There’s a lot of Player Vs. Player shenanigans happening in DayZ – and most of the killing appears to be over rusty tins of cold baked beans. Life expectancy on the Island at the time of writing stands at 27 minutes. The number of murders is currently 194138.

DayZ-brand beans. Don’t go Chuck Norris over this.

Now that’s a lot of murders. Yet with DayZ being a Zombie based Survival Horror Game and all, some think that’s The Whole Point.

For them, ‘to survive’ just means ‘surviving at any cost.’ Anyone else’s cost, that is.

The equivalent rate for a lousy tin o’ beans in Russia is about 43 Rubles. For that price, people are prepared to kill fellow (/virtual) human beings. 194138 of them.

One interesting post from a survivor over at the Dayz Forum explains the in-game situation very well:

“If it were a social experiment many of you could be classified as maladjusted nut jobs.”

One twisted irony is that his post is a response to an observation by other players that “There have to be repercussions to random murdering.”

Wow. You’d like to imagine that nobody has to be exactly ‘reminded’ of that.. but obviously not in the dark inner fantasy world of some people.

Facing the Fear of The (/Undead) Other

Typical Scenario: “You have one hour to prepare for another annoying outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse – what do you do?”

The thing is, most of those playing DayZ are currently acting far worse than any Deader – and more destructive and vicious.

Part of the symbolism of the humble Zombie is that, while it might represent the aggressively mindless aspect of humanity, this doesn’t mean anyone has the ‘natural’ Right (as in wing) to run around deserted islands,  deliberately assuming that other people are as ruthless as they are – and therefore giving them the go-ahead to happily print their own instant kill-license..

A More Specific Scenario

Henry: “Say you end up on a seemingly deserted island – shivering, alone and barely alive. You suddenly find yourself surrounded by otherwise seemingly normal human beings.

Turns out however they’re just waiting for any excuse whatsoever to act out their ‘inner gleeful psychotic-gamer personality’ fantasies – eg. steal weapons, hoard ammo and petrol – and arbitrarily murder fellow survivors (like you) for a rusty tin of cold baked beans.

- What do you do to prepare?”

One answer is: well right now, as your typing this Henry – if the Postie arrives later you’ll be reading some cool, strange new book.. and then you’ll have a cup of green tea, play some Journey, and go to bed.

Tomorrow you’ll rise refreshed, check the news for bean-brained mob rule and – assuming the workplace, imaginary girlfriends or their giant holographic televisions have kept fellow DayZ players off the streets and their overcrowded gun cabinets locked – carry on with living.

In other words, we’ll all be doing the exact same things we do every day while gamers are around. But there’s little we can do to be ready for the next spurious pretend war they’d like to have us all fighting.

U Mad, Bro

You know as well as we do, Henry – there’s little too much death, destructiveness and general ill-themed will in modern gaming to be healthy.

And why would anyone merely want to ‘survive’ when we gamers already have more opportunities to truly live than most people on this beautiful alien ark-planet?

Heck, Henry wouldn’t even want to go back 20 years to some rose-tinted reality – let alone forward to the dread-full scenarios imagined nightly by night-scope polishers talking a bunch of that macho jive about some forever-forthcoming post-apocalyptic zombie-based contrivance in which only Expendables fans and other permanent walking survivalist hardons endure.

Face the Rage, Henry

Perhaps this goes deeper than simply John Gabriel’s theory re: cruel behavior online. In the Perverts Guide to Cinema, philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes this statement:

“Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It’s, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think its just a game? Its reality. It’s more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I’m a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and  so on and so on. So this would be the naive reading… But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constrains and so on, I’m not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it’s only a game, it’s only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact an identity which is much closer to my true self. “

Admit it, Henry. Basically you’re a violent space monkey – and therefore you love playing violent video games – violently.

Now that’s some true zombie-minded horror for you, kid.

Modern darkly speculative teen fantasy romance novels have us thinking that writing about chasing people in cars while wearing clothes is what Good Writing is all about – reading books we hate, so we can watch awful spin-off movies that nobody needs.

We’re the artists of the open book of the future history of literature, man – yet we often feel stuck in the middle of the action, with no purpose or place to call our own. Except the Internets.

On the Liquid Gibsons we remain proud writers of fan fiction. Together.

Kirk & Spock discuss online fan.lit

Despite the wars raging about us about proper technique and the great depression of our critics, our real struggle with words is spiritual.

We’re raised by creative writing tutors and literary snobs to believe that we all have to be millionaires and word-gods, stars of the virtual book shelf. What they really mean by Real Writing is following the rules:

1. Never talk about the fact that ‘Being A Writer(tm)’ is often a depressing waste of time.
2. Never talk about the fact that ‘Being A Writer(tm)’ is often a depressing waste of time.
3. Stick to happy subjects, and lovable characters with white, even teeth.
4. Make ‘the reader’ (pffff, whoever the hell that is) laugh.
5. Wrap it all up neaty – and always make room for the sequel.

We’re fast learning that these people are simply full of it.

We just write for the joy of freely expressing emotion – and now we’re beginning to ignore them all. And they’re getting very pissed-off.

The External World from David OReilly. Description: A boy learns to play the piano.

Show support by buying a HD quicktime of this film! http://pul.ly/b/28323

**SOUNDTRACK NOW AVAILABLE! – http://cathead.bandcamp.com/album/the-external-world-ost ***

World premiere at the 67th Venice Film Festival
US premiere at Sundance 2011

www.twitter.com/davidoreilly
www.theexternalworld.com/info
www.davidoreilly.com

Henry imagines it’ll be something like “Garry’s Mod Vs. Itchy & Scratchy on a wraparound landscape like La Petit Prince but with Generative / Emergent Gameplay, Suwappu-like character-toys (that bite) and Interactive ‘Meaningful‘ Everything: basically a superflat Katamari Damacy version of The Sims times Deadly Premonition on heavy Surrealist downers“

Possible External World elements / mechanisms

• Controlling the uncontrollable; voyeurism & live cameras
• Hypernovelty – providing sensation through play
• Strange ongoing relationships; drama; the mis.relationships between the ‘characters’ / world-processes (incongruity between immediately perceived and internal meanings); emergent, interlocking (surrealist / absurdist) narratives
• Nothing superfluous; every object/process inter-acts (semi-unexpectedly)
• Total absence of normal understanding / constantly re-undermining expectations
• Feedback loops, potentiality and consequences: eno-ambient slider bars (basically generative-everything)
• Extreme sensitivity to initial starting conditions
• Non-real ‘physics’ / in-game Lua scripting

//Update: What about a browser-based kind of persistent world TV with Journey-style communication?

