sciencefiction:These are fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner. They were created by production illustrator Tom Southwell in 1980-1981 and appeared in the background on a magazine stand in the city streets. (!!!!)
(via superelectric)
Cameron from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for a child’s book report (whilst hiding out from a Terminator that was trying to kill the child).
Paul Pope’s pitch for a Dune graphic novel
“It is said of Muad’dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. ‘That was its fate,’ he explained.”
—From The Commentaries Of M’uad Dib
(via torncurtain)
From an intellectual point of view, hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation, is a position that has widely benefited from the WikiLeaks revelations, because they have confirmed that truth is an effect of interpretation rather than its cause. Much more significant than a “truth” are its consequences, that is, how we deal with its revelations and what they are worth.
Nietzsche’s figure of the overman comes in handy here, because he is capable of realising himself as such, that is, of living his interpretation of the world without needing to believe that it is “true”. In an age such as ours, where important objective truths have been revealed, but remain ineffective because of the interests of the powerful, it’s necessary to manage this conflict of information in such a way as to become involved without taking sides. But how is this possible, and who can stand this conflict of the will to power?
According to Nietzsche, the capable ones will not be the most violent and objectively powerful, as is often believed, but rather “the most moderate, those who have no need of extreme articles of faith… and who can think of man with a considerable moderation of his value and not therefore become small and weak”. Indeed, the bisheriger Mensch, that is, the human being as he has been until now, will continue to have violent reactions and severe neuroses like dogs that have “for too long been kept on the leash”. In sum, the overman becomes an original interpreter, not for theoretical reasons, as if he found a truer word, but rather for existential ones.
Too often, as WikiLeaks demonstrated, we believed in erroneous truths or nonnexistent facts, and perhaps we must continue to do so, given the reactions from its opponents. But this is not the reason hermeneutics invites us to remain suspicious, doubtful, and, if possible, disinterested in truth. Hermeneutics wants all of us to actively interpret the world in terms of models we deliberately choose ourselves, that is, without being dragged down by “illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are”. As I said, it is impossible to predict what Nietzsche would have said, but, given his suspicion of truth and interest in interpretation, it is quite possible he would also have looked with ambivalence at the WikiLeaks revelations.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012523115640578983.html
Libertalia is said to be a resource-based colony founded by pirates at the the Bay from Antongil to Mananjary, including Ile Sainte Marie and Foulpointe. No one is sure if the pirate kingdom existed——it is listed as a pirate utopia in Peter Wilson’s book: Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. Libertalia was a secret anarchist enclave for buccaneers from England, France, Portugal and America.
It was founded by Thomas Tew, Misson and an Italian Dominican priest named Caraccioli. Its founders had created this escapist society because of disgust with Papal courts. The Malagasy name of the island is “Nosy Baraha” which is thought to mean the “Island of Ibraham.” Its original name is derived from early Arab or Jewish settlers. Some local traces confirm this speculation in Boraha legend, which explains that Boraha the fisherman was saved from drowning by a whale, echoing the biblical story of Jonah.
The Liberis were famed for their prowess of wrecking European vessels, and for freeing slaves that were headed to be traded at the Cape of Good Hope. Most of the local residents resorted to an agrarian sustenance. All gains from external ships were shared with the people of Libertalia. Their language, meanwhile, was a polyglot mixture between various African languages, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch and native Malagasy. The nation’s motto was “for God and Liberty,” and its rules of conduct emphasised liberty and unrestriction. Libertalia clearly comes into contact with Hakim Bey’s philosophy of the TAZ: temporary autonomous zones.
via The State
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.
Chuck Palahniuk (via kadrey)
(via darklyeuphoric)
Library of Lost Classics: The Top 5 Comics You May Never Read
3. Jack Kirby’s The Prisoner
[…]
In my eyes the best book of this era was a run [Jack Kirby] did on 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s right. Based off the Stanley Kubrick movie, based off the Arthur C. Clark novel. Well, kinda.
Kirby’s run started in a Treasury Size one-shot loosely adapting the movie. Something tells me Kirby was handed a script and some visual reference, saw there was a monolith involved and threw away the rest.
I’m glad he did. The run on the subsequent ongoing series consists of eon and galaxy spanning storylines, more mind-boggling than even the most out there Grant Morrison story told today. That’s including The Invisibles.
So imagine how thrilled I was to know Marvel commissioned him to adapt the equally mind-boggling TV series, Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, to the comic book page.
That’s right. McGoohan’s story of a decommissioned secret agent fighting his way out of a Dada prison resort was in the hands of man who took 2001 to a place beyond either Kubrick or Clark’s wildest imaginations.
And like all the comics here, it simply vanished.
[…]
ALSO: Ditko via Niles + Sienkiewicz, The Manga of Paul Pope, Twin Peaks: Season Three, Moebius/Otomo/Kurosawa
Post by buddyblanc May 21, 2012 at 2:23pm in graffiti moss environment art protest KING MOB
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13913 - Some serious Stranger Pride in this clip from Another Earth.
The only constant is change. It’s the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem. It might even be THE problem. Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the “rules,” the “precepts” or the “doctrine” then certainty can be obtained. Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty. It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It’s this aspect of science that I value more than any other. But science does not exist alone as practice. It’s also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.
The Curse Of Certainty In Science And Religion : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
Schneier on Security: <i>Rules for Radicals</i>
From 1971, still a useful tactical guide:
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people.When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have notes.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within in the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
