Sdtrk: ‘Love of the loved’ by Cilla Black

Obviously Norelco were racking their brains, wondering how to specifically grab my attention. Gentlemen, your research dollars were not entirely wasted.

Much like Björk’s famous ‘All is full of love‘ video, the Heineken DraughtKeg Gynoid, and the lass from the Svedka vodka campaign from a couple of years ago, sexy machines are beginning to crop up everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but it’s a start. But when I see marketing like this, it gives me hope that more and more people are becoming more hip and open to the concept of Technosexuality. Fantastic!
She’s actually a live-action version of a character that appears in a Flash-animated serial called ‘Robot skin‘, that looks like a hideously-animated version of The Matrix… as sponsored by Norelco. They piqued my interest, but they failed to hold my interest. Back to the drawing board!

Personally, I prefer my Gynoids with fake skin (a fact well-documented), but I wouldn’t say no to any of these Sorayama-style Synthetiks, especially Norelco’s ‘Grooming Robot’. Shaving is a bloody hassle, but she’d definitely make it fun! Although it wouldn’t cut down on shaving time, meaning of course, ‘time not exactly spent shaving’, nudge nudge wink wink. There’s pros and cons to everything, really

Technorati tags: Gynoid, Android, robot, Hajime Sorayama, Technosexual

Sdtrk: ‘Romeo’s distress’ by Christian death

ME: Hi, Mrs (muddling through impossibly over-syllabic Russian name)?
*pause*
GLORIOUS SOVIET MATRON: rrrrRussian. English. No. *click*

I laughed like a drain for like three solid minutes

Sdtrk: ‘Intercity 215’ by Merzbow

This can be, in no way, shape, or form, a good thing.

Gaping hole found in universe
Thu Aug 23, 2007 7:31PM EDT | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.

The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.
the rest of the article is here

Let us… let us consider this for a moment. Space contains an awful lot of, well, space, but it’s not completely empty, as we all know. Then there’s the issue of dark matter, which is, quoth Wiki, ‘hypothetical matter of unknown composition that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter’. Which basically means that although it’s bastard hard to detect, there is something there where you’d think there’s nothing there, out there.* But these astronomers and scientists have stated that this void they’ve stumbled upon contains no stars, no planets, no black holes, no dark matter, no nothing. Actually, the only thing it seems to have in it is Nothing.

I don’t know about you, but with the discovery of this Void, a number of various apocalyptic scenarios are forming in my mind. You know: a great rift between universes, the walls of reality being rent asunder, Elder Gods of unspeakable power and malevolence pouring into our fragile little cosmos to wreak devastation until the end of time itself, stars winking out one by one, breathable atmospheres of inhabited planets turning into blood, the endless screams of anguished souls praying for a sweet release that will never arrive… huh. I think I’ve just described a typical day at work

*The Wiki entry then goes on to say, ‘It has been noted that the names “dark matter” and “dark energy” serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance, much as the marking of early maps with “terra incognita”‘, which I found to be pretty funny

Sdtrk: ‘Welcome to the circus’ by Susumu Hirasawa

This occurred while I was at work, but ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th visitor yesterday! Who are these people? Actually, the thing is is that a lot of the hits aren’t garnered from actual humans; they’re from Google image search results, so that hardly counts. So perhaps it’s better to say that ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th symbolic visitor yesterday. N.B.: that’s not necessarily a more accurate thing to say, just better. Yeah.

I don’t really understand that either, but it’s late and my sinuses are testing my patience. Nevertheless, Thanks to all of you for stopping round!
*toots horn, stumbles off to bed*

Sdtrk: ‘Ne cherche pas à plaire’ by Mireille Darc & France Gall

A fitting epilogue to my whole Wacky Voyage into Myspaceville. The ironic thing is that I actually found this on a Myspace profile.

And I’d spotted this outside of a party store a couple of days ago:

But how exactly would the Devil throw up the devil horns? That’s one for the philosophers

Sdtrk: ‘Ashes to ashes’ by David Bowie

Apart from the heat and humidity, there’s one more really good reason why I despise August: the fucking Woodward Dream Cruise. Ugh.
Since it’s that time of year again, I will now trot out the post I wrote back in 2005, concerning this seasonal atrocity. As SafeTinspector says, if you haven’t read it before, it’s new to you.

