Know Your Meme has a handy guide to fighting YouTube takedown requests for content – this time focused on the downfall of the Downfall videos.  While admitting that DMCA challenges are more complicated than YouTube’s own internal system for taking down content at the copyright holder’s request – it is always fascinating to see how people fight back when copyright holders try to trample on Fair Use.

[Via Everybody]

It’s not quite atomic dogs (that damn dog makes me cry every time) or car-harpoons, but a Doctor in South Africa is now producing an insertable dentata.

The Rape-aXe has actually been around since 2007, but its inventor, Dr Sonette Ehlers wants to distribute 30,000 of the devices to women in South Africa prior to the World Cup.  All joking about Snow Crash aside, statistics show that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa.  In fact, South Africa has the highest incidence of reported rapes in the world.  According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 men admitted to having raped someone at least once and 1 in 10 men reported having been raped.   This is also in a country where AIDS or HIV infection has reached as high as 11%.

How does it work?  Well, according to the Rape-aXe website:

The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest.

There is a video that goes with that:

While the device is controversial, to say the least; the idea of anyone having to live in an environment of violence that might make lining your vagina with spikes a logical course of action is nauseating.

[Via Jezebel.]

If you’re like me, you really wish there were more ways for a guy to pull off looking sexy in a saree.  But also, you’ve probably already gotten a little blasé about Augmented Reality. However, this video-billboard in the Netherlands really caught my eye.

An interactive billboard placed above crowded Amsterdam and Rotterdam thoroughfares displays, in real time, a view of the street below. Passers-by can see themselves live on the massive screen, but though the curb space in front of them is empty, on the screen there’s a tense confrontation unfolding as they stand there and gawk.

[Via @GreatDismal and POPSCI.com]

From Discovery:

Adapting technology found in flat screen television sets, scientists have created a thin film that converts infrared light into visible light. The technology could give cell phones, eyeglasses and car windshields cheap, lightweight night vision.

“This device can convert any infrared image into a visible image and would weigh no more than a pair of eyeglasses,” said Franky So, a scientist at the University of Florida who describes his new night vision technology in a recent article in the journal Advanced Materials that was funded in part by advanced technology powerhouse DARPA.

…

So does this by using technology borrowed from flat screen TVs. Infrared light enters the film and is detected by the first of seven separate layers, which generates a slight electrical charge. Additional electrical energy — about three to five volts — amplifies that signal, which is then converted back into visible light.

…

So said his team also plans to create cell phones that can see, and more importantly, measure heat as well. A cell phone equipped with heat vision could instantly take a patient’s body temperature to see if they had a fever. A car windshield could make pedestrians crossing the street much easier to see and avoid.

via Cat Vincent

We’ve featured these architectural projections before. This latest one, an animation of an AC/DC song, at Rochester Castle, England is impressive. It is also a strange promo piece for the sequel to what I called Grinder Movie of the Year, Iron Man. Enjoy:

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 – Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

Part of the Future Obscura exhibition:

Simple and quietly mesmerizing, Zilvinas Kempinas‘ screen of “white noise” was one of the superstar of the shows. Seen from afar, the screen vibrates and sounds like the fragmented black and white pixels of an untuned video source. As they move forward, visitors realize that the screen is an opening into the wall stretched with horizontal lines of videotape vibrating in the currents of air created by fans. Unlike a magic trick which looses its spell as soon as the artifice behind it is revealed, White Noise gets more fascinating the closer you get to understanding it.

Via we-make-money-not-art.com.

So last night, I linked to the Vigilant Citizen’s hilarious Fergie/Transhumanism/Eugenics/Satanism mashup, and apparently some Grinders followed the discussion over there with less than spectacular results.  I would like to remind folks, that while our “friends” over at the Citizen sometimes do have a sharp eye for symbolism and are always good for a laugh, they are still a Christian-themed media-paranoia conspiracy site and thus are probably not really open for strenuous intellectual testing of their theories.

To you who posted over there (or tried and got deleted or locked out) in order to conter-act some of the scary or weird disinformation, I say good job.  But alas, anything you say, it seems, will be brushed off as coming from an agent of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY.   For those of you who got the brush off AND were threatened with an INTERPOL investigation or the threat of an anti-peadophile investigation or were all accused of being the same person – well give yourselves an extra 300xp and head over to Khannea Suntzu’s blog.

