August 2020
Inside Alan Moore’s Head
Great video snippets of Alan Moore talking about everything from Brexit, Magic, Anonymous and why anyone who doesn’t think Northampton is the centre of the world needs to fight him, God and Hitler!
Insightful one minute, bonkers the next. Perfect!
The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised
Interesting article about the apparent biases in reporting on various protests around the world. There are anti-government protests happening in Lebanon, Catalonia, the UK, Chile, Haiti and Ecuador, but the airtime given to the Hong Kong protests dwarfs the others combined. This despite the fact the numbers of participants, deaths and damage caused in the others are in many cases much higher.
The difference? In the former cases, the “rioters” are opposing governments aligned with the US, while the Hong Kong protesters are “defending democracy against a tyrannical communist government”.
“Which protest movements interest corporate media has little to do with their righteousness or popularity, and much more to do with whom they are protesting against. If you’re fighting against corporate power or corruption in a US-client state, don’t expect many TV cameras to show up; that revolution is rarely televised.”
Yes, hyena robots are scary. But they’re also a cunning marketing ploy
Get past the gee-whizzery and armageddon-porn and this is yet another example of misdirection and distraction. We’re suckers for it, unfortunately.
“Boston Dynamic’s videos are, to be sure, entertaining. But by raising the alarm of robot takeover they achieve the self-serving purpose of reasserting unrealistic fantasies about technology’s power, while redirecting away from more critical examination of human decisions and design practices. “
Trump’s Presidency Has Spawned a New Generation of Witches
This appeals to me on so many levels.
“On midnight last Friday, all over the United States, an alliance of magical practitioners called the Magic Resistance gathered Tarot cards, feathers, orange and white candles, pins, water, salt, matches, ashtrays, and unflattering photos of President Trump. The objects are prerequisites for a binding spell, an incantation typically used to keep someone from harming themselves or others, like a magical straitjacket. They use the pin to scratch “Donald J. Trump” into the orange candle (baby carrots are a sanctioned substitute) and read aloud a spell first posted on Medium. It begins: “Hear me, oh spirits of Water, Fire, Earth, and Air, heavenly hosts, demons of the infernal realms, and spirits of the ancestors … I call upon you to bind Donald J. Trump so that his malignant works may fail utterly.” It ends with burning the unflattering Trump photo and telling it, “You’re fired!””
Police Are Feeding Celebrity Photos into Facial Recognition Software to Solve Crimes
Read this and then try and convince me there aren’t research groups around the world scouring William Gibson’s work for ideas.
From Virtual Light, discussing the Separated at Birth system:
“Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A,B,C… The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject.“
“Japanese hotel chain sorry that hackers may have watched guests through bedside robots”
Put a video camera in a bedside device and connect it to the network? Sure, what could go wrong?
Great closing sentence too:
“The chain has suffered a bunch of other issues with the robots, including … a failure of the reception dinosaurs to understand guests’ names.”
So hard to get good help these days.
