tetracube in flatland

 

Victorian society seems to be a preferred metaphor and target for scientifically and technologically inclined writers who strive to express social and cultural critique. Meanwhile I have finished "The Diamond Age, or: The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" (↵Stephenson 1996 [1995])—that second generation cyberpunk-tale wherein the Neo-Victorians feature so prominently. Both emotionally and intellectually I really enjoyed following artifex John Percival Hackworth through the post-nation-state-collapse, retro-tribalized, nano-tech infected near-future universe created by Neal Stephenson. But now I again am in savant Edward "Leviathan" Mallory's company, enjoying—and co-suffering—his adventurous path through a Victorian alternate reality dominated by what might have been the societal consequences of Charles Babbage's difference engine. That means I resumed my reading of Gibson & Sterling's collaborative steampunk-novel of the same name (↵Gibson & Sterling 1991). In the respective context of the two novels 'savant' denominates the highest order of scholars, 'artifex' the highest order of engineers. A person thus attributed is a member of the aristocracies of said noble arts & crafts. The individual going by the adequate pseudonym—I dare not say nickname'—↑Seifert Surface is both a savant and an artifex. A graduate student of three dimensional topology and geometry at Stanford who creates experiencable mathematical conundrums in the virtual world of Second Life. Inspired by ↑Robert A. Heinlein's short story ↑"And He Built a Crooked House" (Heinlein 1940) he has created a house being a tesseract, which can be visited, toured, and experienced by the players within Second Life. "What's a tesseract?" "Didn't you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I'll show you." (Heinlein 1940) No, I won't show you—please see the Wikipedia-entry ↑Tesseract and/or the article ↑Dimensionality at the University of Winnipeg. Via the latter article I learned about ↑Edwin A. Abbott's (1838-1926) satirical novel ↑"Flatland: A romance of Many Dimensions" (Abbott 1884), another inspiration to cyberpunk writers, especially to ↑Rudy Rucker—by the way, in many of Rucker's books hypercubes and all kinds of multi-dimensional space and structures star prominently ... ↑tesseracts in art and literature. Anyway, Abbott's novel can be seen as a classical example of mathematical fiction, the author trying to help us understand the idea of dimensions through the fictional example of visiting a world with only two spatial dimensions. But there is way more to it, as "Flatland" is a story that can be ↑interpreted in several ways:
 

See also ↑Thomas F. Banchoff's ↑From Flatland to Hypergraphics. And now for the feedback-twist: ↑Mr. Surface describes what was still to do once he had figured out how to build the tetracube-house within Second Life's gamespace: "From there, it was mostly a matter of creating the human-sized version, building a 19th century era interior with textures and furniture [...]" [emphasis mine]
 
initially via entry at boingboing

marenostrum

 
In ↵her comment to my entry ↵cyberian churches, ↑orange asked, referring to the entry's two pictures: "and what makes these "cyberpunk ambient"?" First of all, if a little introspection from my side is allowed, both pictures give me the cyberpunk creeps shivering up and down my spine. Those are my individual perceptions, now for the elaboration.

KerLeone's picture shows a gothic cathedral, somewhere in Spain, where air ducts were brutally led through the arched windows into the interior. It's ↵Gilliam's cyberpunk-metaphor for technology running rampant come alive. Without any respect for the ancient architecture the substantial pipes have been driven through, adding to the otherwise decaying facade. The result is a composite picture—in fact more than a mere picture, it's empirical reality, cyberpunked living—containing bequeathed art and æsthetics and purely functional lo-tech devices set in particular relation to each other. This setting is well suited to provoke some reflection about e.g. contemporary culture as manifested in urban contexts. Clearly an aspect cyberpunk is about.

The above picture shows ↑MareNostrum, a ↑Big Blue teraflop-machine, the core of the ↑Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The BSC was built into a chapel, and MareNostrum is inside the chapel, too [There's a load of ↑pics at zdnet]. Maybe starting with Gerald M. Weinberg's "The psychology of computer programming" (↵1998 [1971]) things, which at first glance appear to be deeply profane—calculating machines in the end—have been given the air of the sacred by the use of metaphors like 'cathedral' and 'priests'. Converting a chapel into a supercomputing center, and prominently placing a mainframe like MareNostrum into its very heart, clearly means this metaphors to become physically and architecturally manifest. A computer living in the house of god—if that's not cyberpunk, nicely represented by the contrast of hi-tech and 'old' architecture. And there's more to it:
 