Suntzu takes apart the Citizen rant with a patience that borders on saintlike (or machinelike… muwhahaha…) with a rant of hir own – addressing the malicious fallacies contained in the original on a point-by-point basis.  It’s the perfect antidote to your daily dose of crazed conspiratorial nonsense.   And if you still have rage in your heart after that, remember that as a member of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY you get to go home to your house full of MK ULTRA brainwashed sex slaves and count the piles of money that your evil overlords gave you to post on the internet about H+.

Which is all to say: mea maxima culpa if I accidentally led any of you to where the internet sidewalk ends.

Oh, and as always:  Hail Satan… ROBOT SATAN.

Do yourself a favour and check out today’s COILHOUSE’s article on Kim Graham’s Weta Legs.

Even if these backwards-facing legs are not your particular cup of tea, you can at least be happy that we are entering the age of functional commercially available designer prosthetics.   If you did want to stride out into your favourite urban or rural environment upon mechano-hooves, you could do so with these for under a grand.  (Which, you know, is still a lot of money, but progress is what progress is.)

Now, you get the talented Ms. Graham to combine her new legs with PowerIzers or AirTrekkers or even Cheetahs…

…and stand back and watch while tribes of folks in prosthetic legs run along the outskirts of the city at upwards of 20 MPH, hurtling high over the heads of commuters.  Well, I mean, that’s what I see in my head at least.

[Coilhouse - Inventor/Sculptor Kim Graham’s Weta Legs]

As a part-time occultist with a love of pop culture, one of my guilty pleasures is The Vigilant Citizen.  The author of the blog in question has a keen eye for occult symbolisim and a mind that connects the dots on an not-so-invisible conspiracy within the music and other media industries in a way that sometimes rests firmly in the grey area between conspiracy theory and media studies.  Seriously, how can you not like a blog featuring the tagline: “Symbols Rule the World, Not Rules Nor Laws?”

A few weeks ago, he did a quick overview of the video for the Black Eyed Peas’ “Imma Be” which touched on transhumanism and the video’s over-all message.  Well now he’s back with a detailed breakdown of the Peas’ hidden H+ agenda, how transhumanism is eugenics in a fancy frock.  Oh, and how Lucifer is “the patron saint of transhumanism”.

***

“You know, they have a point.”

“What?  Balderdash!”

“Who was naked in the living room, tripping balls on Ayahuasca and praying for the divine light of Lucifer to pierce their soul, last weekend?”

“<mutter>”

“Right.  Which means, you are BY DEFINITION, a Lucifer Worshiping Transhumanist.”

“Whatever.  That’s totally not true.  I’m really barely a Transhumanist at all.”

***

Admittedly, I’m pretty sure the Peas are using psychological warfare in their albums – that’s the only rational explanation for why I  suffer nosebleeds and start quoting “Catcher in the Rye” compulsively after hearing only thirty-seconds of “My Humps” but our friends at the Citizen have a more nuanced theory of the Psyops that the Peas are bringing to bear in the name of a crypto-fascist, Satan-powered, H+ driven future.

[The Vigilant Citizen - Transhumanism, PsyWar and B.E.P.'s "Imma Be"]

Coming soon to a future near you:

From Worth 1000, via SingularityHub’s short-list of it’s ’cybergenics’ competition.

thanks to Dingo for the tip-off!

Warning: SPOILERS

Guest-starring Buckaroo Banzai himself, Peter Weller, the latest episode of Fringe tells the tale of a grief-stricken astrophysicist that modifies his own body into a time machine.

Just look at him!

(borrowed from FringeFiles)

Best.ep.yet!

(click through for high resolution)

An arresting photo of the plume from the volcano currently erupting in Iceland. It’s uncertain how long it will continue and has plunged Europe into air traffic crisis.

Here are two short, but very sweet films to keep you amused while we wait for those damn scientists to build our upgrades:

via Planet Damage

So on our “Ask us anything” formspring.me account, someone asked the inevitable question: “Where’s my fucking jetpack?”

So where is your fucking Jetpack, anyway?

