Category: Etc

Young man ends own life during interpretive dance performance, steals show

Jeremy Clarke, 20 year old student of communication, took his own life with a handgun saturday night at “Social Science”, an orientally inspired dance performance presented by UQAM.

The show, with a ticket price of 18$c.a.d, featured several adults in various levels of undress moving about on stage “improvising”, as well as several outfits and a lively session of “pass around the dance-spirit”.

According to eyewitnesses Clarke became unnerved when 5 minutes had passed since the performers did anything but make childish noises, and became more and more upset as the show wore on.

Finally, as the three dancers held up their fingers to indicate meaningless numbers, Clarke fired a .45 shell deep into the base of his skull, severing his spinal cord and ending all sensory perception of the event.

The performers later spoke to the police:
“Y’know.. I mean, I felt what he was going for, but the gun is so obvious isn’t it? Where’s the subjectivity, the personal risk? I just don’t feel like he really gave up a part of his soul for his art.”

All new Dorritos flavors officially taste worse than their predecessor(s). Why anyone would think that pickles and mexicania is a good mix is beyond me.

Also, photo credits go out to my new cellphone-camera-palmpilot-mp3player.

So the sundance film festival, notorious for bringing great films to everyone’s attention (fuck the Oscars), has decided that people seeing movies is better than not, and as such has decided to post all of the short films (“shorts”) from the festival on their website as they are simultaneously screened in front of the festival’s audiences. Some of them are really amazing (check out Everything’s Gone Green, pictured above, especially) and all of them are free (with a quick and painless registration.)
Link to Sundance’s (unfortunatlely) flash-based website. (You’ll have to navigate around a little to get at the content, it’s nice once you’re there though. Really.)

Seriously. I was listening to radio Wazee and Common People (click to listen) came on. Amazing, entertaining and enlightening, it’s both the first track on Shatners new album Has Been (that he co-wrote and produced with Ben Folds) and the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.

Did I ever mention Shatner’s 70’s interpretation of Elton John’s Rocketman (alt link)? Also funny, but perhaps more disturbing than enlightening…

When asked in a recent interview what he thought about the recent movement to reform copyright and intellectual property law, Bill Gates called those backing this movement (groups like Creative Commons and the EFF) “some new modern-day sort of communists,” effectively showing not only his cold-war style understanding of ideology, but also his confusion concerning what these groups actually believe.

In retaliation the internet released a slew of logos mockingly promoting the copyleft (commonly logofied as the left-pointing ©) in its deserved red and yellow glory (BB links, 1 2), with one copyfighter going so far as to print tshirts using one of the logos (These are actually amazingly cheap, at 5$ you should buy one for everyone you know!)

In other news, Will Shetterly wrote a funny and completely relevant satire of the current state of copyright law and Mickey Mouse extensions that clearly and entertainingly shows the importance of the public domain for both the consuming and thinking public and the producers of cultural content (using the bible!).

[edit: this was dismantled, clicking the image will give you the story about it but not the thing originally linked]

I finally got around to signing up for my free 7-day trial of Second Life, a massively multiplayer online world similar to The Sims Online, and it has completely blown me away.

The level of detail in the character creation process is insane (8 sliders for your nose!) and allows you to not only live out your wildest fantasies, but also simulate yourself within the system to an almost eerie degree (does anyone else find that I did almost too well at reproducing myself, with my true hair color no less?)

The game itself is composed entirely of events and locations developed by its users. Players can build things and spaces, as well as write scripts to govern both the world and it’s inhabitants. Thus activities range from going dancing (with custom scripts for your phat moves) and playing in-game games (like a little combat simulator or laser-tag), to things as simple as poetry readings (all of which I did today)

Also, everyone can fly.

This is going to end badly, I can feel it.

After a grand total of over an hour and a half on hold with my host it seems that the server has been changed and nothing blew up.

Good news.

Welcome to Simian Uprising v.5.0, now wholly powered by the open source blogging tool WordPress. A few things will be different in terms of how the site works, but just showing up and reading it shouln’t change significantly.

Happy new year everybody, may your stylesheets be deviant but standard, and may your databases be fast and full.

So I finally have some time to work through all the content that’s accrued here and move it over to a new server with my host. THUS please be aware of the following things (this is mostly just for friends and active users of the site)

• The forum is going to topple. It had its moment but has been freakishly dead for a long time now. If you have something there you want to save (or whatever) do it now.
• The gallery is also going to be cleared out and reinstalled. There will be a new one but if there are any photos there you’d want to save do it now.
• The blogger blogs should start working again soon.
• The site may be a bit crazy in the next few days, my apologies, it’ll settle down eventually.

sorry if that had nothing to do with you, keep enjoying this freezing season.

I hope you are warm with someone you like, comfortably solitudinous or being crushed by a horde of stampeding boxing-day shoppers. Whatever hits your fancy.

As a favor to me though, I’d appreciate if everyone could take a moment to ponder the simulation. Consider this biggest of birthdays and consumption periods and try to find its true meaning. (Hint: There is none, the meaning has been crushed by everyone who ever took part. Have some eggnog.)

I hope you got good presents, something fun and something useful. I got an amazing graphic novel (worth far more than its 40$ price tag) and a light bulb for my lava lamp. I am enthralled and funky both.

If you’re free give me a call, I’d love to hang out.