the art of gamemodding

 
It seems that the time of harvesting the fruits of my efforts finally has arrived. Today again an invitation to write an article for an anthology came in—I didn't even send a proposal ... God, am I satisfied and proud. Alas, the problem is the now emerged density of deadlines. But self-organization is the key to damming up this kind of trouble. So I skimmed through my physical and digital folders and found yet another abstract I submitted to ... well, honestly, I can't remember where to I sent it. But obviously it was not accepted or even received. Let's post it here:
 

censorship's bloody spell

 
Although the matter meanwhile ↑has been settled for good—more or less—I nevertheless will recount a portion of it, as it delivers some insights into various issues, namely the computergames and violence debate and the perception of ↵machinima by insiders of the movement and by outsiders.
 
↑"BloodSpell" is a feature-length machinima-movie by ↑Strange Company based on the computergame ↑"Neverwinter Nights". It is released on the Internet piecemeal in the shape of five to seven minutes long episodes every two weeks or so. Until today all in all ↑seven episodes can be downloaded, the eigth being on the verge of release.
 

Now, Strange Company has been invited to screen "BloodSpell" at this year's ↑Games Convention (GC) in Leipzig, Germany, taking place from 24th through 28th August 2006. Subsequently they were asked to only show "peaceful and violence-free scenes", or the movie not at all. The rationale behind this, as ↑related by Hugh Hancock is quite interesting: "They feel that German journalists are looking for violent scenes in video games, and wish to show Machinima as "a positive example of what players do with games." The implication, of course, is that BloodSpell is not one of those positive things." As I am absolutely not into the Fantasy-genre—I once was as a teenager, a long time ago—I only watched episodes one and eight. What stands out are storytelling and the machinimatics, the soundtrack and the originality, but not the occasional shooting of people by means of crossbows, or the sometimes spilled blood. And I really embraced looks and animation of the robots and female characters in episode eight :-) "BloodSpell" is all but a gore-feast—quite to the contrary, what I have seen could righteously be called dialogue-heavy.
 
Hancock, "BloodSpell"'s writer, director, and executive producer, founder of ↑machinima.com and "guru of the machinima movement", who has worked for the BBC and Electronic Arts—just to name a few—goes on to describe his view of machinima ↑that way:
 

Meanwhile the GC seemingly came around and "BloodSpell" will be shown to the press today—uncensored, but not on public days. Nevertheless the statements by members of the ↑BloodSpell crew are interesting and carry some weight. Especially the one by ihatesheep I chose as a closing quotation to this entry. Referring to the politically and in many other respects heavily charged ↵discussion around the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of computergames, he ↑has written a memorable sentence: "If playing GTA is all it takes for your child to go out and murder prostitutes, then there are far, far bigger problems that you probably need to address."
 
"BloodSpell" developer wiki and blog

face off on
appropriation's commodification

 
↑Boingboing reported that a ↑new application for the Xbox 360 by Digimask allows gamers to paste their own faces on game characters. ↑Gamersgame reported that the developers of an upcoming ↑beat 'em up, ↑"Battle of the Gods" (BOTG) launched an unique promotion event via eBay. If you win the according auction currently running your likeness will be included into the game as a background character.
 
Back in ye olde times when ↵MP1-modding was striving, and when we were still in the first stages of the infamous ↵Lightsaber modification, DopeTek, a founding member of our team, perfected his technique of giving game characters faces. Then he encouraged the community members to send him mugshots of themselves, which he converted into the heads of playable characters. In the first installments of the mod, the main protagonist indeed sported the ↵face of HairlessWookie, our team leader.
 
