I woke up this morning with a neat little page that I'm assuming got onto my browser when I stumbled and then switched tabs before it could load. But that's beside the point. The point is that I came upon this cool little site displaying a new FOA Schwarz Exclusive which lets kids draw their own monster and fork up a measly $250 to have it made into a surprisingly accurate plush rendition.
And when I say surprisingly accurate, I mean it; the people at the North American Bear Co. seem to put a lot of care into making these stuffed animals... er... monsters as close to the retarded scribblings of children as possible.
Take this weird guy, adorned with weird spikes and moles popping out of his feakishly round head. The monster he designed is pretty cool tho: And this monster design, while a bit simple, translates into what I must say is a pretty rad stuffed monster: Although, hon, you look a bit old to be having your parents shell out 250 bones to buy you stuffed animals...
But my biggest shock came when I came across a design called Dot by an innocent enough little tyke named Sherri.
Notice anything a little disturbing about the picture? Here, have a closer look:
It appears little Sherri wants her monster to be a bit more than a friend. Let's see if the boys at North American Bear Co. noticed this lil' inconspicuous detail and if they actually implemented it: That's perfect. I wonder if the parents noticed that part of their daughter's drawing, and what they think of her brand new purple monster with a big fuzzy dong hanging between its legs!
So I've just started using this Greasemonkey script called OiNKPlus, and it's absolute sex. It interfaces with gobs of P2P music sites and adds an expandable pane which displays all sorts of information, including discography, similar artists (which for the first time I've seen in a while seems to be accurate) and even a Last.fm player (a site which I should sign up for already).
On top of that I've just installed the latest Firefox 3 beta and, despite the fact that a few of my favorite plugs aren't ready for it yet, the browsing is amazingly fast and seems to handle the display of multiple tabs much more efficiently than its now-ancient older brother.
How pleased I was to see the word "Justice" suddenly in the Top 10 of my favorite P2P music site. Not much else to say other than: here's my blow-by-blow report:
Radio Edit - Who cares?? It's just a shorter version of a song we already love.
Justice Remix - Starts immediately for no regard for uncalibrated speakers and headphones. A distorted synth-guitar similar to the one from the D.A.N.C.E. Live Version pitches down to what almost seems like unending bass notes under the vocals. A 'trough-peak' breakdown leads into a severely cut up version of the bass solo from the-
...
You know what, nevermind that, I'm a bit drunk and wrote way more than is necessary for a 6 track remix EP. I left the above for posterity really, and to make it seem more spontaneous rather than revealing the fact that I wrote about 300 words per song. Instead I'm going to give one sentence reviews (although anyone who knows me knows a sentence can turn into a fucking paragraph in my prose):
*points* Hey look! It made a sad emoticon!
Justice Remix - D.A.N.C.E. Live Version guitars dive bomb like a fleet of oppressive cross-bearing Kamikaze B-52's.
Surkin Remix - Glittery string-laden space-disco worthy of Discovery surrounding an awkward sandwich of ghettotech cheese and meat made of those Surkin stab-aholic bridges we've come to love.
Sunshine Brothers Remix - Vocoded vocals and simplistic, video game-inspired electro-house drum machine-synth combos show how the Sunshine Bros. got their name.
LA Riots Remix - The first remix using the instrumentation from the album mix is a fist-pump worthy romp full of vocal cut-ups, 1 bar-long loops and that now-iconic bass solo.
Petitis Pilous Remix - hold on... I gotta adjust the font...
...
...in a good way, that is.
I could have also said, "Like making sweet, sweet love to a sqaure wave," but it just doesn't have the same impact in enormous, flashing red font.
UPDATE: Watch the video here, which is still in the tradition of the D.A.N.C.E. video. It remixes the icons from numerous movie (and music?) production companies and studios into reading the lyrics to the song.
Also, after watching the video, I did realize that the radio edit is slightly different - about half way through they start looping the instrumentation differently, like what they do at their live shows, and there's more of the piano from the outro of the video in the mix (which I really wish they had included in the radio edit).
Awesome image stolen from the people over at djmix.es.
Along with the rest of the sane population of the internet, I think MySpaces with ungodly amounts of animation, transparencies, and otherwise processor-hogging graphics are unsightly, gaudy things which must go the way of Friendster.
