Lastlight

2002-10-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

And another inactive month...

Here are today's record purchases:

Lustmord, Metavoid: deep, dark, droning ambient-ish soundscapes.
MS Gentur, First Chapter: Rythmic noise, in the vein of Converter and Noisex.
Thomas Köner, Daikan, a "live" album (and I use the quote marks advisedly) from the European Media Art Festival in 2001. Another review of this work of dark, cold (daikan is a Japanese term, "dai"=big and "kan"=cold) soundscape architecture.
Imminent Starvation, Nord: more rythmic noise, though not quite as dancefloor-y as MS Gentur, and more towards the soundscapes (again) with harsh, looping percussion.

Well, that about wraps it up for October, I fear. Anyway, in two weeks, I'm off to Tinitus 2002, featuring Front 242, Covenant, Melotron, Dive, Malaise, Tarmvred, System, The Pain Machinery, and a bunch of DJ:s and VJ:s, and the week after that I'll see VNV Nation. Looks good...

2002-09-18T02:48:00.000-07:00

And after nearly a month of inactivity, I bring you...

The Art Of Science, an exhibition at the Department of Science and Technology at Linköping University.

And the journal Visual Mathematics has a section called Math Art, which has a number of wonderful exhibitions, including but not limited to:

2002-08-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

A press conference given by the head of the Mukhabarat concerning the "suicide" of Sabri Al-Banna (better known as Abu Nidal).

2002-08-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

Well, we're a few steps closer to the Singularity, with:

2002-07-30T03:19:00.000-07:00

After warchalking (easy-to-draw symbols that can identify wireless network nodes), there's psychalking (warning others of dangerous mind control hotspots.

((From memepool.)

2002-07-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

The Spamdemic Map, a map of who's paying who to spam, and how they're all interconnected.

Like the Conspiracy Chart, only for real.

(From the Daily Illuminator.)

2002-07-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

Today's music tips: MC Frontalot (really odd hip-hop) and KOMPRESSOR (really, really odd industrial).

They did a track together - this was where I first heard MC Frontalot, in Rappers We Crush, but their separate works are great too.

2002-07-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

And once again, it's been ages since I wrote anything. Oh well... Two-weeks post-festival, a tally of my experiences.

I survived the Arvika Festival, despite not having any place to raise my tent in the functionary camping (I got some space in a friend's tent).

I saw: Tribeca and Joseph Arthur (not really my thing, but I was working at that stage, so... Joseph Arthur was very nice in person, too), Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Swan Lee, Institut, Haujobb (excellent EBM), The 69 Eyes, Svenska Akademien (a brief bit... eh, I'm not really a fan of hip-hop/reggae), Pain, Ticon, The Delta (wonderful! energetic techno and heavy bass), DJ MORG, Run Level Zero, Assemblage 23 (very good, though the vocals are better on the albums), Icon Of Coil, Etnica, DJ Kvasi, Infected Mushroom, Pluxus, DJ Axel, Soft Cell (enh. not that good), Talamasca, Luke Slater, DJ Mark Allen, Covenant (the songs they played from the new album Northern Light sounds like they're returning towards their pre-USM sound), and Das Ich.

I didn't see (but wanted to): Missljud, Ich Bin Laden, The Cure, Phrank, DJ Anti, and DJ Joti Sidhu.

I heard, from a distance: Puss, Orbital, and Timo Maas.

I avoided most of the mud on the regular camping, though I visited friends there.

All in all, an excellent festival.

2002-07-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

Well, not that I've written much recently, so my faithful reader probably won't notice any difference, but I'll be going off-line tomorrow until Sunday, as I'm off to the Arvika Festival, there to watch as many as possible of Haujobb, The Cure, Orbital, Institut, Assemblage 23, DJ Anti, Run Level Zero, DJ Kvasi, Infected Mushroom, Soft Cell, Covenant, Icon Of Coil, Pluxus, Das Ich, Talamasca, and lots of others.

2002-06-30T02:37:00.000-07:00

And we are told that "when the terrorists strike in Europe, we'll know how it feels for Israel"...

Newsflash: They already do.

From the article:

A bomb has exploded in the main Greek port of Piraeus, seriously injuring one man.
[...]
Explosives disposal experts defused a second, unexploded device found in the area, police said. Authorities did not immediately identify what kind of bomb it was.
[...]
It is the second time in less than two weeks that an explosive device has detonated in Piraeus.

Another article mentions that the Greek bombings seldom target people, with 23 dead since the bombings began in 1975.

Other European countries have been attacked by terrorists too, with higher death tolls, what with the IRA, the Red Army Fraction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the ETA in Spain (with ETA bombings as recently as recently as barely two weeks ago), and others.

2002-06-26T02:07:00.000-07:00

"Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left."
--H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Vostok: lake of shadows - high weirdness in Antarctica, centered on Lake Vostok, from Graham Hancock's "Antarctica is really Atlantis" over Antarctic Space Nazi to secret U.S. explorations by shadowy agencies.

2002-06-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Taking the test at the Ideology Selector (warning, lots of popup windows), I find...

1: Third Way
2: Radical
3: Liberal
4: Centrist
5: Left-libertarian
6: Neoconservative
7: Libertarian
8: Conservative
9: Paleo-libertarian
10: Paleoconservative
(Capsule descriptions of the ideologies can be found here.)

I wasn't all that surprised by the results, except perhaps landing Left-Libertarians so high - I'm not that left-leaning (though perhaps I am by U.S. standards), and getting Neocons higher than Libertarian (I'm much more of a small-l libertarian than a conservative, neo or otherwise).

Of course, the test is designed for test-takers from the U.S.A., so a number of the questions were somewhat difficult to map onto my mental landscape ("Should local government be allowed to regulate gambling?" - will it be unregulated otherwise? Or just illegal?).

Moving on to the Political Compass (I decided to skip the Political Quiz Show, as it was just too U.S.-centric for me to be able to make any sense of it), I land on -1.62 and -8.05. The World's Smallest Political Quiz shows me as a Left-Liberal at 100% Personal Self-Government and 30% Economic Self-Government, and the Politopia quiz from the Institute for Humane Studies pegs me as a Centrist (and I note that it, too, has quite U.S.-centric questions).

(Thanks to Jim Henley for the pointers.)

2002-06-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

It looks as if I won't make any progress on my struggles with the archiving tonight. Oh well, back at it tomorrow.

2002-06-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

It seems that Saddam et consortes were lying about the number of dead Iraqi babies from Western sanctions. Is anyone surprised?

Some interesting, and quite chilling, reading.

2002-06-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

Who and/or what am I? In no particular order: an increasingly lackadaisical computer science student, active in LysKOM and on Usenet, Swedish, probably an internet addict, and a fan of science fiction, fantasy and horror, role-playing games (current favourites: Steve Jackson Games' GURPS Transhuman Space, Pagan Publishing's Delta Green, and Atlas Games' Unknown Armies), and various kinds of music, including but not limited to powernoise, industrial, darkwave, gothic, ethereal, trance, future pop, techno, EBM, and dark ambient.

I like to travel, but have (so far) visited only fourteen nations, though they're scattered on five continents, which is something, anyway.