Clearly there are feedback-loops at work, leading from the games industry to the gamers and back again. Via commodification practices of appropriating computergames [developed within gaming culture] are re-appropriated by the industry. Complex moves within gamespace initially unintended and based on bugs and glitches, like ↵snaking and strafe-jumping [their being possible discovered by gamers], are redefined to be features of subsequent games. ↑Peter Molyneux' ↵"The Movies" commodifies the making of ↵machinima. Now the customization of game avatars by means of mapping the own face upon them has been commodified, too.
 

game over

 
Using everyday household objects ↑PES has done a wonderful ↑stop motion movie recreating famous computergame classics like ↑Pac-Man, ↑Frogger, ↑Space Invaders et al. All actions are synchronized to the original game sounds. The movie is called ↑"Game Over" [1:35min | .mov | 7.89MB], and what I want for Christmas are playable recreations of the games featured in the movie, featuring the graphics from the movie. There's still enough time till Christmas—gamemodders of the world, go ahead ...
 

 

 
via entry at boingboing

kitsch guns
antonio riello's ladies weapons
 

 
This is definitely not street tech, but an artist appropriating the aesthetical appropriation of weapons for his own expressive ends. Italian artist Antonio Riello [of whom I couldn't find an own site on the Web, but about whom I have read at diverse pages that he was born in Kabul, Rio de Janeiro, and Marostica, Italy] has peculiar interests: "Since the beginning of his artistic career," ↑Hoard Magazine wrote in 2001, "he wanted to be a social reporter investigating his immediate environment. He is particularly interested in the "dark sides" of Italian contemporary life."
 

 
The background of his ↑"Ladies Weapons", displayed here are all of them I could find on the Web, Riello describes like this:
 

Maybe the recently issued ↑pimp-style gold and silver Razr cellphone by Dolce & Gabbana appeals to a matching clientele ;-)
 

 
Riello's artefacts remind me of the MP5k over and over engraved with traditional gun-ornaments, of Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti's gold-plated assault- and sniper-rifles [see ↵golden guns], of the ↑countless weapons [selection] ↑endo modelled for Max-Payne modifications, among them fine decorated specimens as well, of the decorated guns in Buz Luhrmann's 1996 movie ↑"Romeo + Juliet"—or was it Andrzej Bartkowiak's 2000 ↑"Romeo must die"?—and of car-modding Chicano-style in general.
 

 
Riello ↑paints weapons as well, but I take the ladies weapons to be more impressive. Especially as they strive to voice an emic cultural insight: "Italians have two great passions," ↑says Riello, "on the one hand, we like costly, lavish things. But at the same time we have this morbid attraction for violence and for blood." In today's world, ↑Fabergé eggs look accordingly ...
 

 
initially via entry at boinboing

golden guns
Because of current events—namely Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti since today facing court again—and because I just discovered something different on which I will report later, I felt the urge to rewrite and revive an old entry I ↑originally posted over at ethno::log:
 

 
↑Bruce Sterling received the above picture from ↑William Gibson, ↑posted it at his weblog and commented: "Wow, a custom-detailed, one of a kind, post-consumer-altered MP5!" [Nitpick: a Heckler&Koch MP5k] Ain't that a fine example of aesthetic technology adaption? Envision an exhibition in an ethnographical museum, showing weapons like the above one—and of course the gold-plated AK-47s from Iraq's ex-elite:
 

 
The wooden barrel handle is engraved in Arabic:
 

 
The engraving reads: "Present by his Excellency Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq"—thanks to ↑Kurt Beck for the translation. There were more golden guns discovered in Iraq, for example this ↑Dragunov sniper rifle:
 

 
And now envision the size and kind of crowd that would flock into an exhibition like that ;-) Seriously: Those indeed are examples of the acculturation, or even cultural appropriation, of industrial artefacts by modifying them; and therefore an issue of sociocultural anthropology. Both, choice of the weapons, and the kind of modification are culturally informed. Decoration of weapons with ornaments is nothing special per se—it is done especially with hand guns like pistols and revolvers or hunting rifles. The examples in the pictures are peculiar, because we deal here with fully automatic weaponry, which is designed for combat, and combat only—that's the context of weapons like that.
 
golden pics via smugmug and alaska rifle club

animator vs. animation

 
The legacy of ↑Xiao Xiao lives on—in Alan Becker's ingenious ↑Animator vs. Animation "An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find—the brush tool, the eraser tool—to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself. —This took three long months ... I think it's worth it." I think so, too.
 
