In the titletag, my ticket for the Confederate States of America election taking place in a parallel universe? Fascist states eventually become liberal, but liberal states eventually become fascist. Us Europeans know. Bruce Lee would be a good leader in the war against terrorism, being moderate and representing multiculturalism while at the same time not allowing anyone to call him a pussy, and Che would be a good vice-president with progressive policies on healthcare, taxation and copyright reform, having a great charisma from the past but being substatially more moderate. Like Lula da Silva in Brazil, for instance (only that Diego Maradona would be the Brazilian president in that parallel universe — and I just got 180 million enemies in this one).

Hm, am I very very drunk? No. It's just unbelieveably hot (32 degrees Celsius) for what we're accostumed in this time of the year, and the air is so thick if I had just arrived from a holiday in Mars my lungs would burst in a gory scene reminiscent of Kill Bill, liquified blood et al. It's like breathing inside a swimming pool, I bet some fish don't die in this atmosphere. Therefore, brain sucks as much oxygen as it can. Eventually, too much. Oxygen high.···

An 1978 essay by Philip K. Dick — How to Build a Universe that doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. Plenty of references to philosphical mindfucks and the essay seems to clarify some of the esoteria behind VALIS. It also makes me feel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a much more important PKD book than I thought when I read it. Hmm.···

Shall I get rid of those links cluttering the bottom of my desktop for days? Here's something for my architect friends: This Transparent New York app sure will leave a particular friend of mine who worked in an socio-architectural (or whatever) assessment of Lisbon salivating, as he was always telling me how cool it'd be if one could add meta information to maps on CAD programs and then script the whole thing, instead of colouring abandoned buildings and office buildings and buildings containing restaurants by hand. By the way, Badarchitecture.org is a photolog about bad architecture in Beijing. Apparentely in China they design skyscapers in a week. Obviously, aesthetic disasters happen.···

My writing here has been quite sparse lately, hasn't it? And if you read this often, you may be asking yourselves "wasn't this bastard on holiday, why won't he write?". True that I'm officially on holiday for a couple more weeks — then comes the challenge of the last year at college with a night schedule — and I haven't the excuse of being actually at work or being in the Netherlands doing the Erasmus student interchange program (which actually seems like a super-vacation) — but, but, I'm drowning in all the work I should have done calmly during the previous couple of months. You know, portuguese-style, living on the deadline's edge. So, over the last couple of weeks I put together a couple of trailers, edited a 'making of', did a showreel (meaning, those self-promotional videos that show clips of the works you've been involved in along with a subtitle stating the what and the what you've done). And I found time to drive 400 kms through tricky roads in a day to visit my aunt at my ancestors' village in the Northeast and take a lot of photos of the place where everything seems made of poorly-cut granite stones (images will be here, once I got the time), and to accept a friend's (way, way outdated website) invitation to go along with her take photos of wrecked automobiles, united somewhere in the generic outskirts of the city.

Throw in putting together a DVD with all the stuff I've been doing so I can start distributing it to people (with my internship in mind, perhaps), and somehow getting promoted to soundtrack composer of the bloody Seven Seals of the Apocalypse because the real composer we got is taking long and so a temporary soundtrack is needed so a finished movie may be sent to the Film Institute, so that they know what happened to their money. I can't even read sheet music, I only happened to be at the wrong place (a corridor at college, when I went to deliver this year's enrollment papers) at the wrong time (when the college director was passing by), so I'm there downloading classical music MIDI files and then feeding those into a Mac with Protools and hoping there's some magical reverb and record noise filters which makes the files sound less like MIDIs.