HERE’S YOUR FUCKING JETPACK.  There, boom, a commercially available Jetpack.  You strap it on, it flies and you don’t even need a license in most countries.  All you need is a little bit of disposable income and wham:  Jetpack.  What?  You can’t afford it?   Well what did you expect; that when jetpacks came around that they’d be free?  I live in a country where free flu shots are considered a government conspiracy and you expect someone to strap a communist subsidized rocket up your ass and tell you to go to town?  I don’t fucking think so.

What are you looking for in a jetpack, anyway?  I mean, sure they’re cool and all – who didn’t hide in their rooms and gently bring themselves off while watching the Rocketeer?  But what do your really want – flight?  Well there are other ways to fly then strapping a giant engine to your back.

Oh yeah, speaking of flight, here’s your flying car, too:

It’s called a “helicopter”.  Yes, you need a special license and metric shit-tonnes of money to own and operate one making it prohibitively expensive and unrealistic for many reasons – but hey, don’t feel bad - NINETY-ODD PERCENT OF THE HUMAN SPECIES feels the same way about cars.   To break that down into more manageable numbers, if the world was a colony of 1000 people, by some accounts only 70 lucky bastards would own cars.  Everyone else?  Hoofing it, biking it, using public transportation or being stuck in a geographic area the size of a postage stamp by environmental factors.

So does the fact you can’t afford a flying car make you sad?  Congratulations!  Now you’ve woken up on the same side of the bed as the rest of the human race.

Okay.  Fair enough, you don’t mean flying car in a loose sort of way that could include a helicopter.  You want an honest-to-God Nick Fury agent of S.H.I.E.L.D “where we’re going we don’t need roads” Delorian with rockets strapped to its ass.

What is it with you people wanting to strap rockets to everything’s ass, anyway?  Remind me never to look at your porn collection.    (Well, I mean… if it has tastefully done ass-rockets, send it on.)

Flying cars are neat, too.  But let me direct your attention to this window.  Look out there… now assuming you’re in a part of the world where car ownership is the norm, then you’re looking at a place where there need to be laws in place to stop people from doing stupid shit while operating several tonnes of dangerous machinery at high speeds.  It is somehow not common sense to not down a beer, smoke a joint, text your boyfriend, pierce your nipples and skullfuck a Peruvian trout when driving a two-ton death machine.

But people who weren’t gifted with a basic survival instinct aren’t the only downer about motor vehicles.   You see, the people making cars are under no pressure to make safe cars.  Do you really want the same companies that have to be sued, threatened and cajoled by private citizens and governments to not make cars that blow up when hit by a stiff breeze to be the ones responsible for shooting you and your car into the sky?   That bit from Fight Club, about auto companies weighing the liability for death vs defects in their vehicles?  That’s a true story.

So where is your flying car?  Perhaps it is waiting somewhere behind the car that is not responsible for approximately 2% of all the death in the world, annually?  (For ex.  1.4 million worldwide in 2004.)   How in the hell is anyone supposed to level up to super awesome flying cars when we can’t even get cars-that-don’t-kill-people-all-the-fucking-time down?

Okay, that’s enough yelling; the shouty old man routine gets old – fast.

But that said, the “where’s my fucking jetpack” meme pisses me the fuck off.

First of all, why the obsession over a future made in the 1910-1930′s?  Flying cars and jetpacks were the fantasy fetish objects of a different time.  Not a simpler time, because the phrase “simpler time” is like “military intelligence” – it’s a contradiction – we only think times were simpler thanks to temporal and cultural distancing.   Still, is that your future?  Really?  Or is your grandparents’ future?  The Jetpack future is a future born of the past.  It is a future created by people who lived in a world that had never seen the artificial suns rise over Japan, had not seen the realities of our space program, and probably couldn’t conceive of a black man in the White House or Celebrity Big Brother.

If you’re really serious about wanting the Jetpack future – and I know some of you are…

Hell, you’re listening to a man who once blew up a poster of Thomas Edison with homemade explosives while screaming “Nikola Tesla thou art revenged” at the top of his lungs and running naked through the woods.  Which is to say… I have my own hang ups about stolen futures.