At least since the times of Tex Avery, cartoon characters becoming conscious of the shape of the world they live in, and that there's a whole universe around this world, is an ever resurfacing topic. Within the genre of ↵machinima this tradition is unbroken, see ↵counter existentialism and ↵the awakening. Can this tradition be traced back to ↵flatland? Or is this a little too far-fetched?
 
initially via entry at boingboing

afrigadget
solving everyday problems with African ingenuity
 

 
Yet another blog collecting instances of cultural appropriation of technology, in the case of ↑Afrigadget it's a group-blog: "The purpose of Afrigadget is to showcase African ingenuity with technology. Many times Africans do not have access to the same quality tools or items that are found in other areas of the world. What is available to be used to solve problems or fix equipment can be wide and varied. You would be surprised at what can be made, fixed or created with bailing wire, inner-tubes and wood." Afrigadget features not only high resolution pictures, but also the occasional you-tubed video clip.
 

bedford's appropriation
the social organisation of craftsmen's innovation in Sudan
project by Prof. Dr. ↑Kurt Beck, Chair of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth
 

 

On the streets of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, richly decorated trucks are a common vista. Occassionally this has been noted, alas, the fact escaped that the trucks are not merely outwardly decorated, but are reconstructed from scratch up in extremely unorthodox fashions, and thereby are adjusted to local conditions and indigenous cultural orientations. Without any kind of aid funds, neither from the state nor from development assistance programs, a surprisingly innovative milieu of truck mechanics has developed in Sudan. Originally stemming from the agrarian society's basic handicraft tradition the craftsmen practice their art with extraordinary creativity. Building upon exploratory fieldwork undertaken during fall 2003 (↵Beck 2004, 2005), the project investigates technological appropriation and the continuous re-invention of the Bedford truck, the associated practices of the workshop, and the meanwhile half-a-century old tradition of local truck building. Starting from a detailled survey of the working processes, focussing on the confluence of matter, vision, and embodied knowledge, the project aims at understanding the cultural and social organisation of technical creativity. The history of the technological appropriation of the truck is seen as a sum of small and smallest modifications, reinterpretations, improvements and rededications, framed by collective processes of learning within a community of practitioners featuring individual identities. A meticulous documentation of the truck reconstruction is supporting the whole project. For this the production of an ethnographical movie has been chosen as a means. The project ties in with Kurt Beck's work on Sudan, on cultural appropriation, and his contributions to the anthropology of work. It can be filed into the ranks of current attempts to resuscitate the anthropology of technology. Furthermore the project promises to deliver contributions to the anthropology of cultural appropriation of global goods and technologies, and insights into the actual courses which processes of technology transfer into developing nations take. In respect to anthropological research methods the endeavour harks back to techniques of visual anthropology and introduces methodological innovations suited to instruct the verbalization of implicit, non-propositional technical knowledge.
 

 

street use

 
That's exactly what every anthropologist interested in the cultural appropriation of technology needed online—Kevin Kelly's blog ↑street use "features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short—stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As ↑William Gibson said, "The street finds its own uses for technology.""
 
Heavily related entries are: ↵truck-canoe hybrids, ↵Bedford's metamorphosis: Hotbeds of creativity—the appropriation of the truck in Sudan, and ↵balineros—and in a way ↵perfect imperfect ... I especially like the ↑elegant thread.
 
via entry at william gibson ... how else?

gods of cyberia

 
Yet another proposal I just submitted a minute ago in reply to a call-for-papers. The hellish thing with sent-in abstracts is that they sometimes are accepted. And then you indeed have to write up the paper or article you suggested.
 