Once all this is done, I still need to improve my media website (it's rather poor as it is), adding more streams of stuff I've done, in case someone ever decides to check the URL I've placed at the end of the showreel and on the DVD. After that, I can clean my room.···

I went to see Spektrum at TeCA the other day. As usual the local cultural 'scene' is rather promiscuous with clubbing and events such as the first aniversary of the rehabilitated Carlos Alberto Theatre become an excuse to turn those spaces — theatres, museums, etc — into maladjusted nightclubs. Anyway I went to the first day of the electronic music festival that passes for the birthday party of a theatre (you know, those places with Shakespeare plays and such) with a friend which convinced me I'd like Spektrum, besides, it'd be a great place to play social critic with her. I did really like the band, in fact: simply described, think mid-90s alternative pop (the kind that leans towards 'trip-hop') updated with the latest de rigeur zeitgeist sounds of electroclash (no doubt they'll discard that particular dictionary in the future once the backlash gets fully underway). The problem was the venue was indeed crap. A band member even told the audience they are used to play in nightclubs and never ever played a theatre in which everyone is seated. And I may add, in unconfortable (though not the very worst of Porto theatres and cinemas) little chairs. The best we, the audience could do, was bobbing our heads like pigeons. Crap.

This obviously served as an annoyance amplifier. We were annoyed at those fashion-victim wankers who screamed loudly everytime the guy with the machinery played a sample that was electroclashy or eightbitty or whatever — couldn't you just take a C64 up your arses? We were annoyed at the old people, there just to be seen, just to be photographed in an important social event, there watching the concert against their will, itching for it to end so they can do their social mingling. Therefore, once the band started to leave the stage, a lot of people got up and left the room immediately, leaving everyone else clapping their hands for the encore with little hope the band would return (I wouldn't if many people in my audience showed such eagerness to leave). They did come back for a couple more songs. More credit to Spektrum, then.

Afterwards there was an after-show party at the lobby of the TeCA, with the disc jockeys and video jockeys and light jockeys and slide-show jockeys and even perhaps bar jockeys serving drinks depending on the music. The problem is that particular foyer isn't exactly a disco or a dancehall, in fact it's a narrow corridor that makes it hard for anyone to dance or move. Me and my friend were for a moment there against the wall trying to chat, eventually we left and went for a calmer drink. And I ask myself, is the culture and arts niche so fucked up in this city the only way a theatre, a cinema, or a museum can survive is by becoming a disco every now and then?···

New at the imagelog: The first test pictures taken with my brand new, thirty-five years old Electro35 GT, after picking it up at the repair shop (I'm suspicious it didn't need repair, some fiddling with the adapted battery so it didn't make contact with the metallic camera body would do the trick). It's still damn nice it works, the Electro is indeed a lovely camera, even if the GT seems to have a lot more 'personality' than the GX I used before — i.e. the GX was virtually point'n'shoot, while the GT requires a bit more care as the automatic shutter doesn't have as much agility to match the aperture you set.



I surely love the baroqueness of the camera when I'm out using the wide-angle lens and put the auxiliary viewfinder. Somehow it makes people look away, understanding you are an artist and that you have a right to take pictures of doorknobs and tree bark. Carrying an ordinary-looking camera, you're just crazy.···

Not being arsed to send a message to a fellow blogger offering invites, that's how much I wanted a Gmail account. After all, your humble narrator has a POP3 mail account with mail server temporary storage of up to 800 hundred megs (less a couple of hundred megs I use for HTML and database storage), courtesy of my hosting service. However, when I saw the Gmail-O-Matic distributing invites people are sick of playing out to get some miserable ammount of blog karma, I thought "oh, why not?". So, if you are really webmail desperate, use that website. Supply doesn't meet demand (I'm sure someone somewhere is auctioning his invites), so insert your current e-mail in that box, then reload the page saying no luck often. I, for one, might actually end up using Gmail. Years of poor management and carelessness turned my POP account into a spam sink taxing enough for the Thuderbird spam filters (a new version — 0.8 — is out, by the way), so I might start from zero. I might drop the current POP account and create a new one that shall only be handed to people 'in person', while using Gmail as a more public address, for webpages and such (I will still enforce anti-spambot measures, of course, but those spiders are getting really smart...). Hate-mail will always take a bit to fill up to one gig...···

As I had mentioned, here are some photos I took by seaside last week. Notice the darkening of the corners (a couple of the photos were cropped), as I 'hacked' my Minolta SLR with my Yashica Electro35's wide angle lens, which has the same diameter but was obviously not meant to be screwed in the front of a modern SLR's zoom lens. I like the effect still.···