Celebration Florida: A Disneyland Murder In A Ballardian Paradise

Henry: “A double dose of reality..”

; continue (in-media rez)

• Media coverage of the virtual event as a new kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscape of the USA in all its mythical glory

• The possibility that the violence of the hyperreality of the entire dis-location was the ‘real’ crime – the impossibility of the understanding of (/the true meanings of) the crime, due to the total blackout caused by the totality of information-communication of the crime itself

• Repeated obvious comparisons to the Truman Show and Stepford Wives, etc. As if merely making such comparisons means Celebration – and these two films themselves – are any less creepy and uncanny:

> Swanson sat up and took stock of himselves. This brief cybernetic inventory, which merely confirmed his physical identity, was limited to little more than his hot buff body in its designer protective lab garments. In the context of the poverty of the surrounding virtual terrain, however, even this collection of fashion statements seemed to possess a unique vitality. The desolation and emptiness of America, and the absence of any local fauna, were emphasized by the huge sculptural forms of the target-market demographics set into its informational supersurfaces.

> Forever separated neurologically each other by narrow bandwidths of 24hr shopping channels and the strip mining mega-malls, suburbia stretched away along the curve of the unknown electronic horizon. On either side, sometimes shaded by the few plastipalms that had gained a precarious purchase in the smart cement – obviously existing in the vain hope that here in the smiling psychic zero of this desert of the real, they might somehow spring to life – were automated walkways, camera towers and isolated block-shaped houses, together forming a continuous concrete cap of empty possibility upon the entire control island – an entire functionally disfunctional, megalithic architecture of utter psychic ruin as grey and predatory (and apparently as ancient, in its projection into, and from, time future) as any of Assyria, Babylon Rome or Shepperton.

-The Terminal Beach, J.G. Ballard Simulator 1.2 (beta)

= = =

//Updates:

• Air Fresheners & Cancer

• This is really, in fact, a television broadcasting a show 24-7 called “We’re Normal.”

• the ‘Expanded Cinema’ of our modem lives

“Hail Conformity!”

- – -

The Astounding Power Of ‘Near Future Retro 80s’ Graphics

Awesome. It’s the first time since you’ve started w/riting alien fiction that you feel a direct feed-backing connection between the webspace and the experience of being ‘live, online, realtime’ – like Baudrillard’s ‘absolute spaces of simulation‘.

Also get this exact same feeling from once hooking up your biowired e-brain to one of those electronic scrolling LCD message display signs once found online. The sign itself looked like it was above a bus stop somewhere in Arizona, and by carefully entering information into/via a cheerfully obsolete plastic ‘text’ input device, you’re able to make amazing sentences appear to total strangers in the deep information desert of the irreal. Here’s a selection of the things you can write:

• “..calling all Big Scientists..”
• “..there’s no bus coming.. there’s a naked guy with an axe behind you”
• “..remote desert telephones are sublime“
• “..the astounding visionary power & charm of near future retro 80s graphics cannot be over-estimated..“

You check out that awesome looking game called N8:

“The idea of “realistic” video games is an oxymoron and I think the industry would be better served by companies devoting more time to pushing the “artistic expression and genuine creativity” of video games instead of copy/pasting the outside world onto a disc” – Gamasutra blogger Kale Menges

First off  – often suspect ‘realism’ really means ‘selling more graphics cards.’ Agreeing with the quote above – some of the best computer games ever played have never had Realistic(tm) graphics, and lean toward the abstract & surreal instead:

• Warlock Of Firetop Mountain (Henry’s ZX Spectrum 48k with the ‘zombie flesh’ keys)
• Elite (BBC Micro) – Never has a sense of infinite space been so fully realized
• Mercenary III (Amiga) – An entire world, rendered in the virtual mindspaces of your computer
• Captain Blood (Atari ST) -
• Corporation (Amiga)
• Carrier Command (Amiga)
• Hunter (Amiga)
• Syndicate (Amiga)
• Another World (Amiga)
• Rez (Dreamcast)
• Killer 7 (Gamecube)
• Mother 3 (emulator)
• System Shock II (emulator ;-)

It isn’t simply a matter of legacy hardware limitations either, but of deliberate aesthetic design choices based centrally about the (now almost entirely obsolete) notion of Gameplay..

That is – the feeling that you’re actually playing a game – as opposed to say, eg. doing your taxes, getting oral surgery performed by someone with dirty hands, or having everything explained through unwieldy exposition-based lumps every thirty seconds.

Check out what this Researcher says about Starglider II for the Amiga:

“I didn’t have a clue what was going on [..] it’s so totally surreal [..] a weird dream whilst doing some serious drugs [..] this futuristic feel that you don’t get with modern graphics..“

Beautiful, man – a perfect summing up of the feeling of ‘retro’. A lot like being an explorer of a far off landscape of the digital imagination (and yet paradoxically a lot of these games have a distinctly lo-fi ‘analog’ feel to them.) An explorer of alternative states of universal Being..

Whenever Henry’s being a modern postmodern Retronaut, thoughts always turn at some nodal point to Jessie Mach – the man-machine called Street Hawk, and his look of naive wonderment (at 0:33 seconds in) just before he speeds off back into the deep Near Future Retro 80s – all the neon visions of the cyberpunk megacities forever reflecting off the onyx black hypersurfaces of his data helmet..

Oh yeah, baby. Now that’s the astounding visionary power Researchers talk about.

-He’s probably off to play Subversion (more on this later.)

There seems to be this strong connection between (for example) the ‘excitation of organized groups of cells produces repeating polygons, mosaics, and symmetrical arrays‘ and a preference for primary colored geometric shapes – all of which is common (unconscious) knowledge to most Video Gamers. Henry’s emphasis is certainly on the ‘primary’ aspect – that is, the impossibly ancient (ongoing, repeating, primordial, animistic) origins of our Humalien Consciousness.

With gamespaces like Wipeout HD – not only do you just see a videogame being played, Henry – but the startling (/troubled) rebirth of an.other entire new techno-psychedelic bioreality [..]