But every now and then the internet surprises us: in what could be called an abstract application of Rule 34, Kavisnky - the French electronic music artist who is more 80's than a Transformer-locomotive carrying Night Rider, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a crate full of 8-bit Nintendo consoles, piloted by Dee Snider himself - has blessed the world with what could only be called MySpace porn:
And thats only one part - the scrolling background is fixed and theres tons more cool stuff to look it - it's like someone took Tron and made it a website. Simply put, this is the most bad-ass MySpace profile ever created.
Let me first diffuse any comments along the line of "u rasist fag0t!!!11" (yes, Jewish is a race, get over it) by pulling the age old, "Hey! I'm [insert race, sexual orientation, nationality, or black here] so it's okay for me to make fun of them!"-card. Yeah, it's a card with a big name.
Second, let me amend that statement by saying that I'm an absolutely terrible Jew: I've been to church more times than I've been to temple, I can't remember whether you fast on Yom Kippur or Rosh Ha-Shonnah, and the only Hebrew I know is the standard Hannukah prayer, and only then it's by wrote memory - I have no idea what the gobbledy-gook that's coming out of my mouth actually means. I even just had to consult Wikipedia one last time to find out how to spell Rosh Ha-Shonnah. Oh, and I didn't know Purim was a real holiday until today.
[And what a lovely segue that was.]
So, today I was browsing Facebook and noticed some party being held for Purim in LA. Now, any of you who have seen For Your Consideration (or are better Jews than I) know that Purim is a Jewish holiday which "commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman's plot to annihilate them." (It seems we've got a lot of holidays based on escaping from some sort of oppressor or another. A recurrent theme in the Jewish history, if you will.)
Well, I'd seen For Your Consideration (and, as stated before, am a terrible Jew) and had actually thought that they had made up the whole holiday! I mean, it's a Christopher Guest film; I wouldn't put that anywhere near past him. Actually, I'd put the two right fucking side-by-side. So I was shocked when I threw "Purim" into my Wikipedia search bar and what came up was not a page on the film but one meticulously detailing the very real Jewish holiday of Purim.
A few minutes of fascinated clicking went by and I had moved past the Purim article, on to the Ashkenazi Jews page and finally to the article on Jewish Population. It was here that I started looking at the statistics on the distribution of the Jewish population and noticed a few odd things.
First of all, Jews really don't exist outside of the US and Israel (which my friend Meena claims is the 51st state, so that doesn't even count). According to Wikipedia, 38.62% of all Jewish people live in the United States. The next highest populated country is Irael with... wait what?! The US has more Jews than the fucking homeland?? I guess it must be all the New York bagel shops and waiters willing to lightly toast it, cut it into quarters, and with a small amount of butter and light chive cream chesse - do you have that? Oh, and the cream cheese has to be on the side. But not the butter! And half a kosher dill pickle. No, I can't eat a whole one, just half. Anyone want to split it with me then? Oh well, forget the pickle, just the bagel then. And can I get some napkins over here?
It gets worse from there. After the US and Israel, the next highest popJewpulated country is Russia with a whopping 800,000 Yiddish-cursing residents. Thats only 4.91% of the Jews in the world! Also, if you were wondering what the little splotch above the sad face in my illustration is, it's supposed to be a Yarmulke. At least I knew how to spell that word. Edit: I didn't.
So to recap, nearly 75% of the Jews on Earth (I'll get to that later) reside in only two countries, one of which has more Jews and more movie-making than the other. This gives us a fairly decent world view of the sitJewtuation. But wait, Wikipedia wants to give us an even more comprehensive understanding, because in determining the Jewish population of the world, we need one more piece of crucial information:
Yes! It is indeed true, according to Wikipedia, that 100% of the Jews are on Earth! Goddamn, I'm glad that someone cleared that up, because I had been beginning to wonder where the Joozians were going to be factored into these population percentages.
But no Jew feels as alienated (Ha! Pun! Get it?) as the one lonely Jewish person in Afghanistan. You read that right: there is 1, count it, 1 Jewish person in Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia. Again in a conversation with Meena, it was decided that someone should edit the page to make it maybe a little more up-to-date:
Sorry little guy, but no one really expected you to make it.
UPDATE: Oh man, would it have been better if I titled this post Stajewstics?
Includes the two mash ups, 'Little Harder Little Better' and 'I Don't Feel Like _________,' both of which are also available to stream and download on MySpace.
It includes four of my mash-ups, two of which are from my new mix 'Crashed' which will be up on torrents in a matter of days (I just have to finish seeding a few other torrents so that I can have my full upload bandwidth available).