It consists of parts bought off the peg and uses open-source software! Technology hitting the streets, ↵wargames reloaded.

amphoræ

 
Just a little story on personal appropriation of mass-produced commodities. The stores around here carry a vast diversity of nearly identical products for everyday use in mass-consumption style, like e.g. shower gel and sun milk. Sometimes the contents are perfectly identical and only the containers, the inscriptions upon the containers, and the price-tags differ. And then there are identical containers used for a range of different products. In this case the text is not imprinted directly on the container, but on stickers. The design of the stickers usually annoy me. It's only the high-class products which sometimes feature designs that comfort me. But in the case of the above mentioned commodities of daily use I am reluctant to go into the upper price-segement. The lower-price-item stickers are all the more annoying, because they especially have been designed to look cheap. Yesterday I discovered that if you remove the stickers, the plain containers can quite look like something, their shapes bearing a certain amount of æsthetic. So I removed all the stickers from my newly acquired products. Design by retrostripping. Of course now you have to remember the geometrical shapes, and if those are identical, the colour-code. From left to right: my new shower gel, sun milk, and after sun lotion.

trademark drawbacks

 
Today a friend of mine who is not so much into soccer, asked me why the commentators on television are always talking about the "FIFA WM 2006", and went on asking, if there was another soccer world cup besides the FIFA one. My friend drew parallels to heavyweight boxing, the other sports monster spectacular, where there are different more or less global associations, each claiming to organize the world championships. WBC, WBA, IBF, WBO plus another dozen or so, among which only the WBU has some significance in the UK. The result of this rivalries is that there are several world champions at a given time, or, seen the other way round, none. Now, there is only one soccer world cup, but I guess it is impossible to register 'soccer world cup' as a trademark, because it is deemed to be common speech. So the FIFA registered 'FIFA WM 2006'—no fault until here. The fault lies in my opinion in the pressure the FIFA exerts upon the media to say and write 'FIFA WM 2006' whenever they want to talk about the soccer world cup. For my friend the soccer world cup lost some of its uniqueness that way.

same, same
It's always the same. Or, "same, same", as people belonging to certain Asian families of languages use to say. Once in the Transhimalayas we had a caravan's man taking care of the horses, a fine guy indeed, but, no matter what exactly you said to him, he always answered: "Right, Sir! You are right, Sir! No problem, Sir!" Until, meanwhile being several weeks deep inside where we shouldn't be, nerves blank, a close friend of mine threatened him with a severe beating if he wouldn't stop the right-Sir thing. To our every relieve he stopped it. Don't be upset about my frankness, this is a blog in the strict sense of the term, as you plainly can read near the top of the righthand sidebar. For those who get the allusion. Today I even revisited ↵the river's bed of gravel to the north, but it didn't help this time. My problem is that I again do not really know how to organize my material. Installing a tag cloud in here is possible, helluva hassle, but possible. But what to do with printed or printed-out matter? Several systems at hand, some self-deviced ... All that was a subterfuge. My real problem is that I do not know what exactly this blog is for. How far can I go in what I am writing here, how visible has the ethnographer to be online. Is it lege artis to use this blog for jotting down my inner states in a cyphered way, indirectly relaying information? Subterfuge again. Same, same, right Sir? Or, as the dead immortal Elvis Presley said: "We're caught in a trap."

blog novel?

 
I'm not sure what the man's up to. We know that quite some time ago he had quit blogging because for him it didn't go together well with writing a novel. When The Guardian's ↑Hamish Mackintosh asked him in 2003 if there was an art to blogging, he answered: "I think there is and I don't think I've necessarily mastered it yet! I have got that feeling of when you're working in a new form and you start to feel the edges of it and it's really intuitive. However, if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist." Either blogging or writing a novel—he chose the latter. Then he came back to his blog and stated there now and again that he indeed was writing a new novel. Recently it caught my eye that some of his blog entries have changed to novelette style, see ↑this month's entries. Has he fused blog and novel, and are we reading snippets from his upcoming novel straight out of the workshop?
 