A taste of the near future:

• The best old thing

• A Brief History Of Modern Retro

• Policenauts translation project

• A cool video on LOLtube about some random guy in Japan, playing the oldskool “Raid On Bungeling Bay” for the MSX.. love the way it makes you wonder about how he is, what he does and his unique take on his particular corner of reality

You came to this overpriced, straight-to-unrewound-betamax theater* with all these natural assumptions, like

• “This is a movie, right?“
• “This supposed to be an action movie, right?“
• “So this what they call Entertainment.”

-And (not ‘but’) what you get seems closer to some kind of.. hyper-idealized abstraction of a “Movie” – not actually a movie as such.. more like what a movie would be and look like, if it were (say, for example) auto-farted out of the cynical backside of an Artificial Intelligence with a degree in nothing but McDonaldization. (This standard cyberpunk literature metaphor might not be too far from the truths, either. Helplessness, horror and irresolution indeed.)

Zone 2: You quickly realize you cannot ‘blame’ the A.I. however – for example, nobody has anything personal against garbage disposal trucks – garbage in, garbage out, right? “Garbage” is its entire raison d’être – the very meaning of and reason for its existence.

That is to say, the amazing twin All-Amerikan consumer product known as “Faster” (2010) ‘starring’ Dwayne Johnson and “Resident Drivel: Afterbirth” is the direct movie equivalent of those tasty “Loftleader synthechicken taco gel sandwiches” street vendors trade for sex / organs in the dystopian megacities of the near future.

Doesn’t sound too appetizing and it isn’t – “synthechicken taco gel” sounds like something made in an industrial warehouse on the wrong side of the tracks at an approximate rate of 175,000 US liquid gallons per minute, is mildly flammable inside it’s delicious dehydrated cockroach-dropping taco-shell and gives hardcore movie-going lab rats terminal cancer of the soul at fifty paces.

You slump there, waiting for the real movie to start; it never does. “Faster” as an extended trailer for some continually self-interrupting non-thing which never arrives – because it can never manifest except virtually; a bad betamax copy without an original, a self-reflexive void without an ‘outside’, in which flat 2D character avatars – cavatars – like “Driver”, “Cop” and “Killer” are stuck in a self-intersecting klein bottle called “Action.”

• Dwayne Johnson as a hot-swappable object in an automatic process / autonomous partial object called “Entertainment.”
• “You” as an automatic reality-role-playing process called “You“.

There does seem one cavatar (character + avatar) in “Faster” with the remote possibility to jump the gap between expectation and on-screen delivery and transcend to the worlds of the ‘temptation of Meaning‘ (Zizek) – and that’s the one played-through by the astoundingly blandly-talentless “Oliver Jackson-Cohen“, a metrosexual haired mockney w4nker so utterly unbelievable & unlikeable that whenever he’s on-screen he generates tears in the nonlocal moviegoer spacetime discontinuium.

Let the eletr0-mystic re.code-phase hypersigil “I beat yoga” be your new Research mantra.

..You ‘beat’ Yoga? I mean I did hear that right, didn’t I?

Henry: Let us be the first but by no means the last to casually-theoretically set your.. breakdancing baby jebus how to describe it – smooth relaxing barnet on fire and beat you back to life with a nail-studded kayak paddle made from the wing of an old Антонов Ан-225 Мрия.

Intense spiritual ascetic practices which are thousands of years of old are obviously no challenge to a walking credit card like yourself – so a quick conceptual bruising should be a walk in the darkness of your own total failure as a human being, right? Stand straight when I (brow)beat you, you aftershave-brained plastic ginzo mother! Nothing personal – this is strictly.. Research. You need this. You.. need.. this. *Ahem*

Zone 3: Zizek’s radical “primordial substitution”

Let’s not be too quick to pretend we understand this – the situation might actually be far more problematic than we think. Which might precisely be the point. We’re not quite out of the matrix yet, Neo movie-goer.

• Skip it: A good review of “Faster”
• Post about gaming interfaces
• Emotions re-stole my unreal identity
• Living, dying, virtual reality

*PS. Don’t get ‘really baffled’, Henry: the best way to see the $atan’s steaming pinch-loaf that is “Faster” is the grainy, over-exposed Cam version. At least then you can listen to the strangers in the background laughing nervously at the classy ‘action’ on-screen.

Zone 3: Resident Evil: Afterlife

You have to watch this one, Henry. In its soul-crushingly tepid awfulness, it’s amazing. As Baudrillard might of said, “Resident Evil: Afterlife never happened.” That is, it exhausts itself in the constant staging of its own (non)-communication.

A movie so utter devoid of any.. content whatsoever, it boggles the minds how something so profoundly hollow can exist.. ‘but then that’s just it’ (in an utterly irony-free way): it doesn’t exist – maybe not even virtually. “There’s just no there, there.” The meaningless act of watching Hollywood movies as an act of essential unknowability, a state of weightless being where identity disintegrates.

• “The flattest possible characters in the flattest possible landscape rendered in the flattest possible diction.”

A good rip, presented in a timely and professional fashion. Thanks.

First thoughts: you find Nicolas Cage to be some deadpan-bizarre future relic from a parallel universe, where ‘plain, bad’ movies live normal, happy lives full of.. nothing much at all.

In fact while watching this bizarre image-based (non)-event unfold in front of me, you get the indistinct ambient impression you aren’t really watching a movie, but rather a movie simulation.

In terms of what it thought it was trying to achieve, it’s almost as if “Drive Angry” deliberately swerves all over the conceptual road – not unsure of what approach or aesthetic (even genre) it was trying to accomplish.. but simply unafraid to not-accomplish anything whatsoever.

That is, swerving simply for the sake of swerving. No explanation necessary; no fuss. Everything on-screen happens in a non-disturbingly straightforward manner of a man (say a well known ‘actor’) who knows he’s bad at something – and is at utterly at peace with this fact.

You’d almost go as far as to say “Drive Angry” is so no-nonsense and deadpan in & about it’s plain, flat badness, it makes David Lynch’s “The Straight Story” seem like a wild, hi-octane ride

- – -

Nic Cage is actually good in this.

That is to say – he’s certainly A Character, tries hard in the role – it’s just that it feels like he’s been accidentally dumped in a cinematic universe & situation that has nothing whatsoever to do with him, or even his entire existence.

