Sdtrk: ‘memory one’ by The caretaker

The only fab thing about being employed again? The money. Or, as Winnie the Pooh might have it, the munny.

Over the course of the past three days, I’ve purchased
+ an airsoft MP40, courtesy of the Bay of e, so I can pretend I’m with the Wehrmacht. With the exception of the highly-coveted P90, my airsoft collection is complete

+ volume 2 of Ultraman, in conjunction with a $10 BestBuy giftcard that I received on Christmas. Initially my plan was to either buy the Prisoner thinpack, or the ‘Doctor Who: The beginning’ box set, but I forgot I was at BestBuy. ‘If it’s not brand new, or a hot item popular with the masses, we ain’t got it.’ Fuckers. O well, I wasn’t even really looking for Ultraman v2, so it all worked out

+ Borders had Emailed me, saying I had until 31 Jan to use up my Holiday rewards savings (a grand total of $7.63), so I hit the location near my work and grabbed volume 2 of Monster, and an Audrey Hepburn calendar for 2007. Not my ideal choice for a calendar, but 1) they were 50% off, and 2) that was the best they had left out of their remaining selection. Thankfully, I’ve always found Audrey hot, so it’s okay. But at the register, I was informed that I’d need a hardcopy of that Email I got, in order to use my savings, as they start tallying savings for 2007 after 01 Jan. Ergh. So I guess I’ll be using my $7.63 to buy Monster v3

+ Also within the same quarter mile as BestBuy and Borders was a GameStop, where I used some trade-in credit dating back to 2005 to get $20 off Samurai warriors 2 finally. The trade-in receipts were yellow and fading, much to the register biscuit’s astonishment. ‘Dude… were these printed on the Declaration of Independence?’ he’d asked. I chuckled

+ My hex key set that I’d ordered through the corporate gift catalogues issued to us at work arrived through the post! From now on, if I ever have a hex placed upon me, I can unlock it with no trouble whatsoever

+ Finally, be witness unto my New Cellphone.

No idea why the pic is blurry — more than likely, it’s due to Shi-chan’s complete inability to hold still — but yes, those are gaily-decorated human skulls as my wallpaper. (If you’re fully intrigued, you can download a copy for yourself from here.) But it’s a Treo Smartphone by Palm, which means that unlike my old Kyocera 7135, it’s smaller, lighter, has a faster processor, a built-in QWERTY keyboard, a 1.3 MP camera, a camcorder, and won’t crash like three times a week. Summation: it is a sexay machine.

So yeah! Stuff Week, or as the Germans might have it, Stüfwoch. O wait — now what the hell is this??

Sdtrk: ‘Der Rauber und der Prinz’ by DAF

Not so much earlier than right now, I had the vague stirrings of an altogether different post in mind, but then I saw the following clip of Delia Derbyshire, the doyenne of musique concrète during the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s heyday, posted to YouTube and decided, ‘well, that other post is gonna have to wait a wee bit longer.’

Delia Derbyshire is one of the earliest and most influential electronic sound synthesists in history. She was musically active from 1962 until the mid seventies, then briefly again for a few years before she died in 2001 at the age of 64.

Although her revolutionary sounds are familiar to over a hundred million people through the theme to the television series “Doctor Who” and the seminal album of 1969 “An Electric Storm” she was hardly ever credited and her name is almost unknown. The bulk of her musical production and atmospheric sound for television and radio programmes is on tape in the BBC Sound Archives. Her own personal collection of tapes was also consigned to the archive on her death and since then only three new tracks have been released on compilation albums with music from other composers. Most will probably never be heard again. A catalogue was made of the Archives, but it has not been published.
taken from this site

Gods, she’s so hot, both physically and creatively. And keep in mind that she and the other premiere members of the Radiophonic workshop, namely John Baker and David Cain, were creating things such as loops and sequencing with analogue equipment. No fancy ProTools or laptop magick here, which makes what they did all the more astounding. I recall seeing another interview with her on the recent DVD for ‘An unearthly child’, the first ever Doctor Who episode, and she was saying that sometimes they would make tapeloops that would literally run the length of a hallway. And naturally, everything was hand-spliced back then. Hand-spliced. Can you imagine?
And yes, I absolutely melted when I heard the way she pronounced ‘punctuating’.

Would you like to learn more about Delia Derbyshire, the woman who helped revolutionise 20th century music? Yes, yes you would. Why not stop round the appropriately-named delia-derbyshire.org, and kill an hour or two?

Sdtrk: ‘My little brother’ by Art brut

KITECH, Korean creators of the EveR series of Gynoids, have been making all sorts of ace statements recently! You can’t stop ’em!