postmodern cyberpunk
Within its comparatively short time span of existence, ↑cyberpunkreview.com developed to be a genuine premium resource on cyberpunk and related issues. There is not only the vast collection of reviews, which was expanded from movie-reviews to including game- and literature-reviews as well, at its main page, but the ↑virtual meatspace quickly became a highly interesting forum, carrying some high-calibre discussions. I am especially entranced by the discussion-thread ↑Cyberpunk Narrative started by ↑illusivemind, dealing with the issue of cyberpunk being postmodern literature or not—and what good classifications like that do at all. In my view during the discussion again striking similarities between the project of contemporary sociocultural anthropology, ethnography and cyberpunk crept up:
 

I grabbed the text behind one of illusivemind's literature-hints and very likely will include it into my upcoming course on ↑cyberpunk and anthropology:
 

Most directly related entries: ↵writing culture and cyberpunk, ↵anthropology voight-kampff style, and ↵anthropology's shades.

hacking the himalayas

 
If I remember correctly it was back in 1987 that I was in Lhasa for the last time. Unfortunately [?] during my "career" my original regional focus, Karakoram and the Himalayas, somehow went out of sight and I defected to cyberanthropology. Now tech culture journalist and co-editor of ↑boingboing ↑Xeni Jardin travelled "to the top of the world to learn how ancient cultures adapt to a new, interconnected world while still holding on to their sacred traditions." Seen from my anthropologer's vantage point I'd jettison the "adapt" and would phrase the statement a bit differently, but we get the idea, I guess, and I deem it to be a good one. Miss Jardin's four-part series ↑"Hacking the Himalayas" is now online [audio and multimedia], additionally she has created a blog on the journey: ↑xeni.net/trek.

via entry at boingboing

wondermark hair gel

 
The ↑webcomic above is copyrighted by ↑David Malki ! and to be found at ↑wondermark.com ... "Although he is an experienced artist and graphic designer, David does not draw the figures in Wondermark; rather, they are culled from a variety of 19th-century primary sources courtesy of the Rare Books Dept. at the Los Angeles Central Library, as well as his own ever-growing collection."
 
via entry at boingboing

martyr fuller
a sports-journalist's biased commentary
 
Last night 100-metres-men Olympic champion Merton Fuller was belatedly disqualified because of the results of a "doping test" done within the hour after his triumph. Inside one of the joints of his prosthetic augmentation a silicon-based "banned lubricant" was discovered. The tragedy of the case lies in the fact that none of the lubricant's ingredients is to be found on the list of banned substances. Neither is the composition of the lubricant illegal. This is little wonder as there is no list of banned substances since 01 January 2020. So, what happened yesterday evening?
 
Whenever an athlete is nominated for the Olympics, a complete documentation of the organic and anorganic parts, of the software used, and of its workings has to be filed with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). Because all of this quite naturally is intellectual property of the sponsoring company, strict confidentiality has to be maintained. A bone of contention for discussion since this rule has been introduced—countless suspicions have been voiced that crucial information has been leaked to rival companies. This already should be reason enough to suspend the rule.
 
After every event the system at once gets disassembled in full by IAAF-technicians. Every piece is scrutinized and the whole lot is compared to the list of parts filed beforehand. No representative of the athlete's owner is allowed to be present during that process, which is completely non-public. Exactly that happened to Fuller yesterday. Every part of him perfectly matched his file, the official report states. To accomplish this task of comparison the IAAF goes for lengths, heaven knows why, and does a chemical analysis of every substance used. So it was done with the lubricant in question as well. Once the molecular watermark had been decoded it was discovered that it was manufactured by a Californian company. And against California trade sanctions are applied, therefore it is illegal to use artefacts produced there. To make the absurdness complete, the company is only legally based in California, its production facilities are located in Qinghai. Since several months already an application to relocate the company's legal base from San Diego to Xining is pending with the courts. But all those facts did not help, Fuller was disqualified, because somewhere inside him a submicroscopical imprint said "San Diego".
 
