Yamiken Hori: Junk Head

via bassmen

Big Bohlen

Der Fun ist ein Stahlbad!

Merry Christmas!!

via BoingBoing.

Merry Christmas!

Joss Whedon has a point

Life is too short to be busy

Tim Kreider on the 'busy' trap. I wholly concur.

Anomalies

The 200th comic by Subnormality! Take your time.

"We are looking for anomalies." This has become a staple of RPG-parlance, it basically means that the characters have a thorough look at their surroundings, trying to note everything that is peculiar, noteworthy or simply wrong, from secret compartments, a diary's pages stuffed under the carpet to a large blood spill on the ceiling. It is a way to cut to the chase if you are just tossing some guard shack, but it is a shortcut, and harms the feeling of immersion. This especially true if you are going for some period or genre feel, which in my opinion is based in large parts on the depiction of specific details: Size and make of furniture, age and disrepair of a room, traces of a personality and their role in the world etc. Of course, details take time, but the time taken to depict a search (even of some area that is not that important or special) helps to create a clearer image of a game world that exists apart from the group and the plot.

Polite society

A tool for the enforcement of nearly lost societal norms, via this isn't happiness. It's practical use is nearly zero (unless you want to get into a fight with an expectorator, and you are superfast with a marker and scissors), but it is a nice handy list concerning acceptable behavior in our urban centers. Alien infiltrators, take note!

With a view of Paris

That's what you can look at in your living room on a big screen, in your own sweet vault, complete with hydroponic garden and classroom. It may only be a refurbished missile base, but the whole setup has a distinctive Vault-Tec feeling to it. I wonder what kind of sociological experiments they have dreamed up this time.

China Miéville: London's Overthrow

China Miéville (author of the delightful Kraken) has written a long, insightful essay on London, garnished with cell-phone photography.

RUIN

by Oddball Animation, via io9.

Solipsist

SOLIPSIST from Andrew Huang on Vimeo.

What is ACTA?

via ByteSoup

Now later than ever!

The fifty most loathsome Americans of 2011, by Ian Murphy. See it as a short, sweet introduction to the USA, and the best roundup of 2011 available on the net.

Drone Warfare gives me the blues

George Monbiot on drone warfare. John Robb has more on this topic. While the moral implications are surely scary, and the emergence of semi-autonomous drones is horrifying, it's not only the non-accountability but also the cheapness of the system that gives me pause. A drone as smart as a rat, able to make its own decisions whether to kill a target is bad enough. Lower the cost of a strike at about 1000 dollars, and that should put Seal Team Six out of business. Link this concept with total surveillance - now that is truly depressing.

One could counter that the low cost democratizes the system, but what will you do with your one little drone when the competition puts a few thousand of them into the sky? It's like voting with your wallet: You might just not be rich enough to win a war of attrition. And while everyone was hoping for a nice robocaust, it's just another wizard-level police state.

Please use the web for this, but not for that

So what is this ACTA business? It is said to be worse than SOPA, and proffering that legislation led to (maybe) the first visible strike on the internet. Now there seems to be an European version on the way, and it seems like it has proceeded quite far, in a rather sneaky way, like one of those halfling fucks lurking on the slope of your house volcano. I think we need another strike, and lots of phone calls to our representatives' offices. And letters. And creepy signboard vigils with vaguely related but really scary bible verses. Like the one about the two hundred foreskins. Other scary religions are, of course, welcome to join the fray.

Anyway: I think we are raging against the dying of the light. One day, a similar or worse legislation will be rammed through the relevant law-giving body, something like "all behavior on the net is illegal, prepare to be sued to oblivion and gitmotized if you do anything that displeases or hurts the feelings someone with more litigious oomph, or if we feel that our ROI isn't high enough. We will fuck you up. Yes, you could be face a lawsuit for posting a photo that looks like a photo that some has taken before, but from a different angle. Shut your mouth and pay up." But fret not. While articles like that cracked oldie above might no longer be possible, the net will still be there: It is useful after all, and you should use it for this, but not for that.

Watching this, I feel my vertebrae crumple

via coilhouse

Shine on, you crazy diamond(s)!

via boingboing

So how was your evening?

Go here. Hover your mouse over the video. Never touch a drink again.

Blind

via partial objects