Sci-fi writer John Shirley interviews six other colleagues — Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton provide extrapolations about the social future. I don't know the writing of them all, but it seems to be an impressive panel — I'm becoming a fan of Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Colors Mars trilogy blew me away earlier this summer, and Bruce Sterling is a cyberpunk legend. Their answers are rather bleak though, that's how much the world has changed since the beginning of the decade. KSR seems the most optimistic of the lot — predicting a victory for Kerry and the possibility of a benign world government —, while Bruce Sterling seems to be closer to my opinion that the US no longer matters as (my words follow, Sterling doesn't say it explicitly) it is taking political choices that lead to a Soviet-like breakdown, and the others are all aware that neofascism is a major political force at work nowdays in the West and most strongly in the US, under the guise of religious groups, repressive laws suited to corporations (such as intellectual property laws, as Cory Doctorow always inevitably rants about), and Big Media which saturates citizens with such a great amount of propaganda they may keep certain amounts of self-expression, as the sheer volume makes it harmless to the power structure (not a new situation though, as philosophers such as Theodor Adorno have pointed out this long ago). Indeed, I rather take Sterling's advice and look at China for inspiration. Not that it is a lovely democratic country, but at least its trend in development at all levels is reverse to what I see across the Atlantic.···

Ten Tips on Writing the Living Web. Surprisingly right, although it seems to have the 'pro blogger' in mind. For instance, that consistency and stamina are good are indisputed facts, but I just cannot be regular. Yes, I did spend a week without blogging, but feeling like a criminal, untrustworthy person is not the best of motivations to writing more often. I'm like this: I do things, too many different things. Yes, I do tend to procrastinate a lot sometimes, but I just don't write when I'm not in the mood because A: this is not a job I have to go to everyday and B: if I'm not in the mood and try to write, I'll be treating my visitors to bad crap. Yes, I'm irregular. But come on, I did spend a week without blogging, am I letting you down? Do I even know you?

Some people ought to go out more.···

The Top 25 most censored media stories 2003-2004. Big Media makes state censorship irrelevant while providing the illusion of freedom. These are the stories that at best, appear as small boxes in the middle pages of a few less corrupt newspapers.···

More images of Mechanized Monsters, it seems these giant excavators are on tour in Germany after all, not Finland. (via Adrift) ···

For instance, take this real-life giant mech monster, apparently terrorising villages in Finland. Now that's something I would like to photograph. It seems to be a hill-cutting machine used in open-air mines or quarries. Neverthless, I wouldn't be surprised to watch this in a Japanese mechanical-monsters-from-Hell movie. (via Everyone) ···

There are other, productive ways, one can feed oneself some soul-sugar. Not just watching movies like crazy. Since the weather was a bit gray and unstable, I took the Minolta SLR, the wideangle screw-in lens that's part of the Electro35 kit (which fits perfectly in the 55mm diameter of the SLR lens), and scoured the beaches north of Porto, trying to take some pictures I had in mind. Unfortunate for my personal endeavour, the beaches are all clean and renewed with proper structures (ie. proper parking, coffeehouses and bars that no longer sit inside derelict shacks), so I didn't find the rusty, toxic and hazardous stuff I was looking after, which I remember used to turn my days at the beach, back when I was a kid, into such life-threatning experiences. Never mind, I did take some interesting photos of stuff I wasn't after, even though the depressing cold, gray photos of rusty petrol bins, ruined boats and dead algae mixed with thick ropes will have to wait.···

It's no secret my personal life hasn't been a joy in the last couple of months. Shattered hopes in love, frustrations related to the work to be done, and witnessing a couple of very depressing cases of character rape (I coined the expression as a derivation of 'character assassination' — it means someone is having his/her personality and tastes changed quickly and greatly by the action of someone else, as in 'brainwashing' but somewhat more extensive as it results in the practical loss of the person you knew). Therefore, I spent the last few days feeding myself some soul-sugar, meaning, cathartic entertainment. I closed a couple of serious cinematic gaps as I finally watched Cinema Paradiso (the Oscar-winning Fellini-esque tale of a kid who grew up as a film projeccionist) and Apocalypse Now (in the longer, Redux version of the best war movie ever, up there along with Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, but then again, I'm a Kubrick junkie). Then I also re-watched Lost in Translation.