Immediately after Fuller's disqualification was made known, a public upcry arose and within minutes Ben Johnson, commentator-in-chief at CyberSportsNetwork (CSN), appeared live on air and delivered an impressive speech, which sports officials should learn by heart: "Sports have to be free from restrictions, be them of the political or economical kind. Sports have to be free from ideas long overcome, because this ideas only serve the interests of lobbyists trying to instrumentalize athletics for their ends. Stop the nonsensical practice of documentation, and delete the concept of 'human athletes' from the rulebooks. Since 1896," Johnson continued, "when Tom Burke ran the hundred in 12.0 seconds in Athens, all we want to see at the Olympics is world's fastest creature on two legs." Every upright athletics devotee will agree that last night, when Fuller ran the soul out of his body and finished the hundred in 5.27 seconds, we definitely saw world's fastest creature on two legs.
 
Johnson indeed knows what he is talking about. You might know him as world's most sought-after track-and-field commentator, but he himself wrote history and was a cornerstone in the ending of the madness in respect to official sports-rules. Until today a partial ending only, as yesterday's events have shown. At the Seoul Olympics in 1988 Ben Johnson ran the 100 metres in 9.79 seconds making him the fastest human ever. But he was deprived of his gold medal three days later because Stanozolol, a so-called "banned substance" back then, was found in his urine sample. In fact he was not treated fairly by the authorities. They cast him out and they were jealous because he turned in the fastest time ever run by a human and it was impossible at the time. Not before 1999 another man was able to cover the hundred in 9.79: Maurice Greene. In 2002 Tim Montgomery beat the time by 0.01 ... and has been "found guilty" of using "performance enhancing drugs", and his record, just as Johnson's, has been retroactively deleted. The disqualification madness went on for another eight years. Then Ben Johnson finally was rehabilitated and declared to have been the world-record-holder for 100m-dash with pharmaceutical augmentation only for an amazing eleven years.
 
Astoundingly enough, after the dated banning of drugs fell in 2010, the world-record on the 100 metres couldn't be improved further, which gave high rise to speculations on undetected use of drugs during the decades before. By then technology already had evolved enough to allow prosthetic-enhanced human athletes to par with the pharmaceutical-only augmented ones. But again short-sightedness and conservativism did not allow to open the competitions for prosthetics. We had to wait another eleven years until rationality was able to win. In 2020 the first open—and truly fair—competitions were held, known as the Games of the XXXII Olympiad. Carl Lewis VI., heavily enhanced by CyberBolic prosthetics, ran the 100 in phenomenal 8.47 seconds. It would have been a perfect triumph, if the heat wouldn't have been overshadowed by a tragic accident. At 79.80 meters the right upper limb of Merton Fuller, the till then leading man, exploded in a blood-red cloud due to malfunction of his Miyamoto-Soho prosthetics. Later it was found that the malfunction was provoked by faulty over-calibration of the system by Miyamoto-Soho's technicians. Immediately after the accident Fuller was brought into the company's nearby laboratory-complex by helicopter. His life could be saved, but he had lost faith in Miyamoto-Soho. Half a year later he switched to CyberBolic as well. Ironically in the same week CyberBolic was bought by Miyamoto-Soho, but Fuller stayed with the company. He came back in 2024 and won the Olympic 100 in 7.89 seconds. The slowest in the field of the eight finalists finished in 8.32 seconds.
 
Fuller, being legal property of Miyamoto-Soho Inc., retreated, or was retreated, to Miyamoto-Soho premises. The next decades he mainly spent at the company's facilities in Edo, it is said. It went quiet around Fuller, only the occassional unfounded rumours of Fuller having died and resurrected again several times popped up. But this babble abated. Only ten years back from now Carl Lewis VI. was turned in by Miyamoto-Soho, too. When early in January this year Merton Fuller again was nominated for the Olympics and presented to the public, rumours started again. It was said that it was no more Fuller, but a hybrid constructed out of Fuller and Lewis—just as if that would matter at all in the limelight of the fulminant performance he presented to all of us.
 
Last night, almost exactly 36 years after his last hooray, it would have been Fuller's perfect comeback. But still irrationality seems to know no boundaries and it was taken away from him—due to "short-sighted economo-political correctness," as the meanwhile immortal Ben Johnson so rightly commented.
 