An analogy. Patrick Lussier is observed – as a child – to be sitting in a quiet corner of the 70s, playing casually with a Rubik’s Cube. He knows he doesn’t know how to solve it. But then he’s not worried about it either.

In this flick, the briefest flashes of the director’s cognitive understanding or aesthetic flair are overwhelmingly flattened out of all existence by the untold acres of Drive Angry’s.. ‘clean, quiet dryness‘ is the best way Henry can describe it.

Another way of alluding to how you felt about it, would be to imagine what one might call “Absolute Emotional Zero” (Kelvin scale) was ‘room temperature’. That is, you could of watched this movie with the sound off and lost none of the impact.

It’s because there wasn’t any. Not that you don’t want to have any emotional feelings toward this movie. Yes, you’ve seen that trailer and already knew it was going to be – in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, a “P.O.S” – yet you found yourselves to be utterly unprepared for the total lack of feeling the movie displayed – andor the lack of feelings you displayed for the movie

- – -

It isn’t that Cage isn’t actually trying..

And it’s not as though Henry was deliberately coming to the viewing with an aggressively cynical attitude (which I would normally have for a movie like eg. “The Joneses.”)

It’s just that he felt like a dog that’s been shown a complicated card trick – yet is neither impressed, confused nor worried about what just happened.

Sure, for a while you prick up my ears when my name is called (ie. Henry sees fake plastic t#s bouncing) – but in cinematic terms your doggy name was repeatedly called over the duration of “Drive Angry” to the stage that (perhaps from the very outset) you no longer wagged your tail or auto-salivated on demand.*

The film was plain-bad, your cognitive soda flat, the appetite for popcorn gone – there’s nothing left; though paradoxically this was because there was ‘something’ there from the very beginning – just that this something (whatever it was) didn’t really mean anything.

That is to say, not a glaring absence – but rather solid material excess as the very essence of emptiness itself.

A radical nonduality?

- – -

* “Amber Heard” was really good in this. You hope she goes far. With a little more experience, she’ll do just fine.

Whilst ‘Daisy Duke’ did come to mind the first time Henry saw her and you did imagine for a split second that it’d be real nice to rodeo ride (/with) her (/back) to Grindhouse ecstasy – there was also an overall searing lack of sexuality about her & her character, a Baudrillardian / Ballardian ‘undeath of affect’ – the deafening silence, not after the orgy, but while it’s all happening. Right up there on the big, wide, empty screen.

If you remember correctly, at some point Nic’s character.. what was his name? – asks her if she’s sure she wants to come along for the hard fight. She says sure – that she’s been waiting her whole life for something to happen, something to Mean Something.. and now it does.

But what does it mean when “What does it mean” is the very meaning she thinks it now means?

- – -

//Notes:

1. The quiet, silent, event-less parallel microverse of “Drive Angry” goes on, unnoticed – especially by the people who live and breathe it’s daily deadpan air. Explosions happen constantly, shocking violence occurs to innocent stunt-people with astoundingly bad hair (guy in the church, you know who I mean), anti-heroes come all the way back from hell to attempt daring & improbable rescues, yes – but that’s fine, everything is as it should be.

Just that it has no #g idea what that ‘everything’ is.

* Sunyata?

By the way, the most important missing track off the soundtrack, which is secretly playing over the entire movie, looping forever, is Radiohead’s “No Surprises”:

2. Swear, you didn’t even pick up on the fact Drive Angry was (/trying to be) “Grindhouse” stylin’ until someone else mentioned it in their critical review. That’s how ‘distant’ & ‘removed’ the movie is..

3. If you ever meet the devil, tell him he’s “Boring.” S#t, the worst thing that could happen is.. he’d probably agree with you.

4. Notice Henry hasn’t touched on William Fichtner / his performance. “Yeah.”

4.2 In the far off near-future – when we’re all singular nodes in the infinite liquid neon blue superspace of the mind of a Rogue A.I living inside a 1cm gold cube drifting in deep space – “Drive Angry” will be seen as the true postmodern classic it is. A silent movie for a silent age.

People in white lab coats will have it playing in the background on slick, wall-mounted holomonitors as an aesthetic aid to subtle environmental mood-enhancement. Virtual e-credit cards will have it playing in the tiny screen embedded in/as their neoplastic supersurfaces.

It will be projected via cybernetically hand-crafted emerald laser onto the gently rotating primary geometric shapes above a cot, in order to calm and enchant a troubled, sleeping child with boring dreams – that has yet to wake up

[henry swanson / big science]

Henry’s recent e-prime themed re-engagement with The Text(s) was in part an attempt to simply trim passive sentence structure – but also to energise language

E-prime feels like a general way of mindfulness, yet for the purposes of my editing experiment I decided to treat it as another specific writing constraint in the style of Oulipo

“4 teh lulz” you even replaced the following with the letter ‘e’:

• I, he, she, me, my, they, their, them, you / your, -ing

One month later however you realized such (e-prime based) re-editing was taking too long

Staring at individual sentences for ten minutes in order to re-think  ‘is’ / ‘to-be’ was severely overheating the skull.

While thankful for the opportunity to exercise a little semantic hygiene, e-prime as a revision strategy proved to be too taxing.

For now you’ll stick with ‘simple’ search and replace.

Henry: “I just felt I was in danger of becoming a full time hipster.

The speed with which I was becoming worried about ‘defining my(tm) online presence’ / brand was itself becoming laughable.”

Since then Henry’s youtube, about.me, flavors.me, twitter and flickr accounts have also been deleted.

Note: You don’t really hate Mark Zuckerberg

Mixed feelings however then arise in the / one’s (/virtual social) body:

1. Regret – that there was something ‘cool’ about each of of these social networking technologies – and thus something (insert) about the “Me”

2. Relief – the sense that utterly useless extra facets of ones existence have been switched off to conserve energy – and thus support (‘real’) Life. Spreading oneself too thinly across the shimmering mirrored hypersurface of / that is teh Liquid Gibsons

3. Regret – that having such tech (andor rather being hooked up to it) didn’t really enhance the understanding or enjoyment of one’s daily existence

4. But mainly Disappointment – that nobody noticed while Henry was Out Here – and when the account was deleted / abandoned, even fewer blinked

And now, one of the best songs about the fleeting nature of online fame:

/ ♬ There’s talk on the nets; it sounds so familiar
Great expectations, everybody’s ‘adding’ you
People who surf, they all seem to know you
Even your old friends treat you like you’re some new app.. etc.

