Castles in the Sand

How the mighty have fallen. It's funny at first, but you begin to realise after a while how horrifyingly ephemeral the internet is. For all the concern over data floating around as search results forever, i.e. those embarassing photo's you don't want your boss to see, the real horror is the total randomness of what stays popular and what doesn't. Can you imagine having spent a good portion of your time on acquiring friends on a social networking site that becomes irrelevant? Now that the internet is here to stay, maybe it's time some serious architecture and institutions are built that manage to last until this global communication network goes the way of the dodo.

Byzantine Autistic Manouvering

I just watched this movie after years of hearing how great it is. And I was stupid to avoid it, assuming that it couldn't be entertaining whatever the pitch. It actually is as amazing as every critic thought it was. The trailer is pretty self-explanatory, but it just can't convey the numerous shots of telling blank faces. Obviously, the documentary makers did a lot to come up with a narrative, as they almost always do. Interestingly enough, it only made me think of another brilliant documentary about the amount of faking needed to make a documentary,Opération Lune. Maybe every documentary should be released only with it's anti-documentary as a double bill.

Yogurt

We've been living under the horrifying spectre of random health products for so long we can't even recognize a laxative anymore. Just to reiterate what every reasonable person ought to think when they see this: A yogurt company has created a patented, trademarked new bacteria that somehow finds it's way unscathed to your lower intestines, where it performs all the oddjobs your native intestinal flora is just to damn lazy for, which you notice because of the improved regularity of your bowel movements? Where can I get it? If they can do this, why am I still waiting for tar-scrubbing nanobots in my cigarettes?

Harry Potter and the welcome explanation

I think there's not enough serious literary criticism on youtube, but this comes close. I love the juxtaposition of Rammstein and what appears to be a cheery scrapbooking template. But seriously folks, I was mystified by how bad those last three Harry Potter books were, and mostly just toed the party line (I have friends who dressed up for the various releases) and agreed that it was awesome Harry defeated Evil, despite everything feeling kind of forced and weird. Luckily, this guy took it on himself to explain why that is. I'm not pretending I felt the calvinism, but there was something strange about all the righteous vengeance and suddenly straightforward plot. Now, all I have to do is internalise this argument and I can rain fiery hell down on Rowling apologists, if it deem it necessary. I can only tender the suggestion you do the same, hilarity is bound to ensue.

You try the survival! Huanxi Condoms!

Engrish.com can offer you many hours of entertainment. I like my mangled English best if the concepts described badly are completely foreign to Western Culture as well. Drivers behaving in a harmonious fashion so that all of traffic is in balance with the universe is a genuine Chinese traffic rule. But the above example is becoming more and more common. Asian cultures using English in much the same way English speakers use Chinese Characters, symbols that give an illusion of meaning, but appear absurd to people who speak the language. There must be a Chinese web archive somewhere with pictures of the ubiquitous Chinese Character tattoos on deluded Westerners, supposedly standing for health, happiness, good luck. I shudder to think of the possibilities.

The death of surrealism

I haven't been watching the new series of Shooting stars, but there is still the possibility of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer coming back to do a sketch show. I really miss seeing stuff like this on a regular weekday. It's not that current comedy is boring or that this kind of stuff is always great, but it's all just so realistic and reasonable. It's almost like nobody wants to do it anymore, just having something weird and silly. There's still standups like Eddie Izzard, and the mighty boosh, but as a whole the last couple of years feel less and less like anything can happen, and more and more like, everything as already happened. This whole decade was like seeing that cloned sheep on TV, the most mundane kind of future you could imagine. In other words let's try and invent and rocket car or something before 2020, or just bring back surrealism.

G-spot Gone!

Terrible news, it's like hearing they bulldozed Disneyland. I was so sure I'd been there, but it was all in my dreams, apparently. There is some hope, though. The research only proved that there is no physical difference between women who claim to have it, and those that don't. It could still be psychological. It like to try a little reality hacking here, you've all read or seen peter pan, right? If we just believe in it, we could make it real. Everyone around the world clap your hands if you believe in the G-spot, don't let it die!

Reassembling Post-Human Hermeneutics: An Essay about Sub-semiotic Totalities in Modern Culture

If you, like me, have at some point flirted with Post-modernist theory and all it entails, you may be aware of the immense possibilities for gibberish. Though a lot of the ideas explained to me by friends who did go down this road seemed appealing, reading Derrida or Heidegger always bored me much more than my desire to learn. There is actually a point to their use of language, but let's not forget that the field is also littered with people faking it, or just not making sense outside of their own heads. The basic problem as I see it, is that inexpertly deconstructing things is analogous to throwing a frog in a blender instead of dissecting it. If you can't take certain things as a given, you simply won't find anything useful. This page is a comprehensive archive of the discussion sparked off by physicist Alan Sokal when he decided to create a random article generator and publish the results. Hilarious fun for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
And this link lets you make your own. Enjoy!