—zephyrin_xirdal for CSN, 08/13/2060

spontaneous paraphysical experience
the mystery of the broken bicycle tyre inflator
 
The uncanny breaks into everyday-life spontaneously and unpredictably. Today it hit me for the third time. The first two instances were "The riddle of the vanished filling station attendant" and "The amazing locked away broken flask" which I may relate at a later date. In both cases it took me quite some time to construct satisfying explanations for the events experienced. For today's phenomenon I still completely lack an explanation.
 
This morning I rode by bicycle to the office. Early on my way I realized that there was way too less air inside the rear tyre. So I stopped at the curbside, got myself off the bicycle and the tyre inflator out of the rucksack. I own a single stroke mini pump with alloy barrel and ergonomic T-handle by Scott USA. The pump's special feature is the handle, which very conveniently can be rotated by 90° into operating position, allowing an ergonomically good grip while pumping:
 

 
It's my habit to count the strokes in order to get an idea of how much air I actually force into the tyre. Exactly at stroke No. 101 the pump came apart. Meaning that the T-handle still was in my right hand, but was nor more attached to the piston's stem. The pump is already since several years in my possession and was much used, and after enough time tools brake. No big deal. Thing is, it was, and still is, not broken. I will explain the matter—have a look at the picture, which was taken within the first minute after the occurrence of the phenomenon:
 

 
At the end of the piston's rod or stem a pill-shaped plastic piece is screwed on. This piece features a drill hole through which the aluminium axis fits, around which in turn the handle bar can be rotated 90°. At stroke 101 the handle suddenly was detached from the stem, with the aluminium axis still being in place and the plastic part's eyelet still intact! So what must have happened is that the aluminium axis permeated the plastic eyelet's brim, or vice versa, or both, without leaving a trace of this process. Matter through matter! As soon as I had realized that I took a couple of "proof pictures" by means of my cell's camera. Documentation finished I started to fathom the phenomenon by reassembling the pump. First I had to take the aluminium axis out of its place in the handle. I pushed it with one of my keys as far as possible and then used my teeth as pliers to get it out completely. Then I inserted the eyelet into the handle and pushed the axis back through both parts. Now the inflator is just as it was before and works perfect again.
 
Now the only explanation I can imagine goes like this: You do not pump in a straight line, as a consequence somehow a tiny vector of force builds up, which pushes at the axis sideways. When you pump repeatedly, and I did a hundred repetitions, the axis gets pushed so far to the side that it allows the plastic eyelet to come off. But this explanation seems very unlikely because of several reasons. Firstly, when you pump the axis' ends are covered and thereby blocked by the two sides of the thumb-crotch. Secondly, when the handle came off I immediately glanced at it and saw the axis being firmly in its correct place. I can not imagine where the force should have come from which could have returned the axis instantaneously to its place. Especially as the axis fits snuggly into the handle's drillholes and substantial force has to be submitted to push it into or out of position. During the day I dissassembled and reassembled the handlebar multiple times and scrutinized every part, but honestly, I can not come up with any solution.

realities of university and academia
Back in May I in here summed up a part of the ↵situation at my institute, especially describing the situation of the Lehrbeauftragte. Today I read oneman's ↑"Living and Teaching in the Information Economy" which perfectly complements my experiences and observations. See also ↑"The "Informal Economy" of the Information University" by Marc Bousquet, to which oneman refers. Well, I do neither adjunct nor part-time labor at the university, as the Lehrbeauftragte do, but am a Wissenschaftlicher Assistent, the German equivalent to an assistant professor struggling for tenure. So my situation is decidedly different, but ... please read Thomas Eriksen's tremendously insightful ↑"Farewell to the gift economy?".

stroll

 
After so many shiny weeks with brilliant steel-blue sky and burning sun in a row the heat finally is gone and an eternal seeming downpour has taken its place. But it's sunday and I nevertheless undertook a lengthy stroll along the river. Lots of new graffiti to be seen. I'll continue my stroll in a minute or so—eternally.

from dusk till dawn
night of the living dead
 

 
When hell is full the anthropologists will return to Earth—good gracious, we all look like straight out of "Doom III". Amazing what some months of coursework can do to people ...
 