Korea to Create Dancing Android
By Kim Tae-gyu, Staff Reporter | 29 November, 2006

Korean scientists are working on creating the first android capable of walking and dancing like an entertainer.

Baeg Moon-hong, who crafted the country’s first female androids (technically gynoids) called EveR-1 and EveR-2, Wednesday said that his team aims to develop a mobile model by 2010.

“Beginning next January, we plan to upgrade our EveR series to EveR-3 by 2008 and EveR-4 by 2010,’’ said Baeg, a senior researcher at the state-run Korea Institute of Industrial Technology.

“EveR-4 will be able to walk and dance as well as sing a song. Its intelligence will also substantially improve by then,’’ the 48-year-old said.

There are several humanoids that can move with a human-like gait, including Hubo of Korea and ASIMO of Japan, but scientists have yet to develop a walking android.

“Humanoids have thick legs because of the many modules, motors and actuators incorporated in them. Thick legs are OK for humanoids, but we must cram all of them into the thin legs of androids since the latter should look like real flesh and blood human beings,’’ Baeg said.
the rest of the article is here

I have to stop here and give a hearty thumbs-up to the reporter, for actually using the term ‘Gynoid’ in their article. Well done sir/madam! There’s quite a difference between Androids and Gynoids — mainly that Androids are designed to look like male Organik humans and Gynoids are modelled after female Organik humans — so it’s best to get used to using the proper terms now. After all, you wouldn’t call a young lass ‘mister’, would you? Unless, of course, you have poor eyesight. Or you’re utterly deranged.

If they can pull this off, that’ll be beyond amazing. Mechanical balancers are a tricky bit of business, however, and being able to put all of that machinery into a Synthetik and still have her retain a petite shape and weight (well, more than likely, the first proper Gynoids are probably going to be rather heavy — EveR-2 Muse clocks in at 135 lbs, and she doesn’t even walk) will be quite an accomplishment. Given their track record, KITECH should be able to do it, though. Unless Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kokoro Co. Ltd pull it off with Actroid-chan first, of course.

But think about it: in three years’ time, we might very well have mobile Synthetiks. Three years is really not that long of a timeframe. Granted, we’re not going to have Cherry 2000 right out of the gate, but as Sidore-chan would say, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was I’.
The fab thing with technological advances, particularly in this day and age, is that it takes relatively less and less time to move forward — for instance, it took less time to go from computers that used punchcards to the laptop that I’m typing this post on, than it did to get from the wheel to the first horseless carriage — that’s the phenomenon that futurist Ray Kurzweil calls ‘the Law of Accelerating Returns‘. I’ve known about this concept for a while; I just never knew it had a name. Note: must look more into this Kurzweil bloke… But the upshot of it is is now that we’ve had Gynoids since 2003 (the year Actroid Repliee made her debut), the developments will start to come more and more quickly, each subsequent iteration being better than the previous one.

Really, what it all boils down to is one very important question: Should I start saving up for a Gynoid now, or should I wait a couple of years?

Technorati tags: Android, Gynoid, EveR-1, EveR-2 Muse, KITECH, Actroid, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Kokoro, Ray Kurzweil

Sdtrk: ‘Speedlearn broadcast’ by F. Peters

I swear to christ, I’m gonna build a TARDIS, go back in time, and flat-out murder whoever invented the flu with my bare and twitching hands. This is utter bullshit. Not only have I missed two days of work — under normal circumstances, that’d be something I’d be crowing about, but I like having money — and worse, I’ve not showered or shaved in two days, so I resemble some fucking hippie filth. Normally, I wouldn’t admit that sort of thing publically, but I’m brimful of Alka-selter/Halls/some generic anti-flu drug, so I don’t fucking care. Frankly, I’m surprised taht Im lucid enugh to speling as goood as I am.
So to everyone I need to Email back — you know who you are — give me a couple of days to remember how to spell my own name, and I’ll get back to you immediatement. Okay? Okay!

In the interim, I’ve just downloaded all three volumes of the soundtrack to ‘The prisoner’ from X-Y-Z Cosmonaut’s CosmoBlog, one of those crazy .mp3 blogs that I scour on a daily basis. One of my favourite episodes was ‘The General’, the one with the supercomputer with the subliminal learning technique that it televised to all the inhabitants of the Village, and I recall that tune that was played during the educational broadcasting was very very ace, as it was like all of Broadcast and Ghost box‘s output condensed into 42 seconds. So I’ve been playing it over and over for the past hour! And now you can hear it, too! FOREVER

Also, I want a Nissan Figaro, just like Sarah Jane Smith drives.