[..] add something about the nature of postmodern online identity in the age of ubiquitous networked-everything; willingly lost in the euphoria of being “Social”(tm):

• About the black ‘text’ (actually pixels) on a white background reminding one of a hermetically sealed (open) museum of obsolete technology / of obsolete concepts like Technology?
• That, just by having an email address, one’s already fooled into thinking that you will eventually get email / be happy
• Henry: “All I ever got was spam by some sad, lonely individual, linking me to endless Batman and Madonna videos on LOLtube – or occasional offers for ‘Russian Best P3n1s’ pills“
• In which treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order – and its relation to the Organization Of Knowledge

“Am I dreaming or what“

Henry: Tried watching it ‘cold’ ie. pretending as if I was an alien visitor stuck in a by-the-week motel room in the middle of the absolute horontality of the American desert with pirate satellite access.

That is to say – viewing the movie as if you had no access to the presumed preexisting Cultural meanings andor contexts in the movie. Viewing it as if watching a random / arbitrary bunch of strangers talking about profoundly unknowable subjects.

The result was the same as it has been for the last Two Weeks I’ve been stuck in this dusty n’ lonesome roadside motel. A lasting sense of overwhelmingly underwhelming.. [insert here]. Virtually complete emotional un-connectivity to anything in this movie / to anything stated by all of the humans in this respectable drama of respectability taken to its natural(tm) default xtreme.

[..] sure Henry there’s fascination, historical resonance – but without emotion; emotion – yet without intellectual import. There is intellectual implication in their words yet no fire or heat exists in the space they live with which to make any of it Real for the estranged viewer.

That is to say – Henry watches these strange People play out their lives / what they call ‘their lives’ – yet is effectively blocked from connecting meaningfully with them. He connects as a living entity with their sorrows and the tall stories they tell themselves about themselves (albeit one pretending to be from another dimension) – but..

• For the total impact it made, the movie might as well have been about (eg.) immensely rich, immensely polite people spanking each other in the 1900′s somewhere in eg. old Vienna.

Taking your tortoise for a stroll.

/ This was not a review of the movie. (That might come later.) Merely that Henry thought that ‘blogging about it’ might help pass the time. Yet the movie – and indeed the entire evening – were so un-involving and nebulous he sensed there probably wouldn’t be enough there to justify it.

• It must be nice. To have something to blog about.
• To have a life one feels delightfully compelled to share with others
• The cardboard-dull reality of a near-infinite series of torpid, delicately soul-crushingly quotidian fragments

Actually modern “Researchers” don’t have any choice – and, while they (/often only) faintly mistrust and even mildly despise the ongoing trend toward mere Victorian ‘utility’, ‘practicality’, ‘accessibility’, misplacing-notions of ‘convenience’ or general ‘benefits‘, will often admit to strolling around the Lab (seemingly) “Freely admitting that there ‘really is something to be said about using plain text / files’, don’t you think, Henry..”

With this in minds (eg. as a tmp.buffer storage-process), set up the initial operating parameters for a Research Log entry on why “Plain Text Files Rule”, perhaps unnaturally gravitating towards the following:

• Tasty (super.Flat) Ingredients
• Folksonomic metadata tags
• Conceptual nodes?.. ie.eg

1. - Plato’s Theory Of Forms: Something to do with G(/r)eek architecture / the philosophy of perception and where Minds draws the (artificial  virtual) boundaries for what it considers seemingly ‘outside’ the Mind: note this is obviously not really a starting point but actually ‘another starting point’..

2. - The Absolute Minimum (unicode & character sets): Often consider the absolute minimum to be absolutely Everything at once. The notion that everything about humanity is ‘already pre-encoded’ in a certain way gives rise to thankfully disturbing questions about free will, block universes, and oranges which run like clockwork – andor a ‘locus of a set of innate possibilities‘..

3. - Neurotransmitters leaping across the synaptic cleft: text as visualizations of nonlocal structure (answering one link with another – call & response between two non-existent parties – hmm.)

4. – Postmodern Detritus; Materialis (pdf file) & History (magazine article).. gladly lost in the deep data. Sifting for fool’s gold, or rather perhaps – tuning in to the higher (deeper) frequencies of a-historical time while taking small notes in the margins along the way.

5. – Text Files throughout virtual digi-history: If there was ever a way out of the Basement Archives, the House Of Asterion considered as the human brain itself -

Text: Aesthetic Measurements Of Cultural Units Of Information-Presentation

6. Despite increasingly wider bandwidth, Text Files (/equals sign) Rock. There’s something about the form which is not only neat and efficient, but innocently neutral. As if they belong in some naturalistic ‘continuum of usefulness’ which includes mothers, pencils and paper, rulers and pen knives.

In terms of the social perception of their specific ‘form’, you feel Text Files are seen (/by non-programmers) as mere scratch-pads for half-baked ideas or marginal mental doodlings – and little else. That, they’re too often actively shunned for being ‘non-professional’, and are culturally associated with viagra spam and polite ‘advance fee’ emails from Nigerian princes.

Text files have their place – andbut it seems this place is somehow ‘fixed’ in the cultural Hierarchy of presentation of Research Information (‘lower’ forms / format-processes first):

• (Non-political) graffiti on the walls of public toilets
• Student-based impromptu desk-etchings
• Wobbly demonstrator placards
• Backs-of-postcard scribbles in thick purple crayon
• Text files (utf-8, non-bom 4tehwin)
• Carl Linnaeus index cards
• HTML5 (?) files
• PDFS
• Strictly limited edition leather bound grimoires with hand-set type
• Sanitary electro-totemic tablet computers (Steve Jobs as Moses)

Text files are everywhere – in the virtual spaces which form my current research lab, they form deep digital snow drifts that Researchers can happily mush through for hours at a time. They look fully crystallized, but are always actually on the verge of crystallization and materialization – sets of potentialities rather than ‘actual’ forms..

Whenever one ‘clicks’ on them with a semi-pleasantly obsolete ‘rsi-mouse’ pointing device, feel like a l33t h4x0r, surfing the Great Tubular Interwave and exploring the Gibsons for ‘raw’ information – something primal, unseen, the underlying source=code of an infinite online multiverse:

Well no, not really. But the ‘low-rent’ nature of .txt often comes pretty close.

