So Ragnar Tornquist, the guy who wrote Dreamfall, is making an MMO which features the Illuminati and Knights Templar.

So I guess I’ll be hibernating this winter.

I was reading a PDF when suddenly, an error. My first thought was “Caroliner Rainbow Bad Object Type Within a Text Operator Array”. Wait, what am I talking about?

Words: Interview (check out what Sore Pony Lore has to say!)
Alex Ross’ fairly non-comittal review

Pictures: 23 Years of Caroliner

Sound and Vision: Caroliner Rainbow Bluembeigh Treason of the Abyss

Inspiring enough to give me The Fear!

Mate, I like this guy Marshall McLuhan.  I want to buy him a beer - especially because I’d have to drink it for him.  Anyway:  a good answer from “The Playboy Interview”:

“PLAYBOY: Despite your personal distaste for the upheavals induced by the new electric technology, you seem to feel that if we understand and influence its effects on us, a less alienated and fragmented society may emerge from it. Is it thus accurate to say that you are essentially optimistic about the future?

MCLUHAN: There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ–Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man’s destiny–if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image–tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I’ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.”

Time’s Person of the Year is You.  Yeah, You.  Feel special?  I do.  This is the Eschaton.  Wake me when it’s 2012.

“But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to disconnected, too, from himself?  sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operatives who did not wish him well?”

- Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”

Well cher bro - that’s as good as anything in 1984.  Back when this novel was set, the turn of 20th Century America, the Frontier days were passing into a bleak unknown.  Pynchon wonders if it’s happening again.  And just think what happened then - mass production, incredible speeds of transportation, the internets…  also Big Brother, Cheeseburgers, Nuclear Weapons.  Are we almost distinct, multiplied perhaps, from our previous selves a hundred years old?  Did Terrance McKenna have a point with his highfaluten Novelty Theory?  Are we all synapses of a mind awakening from infancy, becoming self aware?  And if we could say hello to some great man of the past, like Buffalo Bill, would he think our world utopic, or dystopic?

The five things I really looked forward to this year:

Beck, “The Information”: Shit.

The Mars Volta, “Amputechture”: Wank.

Tool, “10,000 Days”: Balls.

Mastodon, “Blood Mountain”: “Sleeping Giant” and “Capillarian Crest” will kick your arse so hard.

Mark Z. Danielewski, “Only Revolutions”: It ain’t no House of Leaves. It’s probably brilliant, but it’s also off-putting.

Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”: It’s Pynchon, but the kind you can read, without agony and sweat, so I can actually recommend this.

Somebody asked me about his [insert German word here], which is the fear of losing one’s soul to the detritus of existence. The kind that hints at the sadness of ideal vs. reality. I’d coincidentally just found my own answer that very afternoon, but it was too wet to show him any wise words. So these are them here:

“He no longer seems to have it in him to produce poetry of the kind he wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, pieces sometimes pages long, rambling, clumsy in parts, but daring nonetheless, full of novelties. Those poems, or most of them, came out of a state of anguished being-in-love, as well as out of the torrents of reading he was doing. Now, four years later, he is still anguished, but his anguish has become habitual, even chronic, like a headache that will not go away. The poems he writes are wry little pieces, minor in every sense. Whatever their nominal subject, it is he himself - trapped, lonely, miserable - who is at their centre; yet - he cannot fail to see it - these new poems lack the energy or even the desire to explore his impasse of spirit seriously.

In fact he is exhausted all the time. At his grey-topped desk is the big IBM office he is overcome with gales of yawning that he struggles to conceal; at the British Museum the words swim before his eyes. Al he wants to do is sink his head on his arms and sleep.

Yet he cannot accept that the life he is leading here in London is without plan or meaning. A century ago poets derangd themselves with opium or alcohol so that from the brink of madness they could issue reports on their visionary experiences. By such means they turned themselves into seers, prophets of the future. Opium and alcohol are not his way, he is too frightened of what they might do to his health. But are exhaustion and misery not capable of performing the same work? Is living on the brink of psychic collapse not as good as living on the brink of madness? Why is it a greater sacrifice, a greater extinction of personality, to hide out in a garret room on the Left Bank for which you have not paid the rent, or wander from cafe to cafe, bearded, unwashed, smelly, bumming drinks from friends, than to dress in a black suit and do soul-destroying office-work and submit to either loneliness unto death or sex without desire?… In the romantic era artists went mad on an extravagant scale. Madness poured out of them in reams of delirious verse or great gouts of paint. That era is over: his own madness, if it is his lot to suffer madness, will be otherwise - quiet, discreet. He will sit in a corner, tight and hunched… waiting patiently for his season in hell to pass. And when it has passed he will be all the more stronger for having endured.”
- J.M. Coetzee, “Youth”.

(Here is The Fear)
So now I think maybe, this is The End. It’s time to find a beach and smoke a joint and listen to The Doors at volume, and watch your horizons burn and your oceans turn to steam and your face melt off in your hands. Did you see how we got here? We were grazing in the meadow. They, who largely left us alone but always made sure the meadow was sustained and eternal, They who seemed kind, aloof, and benevolent, herded us into wagons. There were bleatings, but we were quietly cooed. Our journey ends in a gaping metallic void. We know it is The End, and we stamp and bleat, but we walk up the ramp, because that is The Way, and we’re never sure exactly what impulse drives The Way, but we need it, because confronting such tensions leads to implosion, and the herd must sustain. How strange that our sense of individual self-preservation isn’t present as a species?

So what we need now is a severing. We need a voice so vital and eloquent that it breaks through the knots of rationalisation and beholds a truth so essential that not even They can deny it. It can’t be said in simple terms. It needs to paralyse with it’s authenticity. It needs to herald a new direction in thought. To reverse complacency. We need William Faulkner. Fused with Bertrand Russell. On acid. Whatever it takes.

Dear Christianity,

I find peace in the idea that one day my body will rot into particles and atoms which will then be assimilated into the fabric of the universe. I like this idea more than I like heaven.

Cheers,

- S.Q.F. Bartleby

“Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

Phillip K. Dick, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”