Hola

Hi hi hi there! Sorry to those who've been checking in only to find the same old things - I'll be posting pictures and gig reviews from the Primavera Sound 2009 Festival in Barcelona, which was last weekend, and totally fantastic to boot, soon.

Meantime, I'm house-hunting! Trying to find a nice 4 bedroom place in the east of the city - it's hard.

Peas.

Cardiff

So I'm back in Cardiff as of today, until Wednesday when I fly to Barcelona for the Primavera Sound Festival, the line-up for which has me salivating.

Sorry for not posting for ages, there isn't an excuse and there's been loads going on in the political/social/technological/cultural world that I haven't been 'talking about' or 'offering my opinion on' or 'viewing through my own idiosyncratic eyes'.

Hopefully will be going to see Sam Raimi's new film 'Drag Me To Hell', which I'm mad excited about, and also the new Terminator film, which I expect will be total drek but nevertheless what can a futurist/geek/media slave boy do?

YooouuuTuuube

This morning I came across this video on YouTube, which gleans sounds from Disney's Alice In Wonderland to create a dreamy electro track synched to footage from the film:



Even better is the mutation of this project by David Kraftsow, a programmer from New York. His YooouuuTuuube project allows users to enter any video from YouTube to create a swarming montage ripple of microvideos that flow psychedelically across the browser. You can see it here.

(you can do it with any video you like, although this 'Alice' really is something)

[via Wired]

Cormac McCarthy Officially Brilliant

Cormac McCarthy, author of Blood Meridian, and The Road has been awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for being totally brilliant.

He well deserves it.

Star Trek Spoofs Surface Ahead Of New Movie

This one from Atom.com:

Special Features: Trek Yourself

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Atom Originals | TV & Movie Spoofs

And this from The Onion:


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Can't wait to see the actual film

Pig Flu - Do I Have It?

Do You Have Pig Flu?

[via BoingBoing]

Marvel To Stream ALL Animated X-Men!

Marvel has opened the vault to the classic animated X-Men series. Also, what's cooler, is that it's embeddable (see above for the first ever episode, 'Night of the Sentinels'

Also available is the Japanese Spiderman. I haven't seen this but from screenshots I can see a slight 'Monkey' resemblance.

Thanks, Marvel

The 2009 Time 100

Each year Time Magazine publishes it's list of the 100 most influential people, in fields ranging from science and technology to music and the arts.

This year, M.I.A made the list, under the 'Artists and Entertainers' column. This is way cool.

What's not so cool is Sarah Palin making the 'Heroes' category.

For the full list, click here.

Ursula Le Guin Nabs 6th Nebula / Joss Whedon Grabs Bradbury Award!

One of SF literature's leading ladies recently scooped a 6th Nebula Award for her novel 'Powers'.

Author of masterworks such as 'The Lathe of Heaven', Le Guin is known for her thematic similarities to Philip K Dick, whom she once described as the American Borges.

This is awesome news. SF has a rich history of female authorship which is sometimes ignored/overlooked by the mainstream (see Joanna Russ' 'The Female Man')

Good work Ursula!

Joss Whedon has won Nebula's prestigious Ray Bradbury (author of 'Fahrenheit 451') Award for achievement, and had this to say:

"Future is my business because I write fictionalised scientifics, or as the kids call it now, fi-sci. There is no bigger influence on my writing than Ray Bradbury – he is the forefather of us in so many ways. Nobody made fi-sci more human, more exciting ... It's stayed with me my whole life even before Stephen King, Frank Herbert and so many people I admire – Bradbury was the first."

For a full list of winners, click here.

The Pages of The Modern Are the City Walls Themselves

Written on the City

Graffiti Archaeology

Urban Curators

Three awesome sites compile graffiti/street art from around the globe for your pleasure. Sweet.

Long Live The Daily Mash!

It's Britain's 'The Onion', and rather than doing a piece on this new flu thing, I'd rather reiterate this hilarity:

[via The Daily Mash]

DON'T PANIC BUT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

PEOPLE across the world have been urged not to panic as experts warned that most of you would be dead by the end of this sentence.

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is badly dehydrated

As pork flu swept across the globe governments sought to calm fears by ordering 400 million coffins, while media organisations offered a reward to any scientist prepared to use the word 'holocaust'.

In the UK, experts stressed there was no risk from pork products before urging Britain's army of morons to round-up all the sausages they could find and throw them into the sea.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "There's nothing to worry about but this is definitely worse than four simultaneous nuclear wars and a dinosaur invasion."

Governments have called on media organisations to work together in the face of what one official described as 'a nice, big, fat panic'.

Professor Brubaker added: "The world is paying the inevitable price for years of unprotected pig sex.

"It's no surprise this started in a devoutly Catholic country where everyone follows the Pope's instructions to the letter, especially the pig molesters.

"Pig sex, chicken sex, monkey sex - eventually they all come back and bite us on the arse. But not goat sex, that still seems to be fine."

Meanwhile the editor of Daily Mail was last night under observation in a central London hospital after suffering what witnesses say was a 'cataclysmic ejaculation'.