10 Things Plain Text Excels In: the blog’s title is interesting – “Invisible to the eye.” Taking about a use-focus on the ‘content’ of a text file, it’s ‘logic’(/s) – that it’s a ‘universal interface’.

• All this suddenly bringing to mind what fellow Researcher Zizek is talking about when he discusses the ‘mythologisation of technology‘ – ie. that the more transparent and ubiquitous it becomes, the more the horizon of our understanding of it’s Hegelian materiality shifts – and the more we need hardcore internal Philosophy-fu to untangle ourselves out of its (apparent) simplicities.

//Note: thinking of ‘materiality’ in the artificial context of “Text Files & Why They Rock”, you’re suddenly reminded of quiet moments in Tarkovsky’s timeless meditation “Stalker”:

There’s something about the ancient (spiritual) heaviness of Earth, the paradoxical weightless of Text Files – the ingenuity of people from Russia who one imagines might well admire their well constructed sturdiness. Compare and contrast:

“[..] on the contrary, when he abandons the hold of his intellect and engages in an intense relationship with material reality” (Zizek: The Thing From Inner Space) – and

“These reconceptualizations thus act as an imaginative and speculative mediator between [..]” (Lillemose: Conceptualizing Materiality)

More on this later. Now go off for a slow insta-coffee and chew some organic banana cake slowly, while listening to a looped tape of tropical morning jungle birds in the empty auto-dispense cafeteria. [Scuffing sounds of a chair on brilliantly white industrial hard-flooring are heard]

Update 2: About the ideology of ‘plain english’ and its connection to ‘plain text’

Perhaps the ideology in the word ‘plain’ is precisely because it appears to be a nice, plain, seemingly ‘neutral’ word – a word you could take home to your ailing grandmother, a word you could trust not to suddenly display its flailing alien genits.

Thing is, the ‘white’ of a freshly opened text file is never a ‘neutral’ space – the myth of the ‘tabula rasa’ often lies in (silently) disavowing previous knowledge of the ‘eraser’ and what was in.exactly erased – Henry, imagine the ‘clean’ milky whiteness of a post-industrial toxic spill, smoothly and efficiently leaking into the nearby cursed graveyard and deep into those dirty polished bones.

It’s not the alleged clean simplicity of the form which gives parallel rise to thoughts of conceptual ‘purity’ – rather it’s the unexamined search for ‘innate purity’ of form which creates – as if out of thin air – forms which precisely conform to their ‘plain’ (ideological) construction ie. “What other way would it be?”

//Talking about ‘plain english’ – why not talk also about ‘plain chinese’

Sure – in computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text. But ‘ordinary’ – ‘sequential’, ‘readable’ – ‘textual’ and ‘material’ – in what ways are these ordinary, sequential, readable, texturally material..

//”Format: a particular way that information is encoded”

//The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension “text/plain”: perhaps from the Greek mimos, “imitator, actor”: someone who acts “textually – plainly” an active actor in a ‘plain role’ – a lovely film star from Germany, perhaps ‘merely observing’ the passing of ‘just some’ Plain Text on pass by on the far wall of the geostationary cafe via his augmented data-shades. It’s all an N-man show for the cameras and the floating girls. Yet nobody quite realizes – andor really wants to..

Jaron Lanier (Not A Gadget) on Files

Quote: “Entrenched Software Philosophies Become Invisible Through Ubiquity“

An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great.

(..) The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in several chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree – and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.”

Henry: Nice. Imagine breaking open / apart the ‘file’.. a nonlinear, file-less, window-less Operating System

2. You read the New York Times Style Magazine article about Lohan’s art video

3. Once installed, you visit Wikipedia’s entry on Lindsay Lohan so you can imagine reading a hypertext fiction neo-antinovel by a combined holographic simulacrum of inventor Ted Nelson & theorist Slavoj Zizek.

4. While listening to “Venus In Furs” by The Velvet Underground you read selected press about Richard Phillips at the Gagosian Gallery site:

5. You suddenly fee like re-watching the trailer for “Vertigo” by Alfred Hitchcock

6. This brings you to a classic advertisement for Chanel perfume by Ridley Scott:

“I am made of blue sky and golden light – and I will feel this way forever.” Wow. Just wow

7. You bring this E.M.Procedure to a close by listening to “This Is What Everybody Wants” by Cliff Martinez (Solaris soundtrack):

Additional Notes:

This Lindsay Lohan video reminds Henry Swanson of Eric Fischl’s early paintings (discussed in theorist Arthur Kroker’s cool sci-fi fanfiction “The Postmodern Scene“) and described by one blogger as “(..) observant and authentic“..

Big Science Term: a ‘Lohan’: “An edgeless series of luxurious poses and enigmatic, direct-to-camera stares by a gynoid replica who looks like she’s lived in a bubble of artificial diamond floating weightlessly in the middle of a mineral-water sea her whole life, and is only now washing up on the shore of The Real World^(tm) – all offered without comment (or content) – advertising a persona, that feels uncanny – yet inevitable”

“Postmodernism” simply explained: simply see what Jiddu Krishnamurti had to say regarding the nonduality bet.’The Thinker’ and ‘The Thought’

I loved miss most about Whitney’s singing: its sheer f’ing AGGRESSIVENESS. Like being bludgeoned to sonic submission by velvety love..

A turn for the worse: the day I saw a ‘special edition Pink Floyd’ Golf VW in town while shopping for plastic ninja throwing stars. RIP Syd

Listening to the 3-hr (dark ambient) version of Lana Del Deff Ray’s “Video Game” yesterday. It was unbearably indifferent to its own being.

Have you seen the amount of shill reviews on amazon recently? “This e-pulp sci fi novel was so awe-some it solved my sudoku puzzle for me..”

Chase mode: fragments of a virtual life online; slivers of emotion sent down the old ‘Liquid Gibsons’ to unknown domains of the global mind.

Basil & chives are doing well. Black cat hanging around; am running out of soya milk – yet Bioshock Infinite should be brilliant on arrival

Memes are not your friend: replication might just signify ‘making the same mistake repeatedly’. I’d rather die of boredom than fake laughter

Coming soon: “Zizek” the FPS video game. You heard it here first, volks.