UPDATE:
 
dusk till doom ethnoparty photoshop contest—mix and r.i.p.
 
Well, it's not my fault, I only had a look at the ↑photos taken at the last ethnoparty and unwillingly associations with the computergame "Doom III" and the movie "From Dusk Till Dawn" came up. So I sat down, gathered some eerie portraits and made the composite picture seen above. ↑2R saw it, fired up photoshop and posted a first manipulated picture. Quite naturally ↑fab chimed in.
 
The holidays have arrived, so let's fool around big time. Here are the terms: Grab one or more pictures from the ↑ethnoparty collection, think something up along the lines of "From Dusk Till Dawn" and/or "Doom III", something vampire/horror-related, fire up photoshop and go ahead. The Web carries a shitload of screencaps from said movie and game. Use Google's image search as a start.
 
Have your picture(s) hosted somewhere, your own server, or whatyouhave, and put an image link into the comments to this story. I'll grab the pictures, put them on my server and will replace the image link in your comment so that you do not have to host the picture anylonger by yourself. If you can't host it anywhere, or don't know how, send them to me by e-mail: Alexander[dot]Knorr[at]vka[dot]fak12[dot]uni-muenchen[dot]de. I'll post the according comment for you.
 
If someone wants to set up something better elsewhere [maybe with an upload feature, I can't do this in here], go ahead and notify me.
 
Now have fun by looking at the pictures in this story's comments.

beyond cyberpunk
a do-it-yourself guide to the future
 

 
Brooks Landon's 1993 article ↑Hypertext and science fiction, a review of Branwyn, Sugarman, et al.'s 1991 HyperCard classic ↑"Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-It-Yourself Guide to the Future" [ah yes, it's available on the Web meanwhile] starts with a gorgeous rant I just have to quote almost in full:
 

Read the whole review, it's very enlightening in respect to cyberpunk, and don't miss the reviewed item itself, ↑"Beyond Cyberpunk!, about which Landon says that it "is firmly grounded not just in cyberpunk, one mode of SF [science fiction] thinking, but in the basic attitude toward the world that makes SF an epistemology rather than just a genre." It contains e.g. ↑Bruce Sterling's ↑"Cyberpunk in the nineties" [the link to the text I had provided earlier seems to be dead meanwhile]. But "the focus of this hypertext," again according to Landon, "is on cyberculture. It does offer information about music, body editing, comics, graphic novels, anime, zines, techno-slang, performance art—all "strains of this curious cultural mutation" that was first clearly articulated in cyberpunk fiction."
 
Another worthwhile piece at ↑Science Fiction Studies is Russell Blackford's ↑"Reading the Ruined Cities", a review of Sabine Heuser's "Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction" (2003). My favourite excerpts:
 

Has the bug bitten? Then you'll dig Rob Latham's ↑"Cyberpunk = Gibson = Neuromancer", a thrashing of Slusser & Shippey's collection of essays "Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative" (1992). Here's the opening paragraph:
 

Ah, to hell, if I am already at it, here is the rest of what I dug up today. Cheryl Laz's article on using science fiction to teach sociology assures my idea of the anthropology & cyberpunk course:
 

In ↑Douglas Kellner's 2002 article ↑"Theorizing globalization" [.pdf | 450KB] (Sociological Theory 20(3): 285-305) I stumbled over this sentence: "Yet the events of September 11 may open a new era of Terror War that will lead to the kind of apocalyptic futurist world depicted by cyberpunk fiction." See also his ↑"9/11, Spectacles of terror, and media manipulation: A critique of Jihadist and Bush media politics" [.pdf | 248KB], and ↑"Theorizing September 11: Social Theory, History, and Globalization" [.pdf | 297KB].
 