photography by Karen Moskowitz

antikythera mechanism

 
sponges


The 22 oarsmen's strained muscles are driving the two vessels eastward. Both caiques are laden with sponges, brought to the surface by a party of six divers at their usual fishing grounds, the Tunesian waters. Captain Demetrios El. Kondos, a former masterdiver himself, securely navigates his pair of ships through the Mediterranean, back to the island of Syme near Rhodes, back home. While passing the channel between the islands of Kythera and Crete they get caught in gales and squalls and are driven off course. On the one hand the channel is one of the most frequented shipping routes between the eastern and the western Mediterranean, on the other hand it is a place consisting of sandbars, shoals, and sudden currents, which already made it a famous shipyard for both ancient and modern vessels. Perfectly aware of all that the experienced Captain decides to seek shelter near Port Potamo at the northern end of the almost uninhabitated, rocky and barren islet of Antikythera, where they drop anchor. At 35°52'30''N, 23°18'35''E, to be precise, close to midway between Crete and the Peloponnesus. Once at the very site, right above the submarine shelf locally known as Pinakakia, not to be found on any official chart, they decide to explore the beneaths, because maybe there are sponges.

Elias Stadiatis, one of the divers, vanishes into the depths first, whilst the burning sun lends the Aegaeian its unique flavour. The year is 1900, the 20th century has arrived, this year's Easter not quite yet. Victoria (1819-1901), Queen of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India is still alive, the Victorian era in full sway, the Empire expanding—making the UK into a superpower—the industrial revolution at its height. Truly a period of significant social, economic, and technological change. Speaking of technology, in contrast to Queen Victoria proto-computer-scientist Charles Babbage (1791-1871) already is dead in 1900. In 1822 Babbage had for the first time discussed the principles of a mechanical calculating engine. He got funds and started to construct the first difference engine: 25,000 parts, 15 tons, eight feet high, never completed. In consequence Gibson & Sterling's steam-punk alternate reality of "The Difference Engine" (↵1991) fame never comes into being. But in the years 1989-1991, by use of Babbage's original construction drawings, his second design, the "Difference Engine No. 2", was built to 19th century tolerances and found to work with astounding accuracy, spilling out results of up to 32 digits length.
 

 

All this does not bother Stadiatis, immersed into the sea, heading down for its bed. And there it is, a compact shadow of some 50 meters in length. The wreck of an ancient Roman commercial cargo ship, lying 42m beneath the surface, just about 30m off shore. Amphorae, marble and bronze statues litter the seabed around the wreck, the rest of its cargo consisted of luxury goods as well: jewellery, pottery, and fine furniture, not to forget the wine once within the amphorae—merchandise, booty, or both. Two millenia have passed since the original addressees have waited for their goods. Hidden in between these treasures there is an artefact yet to be discovered, which will shake our understanding of the classical period. Stadiatis resurfaces, tells his tale and authenticates it by an artefact he has brought up—a larger-than-life sized right arm made of bronze. The Captain himself immediately submerges and makes rough measurements and bearings to be able to again find the treasure ship later on. Then they return home. On 06 November 1900 in Athens they meet Spyridon Staïs, minister of education and a prominent archaeologist. Agreements are made and on 24 November 1900 the divers return to the Roman ship where they immediately start to bring up the artefacts. They work until 30 September 1901. The ship's contents trigger great excitement among archaeologists, but the bringing-up of the artefacts is stopped then, as the problems of fulfilling the task without heavy equipment are immense. Meanwhile one of the divers has been killed, and another one permanently disabled. Among the brought-up items there are some calcified lumps of corroded bronze—possibly pieces of broken statuary, which are laid aside.
 

 

 

 

gears


On Saturday, 17 May 1902, more or less by accident, Spyridon Staïs scrutinizes the corroded lumps. To his astonishment he not only clearly discovers inscriptions, but cogwheels, their teeth being equilateral triangles—the lumps are fragments of a clocklike mechanism. A suspenseful history of research on the mechanism unfolds, involving a whole cluster of different scholars. The main arguments revolve aorund wether the artefact was an astrolabe or something more complex (see ↵Price 1974:10-12). In summer 1951 British physicist and historian of science ↑Derek John de Solla Price (1922-1983) can lay hands on the device in Athens. Eight years later he publishes a front-page article in Scientific American, which he christened "An ancient Greek computer" (↵Price 1959). Price argues that the Antikythera mechanism is a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets. That means it is the first known analog computer. The article spurs a lot of attention, some react in favor of Price's theory, others deny the genuineness of the artefact, especially its age. That's understandable, as the device forcefully demands a complete revision of our perspective on Hellenistic technology. "I feel rather that the whole story of Greek science makes a great deal more sense if we assume that the old view of their rising no higher than the simple Heronic devices was a drastic underestimation that can now be corrected." (↵Price 1974:12) In 1961 Price returns to Athens with funds and immense equipment. He x-rays the fragments, which enables him to understand and reconstruct the device. It indeed is a computer consisting of 32 gears, including a differential—the latter until now thought to be invented in the 16th century. All this is explained in his "Gears from the Greeks" (↵Price 1974). "The Antikythera mechanism was an arrangement of calibrated differential gears inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a shaft protruding from its now-disintegrated wooden case, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. He could predict the movement of heavenly bodies regardless of his local government's erratic calendar." (↵Rice 1995)
 