Fincher’s H-Wooden re-imagining (ripoff) of Dragon Tat was pointless, sexist, toothless and entirely missed the point; stick to ads, Tyler.

Why would I follow any number of the empty headed ‘famous-for-being-famous ‘celebs’ recommended to me by Twitter? I can’t even follow mySelf

Need some recommendations for quality ‘fair-trade’ organic coffee. Am bored with my current brand – it’s starting to taste like mackerel.

Network adapter probs: got a Killer 2100 network gaming card to work w/ Windows 7 64bit? Tweet me up and let me know how you did it please!

Internet spleen vent: your tweet has been sent – your thoughts are all spent; do your tai chi with knees slightly bent; this does not rhyme.

I’m so smart; we both slowly and deliberately shake our heavy heads at the precise degree to which my cleverness fails to amaze either of us

‘Der lippen-trippen’: German for ‘falling over an excess of plastic lip-balm sticks, littering the floor of your lonely downtown apartment.’

No shortage of online multiplayer video gamers with microphone headsets who don’t use them; no shortage of lifestyles for the soulful undead

Everyone keeping the Cyberpunk spirit of 84′ alive should wear foot-shaped shoes; I’ll fight any vat-grown cyborg ninja saying otherwise.

Economy air-dusters cost too much. (That’s what they never tell you before you sign up.)

Woke up this morning / can’t believe what I saw / 100 billion useless Tweets / washed up on the info-store / seems I’m alone in being online

Read B.S. Johnson “The Unfortunates.” It’s pretty good, and makes one think of Vannevar Bush with a brass-band hint of steampunk.

Re-installed Left 4 Dead 2: you wouldn’t believe the number of profound n00bs who get on ‘Expert’ before 9pm. Makes a great Patience Tester.

While waiting for your deck to boot, do twenty Systema style push-ups. Go deep; relax; enjoy the weather; more green tea and less ‘whatever’

Attention all w/riters: David Shields Is Your Postmodern ‘God’. Hunger for REALITY!

Listening to oldskool (90′s ;-) Amiga chiptunes. You can’t beat that Demoscene sound. Retro: “Echoes out of the mystery of Time.”

“Hey guys – ‘I need a reboot here’!” -The ugly sound of gaming Syndicates trawling through the retro (memory) archives with grubby fingers..

Thinking about “Self” or “I” as an inherent Hard Coded Bias

“LOL” : the smallest basic virtual unit of modern online hu-mor / stupidity / casual (attention-deficient) indifference

The fear, not that ‘we are powerless’ – but that the idea ‘we are powerful beyond measure’ is taken seriously by the already-bloated Ego.

These ‘Screen & Spectacle Wipes’ are pretty good: yet do they remove the spectacle stain – or merely re-clarify the fact of its invisibility

Coffee Ideology: that you’re inversely-proportionally dull, to its socio-neural effects. Same w/ green tea; you’re not in fact Buddha, fool.

Henry screens Manhunter, ‘Hawaiian Friday Shirt’ painful, even to the virtual neon tetras floating nearby in his Cyborg Data-Ninja birth-vat

Invisible Cat plays with slow, unraveling yarn; his tale of Bad Internet Poetry is still unwritten. Moody pawprints smear the electroscreens

Birds across the Autumn cloud-face; stark trees, firm against the aetheric storm. Indoor farts stink of old boiled ham; you dislike Batman.

Questioning the Social-Interstitial; a key to the Magnus Mills-ian: “We never talk about it.”

What’s going on? Is Cyberpunk making a comeback or what? (Or is it just the 80s is still undead..)

Planet Gamer to Jon Carmack; please forget the Graphics (for 60 frames) & dial up the Aesthetics & Storytelling a couple of notches.. ;-/

While listening to Blue Mars internet radio & cooking a coffee – I think I just accidentally squashed a beautiful, tiny spider. Feel bad ;-(

Pink Floyd re-issues; a hollow greedy plastic inflatable swine, floating cynically over a source of dead power. Sorry, Syd.

That’s the last tuna I will ever eat. I am now a friend of Ocean Life.

“Big Science”: a term for “I’ve no idea what I’m doing / I feel playful and curious”

Don’t drink milk or eat sugar; avoid vampire movies; have an organic coffee colonic w/ distilled water; practice Alexander Technique

Calling all W/Riters & Postmodern note-takers: you don’t quite believe how many of the Dead Words ‘that’ and ‘which’ you have lying about..

Spuzzing”: a ‘sleepy buzz’ / weird preferred blur had while falling asleep fast – yet you’re racing & sweating, eg. after that last coffee

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: the textual / deconstructive Blade Runner megacity of its day. And we modern replicants still haunt it..

“Big Science” term – ‘Selif’: FILES viewed in a dark (virtual) mirror & now seen as ‘holographic data’ / processes which need no organizing.

A Chris Redfield klone in town today – muscles, hair, shoes.. probably voted the world’s most confident dunce for the second year running.

Your brain as the Ultimate Rube Goldberg machine: it makes Living overly Complex.

Dead Can Dance have got it. The soundtrack for a parallel universe where spirituality exudes from the moss on the very stones of our lives.

Something like a small red seed on the floor next to my old computer. The seed itself looks like a small red beetle – living.. Unknowably.

Still too much salt.

“Do you ever miss the stars, Kelly?” – Half remembering ‘R.L’ via “The Monad” (HL2 Machinima by Sam Goldwater)

Yeah.. I miss Calvin And Hobbes too.

The choice of coffee mug for a ‘W/Riter’ as the (/too-often false) need to select a pre-existing Medium for otherwise uncontainable Spirits

The suspicion that calling oneself A Philosopher is not a philosophically tenable position.

“Products sell you values which are not your own.” -Henry Swanson

Waiting to Surf the evening Nets; what some call “Night Crossings” A little electronic music, good coffee, and a sense of the mysterious Now

Monday morning as pseudo-turkey and cheese escalopes with white malt vinegar and beans. No answers, only bad questions – and too much salt.

Your usual responses to the idea that “Everything you know is wrong”: 1) “Yeah.. but so what” or 2) “I keep forgetting that.” Apathy = Time?

