Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Mario Brothers Flash epic: penultimate installment

More Web-based appropriations of video games: Newgrounds is hosting part four of the grand Mario Brothers flash epic. We're told part five should be the conclusion.

EDITED to add: The author says that the original hoster deleted the first installments due to copyright. Arg.

Outsourcing and global IP

In a reflection on the global intellectual property struggles, today's offering is an article clearly on one side of an emerging argument. Kenneth Brown identifies intellectual property with a nation's economic strength, coupling outsourcing and global piracy in one combined threat:

Our haste to embrace globalization is one of the clearest culprits. In the name of globalization, the U.S. has relentlessly pursued business partnerships with countries that are home to relentless intellectual property (IP) theft. It almost seems as though the more evidence there is of piracy in a country, the more IT business and investment we bring in. The relationship is simple: unpunished IP theft coupled with an increase in IT abroad has exponentially increased the overall amount of IP theft. Simply put, the more there is to steal, the more will be stolen.

New Pentagon papers: Diebold vs the blogosphere

A New Pentagon Papers Case brings us up to date on Diebold's slipping ability to control its internal documentation about its evoting systems. The Web slides around this in stages.

Machinima via Wikipedia

My daily Wikipedia round brought me to a good article on Machinima. It covers some of the usual suspects, like RvB, and the good Machinima.com site, but also adds some nicely (and nonmilitary) meditative ones, like Ozymandias and the more advanced Anna.
Strange Company is pretty energetic on this beat.

These remind me of other net appropriations of video games. The Mario Brothers opera is a recent example, with All Your Base being the ancestor of note. We still need more game entities playing games, more recursivity.

Wordbursts for April 27th, 2004

Today's poetic extraction from the blogbrain, via Daypop's bursts:

boggles; darfur, khartoum; polarization; lyrical; nana; jed; giuliani; chimpy; warmer; mistook; peasant; warehouses; carping; creeps; chimes; sensors; promoter; births; kinney

This feels like a long mnenomic, or hypnotic trigger, or a text sheet for military planning (Operation Carping Warehouses). Such rhythms, expended by the longer ones, and broken up by syntactic leaps.

Lots of A-listers today.

Dutch copyright raids: more global IP

The latest from the global IP battlefront: a semi-law-enforcement unit raided Dutch student dorms for copyright infringement materials. Team Opsporing Piraterij, a unit within the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service-Economic Investigation Service (FIOD-ECD), led the charge on student residences.

DM Europe has an editorial mocking the raids.

(via OLDaily)

Surreal comic cutups from Ex-hilarator

Ex-hilarator cuts and mixes old cartoons with captions, releasing surrealist goodness.

The cartoon with its sheer endless humoristic allegories is among the oldest of trades, and a creative one at that. We want to breathe new life into all those used and out-laughed witnesses
of human tragedy - but how? We have asked our friend algorithmic random generator to give us a hand. We split the image from the text and shove the gag into a new interpretation (with an element of sadism, one might add).

(via BoingBoing)

Daypop wordbursts

I'm increasingly fascinated by applications which try to aggregate as much human thinking as possible into one narrow focus. Google's Zeitgeist digests a year of searches into a page. Others are faster, more to the moment: Blogdex gathering up leading blog stories, Google News bubbling up the leading stories from thousands of media sources, Daypop grabbing the biggest News and blog posts it can find.

My current favorite is Daypop's Wordburst. This sorts out leading stories, then extracts keywords from them. It's like a poetic language snapshot of the global brain - here's the latest:

basra clarett billiton diana indicts mice ore negotiable coffins mgm screeners beluga eases assurances wetlands explode hewitt macgill doublethink

Stephenson interviewed in Salon on Confusion

Another one: Salon interviews Neal Stephenson on The Confusion.
Reason notes his historigraphical illness: "I have a perverse weakness for past generations that are universally reviled today".
A nice note about literacy antecedents:

Do you see yourself as part of any particular literary tradition?

I absolutely look to -- consciously, knowingly look back on -- those 19th-century serialized, potboiler novelists as people who are on to something. They got something right. There was something about living in that environment that made these guys incredibly productive. Dickens was the same deal. I do not have the sheer guts that it would take to serialize something. Before you've written the last chapter, the first chapter has already been published, so you can't go back and change anything to make it all work out. I just do not have the sheer chutzpah to start publishing stuff before it's all done. Mine is a pretty risk-averse strategy.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Embassy: very cool video

The Embassy is an ad firm, specializing in high-end digital video effects. Check out the clever Nike ads, along with the disturbing robocop one.