If you’re serious about the Jetpack future, then don’t stop at “this is not my future” – make it your future.  Claim that vision of now that circumstances and small minds have denied you and find other like minded people and build it.

When Steampunk came back, you had people who looked at the future-of-a-different-past in some works of fiction and then started to make it real.  Not just with cute costumes and at conventions, but with building their own machines, starting real community and carving out a niche where that future made of cogs and springs and the rushing of superheated air has weight and takes up space and becomes real.  Now you’ve got people getting into D.I.Y. and sustainability and reclaiming urban spaces thanks to a subculture that in the beginning, just really liked some sci-fi books and had an unhealthy fixation with top hats.

Here’s the thing; if you stop at “this is not my future” and go no further, then someone else will make their version of the future and I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like it.   I can guarantee this because you already don’t like it.  We’re living in the future of men who saw people as commodities and human lives as disposable sources of income.  It’s not some grand conspiracy, it’s just people who have a vision of the future where the top 2% get richer and the rest of the world… well… you want to be in that 2%, right?  And the only way that is going to happen is if you buy into their future and not into the steam-sustainability-and-goggles future, the Ayahuasca-and-shamanism future, the Russian-feminist-ninja future or the Japanese-post-gender-newtype future.

We don’t have nice things because we let other people take them away from us.  We have these futures that seem alien to us because we let them happen.  I’m including you, me and 99% of all the humans and mutants I have ever met in that “we”, too.    We are the reason there are no jetpacks or flying cars or universal distribution of water and food.  ”We have met the enemy,” as a great man once said, “and he is us”. We contribute to a future that has no place for us in so many ways:  inaction, being convinced that we don’t have voices that count, being convinced that the only choices we have are the choices we can buy, despair, alienation… the list goes on and on.   We let the beautiful, amazing, weird, fucked-up futures we hold next to our hearts die stillborn in the face of futures so alien to most of us that they might as well be dread Cthulhu sleeping beneath the waves.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  If you want the jetpack future?  Find the other people who want it and make it.   If you see the people around you stand mute while the dreams of human accomplishment are ground into the dirt and they instead run over each other to embrace steaming mediocrity and you don’t think that’s a fair trade? Say something.  Contrary to slick movie quotes, the Devil never even bothered to pretend he didn’t exist – instead he made so many of us believe the lie that our voices and actions don’t matter.

Fuck the Devil.  Put on your tophat and latex gimp suit or Rocketeer jacket and carve out that future – Jetpacks and all if that’s what floats your boat – and don’t let me or anyone else get in your way.

At least we do have the alien dancing girls.

It is with much interest that I have observed the rapid popularity of formspring.me. This is an extremely powerful service that simply let’s the user:

Create a box where friends can ask questions anonymously.

So not only are people microblogging their life, replying to each other and retweeting; now they can hold their own Press Conferences.

Now, to help understand this, let’s go back to danah boyd’s seminal piece on Super Publics:

A reporter recently asked me why kids today have no shame. I told her it was her fault. Media is obsessed with revealing the backstage of people in the public eye – celebrities, politicians, etc. More recently, they’ve created a public eye to put people into – Survivor, Real World, etc. Open digital expression systems coupled with global networks took it one step farther by saying that anyone could operate as media and expose anyone else. What’s juicy is what people want to hide and thus, the media (all media) goes after this like hawks. Add the post-9/11 attitude that if you hide something, you are clearly a terrorist. Should it surprise anyone that teenagers have responded by exposing everything with pride? What better way to react to a super public where everyone is working as paparazzi? There’s nothing juicy about exposing what’s already exposed. Do it yourself and you have nothing to worry about. These are the kinds of things that are emerging as people face life in super publics.

What’s the difference between micro-celebrity (let’s say anyone with a few thousand followers on Twitter) and the sub-lebrities Joan Collins is bitching about? Nothing! They are just two of the ways we are entertaining each other to death, waiting for the world to end. One is for Hipsters and the other is for Chavs; that’s the only difference.

In fact, can it be that the only reason celebrity biographies are so popular is that we are data-mining them for content and clues?

This is the democratization of celebr1ty.. a new Golden Age.. when anyone that is entertaining enough and has an internet connection can develop a Cult following.

In the spirit of this, Ask Us Anything!