HUPOMNEMATA

Japanese trucks

Ken Macleod about Matrix

“(…) I thought of something I hadn’t before – the real reason why
in the film the machines use the humans as a power source, as
‘batteries’, something I have long derided. On a literal level it is of
course ridiculous. But symbolically it makes literal sense: we are the
source of their power. Surplus value comes only from living labour, not
from machines.

Look at the title and see whose name is spelled out in it: The MAtRiX.

Comrades, this is no accident! “

Fantagraphics, one of the best comics publishers around is going to disappear if they don’t find 80.000 $. So they want us to buy some books, now, rather than in two months time because it shall be too late. To find something worth buying shouldn’t be too difficult :

” Fantagraphics Books has just celebrated its 27th year publishing many of the finest cartoonists from all over the world as well as our flagship publication, the magazine people love to hate, The Comics Journal. We are proud of our long-term commitment to comics as an art form and our dogged determination to push excellence down everybody’s throats. This is all very well and good but it doesn’t mean much in the face of brute economics — and it’s the wall of brute economics that we’ve just hit, hard.”

Read the rest of their message to comics lovers throughout the world

Science fiction everyday with robots.net where you can read all the latest news about robotics and artificial intelligence. And also admire the pictures of the robot of the day, such as this one that i like a lot.

“Waking up in a borrowed flat in Camden Town, Cayce Pollard, the heroine of Pattern Recognition, switches on an ‘Italian floor lamp’ powered by ‘British electricity’. She pours some water – ‘London tap water’, as she later notes – through ‘a German filter’ into ‘an Italian electric kettle’, and seeks out a bag of ‘imported Californian tea-substitute’. After a hasty Pilates session, she checks her watch – ‘a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock’ – and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness’. Then, shouldering a handbag ‘of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay’, she steels herself for a mind-blowing trip to the pullulating ‘logo-maze’ of Harvey Nichols.”

From a review of ‘Pattern Recognition’ by Gibson in the London Review of Books

Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here. This is the hat and shawl for disguising oneself. This hat is made of soft boa cloth, and its lining cloth with a flower pattern is very cute. Since it can equip also with a hat and shawl on a piece of Velcro, attachment and detachment are easy!

see the rabbit

see more

A nice essay about the Clamp manga X 1999, where Kamui is “the one”. His only choice is to decide if he will trust the oracle or not (!) Here’s a little bit of it :

” The most prominent theme in X is that of a set destiny; as the tagline of the series states, “Their destiny was foreordained” (CLAMP, X 1: 2). Each of the fourteen major characters possess magical or psychic abilities but are powerless to significantly affect the roles they play in the future of humanity. Only one character appears to be offered a choice about his future, the main character, Shirou Kamui. He must choose between joining the Dragons of Heaven or the Dragons of Earth but once he makes his choice the path for the rest of humanity is inexorably decided. This once again reflects the powerlessness of the individual against the monolith of modern society; the other characters are powerless to determine their own futures or to alter their destiny.”

Online musical steampunk in the techno museum.

Digital SARS folk art is piling up on boingboing.

Malice@Doll is a new computer generated japanese film and when you read the
Midnight Eye review, it seems to be interesting. Here is a piece of it.

“Malice@Doll is situated in a rundown future society solely populated by service droids and mechanised prostitutes, where the humans who built them to attend to their carnal needs no longer exist, and the robots follow through their daily programs with no reason or purpose. Malice is one of these pre-programmed prostitutes, first seen exchanging pleasantries with a spider-legged cleaning droid before taking to the streets on her daily patrol repeating her hollow hard-wired mantra, “I will give you a kiss – it’s the only thing I can do”. When she starts weeping coolant liquid, she goes in search of a repairer droid, but after being diverted from her path by the mysterious ghostly apparition of a young girl, finds herself attacked by a giant tentacled creature. After she recovers from the assault, she discovers she is not quite the doll she used to be, her hard body now turned to flesh after mysteriously being transformed to human form.”

And there is the rest of it.