characters


In 1993 Rob S. Rice remarks, that the "Antikythera mechanism dropped and sank—twice. The first time was around 76 B.C., when the intricate astronomical computer was lost with the rest of a treasure-ship's cargo. The second time came after Derek De Solla Price analyzed and published its construction and nature decades after its recovery. Since [then] little attention has been paid to our most exciting relic of advanced ancient technology" (↵Rice 1993). It seems that our standard narrative on science, technology, and cosmology of ancient Greece is a fictitious alternate reality, never been in existance. Seen with cold blood the Antikythera mechanism forces us to reconsider e.g. the paramountness of a geocentric cosmology in those times. But standard narratives, once written, are cherished items, hard to overcome. There were some more attempts of reconstruction, by Allan George Bromley, Frank Percival, and Bernard Gardner in the 1990s, and by Michael Wright in the 2000s. Now finally a massive joint program, the ↑Antikythera Mechanism Research Project has taken over, generating fabulous results. In October 2005 it was announced, that more fragments of the Antikythera mechanism have been found, now making a total of about 70 pieces. Sometimes everything seems to conspire in order to let the world remain in style. Re-enter the monstruousness of high-tech devices of Babbage's times. The Antikythera mechanism's uniqueness forbids its being removed from its home, the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. So the project hauled in a state-of-the-art 3D-tomography prototype by X-Tek systems, weighing eight tons—quite matching to the overall story's ambience of steam-, cyberpunk and alternate realities, this device bears the name "Bladerunner". On 06 June 2006 ↑the project announced first results the imaging system has generated. Until then the known characters inscribed on the mechanism amounted to about 1000, now there are about 2000. 95% of the complete text have been translated until today, but not yet published. Things to come.
 

 

cyberian churches

 
More cyberpunk ambiente: Nooped has hinted me to ↑mare nostrum [at the left], and KerLeone to another ↑church in Spain [at the right, scroll down a bit for this one]—thanks to both.

m'unique

 
Munich offers some striking features. I don't mean those ones experienced by the flocks of tourists streaming into the city 'cause of the soccer world cup these days, but quieter ones, mediating unique experiences. If you journey by bicycle along the river—no matter if to the north or to the south—for no more than about 20 minutes, you'll be fully encircled by trees and scrub, nothing more of the city to be heard or seen. The river's bed of gravel is perfect for picknicking and reading, and even for spending the night, a full moon guarding your sleep. Sun's first rays awake you in the morning. You'll be a li'l broken on the wheel, but reborn.

dojo

 
Excerpt from Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" (1995), Dinosaur's tale:
 

Excerpt from the final transcript of "The Empire strikes back" (1980):
 

cyberpunkreviewed
The daily bandwidth my blog uses suddenly jumped from 671.76MB on 08 June 2006 to 1.35GB on 09 June 2006. ↑Soccer world cup related? I checked the referrers, and hey presto—I've been ↑cyberpunkreviewed! Tongue-in-cheek fashion I added the sentence "Sfam, you can file that under cyberpunked living ;-)" to my entry ↵cyberpunk ambiente ... and guess what? Sfam did so. ↵My cellphone's crappy camera at least pays off. And I indeed have a lot of fun in recognizing cyberpunk ambiente, so I'll go on collecting shots like that. Maybe even an own category "cyberpunk" is overdue at this place.

