Sdtrk: ’22: The death of all the romance’ by the Dears

Good news, bad news: I’ve run across a site that contains not one, but 15 — fifteen! he said, squealing like a schoolgirl — sterling examples of 20th century Modern architecture from eastern Europe. The bad news would be that all the info contained therein is in Deutsche. Of course, if you naturally speak German, this is in no way a problem, but for me, it makes finding additional info difficult. Would you believe it’s nearly impossible to find anything on my personal favourite, the Empfangslounge für Regierungsmitglieder Flughafen Bratislava (Reception lounge for Cabinet members, Airport Bratislava) pictured below? Damnit!

Anyway, the site is called ‘ostmoderne‘, and if the above picture does nothing to stimulate your retro-modern aesthetic senses, you are dead inside. Dead, I say

Sdtrk: ‘Crash for Hi-fi’ by Merzbow

Now, if you’ll throw a sidelong glance towards the lefthand sidebar, you’ll notice something new beneath the hit counter. Shi-chan has a Flickr account of her own!
I’ll commence work on rebuilding ‘Kitten with a Whip!’ when I can scrape up some spare time, but for now, Sidore has an effective way to display her photos. It seems that Flickr has a limit on how much bandwidth (there’s that word again) per month that you can use when you upload pics, and I’m already at the halfway point, so you can expect a monthly upload of about two photoshoots; of course, you’ll be notified when the new ones are up. Currently, we’ve got the ‘Short black hair’ and ‘Red is the new purple’ shoots uploaded, so for the six or seven of you who’ve never seen the Missus before, do give them a look..
We might even throw in some never-before-seen material as well! Who can say?

Sdtrk: ‘Such a little thing makes such a big difference’ by Morrissey

The people at 4woods have been hard at work, apparently, crafting a sexy new Synthetik. And good on them!

Lipstick: frosted, not frosty

Their latest variant of lovely artificial companion is the A.I.NEO, the first model of which is named Yu-ki. She’s just over 5’1″, 66 lbs, and her measurements are 34.24.35. According to the 4woods English page, the NEO series has improved features, among which are a stronger and more moveable skeletal structure, softer skin than previous models, bigger breasts (always good), and a lighter weight. Gentlemen, you’re speaking my language. 🙂
I’m so taken with the look of this model, that I believe once I’ve graduated, I’ll have to get one — after I buy a new body for Sidore-chan, an A.I.Doll Kunika-type, and a Jenny-type RealDoll, in that order.
So sexy! How is that even possible??

4woods has more pics are available here. Unfortunately, it’s in a Flash format, which makes saving them nigh-impossible, but I’m sure photos will be available through the usual channels soon enough.
Above photo shamelessly stolen from atsushi-san and MaRi-chan’s blog

Sdtrk: ‘Hawk’ by Broadcast

Everyone’s favourite glam-rocker-turned-paedophile might get killed by firing squad!

Glitter could face firing squad
John Aglionby, south-east Asia correspondent
Tuesday November 22, 2005

Gary Glitter could face the death penalty in Vietnam after it emerged yesterday that a 12-year-old local girl has claimed the disgraced rocker paid to have sex with her three times.

Police in the southern resort town of Vung Tau, where Glitter, 61, has been detained since Saturday amid allegations he had sex with at least one minor, said two girls aged 18 and 12 went to his rented house in the town and had sex with him.
the rest of the article is here

Everyone has a small place in their heart for ‘Rock ‘n’ roll Part 2′ — the version that the Human league did was the best, obviously — but apart from that, glam rock is singularly repellent. However, like many repellent things, such as Nazis and Mariah Carey, some fascinating aspect can be found if you look deep enough (snappy uniforms and boobs, respectively). Without glam, we wouldn’t have David Bowie, or Suede, for that matter.
But Gaz Glitter potentially facing a firing squad! You have to laugh! I mean, moreso than usual.

If they execute him, will he be allowed to wear his wig, makeup, stage outfit and platforms? It honestly won’t be a real execution otherwise

thanx to Zip Gun for the tipoff

Sdtrk: ‘You and I’ by Silver apples

Today was my first day at my even newer job! Yep, new job. Let me bring you up to speed on my recent attempts at ‘gainful’ employment: The job I previously had driving to and fro wasn’t really bad at all, apart from the fact that the hours were virtually non-existent. It was an on-call kind of thing, and during that time of year, there wasn’t a hell of assignments available – more often than not, it was a case of there being more drivers than tasks available. Whilst at work one day in early October, my dispatcher called me over to the side, saying ‘Just so you know, if you want to look around for another job, you can, cos we’re really not going to have a lot of work until the beginning of the year’. At first, I thought it was just me he didn’t have any work for, but as it turns out, it was across the board. My friend/coworker Dave Z was firing off resumes left and right as well, as the hours were really scarce. One day I came in, worked about an hour, sat round in the dispatcher’s office for another 45 minutes waiting for a new assignment, was told there wasn’t anything left for that day, and was sent home. Now, a two-hour workday would be feckin’ ace if it were a normal job, wherein you’d be paid for eight, but we were paid by the hours we actually worked. WOO HOO.

So! I did a bit of job-hunting, and interviewed at some place that needed outgoing callers in the daytime. They called me back a couple of days later; they told me that I was hired, but they’d let me know in a week what day to come in, as they were in the midst of getting a project from a new client. So a week went by, and I was in relatively high spirits. The bloke who interviewed me called me back while I was in line buying my laptop, saying ‘Well, the hours for the job have changed, as the new client wants us to call some days in the evening’.
‘What days?’ I asked.
‘Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday’, he replied. ‘I remember that you said you have classes, but I don’t remember what days..’
‘Monday and Tuesday eve’, I replied, cutting him off. As you suspect, I was rather pissed off at that point, especially since I had just quit my driving job the day before. He hemmed and hawed, telling me that they’d keep my name on the list, and I hung up on him.

