Category: Found

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Yesterday, a guy in Chicago burned himself to death in protest against US foreign and domestic policy. He wrote his own obituary and posted it online ahead of time. That next to last paragraph reads “He had many acquaintances, but few friends; And wrote his own obituary, because no one else really knew him”.

Regardless his suicide, his letters are worth reading. If nothing else I see myself in much that he wrote, and he didn’t take himself too seriously even when writing his last letters.

Read the obitiuary here: http://www.savagesound.com/gallery100.htm
Read him expaling why:http://www.savagesound.com/gallery99.htm
Infoshop has a short article here: http://www.infoshop.org/inews

I got the story from boingboing.net and it feels odd. Shouldn’t this be on the front page of papers and such? This is quite an extreme thing to do, and considering all the text he posted about both his planned suicide and his political stance it wouldn’t be too hard to do a background check.

And if you want to distance yourself from his very personal letters and despair, you can always check out the list of others who have set themselves on fire in protest.

Unless he was mentally ill and planning on killing himself regardless, do you realise what level of despair is required to do something like this? How furious you have to be at the willfull ignorance of people in general? My head is spinning slightly, because I get a sensation of vertigo reading through his texts.

Bastards & models

A stupid part of my brain agreed to do nude modelling this thursday. so i’m reading up on this whole pose thing. I found a good article about someone whose experience I might soon be sharing: Slinky-linky

Earlier today I tried to stand still for fifteen minutes. I got so focused on holding still that any tremors I had made me feel like an epileptic seizure victim.

More linky:
Swedish organisation for models: www.kyo.se

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This was fun. I actually smiled and chuckled and then got the wow, this was kool reaction. Control a bunch of lights in Stockholm by using your cellphone, and watch the change through a live video feed here. The project is called “colour by numbers” and isn’t all that original (CCC has done similar things as well as a ton of other groups) but it’s very well executed and you can see the results almost instantly.

I made it all red. Then all green. Then all blue, and finally mixed the blue and green. Ooooh – shiny.

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Here’s a good example of making me want something: nuance.com.
it’s a video demo of a speech recognition software, with a follow up “keep up with me by typing” challange. And just to mess with me, they used “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog…” – which is meant to use all the letters of the alphabet and is a bitch to type fast.

On a good day I get 80 wpm, but even though that’s quite ok for a non-professional, their demo really got me re-evaluating my skillz. Good for them, sucky for me. Too bad it’s a pc only app.

I link, you blink!

Todays sentiments:

1) Yes, everyone and everything is against you.
2) Friends are few and far between.
3) You are born, you live, and you will die alone. Get used to it.

• Findagrave.com: Find out where people are buried, both famous and not. There’s a spyware thingy that might try to install itself on your computer if you’re running windows and javascript (don’t know if it applies to all browsers) that’s emanating from errorsafe.com. Block any traffic to that site if you can, or just use the firefox browser with high security settings.
(version 2.0 of firefox is officially appearing tomorrow, so wait a few days before setting out – there are always some bugs. I just downloaded it for shit and giggles)

• In the usa, tax lawyers have started to patent different ways of managing your taxes. Not tax applications or forms, but the actual combination of tax deductions you can do. Awesome. If i lived there I’d patent a way of breathing. Imagine the money I’d be making!
International herald tribune article here.

Image A) If this is what your to-do list looks like, you might want to act on that.
Image B) If you buy another pack before the old one runs out, you might want to focus on your to-do list instead of smoking.

• Speaking of nothing in particular: Remember when North Korea was trying out their intercontinental ballistic missiles a while back and the western leaders had a fit? How the fuck is it possible for south korea to test an ICBM and I can’t even find it on google.com/news? C’mon people! we know NK is evil and there’s no love lost on Kim Jong II, but do you seriously have to be so obvious?

Hot in here

Most of the interesting stuff I see comes from ads. Prolly cause ads come to me, as opposed to books, movies, art exhibitions, concerts, and so on.

The effect used in this live outdoors ad is an old one (first instance i recall is from nightmare on elm street) but it’s still superduper, imho.

I got this off of reklam.feber.se which is a Swedish site that covers ads and commercials. (i think Bonniers — the largest media group in Sweden — bought them out a while ago, but they still try to be cool kids and manage it most of the time).

Peddling human package material

If sexual innuendo sells, outright sex sells.

Sexpacking.com is a site for clothing company shaiwear.com where they’ve done short porn movies to advertise their wares. Neither the clothes nor the porn is particularly interesting, but the combination is. They also swing all ways, m/m – m/f – f/f, so they are trying to really blanket the demographic.

In the long run, I imagine this kind of stuff really get’s tedius – I mean, all that cock sort of gets in the way of the clothes. Then again, you do want to know how easily those pants slip off in a similar situation, so what the hell? I don’t know. check the link out and let me know what you make of this.

[Found through coolhunting.com]

Abortion n’ stuff

I felt sad all day yesterday. Don’t know why. Maybe I’m not drinking enough, or maybe I’m just in stage three. The list goes: numbness, denial, despair, acceptance.

So to cheer myself up I made a whole lotta food and read late into the night. I’m still reading up on Leibniz for my thesis, and need to send in a synopsis later today. Not a problem. Synopsis I can do.
I’ve been multitasking quite a lot the past two weeks, reading a lot, sketching a lot, making some lockpicks and helped Anna shoot a remake of the bang-bang-bang videos I did three years ago. She’s doing something on appropriation.

And for your reading pleasure: A story about a women who shot herself in the stomach because she couldn’t afford an abortion. I found this story at warrenellis.com, a blog you should be reading from time to time.

Neat illustration

I’m helping my dad out finding online bookstores, and I stumbled upon a really nice book cover on a Taiwanese site. Don’t know what it’s for or who did the illustration, but I share, I share until it hurts:

The first one to identify the author, title of the book and illustrator gets bragging rights and maybe a handjob some pizza.

The original page is here.

(yet) Another thing to feel guilty about

It’s always fun to see documentaries that trace everyday objects back to their origins. Usually those films are about bread or maybe books; one comes from wheat, the other from the forest. We get a nice line to follow and are given the option of keeping our hunter-gatherer ancestry in sight. (well, sort of)

I’m always baffled (well, again, sort of) when it turns out that the apples I’m looking at in a store have been shipped across the globe. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And if you try to track down the components and resources of high-tech stuff, you’ve got a lifetime of tracking ahead of you.

Take the example of tantalum, a metal powder extracted from coltan ore, and a required part of cellphones, computers and airplanes. It’s a rare resource: Prices are high and the supply is low. Market forces at work here, people. And those forces are at the moment, to put it gently, bum-raping the people of Congo where there’s a huge deposit of coltan ore.

You have a bunch of rebel groups fueling their civil war by selling the ore to refineries that in turn sell this to high-tech companies (Apple? oh, Apple i though you were a cool company! This shit aint cool! Not cool, y’hear?) and in the process killing people (or enslaving them to work in mines), destroying animal habitat (killing gorillas – your cellphone is killing cute baby gorillas) and generally making a muck of things and adding some more bad to an already quite baddish world.

What to do what to do? I love the quote from Outi Mikkonen at Nokia, when asked how they check up on their suppliers if their tantalum comes from Congo: “All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it.”
Yes, because we all know that Nokia just doesn’t have the resources necessary to check up on the supply chain.

I don’t know what to do, but at least I feel i should know where my stuff comes from. A good place to start on that is here: www.globalissues.org