diamond culture

 
At first I didn't like Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" (1995)—mainly because of Bud. Mainly because of his straightforward dumbness and naïveté. My fear was that I had to follow this guy through 500 pages. Within "Cryptonomicon" (1999) Bobby Shaftoe was such a character, whose fate literally made me cry. But this Bud ... then things began to change and Bud had to encounter Judge Fang, who sentenced him to a timely fate. Judge Fang is my friend. Not simply because he had Bud executed, but because his deeply cultured personality, which made me undust my Chinese teaching-books. Really. Please read this excerpt, describing how ↑Judge Fang receives a letter from Dr. X, and you'll know what I mean.

the art is in doing

 

cyberpunk ambiente

 
Yesterday night, while I was walking the forlorn streets, a lust for a substantial dinner struck me right out of nowhere. Accordingly I directed my steps towards a particular joint, 'cause I knew that they serve quite large steaks there—or so I thought. I entered the place, occupied a table, ordered a steak and a beer, one more beer later on, and felt myself to be perfectly at ease and somehow content. While digesting the first beer, simultaneously waiting for the slab of beef to arrive, I reflected on the real reason why I came to this very restaurant. The steak, all right, but I know a heap of places where they offer similar items, and the way to them wouldn't have been farther either. After a while of reflection I came close to accepting that there was no special reason, or that it was buried deep down in the unconscious layers, unfathomable, not retrievable. But even when you are thinking about matters of such profoundness your gaze wanders around. So did mine. And then I saw the ceiling: "But very quickly, ↑Brazil changes to a surreal experience, which shoes converted to hats, ventilation pipes dominating every roomscape, and massive expansive buildings without ground floors. Ventilation pipes are Gilliam’s symbol for technology run rampant." Somehow I felt quite comfortable beneath that century-old art nouveau stucco beautifully complimented by industrial ventilation pipes, the latter being at least 50 years of age themselves. Sfam, you can file that under ↑cyberpunked living ;-)
 

 

time to remember

 

event horizon 2

 
There are always the prophets of doom [pun not intended]—cyberpunk has been declared dead and to be a forgotten relic of the 1980s, ↵Q3A has been labelled accordingly, and trickjumping ... now someone even has called a vote at Wikipedia to delete the entry ↑Strafe-jumping, and that in the face of articles like ↑"Strafing Theory" by injx being online. It already went so far that even I sometimes thought that ↵my being concerned with Q3A stuff meanwhile is purely of historical interest. Far from it. Nothing is dead. Just recently Team Event Horizon's second team tricking movie has been added to the database of planetquake 3. Do not by any chance miss ↑Event Horizon 2 [15:27min | .avi | 453MB]:
 

Compare it to e.g. ↑The Art of Tricking II [13:57min | .avi | 325MB], and you will see how trickjumping and the according movies have developed. This culture obviously still is going strong. Long live ↑defrag.

runpayze2

 

insignia of bureaucracy

 
Having rewatched ↑"Brazil" and talking about bureaucracy going rampant, this one's well overdue. When years ago I for the first time read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" (↵Stephenson 1999)—in my opinion by far his best book—I especially was delighted by this passage:
 

And now imagine the chill that ran down my spine when, at my first day of being a state officer at the university, our magnificent secretary stopped me when I was just about to enter and claim my very own office, saying "You'll need this one," and handing me, by means of a somber ritualistic gesture, above pictured device. Instantaneously I realized that now I was no more an academic, but a true bureaucrat.

sky blue

 
Maybe I have ↑infected 2R with my still rampaging cyberpunk craze, as he now raves about ↑Sky Blue [Wonderful Days]. It scored 9 out of 10 ↑at cyberpunkreview, the degree of cyberpunk visuals is rated as very high, and the correlation to cyberpunk themes as high. I'll try to lay my hands upon it as soon as possible.

the making of machinima

The ↑final draft is available online [scroll down to the CV's publications-section, there's the link].

machinima—finding its way

 
Coincidence again—just last Monday, while composing ↵demo and ↵snaking and strafe-jumping, I found ↑"Diary of a Camper", not this blog's subtitle, but allegedly the very first instance of ↵machinima. Today I found ↑Machinima: Finding Its Way, representing "not only a somewhat loose retrospective of Machinima's history, but also the blurry lines between fandom, subversive fetish and grotesque commercialism":
 

