You’ve all heard of (and in some cases, masturbated to) The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Well, forget that. They also found farts excruciatingly funny, as these artworks show.

The price of fuel. So very true.

This image needs no explanation. Source: theamericankid

devotingfulltimetofloating:

the strangest thing…. by the doubtful guest on Flickr.

I think this is a glaucus sea slug. It feeds on jellyfish.

Also, it can consume the stinging cells without triggering them and transfer them to its extremities, as a kind of defence.

(via submantis)

Abandoned Yugoslavian Monument

superstarling:

Abandoned Yugoslavian monuments by Jan Kempenaers

Oh. My. God. At least two of these look like things out of Myst or could be built in SL.

(via submantis)

Seriously, what was the story behind them? What were they meant to celebrate? And could these structures be made (or at least approximated) in Second Life?

psychicdisco: Just a sketch

YOU!! YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE BOWLEGGED KEWPIE DOLL SHAPES!!

I think Amanita misses Vernon. They had good long lives. (Viewer: CoolVL with shadows)

It’s funny, actually, how I actually dithered over clicking on my two oldest meeroos and then clicking the ‘Release’ button on the HUD. According to the system, the little cryptids are released into the wild and you get thousand of regard points.

But Vernon and Amanita were elderly. Releasing old meeroos… well, it made a more poignant story to add death into the equation.

This mix was originally played mid-December at Fracture, and this version has a few replacement tracks.

All these tracks were ones that were injected into my empty head during my one otherwise disastrous year at Massey University.

Scholarly speaking, it was a disaster. Musically, it was a revelation.

Support your local indie and student radio station today!

I mention this because I have, in group chat, offered to run a hunt that may well span the city. Calling it A Toast to Bay City probably helped pique interest. That it turns out to take place in April, between other events, also probably helped interest.

As such, I am in a proper lather of excitement, and also a great deal of fear. I am absolutely convinced that something is going to go bang in all of this, and I only have about two months to do many things:

1. Confirm that there is sufficient interest and support to go ahead
2. Rent a space, build an HQ, the first toasters, bread slices and all the other paraphernalia
3. Gather interested merchants and/or prizes
4. Dispense the hunt kits to same
5. Noise the event about
6. Make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. Repeatedly.

This may seem a short list, but it terrifies me.

As such, I intend to attend a Bay City meeting next week, ready to do a little show-and-tell.

I feel like my User did, about to step off the platform and entrust his life to a few strands of elastic. Hopefully whatever lifesaving threads I have will be like his bungy, and not break.

I call it denarration: the state of being without a narrative, without history, and thus without a future to look forward to.

I haven’t looked at the notes for this yet, but I’m dead certain that at least one of them repeats the tired old lie of “dem moon landin’s r t3h FAEKS!!!1!”

(Reblogged 23 Dec 2011 Source: 1000scientists, via grottu)

What causes denarration – which I personally believe is not just one man’s fancy, but a very real state and a very real threat to humanity – may be manyfold. For example, a sufferer may simply not understand why he or she should care about what happened in ages past when there’s the present to react to, perhaps because the concept of history was irredeemably wedded to long boring lists of dates and data whose sole use was to pass a test.

"Dude, who cares about the past except stinky ol' Miss McGurkenshaw anyway?"

I should know. In school I didn’t understand what Social Studies was for at all, since it seemed to look at every other society except the one I was stuck in.

Apart from school damage, another is the simple fact that modern, First World, industrial-era lifestyles aren’t exactly… what’s that word… significant. Hence leading this blog post with a screen from the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

There are, as everyone well knows, a lot of people convinced that the US government pulled a swifty on everyone and faked - along with hundreds of thousands of accomplices – the fruition of the Apollo space programme and the greatest feat of manned exploration in history. (Maybe because they can’t see any tyre tracks on the moon.) There are those who say much the same thing about the Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Centre in 2001. And of course the millions whose desperate need for affirmation that their particular Christian god is real causes them to spit in the face of almost all science as they obsess over one of the creation myths in the Bible.

They seek importance in their lives, and they cannot find it in dry history and often incomprehensible science, let alone the mechanised tedium of day-to-day living. Instead, they find an exciting story that panders to their biases, puts them centre-stage as Brave Underdogs Against The Man, and live it to the hilt.

Actually, tinfoil hats let the government IN.

But there’s another problem. These days, we are more or less drowning in a torrent of stories, of varying levels of fact. Sure, a book on car repair is miles away from the latest big-name techno-thriller, but it also becomes disturbingly easy for people to get confused between a factual discussion and something more fanciful. (That for many subjects there are conflicting opinions probably doesn’t help, and so they go with whoever agrees with them.)

Information overload doesn’t enlighten; it just entrenches existing endarkenment.

But denarration isn’t just a severing from social or cultural or physical history. There’s also cultural denarration. As Big Media becomes ever more risk-averse and reliant on recycling  fads of the past, the more bewildered generations become as they find themselves confronted by source material they are unable to comprehend.

Wait, what, there were bands BEFORE Glee?

Seriously, I’ve seen reposts of ‘reviews’ in which either truly naive or trolling reviewers panned the original because it didn’t resemble the adaptation or remake they were comfortable with. (E.g. #1, #2 which is more a counterexample.)

I agree with Hipster Kitty.

I am not tolerant of people who insist on flying in the face of facts, of history. Because if you don’t know how you got here, how can you tell where to go from here?