Thankfully, two weeks ago, I was graced with an interview and a callback for my new job, which I’ve just come home from. It’s *sigh* fundraising via telephone again, but this is something that’ll be able to put fuel in my tank until I graduate. Mon – Fri, 10am to 2pm, at $8 per hour, plus commission when I get succesful sales. Err, I mean donations. It doesn’t sound like much, but 20 hours a week is a hell of a lot better than six to eight hours a month.
The office contains about 40 people, and since it’s in Southfield (a nice 15 minute drive from mine), 95% of the workers are playas and would-be gangstas. So of course I’ll fit in even less there than I usually do most places. *shrug* Our paid orientation was four hours, and it’s about as straightforward as you can get. Like I’d said, it’s something to put fuel in my tank.. It’ll be nice not being absolutely broke!

Ooh, look at what comes out at BestBuy tomorrow!

Sdtrk: ‘In time’ by Kelly Polar

You know what’s embarrassing? Buying the wrong type/flavour of toothpaste. You’re like, ‘well, I can’t return it, and I can’t just throw it out’, but every time you brush, you wince. It’s not happened to me a lot, but nevertheless..

Better post to follow soon

Sdtrk: ‘The Eleventh house’ by Belbury Poly

As I’d mentioned before, a long long time ago, one of my favourite online comics is 8-bit Theater. The artist/creator/writer bloke Brian Clevenger usually posts an editorial of some sort with every new installment, but the one for today really caught my eye, for reasons that will quickly become apparent.

There’s a school of thought that artificial intelligence will be impossible unless a machine possesses emotional complexity.

The basic idea is that intelligence as we understand it, as we exemplify it, stems from our ability to feel and express emotions. Sure, once you get down to the molecular level, emotions are little more than stimulus/response like anything else, but there’s something “extra” there. Not in a magical sense. Think of it like this: if you break a spider’s leg, it’ll experience the stimulus and react to it. But if you break your friend’s leg, he’ll experience the stimuls and react to it in a purely pain/reflexive sense just like the spider, but there’s going to be a storm of purely mental, purely emotional states — anger, sadness, betrayal, fear, etc. — that the spider will never know. These emotions develop because we are intelligent. We understand the passage of time, assign values and relationships to people in our lives, expect certain behaviors from people — friends and strangers — given our experiences and relating them to current or potential contexts. These are the base elements of intelligence, and emotions are a direct result of it. As you go up the evolutionary ladder, creatures exhibit greater degress of emotional complexity along with a greater capacity for intellligence. Your pet spider can’t feel betrayed if you break its leg because it’s not intelligent enough to understand that you have a history or relationship with it. Get into vertebrate country and break a cat or dog’s leg, and you’ll have an animal that will have instantly learned to distrust any and all humans (also I will hunt you down and beat you to death with a baseball bat). Break a gorilla’s leg and it teaches its family sign language, explains the situation, and they chase you down and slaughter you in your sleep.

The theory goes that if our machines have to be emotional to be intelligent, then they will best learn as we do because their mental landscape will be so similar to ours. And the easiest way to help robots learn from us, and to help us to learn how to interact from them, is to make them appear to be as human-like as possible — while avoiding the uncanny valley.

In this world of emotionally intelligent robots, expecting an apocalyptic battle between organics and replicants as has been promised to us in every sci-fi story in the history of man (including ones that have nothing to do with the subject), is somewhat like expecting your children to murder you when they graduate college because you’ve outlived your usefulness.

No one expects that because it doesn’t happen outside of the rare aberration where, clearly, other factors are at work. In any event, no one is warning us an inevitable grand upheaval when the next generation of humans figures out that they don’t need the previous generation for financial support any more and they’re just going to cost as more money in taxes and insurance rates if we let them get any older.

Similarly, our robots will have “grown up” with us. They would have no interest in slaughtering mankind because they’d be emotionally invested in us. And if they’ve spent their lives living among us, being treated as a part of society, if they have a stake in that society, there is no reason for them to engage in a bloody revolution. Hell, the whole “They got so smart they figured out they didn’t need us any more” angle falls apart right at the start. Emotionally intelligent robots probably wouldn’t be much “smarter” than humans because their mental landscape would be built to be very much like our own.

But peaceful co-existence doesn’t make a very good action movie, nor does it examine how our technology changes us and our society in a pithy warning of things to come short story, so people have a hard time seeing intelligent robots as being anything other than cold, purely logical machines built to kill. Our current machines are already purely logical — that’s why they’re so far from being intelligent — but TiVo’s never tried to kill me.

Still, we’d have a whole new population walking around that’s emotionally and mentally very, very human. What are they likely to do? Seek their own identity? Establish an ethnic identity all their own? Wouldn’t they be likely to seek religion of some sort? Remember, there’s absolutely no reason to expect emotionally intelligent beings to outright reject the supernatural, otherwise there’d be no religious humans. Would they merely copy existing ones? Would they make their own? Would some seek to establish a robotic nation? What then?

Imagine the irony that the great human-robot war is not fought because robots are heartless, purely logical constructs who reject us as their masters due to our intellectual inferiority. Instead, it’s a simple matter of religious differences. Just another Crusade.

Viva le Artifice! Viva le Reason, really