Jeeves, fetch me my rocket launcher

The Woodward Dream cruise, if you’re lucky enough to not be familiar with it, is basically an excuse for all the gearheads and nostalgia freaks in the state (as well as a couple from neighbouring states) to cruise up and down Woodward, which is the main drag of the Tri-county area, as well as the dividing line between the west side and the east side. It’s ostensibly a sad reenactment of the ‘good ol’ days’ of the Fifties and Sixties, when Detroit had both a functioning auto industry and places worth visiting, and young people would drive aimlessly up and down Woodward in their oversized automobiles. Now, once a year for the past.. however many years.. all those individuals who grew up during those years that have reconditioned ‘classic’ cars spend an entire week-end, driving aimlessly up and down Woodward, slowing traffic down, and being a general nuisance.

Superior!

Sdtrk: ‘Across the universe’ by Laibach

At times, I’m glad I’m not rich, as I am a bonafide sucker — perhaps one could even call me a sucka — for obscure and anachronistic technologies. ‘Technological white elephants,’ as Danielle Dax once called them. I used to own one of the infamous Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorders back when they debuted in the late Eighties — you know, the ones that record sound and image onto normal audiocassette tape — and since I sold mine, I start each day weeping softly into my pillow, regretting the tragic mistake that I’d made. Especially since working PXL-2000s run about $400 – $500 on eBay these days.
So you can imagine my Glee Meter (and my Esoterica Meter) going well into the red when I saw this online: VinylVideo.

VinylVideo™ is a fake archeology of media.
We designed a device that retrieves videosignals (moving image and sound) stored on a conventional Vinyl (LP) record. The discontinuity in the development of electronic film technology constitutes the historical background for this fictitious video disc technology: Even though television, the electronic transmission of moving images, had been feasible since the late 1920’s, storage of these images became possible only after development of the video recorder in 1958. Recording images for private use did not become available until the mass introduction of the VCR in the early 1980’s (!). Before, the average consumer was confined to use Super-8 film, a technology dating back to 1900, usually without sound. Recording of television was not possible at all.
VinylVideo™ reconstructs a homemovie technology of the late 40’s/early 50’s and thus bridges a gap in the history of consumer technology. The images are stored on a conventional analog record, with a running time of ca. 8 min / side (Singles 4 min / side). These records are played on a standard turntable with an ordinary diamond needle, the signals are then processed by the VinylVideo Home Kit into a videosignal that is displayed on a black and white TV-set.
taken from the presskit

So it’s basically like the bastard child of Edison’s wax cylinders and SelectaVision, RCA’s well-meaning-but-doomed analogue storage format from the Eighties. Huh!

The site is fab, in and of itself; there’s a lengthy infomercial that explains, in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion, what VinylVideo has over boring conventional television. Essentially, VinylVideo is a medium for video artists to make their art arguably more available to the public — it’s easier and cheaper to purchase a VinylVideo kit than it is to buy a work by Nam June Paik — and its super-lo-fi technology (they call the image’s quality trashpeg, tee hee) makes it easy to use and alter for one’s own purposes, if you’re into the whole deconstructionist thing. Personally, the biggest draw for someone like me is that it’s composed of sexy retro-tech!

You hook up your telly and home hi-fi turntable to this outsized converterboxthing, fiddle with a few knobs to fine-tune the image, and voila! Greyscale visuals flicker across your screen in a ghostly fashion, for as long as the record plays. The images that the conversion present seem like the perfect sort of medium for videos done by the growing crop of ‘eldritchtronica’ artists, such as those found on the Ghost box and Blank workshop labels — even the high-contrast pictures seem washed-out and murky. Lovely stuff…

It’s a shame I’m not rich, as the playback kit alone for VinylVideo goes for the horrifying amount of just over $3,400 USD. Kinda makes the highway robbery that extortionists want for a PXL-2000 seem quite reasonable and pleasant, eh?

Technorati tags: VinylVideo, Ghost box, Blank workshop, SelectaVision, Fisher-Price PXL-2000