... and finally something for the aficionados ;-)
 

appropriating kuhn

 
Again things are falling into place. Most of the day I spent with thinking about cultural appropriation, the literary genre cyberpunk, anthropology and the connections between all three 'things'. Finally I wrote up ↵appropriating cyberpunk hinted to today's achievements of mine and went out to haunt the bookstores for a new copy of Appadurai's "Modernity at large" because my own copy somehow got lost—give it back, you bastard, whoever you are to whom I lent it. The first three stores didn't have it in stock, the fourth's clerk slammed the door right into my face at 18:01h and meticulously locked it from well inside, not even throwing a glance at me. Somehow I can't get rid of the feeling that he was the very man whom I lent my original copy ... Anyway, the only thing left was to resort to 'my' Gentlemen Loser and have a beer. So I did and it gave me enough strength for returning to the office and try to do some more work. Immediately after having fired up the machines again I checked ↑William Gibson's blog, and hey presto ... during the day I had thought about the need of anthropology to engage itself into current societal and political discourses, and that writers always had taken up pressing events. I had thought about the cyberpunk-writers' apparent fondness of social sciences, anthropology in particular. And I had thought about cyberpunk being about cultural appropriation. To prove this I quoted Gibson's 1989 sentence from his essay ↑Rocket Radio: "The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined." [see ↵writing culture and cyberpunk] Just three days ago William Gibson commented on the current events in the Near East, associated them with Thomas S. Kuhn's seminal book "The structure of scientific revolutions" (1962) [which is tremendously important for the social and cultural sciences, the anthropologies of knowledge and technology in particular] and concluded his blog-entry ↑Hammer, meet wasp's nest like this:
 

Now, do the things fall into place, or what?

god talks blogs

 
Embrace this quote from ↑Sir Timothy Berners-Lee's blog:
 

"When I invented the Web," what a statement! And now we definitely know that in our academical papers we have to spell "Web" with an uppercase "W". Just like we have to spell "Internet" with a capital "I"—the latter custom needed a lengthy academical discussion to come into being. There can't be a discussion on the correct spelling of "Web" now. Why? Hell, because the creator-god wrote so. Apart from this, everyone into the net-neutrality discussion, don't miss timbl's comments: ↑Neutrality of the Net and ↑Net Neutrality: This is serious.

appropriating cyberpunk

 
In his article ↑"The economies of online cooperation: Gifts and public goods in cyberspace" (↵Kollock 1999) ↑Peter Kollock says about digital goods:
 

Well, the same is true for knowledge in general, consequently for anthropological knowledge in particular, too. Since 1999, when I met ↑Kurt Beck [meanwhile ↑Chair of Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth] for the first time, I appropriated the concept of cultural appropriation from him. It quickly became my pet paradigm and the whole ↵maxmod-project is built upon and around it. But as knowledge is indivisible, Kurt has the concept still, too [see his current project ↑"Bedford's appropriation—The social organisation of craftsmen's innovation in Sudan"]. Knowledge and ideas are gifts not to be given, but to be shared.
 
The mentioned project is what should occupy me during the majority of my working time. But, as the faithful reader may have noticed till now, I am prone to reading and watching cyberpunk. So I appropriated cyberpunk for my project and more or less privately started to fuse the concept of cultural appropriation, [cyber]anthropology, cyberculture, and cyberpunk. This fusion I will celebrate next term.
 
In here I already mentioned that I will teach two courses during the upcoming winterterm (↵teaching appropriation and ↵teaching cyberpunk), now the websites for both courses are online: ↑Appropriation and ↑Cyberpunk. Until now the sites only carry the courses' abstracts (in English and German), the dates of the sessions, and general information. The final schedules of topics do not exist yet, I will work them out in the next days and weeks. During that time the sites will be used as a collection of material on the respective topics—I already started to compile my bibliography of choice on appropriation [scroll down to the bottom of the course's website]—apart from that: have a nice holiday ;-)