't live like that. That someone would eventually notice, and then more and more. The peasants would become incapable of accepting an even lower standard of life, and then the higher classses. Or perhaps the higher would no longer think that merely being able to fill one's stomach was such a grand high thing. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed, maybe it didn't. But I would think something like the Brotherhood would exist. And maybe 1984 would have its own V. Maybe not an untouchable superman, but perhaps a Claudius, willfully cloaked by seeming innocuousness.

Not Quite Somewhat: 1984, V for Vendetta

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If you’re going burn a bridge, make it worth it.

How I feel when I see this

Submitted by: Unkind
Posted at: 2011-12-06 02:32:46
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The 15 Funniest Autocorrects From November 2011

These were the 15 most popular autocorrect submissions sent into this site in November, 2011. Congratulations to the submitters!

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http://damnyouautocorrect.com/15063/the-15-funniest-autocorrects-from-november-2011/

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To Google: Stop Reading My Email

I noticed that when I hovered over the flag in Gmail, the following text descriptor showed up. While convenient, it makes me think that even if through automation, I am still not comfortable with Google reading my email content.

What’s YOUR Budget These Days? « THE WAKING GIANT

I love it when complex things are simplified so that most people can understand.

• United States Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000

• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Now, remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget.

• Annual family income: $21,700

• Money the family spent: $38,200

• New debt on the credit card: $16,500

• Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710

• Total budget cuts which some politicians are proud about: $385

What’s YOUR Budget These Days? « THE WAKING GIANT

Street art: The Death of SpongeBob

The Death of SpongeBob..(Read...)

Ridley Scott Signs On For Blade Runner Sequel ‎

For those of you born post-1990, Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Superficially it's the story of a man hunting down android killers, though (depending on which version you watch) it also serves as a meditation on what it means to actually be human.

The film features Harrison Ford, Sean Young and the most intense Rutger Hauer performance not centered on transient vigilantes. Most critics adore Blade Runner, and rank it alongside Alien (another film directed by Scott) as one of the finest science fiction efforts ever committed to the silver screen.

Now, nearly 30 years after the film's debut, Scott has agreed to revisit the universe. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog, Scott said production is already rolling along nicely, and that he is currently seeking a screenwriter to assist in crafting a final script.

"I think I'm close to finding a writer that might be able to help me deliver. We're quite a long way in, actually," Scott says.

As for what exactly this new film might be about, that remains a question mark. Though Scott specifically says that this new tale won't focus on the original's cast of characters, he did mention his impression that the original "is very much about humanity," offering a subtle hint that the follow-up will likewise focus on the original's core existential query.

Revisiting his early successes seems to be a key theme for Scott these days, as the director recently finished filming Prometheus, a movie tied to the same mythos as 1979's Alien.

So, what would you like to see in a new Blade Runner film? I've got my fingers crossed for some of them glittering C-beams.

Ridley Scott Signs On For Blade Runner Sequel
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The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in GATTACA

Genetic Determinism and Eugenics in GATTACA. Given this cultural context, Sony Pictures’ GATTACA (1997) presents a unique counter-argument. GATTACA not only deals with the bioethical issues associated with the new eugenics, it actually suggests that these issues arise from societal acceptance of the genetic-determinist ideology. In essence, GATTACA tries to break out of the black box constructed by genetic scientists who portray a world dominated by genes. GATTACA does not deny the importance of genes, nor does it fault the technology itself; rather, the film warns of the problems that arise if we believe that humans are nothing more than their genes.

GATTACA depicts a future world in which parents are encouraged to decide the genetic makeup of their offspring before birth. In this world not everyone has access to the technology, and individuals who have not been genetically enhanced encounter severe discrimination. GATTACA’s narrative focuses on Vincent Freeman, a genetically unenhanced individual, and his interactions with three characters, Eugene, Irene, and Anton, who are genetically enhanced. During the course of the film, Vincent avoids genetic discrimination by passing off Eugene Morrow’s genetic makeup as his own.⁸ Because everyone believes that Vincent has Eugene’s genetic profile, he is able to obtain a job at the prestigious Gattaca corporation, which arranges offworld expeditions. While at Gattaca, Vincent develops a romantic relationship with Irene, who would be genetically perfect except for a single flaw, a weak heart—ironically, the same defect suffered by Vincent himself. Early in the film an executive is murdered at Gattaca, and the subsequent investigation is conducted by Vincent’s genetically augmented younger brother, Anton. A stray eyelash provides DNA evidence, making Vincent the prime suspect in the murder. Because the DNA profile from the eyelash shows a genetically imperfect individual, nobody suspects that the eyelash really belongs to the best engineer working at Gattaca. As Irene and Anton begin to realize that Vincent is not genetically perfect, they are forced, along with Eugene, to confront the fact that the genetically unenhanced Vincent is actually a superior human being, able to excel physically and socially despite his built-in "flaws."

