I’m sorry Orlan. I didn’t mean to front on being the posterchild for post humanism. Just the thought of having two penises induced such a megalomaniacal state that didn’t know what I was saying. You still rock. Having funky bumps on your head and fusing your image with people from different cultures is a far better way to bring us into the post human era that running around with a second penis. There are already too many dicks in the world as it is. You are probably pretty mad and if you don’t ever want to talk to me again I understand. Whatever happens, I want you to know that I am still on your side and anytime you want to get some coffee or chai or mate or whatever it is eurotrash artists drink these days, I’m there for you.
In china a man: 1. loses his penis in an accident. 2. gets a BRAND NEW penis from a brain dead man 22 years younger than him. 3. After no complications or tissue rejection demands to have his new penis removed because of psychological trauma and its… (are you ready?) swollen shape. Clearly this man is not ready for the post human era.
It gets me thinking though. What are they doing with the dismembered penis? Can I have it? Despite turning 30 I still have functioning genitalia. (At least I’d like to think so.) But why limit yourself? If there is a spare swollen 22 year old’s penis just floating around why should it go to waste? If that poor bastard would rather go through life without a penis just because he didn’t grow it himself then I will gladly go double barrell. It would take me a step beyond post human artist Orlan and make me the poster child for post humaninsm! I don’t know where you could hang that particular poster though.
I am sorry to say my fictitious trist with Illegal Human Remains Girl is over. I admit we were star crossed from the start. Her an exotic dancer living in a polygamos death cult and I, a bashful struggling futurist. But I had to give a try even if it was only a fantasy.
We met over the internet when her arrest made the news. I never thought I would meet somebody through Boing Boing It was rocky from the begining. I was recovering from a painful breakup, she was in a committed polyamorous sadistic relationship and recieving human remains from her fans. We had our issues. I started to get frustrated when she jumped bail. It was like I was the only one who wanted it to work. And then they caught the young medical student who gave her the hand. It kind of made me check myself. Was this what I had to look forward to? My career in shambles and up to 10 years in prison. It was time for me to reevaluate my priorities.
I thought to myself,”Sure she’s cute…” Oh wait I was just assuming that. I had never seen this girl. Usually I consider it rude to google to somebody without their permission, but she never consulted me before jumping bail so I was a bit mad. An image search for “severed hand woman,” and… It was over.
Come on! You don’t even have dreads or a prominent neck tattoo or facial piercing! What is up with that? At least have some running mascara! I believed in you Illegal Human Remains Girl! I had a whole fictional character and wardrobe that you were supposed to live up to. And you can even be bothered to look all spooky and dangerous then I have one thing to say to you.
Yeah, so apparently a huge problem in Africa is that women aren’t producing enough babies for their husbands. You see in many parts of Africa a woman’s entire worth is based on her ability to produce children for men. A woman who reproduce “is worse than a dog.” What could be the answer to this grave social ill? In Vitro Fertilization of course! God forbid we address the issue of the blatant sexism that lets men think its OK to throw their wives onto the street for not producing children. Or maybe the rampant venereal diseases that are left untreated and cause infertilty. Unfortunatel nobody ever made any money promoting social elightenment or public health so the answer is of course to provide affordable IVF for the third world.
How can a world be so ass backward? Where a woman is mutilated at birth, has no access to or knowledge of contraceptives, no treatment for subsequent diseases, and after all of that, despite being the infertile member of a couple only 60% of the time is driven into the street when no babies come from the indentured rape that so often is marriage.
When I grow up I’m moving to Africa to marry a bunch of beautiful but recently divorced ladies and open a university for women. It will be a school with only three majors. Public Health, In Vitro Fertilization and Lesbian Studies.
So I am going to Burning Man this year. Part of me thinks it is the wrong thing to do, but that part of me is a wus who needs to shut the hell up. I am going with the most futurey camp out there, Imagenode! I have always had respect for these guys. Great music, awesome technology, and the right mix of art and geek.
Getting the camp ready has been a task. Lots of fundraising parties, lots of carrying things and soldering, soldering and more soldering. Making the sign required the soldering of almost 1500 LEDs and 4500 resistors for voltage regulation.