Okay? Okay! Back to lying down! But first, let me stumble over to the bog and puke some more WOO YAY

Sdtrk: ‘Wattwurm’ by Liliental

Looks like Juergen Specht wasn’t the first to have an Organik lass portray a Synthetik in a photoshoot. Hardly surprising, but still. But it looks like Italian artist Mario A. beat him to it seven years ago, with his ‘ma poupée japonaise’ series.

Mario A.’s ‘ma poupée japonaise’

Slightly NSFW, but then it depends on where you work, of course… Mario A., if I had a glass nearby, I would raise it to you

Sdtrk: ‘Kenickie folks’ by Hideki Kaji

Right right; now I see why there’s been a metric ton of people over the course of the past few days, hitting ‘Shouting etc etc’ by looking for Ronald A. Dotson. I’m peering at my stats, going ‘WTF??’ Not ‘what the fuck??’, mind you, but making a perplexed sound that resembles ‘wittif’.

Mannequin fetishist could get life
Associated Press | Mon Jan 1, 5:33 PM ET

FERNDALE, Mich. – A man who has a history of smashing windows to indulge his fetish for female mannequins could draw a long prison term for his latest arrest. Ronald A. Dotson, 39, of Detroit faces up to life in prison if convicted of a charge of attempted breaking and entering at a cleaning-supply company in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale.

The potential life sentence is because prosecutors charged him as a habitual offender. Authorities say he has at least six convictions for breaking and entering and a stint in state prison over the last 13 years.

Ferndale District Judge Joseph Longo ordered Dotson to stand trial following a preliminary examination on Thursday, The Daily Tribune of Royal Oak reported. The judge ordered him jailed unless he posts a $15,000 bond.

Dotson was arrested Oct. 9 after police say he smashed a window at a cleaning-supply company to get at a female mannequin dressed in a black and white French maid’s uniform. He had been out of prison for less than a week.

Dotson was arrested in Ferndale in July 2000 and later convicted for breaking and entering at a women’s clothing shop to get at a mannequin in a pink dress with bobbed hair.

Ferndale police also arrested Dotson in 1993 after finding him in an alley behind a woman’s store with three lingerie-clad mannequins. He also has similar convictions in Detroit and suburban Oak Park.
___

Information from: The Daily Tribune, http://www.dailytribune.com

Oddly enough, the Trib doesn’t actually have this story on its website. What does that say about the Tribune? *coughfishwrapcough*

Now, I know exactly where that shop that he broke into is — I pass by it at least once a week when I’m Out and About — and I’ve seen that Mannequin. She’s cute, but definitely not worth risking a prison sentence.
And I have to go even further by saying that yes, our Ronald certainly isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but I think a long-term conviction is quite literally a waste of taxpayer’s money. Don’t you think it’d just be cheaper to get that tosser a couple of Mannequins, and let him go crazy? Honestly, they’re not that expensive, especially if you buy used. Now if his problem isn’t based on wanting to have it off with a Mannequin, but is actually centred on simply breaking and entering/theft, then by all means, get him some psychiatric treatment. But throwing that silly tosser in prison simply cos he doesn’t have access to Mannequins is, well, silly. Sure, it’s not as if he couldn’t buy one, but it’s been proven that he’s just not that clever. He’s an idiot, but ultimately, he’s a harmless idiot — it’s not as if he’s knifing people in the streets or whatever. There are worse individuals out there that deserve harsher punishment.

You gotta love ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’. The execution of Saddam Hussein? Not a jot, not a single syllable. Some story about some local loony who attempted to make sexy time love explosion with a Mannequin? Well, he gets not one, but two posts written about him! Our priorities are different here

Finally, a new one!
Sdtrk: ‘Don’t drag no more’ by Susan Lynn

Well, well, well, if it isn’t a structure by Mr ‘Machine for living’, Le Corbusier. This would be Villa Savoye, located in Poissy, France, and completed in 1929. In fact, this would be the primary example of his whole ‘machine for living’ aesthetic.

The Villa Savoye was designed as a weekend country house and is situated just outside of the small village of Poissy in a meadow which was originally surrounded by trees. The polychromatic interior contrasts with the primarily white exterior. Vertical circulation is facilitated by ramps as well as stairs. The house fell into ruin during World War Two but has since been restored and is open for viewing.
quote taken from this site

One of the coolest and most forward-thinking aspects of Villa Savoye is that the garage is integrated into the structure itself. What would occur is that you would drive along the paved section up to the house, and your vehicle would follow the curve established by the ground floor. Le Corbusier knew what he was doing, as that ground floor curve was the exact turning radius of an automobile — some sources say the 1927 Citroën, others say it was the 1929 Voisin.

Other ace features would be the open-plan layout, the central spiral staircase, windows practically everywhere, and a ramp leading to an open-air roof garden. Quite innovative, especially for the late Twenties. Not counting the Maison de Verre, of course