HUPOMNEMATA

“Bow, nigger.” he typed.
I kind of hunched uncomfortably over the keyboard at that point. Not that I should’ve taken offence, really. For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity and for another, it’s only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life.

It’ the beginning of a brilliant text about the videogame JKII: Jedi Outcast . It reads like an excellent science-fiction short story.

From the Wired news :
“At first glance, Les Seules might look like an all-girl rock band — complete with sassy attitudes and fawning male groupies — but the Swedish septuplet doesn’t play instruments. They play competitive video games. “We want to show the rest of the world that guys and girls can play on the same level,” team member Louise Thomsen (code name: AurorA) said from the the geeky flurry on the floor of DigitalLife, a four-day technology and entertainment convention. In French, their name means The Outsiders. But in the world of competitive Counterstrike, a first-person shooter PC game, Les Seules have moved to the forefront, thanks to their virtual machine gun and grenade wielding techniques and, well, their good looks. ”
The Wired understanding of French is as imperfect as my English writing. Depending on the context, Les Seules could mean the only ones or the lonely ones, not the outsiders. Anyway, the article present them as popstars for the future.

Today I got an excellent tip from Pieter Van B. where you can see a comic with “standard” figures commenting about… war, politics and economics!

Check it out by clicking on the red words underneath the pink kung fu thingy!!

Thanks P!

“Cosmetic surgery is on the rise in China and the country is soon to hold a “Miss Plastic Surgery” beauty contest. ” (from the BBC)

No relation whatsoever, I finished the OGG and MP3 archiving of the second part of Stitch and Split so it should soon be available on the website (feat. a.o. Catherine Ramirez on Octavia Butler and Ken Macleod on identity politics). I was sick with a cold, so I spend a few days archiving minidiscs (when you have a slight fever, there is nothing like watching a very slow progression bar). Even managed to archive the Cybercommunism evening which was a kind of mini Stitch and Split the Third. So the nice voices of Stross and Barbrook will be there too.