I have always been more of a biology person, but I have yet to find an easily applicable and robust use if biology in art. While the design and planning of a large scale LED project requires in depth knowledge and experience the actual fabrication techniques can be picked up with a little practice. I have already learned lot from TwinA and Spec, and I pick up more all the time. Inspired, I will try to put together a light sculpture of my own next week. Something a bit smaller scale I think.
Thanks to pink tentacle for posting this Apocalyptic view of Tokyo. Is this what we have to look forward too? Maybe. Does this mean we should bomb Iran, North Korea and Syria. Mmmm I’m not so sure. The first world certainly doesn’t lead by example and sometimes I think the only reason why this hasn’t happened yet is that the apocalypse would be bad for buisness.
I stopped blogging for a while because the ownership of the site and its fate were indeterminate. That is an ongoing issue, but what the hell. I write this for me, and it’s not like anyone reads this anyway. There are few futureBen projects in the works. My thesis proposal is almost ready to go. Which means a paper for publication is next. Meanwhile some Madagascar Projects are nearing fruition and Burning Man is coming up. I will start taking breaks from doing stuff long enough to write it up. Up next, a report and pictures from Dueling Reenactments.
Wow. Thank goodness the US government is devoting its resources to standing up to those nasty environmentalists. No organization is beyond reproach and admittedly, there have been some scandals with CEOs from larger organizations getting paid a bit too much. Still, on earth day, who the hell presents anti environmentalist propaganda?! They even took a quote from Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, about the luddite direction of enviromentalism and streched it into their twisted campaign. I was going to draw some kind of analogy about how inappropriate this is, but anything I can think of would be too insulting for everyone involved.
Check out the future of gaming. The best aspect of Spore, in my opinion, is that it is an asynchonous MMO. That is to say that the content comes from the user community, but you don’t actually interact with other players. This keeps things fresh but play can be casual.
In my coding class we were talking about web server based programs. First everybody thought that big mainframes were going to do all the work and terminals would be nothing more than a portal for keystrokes and other input.(There was no such thing as a mouse back then.) But then things started to change when Apple released the first PCs. I actually did some consulting for a guy named Daniel Alroy whose claim to fame was an article, written when I was in diapers, about how desktop machines were going to be the next big thing. Indeed that trend has proven true. I can assert that mainframes and supercomputers became marginalized to specialized applications until the internet took hold.
Anyway these trends got me to thinking about how modern games take full advantage of both huge servers and powerfull desktop machines. Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life maintain environments for huge rosters of people. The gamer interacts with that server based world and maxes out the PC’s graphics capabilities in displaying the server based game. Spore is a reflection of that where the server side of the game actually explores the world of content created by the gamer and serves it to other users.
This is just ridiculous. This is an article about science education in Arkansas. I have been very slow to accept the idea that biblical history carries so much weight in the American educational system. Thinking back, I don’t remember being explicitly taught evolution, but all but one science teacher I ever had felt quite comfortable saying, “millions of years.” Apparently that is taboo in some parts of our country.
Its easy to write off anti-evolution as an outspoken, but backwater movement.(Fun too) But this article shows that this is not the case. Arkansas has been independently ranked 37th in the nation for education. OK so their kids aren’t all Ivy League bound, but they aren’t dead last. (Hey Arizona, I guess you guys are better off going to school on Martin Luther King Day. Maybe it might help you guys catch up.)
This passage is just shocking.
According to his survey, about 20 percent are trying to teach evolution and think they are doing a good job; 10 percent are teaching creationism, even though during the workshop he discusses the legally shaky ground on which they stand. Another 20 percent attempt to teach something but feel they just do not understand evolution. The remaining 50 percent avoid it because of community pressure. On an e-mail to members of a list he keeps of people interested in evolution, Randy reported that the latter 50 percent do not cover evolution because they felt intimidated, saw no need to teach it, or might lose their jobs.
By their own description of their classroom practices, 80 percent of the teachers surveyed are not adequately teaching evolutionary science. Remember that these are just the teachers who are in a professional development workshop in science education! What is more disturbing is what Randy went on to say about the aftermath of these workshops. “After one of my workshops at a [state] education cooperative, it was asked that I not come back because I spent too much time on evolution. One of the teachers sent a letter to the governor stating that I was mandating that teachers had to teach evolution, and that I have to be an atheist, and would he do something.”
So basicly the Arkansas educational system has been bullied into mandating ignorance. Yikes! No wonder the Clintons abandoned that state for New York.