See also ↑Henry Lowood's vast ↑The Machinima Archive:
 

initially via entry at infocult | screencap from "Diary of a Camper" (1996)

free spirit
Still I am deep down into the consumption of cyberpunk—literature and movies. Yesterday I rewatched Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and this afternoon "Immortal" by Enki Bilal. At 8 P.M. I watched the news and afterwards zapped through the channels a bit. Suddenly "Immortal" was on the screen again. Confusion at my side, then I realized that it indeed was on TV. D'oh—just yesteday I have bought the DVD. Anyway. And I have gone back to the habit of reading several books in parallel fashion. After having watched "Minority Report" some days ago I am now reading Philip K. Dick's short story of the same name. Additionally I am half way into "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and well into the first third of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age". Reading this two books at the same time is a purely accidental coinicidence, but both are somehow mutually complementing each other, as both deal with the Victorian model of society, norms, and values. In between I more or less randomly pick a short story out of the anthology "The Ultimate Cyberpunk" edited by Pat Cadigan. So far I liked Bruce Sterling's "Green Days in Brunei" best. Sometimes I augment my literary diet via the Internet. Here's what I stumbled over today:
 

quote from entry at william gibson

symbols
In gamedesign and -modding it is a cherished practice to integrate references to other popular- and/or cyberculture items. Especially hidden references, so-called easter-eggs, have developed their very own dynamic. But not only gamers "creatively re-fashion the resources of popular culture for their own expressive discourse purposes." (↵Wright, Boria & Breidenbach 2002) I guess it is a practice to be found within every discipline of artistic expression falling into the domains of scifi, cyberpunk and their kin.
 
The dominant and constantly reappearing graphical design within Kurt Wimmer's movie ↵"Equilibrium" (2002) is the Tetragrammaton 'logo'. It's prominently displayed on walls, flags, imprinted on items and so on. In addition to this appearances Wimmer has placed some kind of in-movie easter-egg, referring to the viusals of the movie itself—the pistols of Cleric John Preston (Christian Bale) emit a muzzle flash in the shape of said symbol:
 

 
This already has been ↑mentioned elsewhere, but now I discovered the same stunt in Wimmer's next movie ↑"Ultraviolet" (2006). Again the movie is dominated by a graphical, ever-reappearing design, this time it's the biohazard symbol. This symbol is vastly used in gamer-, online, and cyberculture. In several milieus it already has been 'cited to death', for example within the casemodders' domain: "[Kitty:] In my opinion, such things as biohazard window etches are long since passé. If one guy does it and others like it, the rest of the sheep herd themselves together and do the very same thing. That's not modding. It's copying. It's right back to another level of status-quo, ie, one massive clusterfuck. The modding guys I still stay in touch with occasionally are those who always have pushed the limits in ability and creativity." (↵Kitchenman 2001) But Wimmer's creative use is acceptable and noteworthy in my opinion. The muzzleflashes of the guns used by Violet (Milla Jovovich) are trying hard to resemble something like the biohazard symbol:
 
 
Watching frame by frame you discover that the symbol even rotates around the axis of the weapon's barrel. I am sure that during the movie there would be even better occasions to take clean screencaps of the designed muzzleflash, but somehow I constantly get distracted by other visual attractions ...
 

 
For a ton of screencaps from "Ultraviolet" and lots of photographies showing gorgeous beauty and ultimate female cyberpunk icon Milla Jovovich, go to ↑Ultraviolet (2006).

on target

 
After ↵collecting toilets and ↵more toilets, now it's the other way round—not toilets in computergames, but computergames in toilets. Designer ↑Marcel Neundörfer has developed urinals with integrated gameplay: "Recessed into a urinal is a pressure-sensitive display screen. When the guest uses it, he triggers an interactive game, producing images and sound." To make things clear: you actually have to well-aimedly pee on the touch-sensitive screen. A gender-sensitive topic? And what about combining Neundörfer's gadget with ↵shocking roulette? Unthought-of business opportunities. But there will be copyright issues, as Hayes Solos Raffle and Dan Maynes-Aminzade had the idea already in 2002 and have built a prototype back then. See ↑You're In Control (Urine Control). And they already have solved the gender-problem, too:
 

 
initially via entry at gamersgame

blade runner finally

 
Another addition to a seemingly never-ending story—is this the last hope? Read ↑Blade Runner Final Cut Coming in 2007! at ↑cyberpunkreview.com. Thanks for the opportunity to post yet another Blade-Runner screenshot ;-)

asa ethics blog
The ↑Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth has brought the ↑ASA Ethics blog online.
via entry at savage minds

cmc bibliography
Some good soul has compiled a selected ↑bibliography of computer-mediated communication [.pdf | 22KB].