HUPOMNEMATA

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.

“35 years on from events that never took place, there are still many gullible people who believe that men went to the Moon back in 1968, and 6 months later landed on it, so here is the evidence which proves otherwise.

Back in the 70’s many people worldwide had doubt that the Moon landings were for real, but there was no material available upon which to base an investigation, other than the few photo’s in a limited number of fictional/fantasy books which endorsed Apollo.

It was the INTERNET which brought about the full expose of NASA’s 35 year scam, as people worldwide now have almost full access to NASA’s web site pictures, and can see for themselves how the pictures have been doctored with false backgrounds. Before 97 it was not possible to see these pictures, however all are now available.” […]

read it

source:Washington Business Forward
http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2001-10/firstforward/

Arlington, VA-based space-tourism company Space Adventures (SA), instrumental in Tito’s highly publicized docking at the International Space Station, is banking on the survival of these travel titans. Founded in 1997 by 27-year-old astropreneur Eric Anderson, Space Adventures has raised $22 million in equity investment and bond financing. Geologist Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. senator and astronaut, will lead the Antarctica expedition early next year.

“People are still looking for excitement and adventure in their lives,” says Anderson, who’s taken seven zero-gravity flights himself. Anderson, a University of Virginia alum, charges between $2,000 and $200,000 for a variety of aerial and terrestrial tours – including orbital flight-qualification packages, supersonic jet flights and centrifuge training, which simulates the high-gravity re-entry environment.

read more

CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE FEBRUARY 29TH 2004

“SPACE: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS”
The “7th Workshop On Space And The Arts”

18-21 May 2004, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Continue Reading »

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

(read in slashdot)
The Boilerplate was a prototype soldier built in 1893 to resolve potential conflicts between the nations, …

more like this on Big Red Hair

in an interview of Ken Mac Leod, by Ernest Lilley

SFR: Which culture will assimilate which? Communism, Capitalism, or Islam?

Ken: Capitalism will assimilate everything that exists in the world today, no question. The interesting question is what happens then. Professor Meghnad Desai of the London Schoolo of Economics has recently written an interesting book called Marx’s Revenge, in which he argues that what happens then is that capitalism begins to press hard against its limits, and socialism comes on the agenda for the first time.

Ken: Islam is a religion, not a mode of production, and is not counterposed to capitalism. Communism is a potential mode of production which, in the words of Lenin, ‘requires the joint efforts of several advanced countries, which do not include Russia’. Well, today Russia is arguably an advanced country, but it could only reach socialism through joint efforts with other advanced countries. Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ was always a utopia, and a reactionary one at that. There was never the slightest chance of the Stalinist states assimilating the capitalist countries. Nor is there the slightest chance now of the Islamic countries assimilating or overwhelming the largely secular West.

The West could destroy itself, and it’s possible – if the destruction wasn’t universal – that the successor civilization would be Muslim, but then *they* would be ‘the advanced capitalist countries’ and the religion would have to bend to that – as it was beginning to do, in Moorish Spain for instance, before it was over-run by Christians and sank into a long sulk.

SFR: You don’t seem to give faith based cultures much staying power in you fiction, is that because you see them as antithetical to advanced tech and hence limited in their ability to propagate themselves through space?

Ken: I don’t see faith-based cultures as antithetical to advanced tech, at all. Islamic societies were among the most advanced in the world in the Middle Ages. There’s no reason why a space-going civilization couldn’t be religious, so long as the religion’s dogmas didn’t rule out space exploration. As to my fiction, the future culture in The Sky Road has in the story endured for centuries, and is either Deist or pantheist, and is reaching out to space. The Christian fundamentalist Beulah City, in The Star Fraction, is a kind of like Singapore – repressive, but not anti-technological. The religion that really gets the boot in my books is that of the Greens and ‘their evil goddess, Gaia.’

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 ^_^)