Then, to the theatre proper. Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent confirmed my opinion I truly dislike this director (therefore going against film school political correctness), as an interesting concept — and interesting characters — is turned into a confusing film with no real sense of dialogue or interaction between players (and I believe the director should know having an epilogue explaining everything that went on is a symptom something is wrong about the film). I also went to see I, Robot to confirm the total destruction of Asimov's work I suspected about when I saw the trailer. Of course, they say the film was 'suggested' by Asimov's I, Robot in the end, which is in fact true since the film is based, at best, in the back cover of the book. Needless to say then, the makers didn't resist and went for the whole evil robots taking over the world drama, with obviously rogue policeman Will Smith kicking their metallic bottoms while advertising Converse All-Stars (just the stupidest, blunt example of product placement ever). Not even the art direction was worthwhile, this film featured a disinspired futuristic scenario full of clichés such as the evil computer with its 'core' on top of a huge shaft, full of shiny plasma and metal and Christmas Tree lights, and which must be overrided by injecting some nanobots in a complicated place because blowing it up just wouldn't work in... providing an action-packed climax to the movie. Wow, it was a piece of cinematic crap indeed, but at least I felt happy because I had been right. I told you so, like Will Smith's character was itching to say.···

sIFR looks like a clever hack (using Flash, CSS and Javascript) to allow webdesigners to embed any font they wish in their websites, so that I could, for instance, finally have the headers of this weblog set in proper Helvetica Bold or Univers Condensed (trust me, it'd be pretty). Problem is, I tested it and it tends to break down pretty easily, and the number of comments in the page makes me feel other had the same problems. Sometimes it doesn't render at all, it's slow, sometimes larger text sends it spinning out of control. And although browsers should be stable and its caches should work properly, the concept of ten instances of the same Flash file running in the same page makes me kind of nervous. So, this is a clever hack for one ocasional use, but still not ready for widespread use. Just a cool trick for portfolio use. Someone still ought to come with proper font embedding, so people start doing hideous stuff like setting whole paragraphs to Microgramma.···

Long exposure night shots. With the correct amount of overexposure, some images will turn out completely surreal. And I love what it does to the greens on the trees. Next project, repeat this at the right moment of dusk. In related news, I put up an Electro35 collection at Cafeína, featuring a couple of images I hadn't included in this site's Electro35 collection, and all in rather higher size and quality.···

Well, I've been going photographer lately, haven't I? Here's the Ultimate Exposure Computer, which past the introdutory routine stuff about aperture and speeds has very handy tricks to know how to expose correctly without caring about the meter. I love to know the kind of things they won't teach you at school (ie. if you're supposed to be a pro, you're supposed to have all kinds of helper equipment).···

Don't I love Apple computers? Their last iMac looked like a Chinese cheapo bedside lamp, their new iMac looks like... an oversized portable computer with a misplaced screen. And I'm sure Mac fans will loved it because it has... design, and surely Mac fans like design, even if it is a ridiculously squashed Classic Macintosh. Just throw'em something white and round and they'll eat it. Ok, maybe I'm being unfair. I don't hate the Macs that much. I even have my Windows adjusted to feel a bit like the good parts of MacOS, taskbar on top and some dock software running at the bottom of the screen. Problem is, iMacs seem they will always look stupid. I may envy the practical and beautiful 'titanium' case of the Mac G5, but as expensive-toy Macs are concerned, first we had a toilet, then a cheapo lamp, and now (I'm sure some consultant said "widescreens are hip", only forgot we are dealing with multi-purpose computers, not TV sets) a flat panel screen with the bottom bit missing. At least they could leave some ports on the front, only that it won't look much good on the desks of high-end, very dead, design offices. That's the irritating thing about the Mac mystique — they seem to constantly choose form over function, and many times the form isn't up to it.···