After poohpoohing the righteous rantings of the waterlogged Christ figure, the Cat begins to juggle several icons of Western culture, most notably two books, representing the Old and New Testaments, and a saucer of lactal fluid, an ironic reference to maternal loss the two children experienced when their mother abandoned them "for the afternoon." Our heroic Id adds to this bold gesture a rake and a toy man, and thus completes the Oedipal triangle.
A totally awesome list of videos of building demolitions. This is one of my favorites, mainly because you can see so much of the explosion illuminating the inside of the building:
And finally, a picture (thanks to my neighbor Brittany) of a car which drove through the front of the 7-11 down the street. Another of my neighbors, Doug, was in the store and literally 5 feet from the car when it crashed through the window. The guy was so trashed that he was actually trying to back out of the store. I guess he was hoping for a drive-thru.
This is probably one of the worst people on earth right here:
This kind of exploitation of people is just horrendous, as are the people willing to go on these shows. Although, I hate to say it, but I almost wanna know what happened in the first half of the show; I mean, stealing the money and everything? Damn this bitch is cold.
I just StumbledUpon this site which catalogs a number of 80's boomboxes. It led me to find the Vintage Boombox and Ghetto Blaster Museum, a site which I had perused a while ago. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, wishing for the days of cassette tape and neon colors. I remember getting boomboxes banned from the buses to Camp Mitchman after my friends and I played songs like "Long View" and "Stinkfist" one too many times - makes me want to buy one of these from eBay, get a cassette-adapter, and carry it around with my laptop and midi controller and DJ out on the street on hot summer days, drinking 40's on the curb. The perfect meld of old (read: from my childhood) and new technologies and culture.
A city council in Chicago has just put forward a law to ban the sale of plastic bags under 2 inches in height - essentially, dime bags. Like banning the bags is going to have any effect! Think about this: if the substance being transported in the bags is illegal, what's to stop the dealers from getting the bags illicitly as well?
Lt. Kevin Navarro, commanding officer of the Chicago police Department's Narcotics and Gang Unit, said the ordinance will be an "important tool" to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses. The bags are used by the thousands to sell small quantities of drugs at $10 or $20 a bag.
Navarro referred to the plastic bags as "Marketing 101 for the drug dealers." Many of them have symbols, allowing drug users to ask for "Superman" or "Blue Dolphin" instead of the drug itself, he said.
Yeah, um, because drug dealers never heard of CELLOPHANE or any other number of methods of transporting drugs. This is the equivalent of banning pint glasses and bottles in order to "crack down" on alcohol sales. What's next? Is it gonna be illegal to have a rectal cavity?
Also, just to prove how unknowledgable they are on the drug culture, logo'd bags are not used to code-name drugs but the dealers who SELL them. Even if they were right, considering how many other pseudonyms drugs have, I highly doubt it would have made much of a dent in drug sales if suddenly people had to stop ordering "Blue Dolphins" and find some other way to refer to their shit.
Here is what I hope to be the final draft of my article on the uncanny valley for The Cyborg Database.
The Uncanny Valley by Nils Weedon
Please watch each of the following embedded videos and answer the questions regarding those videos.
After each video, have the follow questions each with a drop-down menu with the choices of the numbers 1-5:
On a scale of 1-5, 1 being 'very little' and 5 being 'extremely,' answer the following questions: How uncomfortable did the subject make you feel? How life-like was the subject? How human-like was the subject? How human-like do you believe the subject was intended to be?
After, the user clicks submit and both individual and total results are displayed for each subject.