A source said: "He got more and more engorged as the details came in and then, when we got the Brubaker quotes, he went all cross-eyed, fell backwards off his chair and his trousers exploded. There was spunk everywhere."

Locus Finalists 2009

SF 'zine Locus have published the shortlist of finalists from categories including Novel, First Novel, and Short Story on their website.

As usual, and similarly with The Hugo Award, I haven't read nearly enough of these.

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

• Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK)
• City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey)
• Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
• Saturn's Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace

  SHORT STORY

• "King Pelles the Sure", Peter S. Beagle (Strange Roads)
• "Boojum", Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (Fast Ships, Black Sails)
• "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
• "The Kindness of Strangers", Nancy Kress (Fast Forward 2)
• "After the Coup", John Scalzi (Tor.com 7/08)

MAGAZINE

• Analog
• Asimov's
• F&SF
• Realms of Fantasy
• Subterranean

http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/04/2009-locus-award-finalists.html

Ornette Coleman's Meltdown

The Meltdown festival at London's South Bank will this year be curated by Ornette Coleman, one of the all time great American jazz musicians.

An initial line-up for the event has been posted here, with more to follow.

I've never managed to get to any of the events included in Meltdown in previous years, so I'm hoping to get to some this year, especially since experiencing (seeing? hearing?) Fever Ray at Ether '09, also at London's South Bank.

Can Games of Current Conflicts Ever be Acceptable?

The controversial Six Days In Fallujah, a Konami developed next-gen Medal of Honour type tactical shooter based directly on real events such as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' (otherwise known as 'the war') has been indefinitely shelved due to overwhelmingly negative public feedback.

A Konami spokesman said “After seeing the reaction to the videogame in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it”

Interestingly, games that emulate past wars are immensley popular. There are games based on WW2 and Vietnam, and they enjoy huge critical and commercial success. Concerns raised over Six Days In Fallujah seem to centre around the obvious - that, politically, this was a tenuous engagement, and, similarly, that this particular battle had connotations of illegality. Moreover, some marines have pointed out that in Muslim kids playing the game there might be engendered feelings of 'retribution' or retaliation.

I feel that there are deeper implications for this sort of almost-real-time simulation in that, like media saturation, the events themselves can be digitised and commercialised into an effective simulacra of the evetns themselves, which in turn wholly disengages the user emotionally from the horror that those involved must have felt.

As always, thoughts will be appreciated.

Pirate Bay Judge Revealed to be Copyright Crusader

[via everywhere]

The judge in The Pirate Bay trial has been revealed to be a member of no less than two pro-copyright groups, which has prompted some of the defendants to appeal for a retrial based on the judge's bias/conflicting interests.

Tomas Norstrom, whose links to groups include main players in the prosecution of TPB crew, has denied an conflict of interest.

From Wired: """""says Eric Bylander, senior lecturer in procedure law at Gothenburg University. "There are several circumstances which individually don't constitute partiality, but that put together can form a quite different picture. It's also a matter of what signal this sends to the citizens. Anyone who, on reasonable grounds, can be appear biased in a case should not judge that case." """"""

Wow

'Pirates' More Likely To Buy Music

Shocker, this. Apparently, people who like music will actually buy it:

[via The Guardian]

Everybody knows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that filesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of internet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent and never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid this doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions of internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs they like – purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet according to Professor Anne-Britt Gran's new research, these two groups may be the same.

The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry's largest audience for digital sales.

The Budget

The Budget. Who really understands? The BBC have created this handy little app, to help us.

Budget calculator 2009

I've never really been much good with figures, and don't know enough about economics to really have an informed opinion, but I'm gonna try this baby out and see what it says. I can barely live within my means at the moment, so let's hope for good news.

So here it is:

	2008/09	2009/10	Year Difference
Alcohol	114.07	119.42	£-5.35
Tobacco	425.9	441.56	£-15.66
Fuel	0	0	0
Income tax	2693	2605	+£88
National insurance	1547.15	1516.35	+£30.8
Child benefits	0	0	0
Tax credits	0	0	0
Vehicle excise duty	0	0	0
State pension	0	0	0

If you lead a similar lifestyle next year, the indications are that you will be £97.79 better off.

So what will I do with my extra money?

The Field/Bioshock 2/Mad Magazine/Terminator 4/In The Loop/The Knie

Trance-loop genius 'The Field' has a new single out, which you can listen to here (its beautiful repetition leaves me dreaming while awake)

The sequel to thoughtful/hysterical/creepy/subversive Bioshock is coming out soon, and you can read a sneak preview review here (screenshots look great)

Mad magazine's 500th issue lampoons Google, and you can see the funny/stupid/ironic/provocative cover here

Arnie rekons he's gonna be in the new Terminator film, and you can see how/why here

Went to see 'In The Loop' last night, which was funny. Wish I could get away with swearing that violently/creatively/dismissively, though I'd probably have to be quick and witty, which I seldom am.

Finally, some real news about The Knife's next project, which is an opera based around Charles Darwin (WTF?), which you can read about here

Caprica

Review: Caprica Spins Religion, Race Into Worthy Galactica Prequel