Are we “(..) constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress”? – Herbie The Hoover, 1928

Pull Quote of the year: “We can’t let Funky Boy destroy Roboworld.” -From >>REDLINE>> anime, which made my e-brain bleed liquid neon.

Watching DOTA 2 Championships: Like an Alien (state of) Being, watching the Neurosis of Micro Management from deep space. Pleasingly absurd.

The ab.use of red + cyan 3D stereo ‘anaglyph’ imaging as Hyperreality Symbolism eg. see Paul Oakenfold – Tokyo (GTA Machinima) on LOLtube

Another coffee, another thin line of text laid down / this tai chi metaphor, extended / slow stories with a smooth shine / a literary pause.

A wet, quiet morning; you tear from the Screen / to see a female cat / stop to eat a small, white lawn flower / alone again in Polyverse.

Cyberpunk 2.0? It was always in Permanent Beta. Even this gets old fast. We need less Tech and more Strange Relationships. Sterling knows.

Widecasting into the noosphere; widebanding privacy, hoping to be lost in the act of pseudo-communication: nothing is transmitted except 0/1

‘Making stuff that looks like stuff’ in The Video (Gaming) Arena ie. basing them on “The Real Word”TM – is both tiresome and un-fun. Stop it

The miserable state of “Endland” as seen on the side of a packet of ropey biscuits: “Surprisingly little has changed in over 150 years.”

You don’t feel in an aphoristic mood; no tersely phrased statement of a seeming truth or opinion leaps from your brain; stay thy lips, fool.

ENO said art is religion for people who don’t believe in god; maybe TECHNOLOGY is too-often religion for people who don’t believe in people

McKenna quoting Anon: “What’s so progressive about media? It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.”

Today’s example epistemology bumper-sticker: “Seeing is a form of belief” – [Henry Swanson / Big Science]

Today’s ‘philosophical t-shirt’ idea: “Reality :: Higher Rezolutions Available.”

Visions of the ‘Near Future Now’, part N: “A hundred billion bottles of liquid neon, washing up on Her horizonless information shoreline..”

Idea: a Nothing But Text OS: nonlinear filing, wraparound zooms (vectors), mulitiple simul.cross-editing, scientific visualization-analysis

Talk about complementary non-opposites: Zizek + Lady Gaga- two missing e-Media God Particles in search for teh non.existent (/Virtual) Other

Watched an excellent & sobering presentation about porn: stoppornculture.org.

457h 39m 33s wasted permadeading Zombies in L4D2. Time which could have been productively gained talking about the Future with the living..

‘Philosophical t-shirt idea’: “Metaphysical explanations of the world are but mud puddles to the azure waters of empirical truth.” o_O

Cool near-future (/’paradoxical’) headlines: “Recent undocumented sentient developments in undetectable alien consciousness technologies.”

Big Science term: “Paidarit”: The free play of ‘Paida’ (Roger Caillois) plus ‘Spirit’ (spirituality) – used where “Game” doesn’t quite fit..

Tip: the only safe way to ‘permadead’ a Social Networking Zombie: remove the ‘i-complex’ directly through un-friendly ‘social decapitation’.

In an age when “Science Fiction” is a dirty term.. we need to evoke “Teh Golden Age of Cyberpunk” as a means to crash the Speculative party.

On “Gamification”: You are now – more than ever – an ‘app’ in an online store filled with nothing but SNU (the Social Networking Undead).

Dr. Orloff’s feel-good rebel yell for the summer: “Lactose intolerant albino barricade!!” Go on, say it; be a shiny bio-metallic lunchbox.

“ENO-esque”: It’s not about the ‘courage’ needed to take alternate pathways; rather, LIFE pressures Self back toward its un-knowable limits.

NOT mindlessly following that ‘advice for writers’ b.s as good advice. Only Buke The Puke had it right: “Don’t Try.”

Social Incepting”: when you try to implant inherently-false Images (you have of yourSelf) in the mind of another, during a conversation.

Term: “Carmack Parallels” – Wishing videogames were even remotely as innovative (eg. Gameplay wise) as Carmack is making them Graphically.

Term: “Proxyplayer”: n. A hardcore gamer who DOESN’T buy a new game, but simply watches its HD-nocommentary ‘Walkthrough’ videos on Youtube.

Searching for a new series of debased nonlinear realities to adjust my theoretical coordinates. Total ideological protonic reversal rules.

Baudrillard was right.. this cold sci-fi universe: ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, communication.. hazard, chance and vertigo. Exhaustion.

March. Spring still hasn’t fully sprung. My alt.sci-lit project continues, quietly. Nothing to report online – it’s all the same sad song.

Sudden need to apply a Zizekian filter to an ongoing bioquantum analysis of electro-dreaming inthe psychoanalytical moviespace “Manhunter”..

More anti-irony: Having to get up too early this morning in order to be up in time for a new watch coming through the post. I have no life..

Cool Japanimation architecture: it’s cyberpunk aesthetics mirror massive societal surges in relative Information Density – surfaces, neon.

Blue summer skies as clear as a daydream. Bright biomagnetic fields of ripe corn rippling in the aether-wind. Here, among the mice, I smile.

Those who can, live. Those who can’t, online game. (The rest tweet uselessly about it and remain alone. Unknown.)

Meditation on inevitable Death: The idea of the “Self” is perhaps just that – no more or less than a dream, a fantastic, limiting illusion.

Summer: where the height of organic infinity contrasts sharply with the massively limited perspective offered by its national appreciation.

Spent the day cleaning the house. A little taste of Zen. At every moment, the teardrop melts on the infinite fire.

This odd feeling called Life; the bright, hard pulse of nameless days spent chasing dreams and the root of memory, which is emptiness. Light

People have money – but no time; time – but no joy; joy – but they are blind to meaning; they have meaning – but no reason to act upon it..

Thought I’d found a winning lottery ticket.. No, its just a list of old win-numbers! ..It’s not money we need, but to shed our old non-life.

Worried – Metal Gear Solid 2 (pc) might not be fully bio-compatible w/ my fave ZX-opSys of choice. Need another techgnostic coffee; no milk.

Before me lies De Chirico’s red tower; behind me is the glass bead sweating night. A sunless ambience that betrays a depthless hypersurface.

Everything’s far plainer & duller than it first seems, eg. flat, dry video game textures – a metaphor for this dehydrated virtual sym life.

Thinking about the near future retro 80s