Introduction
If you answered 4 or 5 in regards to first question (“How uncomfortable did the subject make you feel?”) for any subject in the videos on the previous page, what you have just experienced was what has been dubbed The Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is a concept regarding the relationship between humans and machines first introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. However, the notion of the uncanny was first brought into popular thought by psychologist Sigmund Freud in his paper ”Das Unheimliche”. (I am aware that the uncanny was described by others before Freud, but for all intents and purposes he can be said to be the father of the current understanding of the phenomenon.) In the article, Freud posits a scenario in which one's feelings towards an object are conflicting; in one sense, the object is known and recognizable – familiar – while at the same instance one also feels that the object is not something one has seen – it is unfamiliar. This dissonance between emotions is what Freud calls the uncanny. [1]
The Uncanny
The uncanny can be any number of things: it can be returning to your hometown, only to find that many of the businesses and homes you grew up with have been sold, destroyed, or simply revamped; it can be meeting the relative of someone whom you know well; it can even simply be flying to some distant location and experiencing the sunset at a different hour. When we interact with some new stimulus, the first thing we do is to try and discern what it is that we already know about this thing from what we know about other things like it. Next, we attempt to classify the new thing, so that we may attempt to operate around it with some kind of certainty. Now, let us posit that of this new thing, one minute detail, one indiscriminate quality, is not what we expected – then the rules which we had previously ascribed to this thing no longer definitely hold. It's like tripping on a misplaced shoe in your own home. [1]
When you trip over a shoe in your house, what is the first thing you feel? Are you confused why the shoe was there? Do you rationalize that someone must have carelessly left it there and move on? No. You get angry. More so, you are angry at the shoe because it interrupted your previously familiar activity. Humans thrive on familiarity and predictability – without it we would not be able to operate at all, because at an elementary level even our concepts of cause and effect – that which allows us to do anything in this world with certainty – are governed by the simple fact that we have seen something happen so many times that we can only assume that it will happen again. [2] So yes, we do initially feel confused, but this confusion, the unfamiliarity, when linked with the original sense of the familiar, breeds anger, as does anything which people do not immediately understand.
The Uncanny Valley
Even since the 17th century, man's desire to replicate the human form with machines has been strong. In 1810, mechanist Henri Maillardet produced an automatous doll-like figure which not only utilized human-like movements but even wrote down poetry and drew pictures; it could almost be seen as a God-complex – man feels powerful and fearless in front of all but God, so he attempts to become God himself. [3]
How the concept of the uncanny relates to that of robotics should be obvious, but as always, it is the first person to name something, not discover it, who gets the credit. (Sir Isaac Newton wasn't the first person to discover gravity, he was merely the first one to properly conceptualize it.) In 1970, Masahiro Mori published his paper “The Uncanny Valley,” and thus coined the term. In the paper, Mori describes climbing a mountain. When climbing a mountain, the altitude of a climber does not uniformly change with regards to the climber's distance from the summit. He uses this example to illustrate a graph which displays non-direct relations between two variables: familiarity and human likeness. Mori posits that as the human likeness of a robot increases, so does one's familiarity with the robot, until the human likeness comes to a point where it, for lack of a better expression, hits too close to home, and familiarity suddenly drops. It is this point which he describes as the uncanny valley. [4]
The reason the uncanny valley exists is due to how we initially classify our subject. At the lower-end of human likeness, we are judging the robot as a robot, which is an unfamiliar class to begin with. Any human-like characteristics are noticed as an attempt to imitate the human form, and are thus welcome, and almost cute in some sense. It has always been said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” However, as one approaches the uncanny valley, the initial framework upon which the subject is judged changes – it ceases to be seen as a robot and is now viewed as a fellow living, breathing human being. Of course, imperfect, non-human-like qualities are still present, but now these are the attributes which stand out, as opposed to before where the human qualities were most apparent. Now, instead of being a robot imitating a human it is a human who is doing a bad job at being a human. Before what was the unfamiliar mocking the familiar is now something familiar with uncanny, unfamiliar aspects.
The Second Uncanny Valley
Mori's concept of the uncanny valley only applies to robots which are approaching human likeness – that is, at the far right of the graph, the subject in question is indistinguishable from an actual human. In our current society not only are robots becoming more human-like but humans are also becoming more robot-like, either in abilities or appearance. From this a new problem arises where humans could themselves become victim to the uncanny valley. This point is what Jamais Cascio has dubbed the second uncanny valley. Cascio proposes that as technology advances, a second uncanny valley could arise, with the second trough being at the point where transhuman-enhancements are both present and apparent. Instead of applying to adaptations like artificial limbs, where the aim is to emulate and restore human likeness as much as possible, the transhuman – or H+ – technologies aim to improve the abilities of the human body beyond what would normally be possible, be it eyesight, muscle strength, or cognition.