Mull that over a bit and you’ll understand my concern. If your preferred story doesn’t jibe with the facts, then any decisions you make are likely to be the wrong ones. No history means no knowledge base from which you can attempt to plot a course for the future. Or, even worse, you cannot conceive of the future, period.

I’m not just talking about garden-variety NIMBYism, but about a total incapacity to rationally discuss the inevitable seismic changes that will come in the future. And if we, as a race, are too busy either living day to day or defending some romantic self-aggrandising fantasy, those changes will most likely break us.

A shared narrative binds us together as a people, as a culture, as a society, as a race. Denarrated, or struggling to choose between competing narratives, we will most likely become a bitterly disputed history ourselves.

I agree with hostilemakover.

hostilemakeover:

FULL OF OPINION HERE: I hate hate hate this look. What the hell is wrong with you people? Have you even ever heard of basic anatomy? Your ducky frowny petulant whinebag face, stupidly short legs (this one seems to not be suffering that), and HIPS LIKE WHOA BACK AWAY are not cute. They are not edgy or trendy, or even stylized. THEY ARE DEFORMED AND STUPID LOOKING.

I am completely disgusted that my partner and I tried to run a shape store with a large variety of well-proportioned shapes (no giant V torsos, no tiny heads, no arms to the waist, etc), at bargain basement prices, and we couldn’t even make enough to justify the rental space. Yet I see people selling these monstrosities for 500L, and they’re raking in cash hand over fist.
What the actual everliving fuck?

If you want to argue, or try to explain to me why I am ‘wrong’, feel free to hit up the ask box. I’m feeling feisty today.

I have my own suspicions: that the fashionistas, desperate to prevent the bourgeois from imitating their styles, have adopted these incredibly ugly shapes in order to damn their clothes by association.

The Angry Fuck You Set cover art

I was in a rotten mood when I logged on and headed to Fracture, but then it was Thursday the 5th of January SLT, and the long holiday break was telling on my psyche. While they are my parents, there’s only so much I can take.

So I entered a certain word into SAM and loaded up an F-Bomb.

Then I dropped it on Beta and all the other innocent bystanders.

Download audio file ()

1. Eric Idle – The FCC Song
2. Wendyhouse – Fuck the Mall II (Cubehead mix)
3. GG Allin – A Fuck Up
4. Little Fyodor and Babushka – Why Fuck It Up (live at X-Day 7)
5. Rev. Bill T. Miller – Fuck Amerika
6. Life Production Studios – Fuck With Me and Find Out
7. DPRK – Fucking USA (yes, it’s from North Korea)
8. M-Halo – Fuck You
9. Serrated Edge – Fucked Up World
10. Dead Kennedys – Nazi Punks Fuck Off
11. Man Inc. – Fuck the Team (live)
12. Slipknot – Fuck the World
13. The Queers – I’m OK, You’re Fucked (oops! These guys might appear twice. Damnit.)
14. Wendyhouse – Fuck (off the Garage Strand EP)
15. Phineas Narco – All Fucked Up
16. The Experiments – Fuck ‘Em If they Can’t Take a Joke
17. Your Girlfriend – Fucking Up Floyd (the wannabe hamster)
18. National Cynical Network – Fuck You People
19. Man Inc. – Go Fuck Yourself (live)
20. Bern Porter – The Last Acts of St. Fuck You
21. Foetus – I Hate You All

Download The Angry Fuck You Set (about 57MB)

Robots Gone Wild Mix cover art

The original playlist for this mix dates to about mid-2011, back when The Listening Room was still in Bay City – Dennis. I made special wall arts and everything.

I think maybe two people showed up towards the end, but that was fairly typical for that time.

The short description is: two hours of robot-themed music – either with the word robot in the title, or vaguely related to robots, or in one case made by robots.

Download audio file ()

1. Hellpope Huey – Tobor’s Tea Time
2. Little Fyodor – Look At the Humans
3. Voodoo TV – Bad Robot
4. Lords of the Trident – The Robot’s Revenge
5. Fear Factory – Machines of Hate (the official site is a hollow shell – you’ll have to find a store yourself, sorry!)
6. Bailterspace – Zapped
7. Hannah Stery – Robot Population Explosion
8. Danny Baranowsky – Robot Army Menace
9. Supercommuter – Robot Party
10. National Cynical Network – Robots are Cooler
11. Joe Neumann and the Rudy Schwartz Project – Invasion of the Chrome Fish People
12. Frank Zappa – Put a Motor in Yourself
13. Disasteradio – No Pulse
14. Gifted But Twisted – Do the Robot (The Robot Dance)
15. Takeshi and the Kid – Cyberdemon Boogie
16. The Futureheads – Robot
17. Jez Kemp – When Robots Cure Cancer, Then We’ll Talk
18. Matthew Ebel – Everybody Needs a Robot
19. The Trons – Sister Robot
20. Mi-Sex – Computer Games
21. Rev. Bill T Miller, OBE, Kings of Feedback – Alien Android Succubus
22. Charles Ryan Lambert – She’s a Rubbermaid
23. Johnny Future – Do the Robot
24. Free Parking! – My Girlfriend is a Robot
25. A.M – Robot in Love
26. DJ Pantshead vs Styx – Machines Dehumanize
27. Disasteradio – Computer Whiz
28. Alex the Kid – Future
29. SCMBAGS – Human for Dessert
30. The Hoot Hoots – Robots in Space
31. Freudian Ship – Giant Gay Robot in the Shopping Mall
32. Hello, the Future! – Monkeys and Robots
33. Pedott – Robo-Sing

Download Robots Gone Wild (about 120MB)