HUPOMNEMATA

Wendy sent me this incredible link about a hamster controlled midi sequencer. You can listen to it too (wav and mp3).

Stitch and Split poster on a Barcelona wall.

“Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody — except the flight crew — could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.”

Read Charlie Stross on line.

A little bit of engrish poetry from the japanese online shop metamorphose (equipping the gothic lolita chan all over the world) :

” The other good reason to wear drawers is
worm in winter.
Wearing skirt in winter is a little bit cold.
So wear drawers to get worm!!”

Some days ago I stumbled upon this through slashdot. It’s a project by the Oxford English Dictionary, a collaboration with sf fans to find the earliest appearances of specific science fiction terms. The list in itself is already quite beautiful. Here’s a short part of their intro :

“This page is a pilot effort for the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the words associated with a special field of interest are collected so that knowledgeable aficionados can help the OED find useful examples of these words. This, our first project, is science fiction literature.

The OED aims to include all words that are frequently used in any field, and attempts to find the earliest example of every sense of every word it includes. For SF the OED needs earlier examples of terms it already includes, early examples of terms that have been slated for future inclusion, and any examples of terms that have not yet caught the editors’ attention but are common in SF. Words used infrequently, words associated chiefly with a single author, or words so specialized that they are found only in a single subgenre, are not high priorities for inclusion. “

They’re launching a new series. Good time for a visit to that nice virtual museum.

I have to admit that I enjoyed a lot of Orson Scott Card’s books. But I think it’s over. I’m going to find it difficult to open another one. The last two essays he published on his website are just really too absurd and stupid.

In the last one, he writes about Mel Gibson’s “Passion”, a film that he finds to be perfect. With some nice parts, like this one : ” The most obvious such fictionalization is the way the film depicts Satan. I was astonished, after the fact, to find that Satan was played by a woman, Rosalinda Celentano. But the way Satan is presented, his face a mockery of tenderness and concern, surrounded by images of maggots, serpents, decay, deformity, I could not imagine a better depiction.” Safe assumption, operative words here are “Satan played by a woman, could not imagine a better depiction”. You can read the rest there.

Last week, it was about homosexual marriage, and it was even worse : “The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally. It’s that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual “marriage.” ”

game over. no more Card.

From a Bruce Sterling interview on reason.com :
” I think we are on the verge of post-humanity, but I don’t think it’s going to look like what any Extropian thinks it’s going to look like. At the end of my novel Holy Fire [Bantam, 1997], two post-humans meet. The woman is assessing her former husband and says he’s a god. But he’s not a god. He’s a tommyknocker or a garden gnome. He’s this thing which is no longer human and doesn’t have human concerns.

There are methods of speculating about how this will play out, and some will have some traction, and some will be ideological or otherwise mistaken. The Extropian problem is thinking you can upload yourself into a computer and have this rapture of the nerds. It was a powerful fantasy of escaping the unbearable pressures of being human. And there are many unbearable pressures of being human. But you find that when you escape one of these things you generally bring all your baggage with you. We will escape some of the limits, but we will not escape into some pure electro-Platonic world any more than the Internet will turn out to be this pure electro-Platonic philosophers’ realm.”

Until the end of January, “Hommes et robots” (so much for women) at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, with a film program sadly titled “Le robot et son humanisme”. Some of it should be interesting anyway.

“Hommes et Robots intervient dans un contexte de fort développement des technologies robotiques et de débats sur les implications scientifiques, philosophiques et sociales qu’elles engendrent. Le robot est devenu au Japon un véritable phénomène culturel. Très présents dès l’après-guerre dans les mangas, des personnages comme Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) ou encore le chat-robot Doraemon, ont contribué à familiariser les Japonais à ces étranges machines, devenues aujourd’hui d’incontournables compagnons domestiques.”

their website

Hop, un post en français une fois n’est pas coutume, mais à propos d’un livre en anglais. “Trigger Happy” de Steven Poole n’est pas bien vieux, mais comme il parle de jeux vidéo, le lecteur/la lectrice risque de penser qu’il est déjà rance, ce qui serait dommage. Même si Poole au moment d’écrire n’avait pas encore pu jouer sur de nouveaux morceaux de plastique qui n’existaient pas encore, le propos reste captivant.
Trigger Happy est une tentative (souvent réussie) de développer un discours critique un peu poussé sur les jeux vidéo, et en profite en cours de route pour expliquer pourquoi le vocabulaire critique du cinéma n’est pas forcément bien équipé pour traiter des jeux, et pourquoi la fameuse convergence cinéma/jeux est, à la réflexion, une mauvaise idée. Et plein d’autres choses pas toujours abouties, mais c’est un bon début. On ne trouve pas grand chose en français allant dans ce genre de directions mais certainement un jour ça viendra.

(à noter aussi que le/la gamer est alternativement “he” ou “she” tout au long du texte ^_^)