So long as these enhancements remain within a perceived norm of human behavior, a negative reaction is unlikely, but once individuals supplant normal human variety and become super-human, revulsion can be expected. This is exemplified in people's initial reactions to the cyborg collective known as “The Borg” in the Star Trek franchise, who bear extremely noticeable enhancing prosthetics, or the super-humanly strong cyborgs of the Terminator series. However, it can be hypothesized that once the technologies gain further distance from human norms, H+ individuals would cease to be judged on human levels and instead be regarded as separate entities altogether – this point is what has been dubbed posthuman, and it is here that familiarity rises once again towards acceptance and out of the second uncanny valley. [5]
However, one could argue that this second uncanny valley is actually our standard uncanny valley, shifted over. You see, the uncanny valley cannot be a static plot, as people's attitudes and what they are familiarly with are constantly in flux. Show one of the modern androids from the videos previously displayed to someone from the 17th century and he or she would surely be far more repulsed by the subject than someone from the 21st century. This effect can be seen throughout history. One example would be the existence of homosexuality is our culture. Fifty years ago, a man and a woman in a state of embrace was the norm; it was the familiar. A scene of two men in loving embrace would then obviously have elicited a feeling of unease and repulsion, even as it does for some today, but today that scene is far less repulsive (to the average person, there are still some idiots...) and is quickly becoming one which is readily accepted in society. The nature of the uncanny can and will change, and only time will tell whether in the studies of robotics or transhumanism if the uncanny valley presents a significant problem for the assimilation of new technologies into society.
1.Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 2.Hume, David. “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” 3.Grenville, Bruce. “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture.” 4.Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” 5.Cascio, James. “The Second Uncanny Valley.”
Here are more sites which have been tickling my entertainment bone lately, mostly culled from StubmleUpon.
8 Letters in Search of a Word - a great little word game where you are given 8 letters and have to find as many words contained within those letters within the time limit as possible. Hint: whenever you see the letters i, n and g, immediately isolate them.
CubeCraft - a nifty little site with DIY paper box models of a number of different pop culture icons
Ring of Fire - a cool experiment which results in a constantly rotating ring of fire!
Turing Test - a conversation with a far-too-clever computer.
Stars - a frustrating flash game which is entirely too addictive
Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife... with which to kill your spouse for sleeping with the young soup chef who works at the Au Bon Pain.
Meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife... who happens to be the psychiatrist I recently hired in hopes of improving my luck with the opposite sex.
So I've redone the look of the site a bit, I hope people likes.
There's the new sidebar which includes an RSS feed finally, as well as links to all my mixes which are up on The Pirate Bay.
Rock.
\m/
Also, on a pretty random note, I've just added a chunky section to the Uncanny Valley Wikipedia article on transhumanism and a supposed second uncanny valley. It's my first Wiki entry, so I apologize if I'm a little excited. This was done for my Cyborg Society class, and an article which I finished tonight should be up on the Cyborg Database soon...ish.
I couldn't count how many times I watched this on tape as kid. All I'm missing now is the premier of Gizmo Duck in the made-for-TV movie of Duck Tales and an archive of the origin of my obsession with television would be complete.
Reading through the Wikipedia article on Ipaetus, one of Saturn's moons, which has a number of odd, unexplained features including a huge ridge which spans the equator, but only on the lighter, ice covered side of the yin-yang colored moon.
The fact that the movie Twister was, "[r]ated PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather."
The fact that a group of ferrets is called a business.
Now, let me first say, this song is kinda catchy, but it has nothing to do with Kanye. really, his rapping is quite subpar in general, and this track is no exception. No, it's only because probably the best DP song ever written is sampled in it.
The reason I'm posting this vid is because when Daft are finally revealed (which takes over two and a half minutes - fuck you and your ego Kanye!) the camera swoops overhead and you can get a few glimpses of the custom software which DP had built for their show.
"Well, the ship was towed outside of the environment." "Into another environment." "No, no, no, it's been towed beyond the environment... it's not in the environment." "Well what's out there?" "Nothing's out there!" "Well there must be something out there." "There's nothing out there. All there is is sea and birds and fish."
"And?" "And 20,000 tons of crude oil." "And what else?" "And a fire." "And anything else?" "And the part of the ship that the front fell off...
But there's nothing else out there - it's a complete void!
Wired has just published an excellent article by Chris Anderson entitled, "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business." I have frequently been getting into somewhat-heated discussions with both my peers and others about the current state of media and how things like P2P and YouTube will be affecting the sale of media in the future. More often than not, I'm saying that somehow everything will end up free or at an extremely minimal cost to the user, while the others complain that without a money-based consumer-producer based relationship, there won't be anything to fund any of the media.
Well this article takes everything I've been trying to say (and more) and makes it coherent and kicks the ass of anyone who I had been arguing with before.
Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.
Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)
