To google one's computer. Hm. To google one's photos. Hmm. To google for one's personal relations. Hmmm. To google one's mail. Hmmmm. I bet this won't be the last time I ever post this image (#1, #2, #3):



Feel free to articulate the news about Google with my previous post about thought interfaces. Scary cabal, eh?···

Science fiction coming true, again: a paralysed man sends e-mail and operates a remote by thought, after having a chip implanted in the brain I'm pretty convinced telepathy may or may not exist at the moment but is definitely a future technology — I wrote this five years ago (in portuguese though).···

One of the bad things about a night schedule is that you don't get to watch the news. And football matches. For instance, the WC-2006 qualifying match in which Portugal beat Russia 7-1 after drawing 2-2 against Liechtenstein four days before (WTF?). Indeed, international football is starting to look like a computer game Or did Russia and Liechtenstein swap kits? Well, tomorrow FC Porto goes to Lisbon play Benfica, at the moment four points ahead (let's hope that difference will be down to one point after the match). Still, after such a bad start in the championship, Porto seems to be gearing up while Benfica already appears overstretched, and playing UEFA Cup matches will put an end to the energy and hopes of a squad with so little room for management. Even if not tomorrow, we'll win in the end.···

Yes, João, I did see Collateral last Thursday. I haven't much to comment on the film. It's an action movie with a bad, very predictable plot that looks like a Grand Theft Auto mission and the curious facts that Tom Cruise plays the bad guy (oh, now I'm so excited! rright...) and it takes place in just one night (ditto). That said, it was directed by Michael Mann, who is one helluva director (see Heat, The Insider), meaning, Collateral is a movie with a bad argument but very good direction (and solid acting, in fact). Therefore, it's an interesting aesthetical experience (see L.A. the way you never seen it before!) if you do have a fetish with nightly urban landscapes in shades of fluorescent light as I do.

Collateral is indeed interesting from a technical point of view, as the film required to shoot on location in such conditions (without resorting to day for night techniques) would be quite grainy, so Mann went digital, shooting most of the film using high definition cameras with very impressive results — I've read in a poorly-researched review Mann shot Collateral with a handycam — untrue! Think George Lucas, Star Wars episodes 1 and 2, HD cameras, terabytes of storage instead! Pity that I found the transitions between the sequences shot in film and those shot in HD quite noticeable, the problem being a somehow different depiction of movement. Therefore, Collateral may be a technical landmark — a movie in which digital beat film, but as I said, a lesser film from Michael Mann.···

Videodictionary is a collaborative video-art project seeking contributions. As the name says, they are trying to put together a visual dictionary, therefore they want one-minute long video definitions of words, without resorting to text or speech.···

A great, great photographical essay about a few homeless' entire belongings — the Indentity Kit series. Reminds me of a work by a colleague studying Photography at my college who gave disposable cameras to beggars and homeless people and then made an essay on the results.···

Crazy. Shockwave (plugin required) meets cadavre esquis meets acid trip meets MS Escher meets a never ending zoom!···

This was a shitty summer (yeah, summer, right) in blogging, wasn't it? Three full months of apparent idleness, and what does your narrator do? Procrastinate, that's right. I may have been busy. Editing stuff, photographing stuff, cleaning stuff, but, but but... many people out there had their mandatory twenty-two workday holidays in Algarve, have their mind-numbing nine to five routines and their girlfriends and their landlords and their dishes and they do blog a lot. To me, it's as if I was going down on a solipsistic paranoia in which nobody ever needs sleep but me, and the whole world conspires to hide the fact. How can people do so much? Or did the blog took over their lives? Humm...

Anyway, classes start today. Back to college then, this time obeying a mind-bending six o'clock to midnight night schedule, Monday to Friday. I still don't know the exact schedule tho', but I hope theory classes are packed together, so I can skip a day or two in case I want to go watch a play at ten or just have a proper dinner with friends at nine thirty. There are a few goodies to look forward this year: documentary class (meaning documentary project), animation class (meaning animation project), another 35mm collective film project, plus yet another individual project which may be whatever we wish (I think I'll go for a 30 minute DV film). And all that must be done in just a few months, as the year ends in flames: trainee / cheap labour hell. After that, here's your degree, you go girl.

And I still haven't done my tasklist for summer, never mind last year's (there's a few gigs of unedited footage for an experimental-documentary still sitting on my hard drive). Web-wise, I'm becoming a disaster — Cafeína is anemic, and most of the asseptic.org empire needs a rebuild badly — and I still haven't registered the new domain. Let's see if I can pick on that once I adapt to the new crazy schedule...···

That was my most extremist, Work Against the System post ever, wasn't it? So back to square one... Airline Logos! Complete, down to the 1960s TAP logo which appears in today's trendiest ironic handbags.···

I totally missed last week's Cat & Girl: the best ever. No better illustration could be made of a conversation I was having with a friend the other day on how people drift into a routine that makes them square — perhaps it's because routines are anti-evolutionary, meaning, the human brain evolved out of exceptions, not routines and repeated procedures, at which, by the way, near-mechanical beings such as ants or roaches (indeed robots are taking over the world) are far more efficient. I can imagine a film already: Square Earth.···

Ladies and gentlemen, my showreel in streaming video. It requires a 256kbps+ connection and a NSV-enabled media player, meaning Winamp (for Windows) or the VideoLAN player (also for other systems). ···

Cinema Redux, whole movies distilled to a matrix of 6x8 pixel images representing each second. As if Beflix got a telecine machine. It's interesting still to look at each final result and see the structure and overall tone of the film in such an explicit way.···

Places viruses sneak into, that is, the places in which a virus, a trojan or any other piece of malware may add a reference so it gets executed every time Windows starts. The page contains some scary information. I normally keep an eye in my Start Up folder, the Run/RunServices registry keys and in the C:\ root directory for the appearence of unusual entries, but it seems there are a lot of other places an autostart references may hide. Does anyone know a good (meaning: not dodgy like many 'anti-spyware' apps are) program that allows you to inspect ALL startup possibilities?···

Also via milov, PHP/SWF charts, a set of Flash files that generates good looking charts from PHP-generated data. File under 'might be useful someday'. Anyway, looks way better than the typical MS Excel pie chart.···

Via milov, the 'Hello World' program in different programming languages. PHP (which, for instance, powers the weblog you're reading) is simple, but some of the languages (take Bliss) seem baroque indeed. Then again, there are the esoteric programming languages — one is aptly named Brainfuck.···

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?···

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.···