More: David A. Kirby: The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in GATTACA

Why Mark Twain would be booted from Facebook

American author Mark Twain would have turned 176 today, and to celebrate, Google has decorated its homepage with an elaborate doodle, depicting a couple of boys slapping paint on a wooden fence. The boys, of course, are Tom Sawyer and a friend that he conned into whitewashing the fence. But who was Twain? Only one of the most accomplished writers in American history.

Born in 1835 in Missouri, Twain traveled widely through the American south and the west, recording his impressions for magazines and newspapers, including Harper's and the Sacramento Union. His first novel, The Gilded Age, was published in 1873, and his last, The Mysterious Stranger, in 1916, after his death. Ernest Hemingway later acknowledged that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

All of which got us thinking: What if Mark Twain, that great chronicler of American culture, was alive today? Would he approve of today's online world? Well, maybe not. He certainly wouldn't be allowed on Facebook, especially if he refused – as he sometimes did – to go by anything other than his pen name: Mark Twain.

After all, savvy readers will remember that "Mark Twain" is an invention – a piece of riverboat slang. Twain's real name was the somewhat-less-pithy Samuel Langhorn Clemens. (True story: Before he was Twain, Clemens was often credited as "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.") And there's nothing that riles up Facebook more than a person – any person! – who refuses to use their real name.

Consider the peculiar case of another writer, Salman Rushdie. Rushdie recently had his account deactivated. After he sent Facebook HQ a copy of his passport, the social network reactivated the page, but forced him to use his birth name, Ahmed Rushdie. Rushdie eventually obtained a reversal, as well as an apology from the folks at the social network, but Facebook brass has stressed the importance of something called "real name culture," an idea also embraced by Google+ and several other social networks.

"Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture," Elliot Schrage, vice president of public policy at Facebook, told the New York Times. "We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service." Maybe so. But it sure would have made Samuel Langhorn Clemens pretty cranky.

Why Mark Twain would be booted from Facebook

The Average Bush Tax Cut For The 1 Percent This Year Will Be Greater Than The Average Income Of The Other 99 Percent

As Occupy Wall Street protestors continue to demonstrate across the country, congress' fiscal super committee failed to craft a deficit reduction packagedue to Republican refusal to consider tax increases on the super wealthy. In fact, the only package that the GOP officially submitted to the committee includedlowering the top tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, even as new research shows that the optimal top tax rate iscloser to 70 percent.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who co-chaired the super committee, explained that the major sticking point during negotiations with the GOP was what to do with the Bush tax cuts. With that in mind, the National Priorities Project points out that those tax cuts this year will give the richest 1 percent of Americans a bigger tax cut than the other 99 percent will receive in average income:

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent ($66,384 compared to $58,506).

"The super committee failed to grapple with the extraordinarily costly Bush tax cuts for the richest—tax policies that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost more in added federal debt than they add in additional economic activity," explained Jo Comerford, NPP's Executive Director. Frank Knapp, vice chairman of the American Sustainable Business Council, added in a statement yesterday, "the high-end Bush tax cuts are a big part of the problem – not the solution…It's obscene to keep slashing infrastructure and services for everybody on Main Street to keep up tax giveaways for millionaires and multinational corporations."

The Bush tax cuts have done nothing but blow up the federal debt and hand billions in tax breaks to the Americans who needed them least. As a reminder, past grand bargains when it came to the budget included substantial new revenues, to balance the pain of getting the country's budget in order. Instead of adopting that approach, the GOP wants to continue lavishing tax breaks onto the 1 percent, while asking everyone else to sacrifice.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/23/375654/bush-tax-cut-one-percent/