WORK: Music Festival Collectible Card Game

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I turned the whole European music festival season into a collectible card game. Next week I am playing Tetris with religions. Nah, seriously. Working with the hard data set from music community site Tastebuds, I came up with card designs for 16 European festivals (most of them UK-based, obviously) - focusing more on representing the demographic data than coming up with actual gamification. Still, if any of you guys wants to work with me on mad gamification designs or mechanisms, I'm actually up for grabs.

Just posting four of these cards here, those for Benicassim, Download, Sonar and Sziget festival. Spotify playlist links included (thx to Nisha of Storyboardmusic for prepping those!)

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PERSONAL: XXXIV

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While learning how to take photos like they curve bullets in Wanted (that, or I've finally managed to summon up spatial distortion demon fields that'll appear attached to a new Instagram update), I incidentally turned 34. I never wanted to grow older than 25, to be honest, and when someone very much like an end-level boss to me said Vancouver was a godawfully amazing place and I should really spend my 30th womb extraction day there, Skinny Puppy and William Gibson aside, I ended up by a lake where the sky was grey (good), it was cold (good) and me being a Martian was undeniable (still not sure whether it's good or bad). There's a hidden conclusion here somewhere. Four years later I'm warping space by the Thames (the whole Big Ben is an Enochian watchtower, notice how it warps tourist speech centres into ooohs and aahs and devoted, yet incomprehensible mumbling?), Vancouver's a tentacle's reach away, cEvin Key's Facebook updates mostly holler at me from Tokyo and I'm mostly bored with how things are because restricted technical evolution keeps me duller than usual, so I end up writing essays of thousand words mostly containing fuck you. Welcome to another day in the life of.

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Note: also going full-on Snake Eyes over the London tech/subversive scene after my six months at Tastebuds as a community manager. Conclusions about startups, psychographic profiling, user channeling and manipulation, human shallowness, redemption and guitar/pop bands that make my heart retch up further uncontrollably retching hearts are by the bucketful.

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Music? Injections of noise, amygdala waves & black glaciers - the more compatible with silence and more well-suited as soundtracks, the better. These often coincide. Ambient releases from Glacial Movements Records, Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, Raster-Noton or Tympanik. Mostly. A bit of black metal for old times' sake, always had a soft spot for Absu, Forgotten Woods or Wolves In The Throne Room and that also led to more majorly fucked up moodsetters, but I'll get back to these later. A newcomer to the fold is minimal wave - Farah's Law of Life (soundtrack for Dawid Marcinkowski's amazing interactive movie Sufferrosa) was the first hook and now Phantom Love is the next - surprise vinyl from my birthday came from TheLastLaugh Julie). Note for the detailspotters: yep, that's some promo material from La Mort Clothing right there and yep, a few lucky events led to another and I've managed to grab hold of the Mage Tarot as well. And to be honest, the Invisibles omnibus is not exactly commuter-carry material.

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Loving how the London Eye actually looks like Pripyat when you look at it like that. Left out the pictures about the Thames looking like an oversized oil pond with dead pigeons... OH WAIT.

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Yep that's us, Polly and me, and I'm sparing you all five days' pictures of constant restaurant-hopping - but clearly Peruvian restaurant Ceviche was the best of all (sea bass in tiger's milk is quite unbeatable!) - Polly's quite good at bringing surprises by the vatful, because vatful's a standardized dimension of quantity now - and for the interested lot - Ceviche is right next to Garlic & Shots!

Tricky question: what's the fourth book from the top?


BRAINFOOD: My Five Minutes Being A God (appears in Machete Girl 8)

Here's my lead article from cyberpunk magazine Machete Girl issue 8 a.k.a. the cyber mage issue, on how technology and magick overlap. Read the first half of the magazine on Issuu - part 2 and PDF downloads coming soon! And now, drop the reality warp drinks, pills and basslines, the warfare for the new Zeitgeist IS ON! (According to chief ed Comwedge, Machete Girl is back after a year of misdirection and lack of cyberpunk sexual drive. This is the first part of a two parter issue exploring the sigil punk method of the Cyber Mage!)
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INTERIOR DESIGN: Deus Ex, the DIY way

That's probably the best thing that happened to the Deus Ex franchise this week. Yes, it's not a recent post. That's how good it is.


PERSONAL: laptop décor

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I usually make a lot of friends furious when I deface my laptops with stickers. The last one I wrote Damage Report on was covered with Angelspit, Psylo, Ant-Zen and a home-made Barbelith one with a fairly vibrant Enochian Aemeth sigil that's attributed to Queen Elizabeth's court magician John Dee - my new one was dressed by Angelspit, Amelia Arsenic's Miss X Laboratories, Stickerbomb Monsters (bought at Magma Books) and stuff I found by spending half an hour with Redbubble's cyberpunk sticker inventory.

Do you have stickers that I need, might need or should need? Get in touch.


LINKBOX: Bookmarks for 2013-05-19

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"I wrote a story for Hiversaires, but about halfway through development I decided not to show it. In my early testing I realized that people were trying to figure it out and making up their own stories. For me that was much more enticing and interesting than just spelling everything out. When I realized that there would not be an explicit story, that aspect turned out to work really well." (Aliceffekt about his game Hiversaires on indiegames, photo by Jeriaska)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_onv9-fHoEc&feature=youtu.be

Max Keiser of Russia Today drops by to explain the genesis and implications of the digital currency Bitcoin, why The Federal Reserve and the banking system should apologise to the people for manipulating interest rates, how Warren Buffett is complicit in the Mexican drug trade by purchasing Wells Fargo, and Max's crazy times in the 1980s as a New York City stockbroker by day and punk-rock party animal by night. (via londonreal.tv)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQLeNiNTtbc

That's just the weirdest and cheesiest Nine Inch Nails mashup I've ever heard, Trent basically rickrolled on his 48th birthday?

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Bacon udon from Skankynavia via Zeta, the flatmate of ROCK.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMYl1w09Wz4&feature=youtu.be

Features on these issues provide subjects for discussion and enhance the conversation on Talking Germany. This time we're looking at how the Pirate Party's recent ballot box successes have added to the challenges of finding common positions and translating them into a comprehensive political program. We'll also discuss the Pirates' opposition to the planned global anti-copyright violation pact, ACTA. And we'll ask her about the role-playing games she enjoys in her free time. (more info on dw.de, coming via comwedge of machetegirl)


This is how Detroit's Robocop statue will look like

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The RoboCop statue has been in the works for a couple of years now, having raised money on Kickstarter after the mayor originally shot down the idea. (Understandably, since the city has more important things to spend its budget on right now.) The photo below isn’t of the completed statue — the 10-foot figure still needs to be cast in bronze — but it’s “basically how the final product will look,” according to MLive (via Badass Digest).

If you're interested in what's happening to the Robocop franchise now apart from the Kickstarter-founded Robocop statue, head over to Slashfilm - extra words of wisdom there about a Frank Miller graphic novel and Jose Padilha's remake! (via Slashfilm)

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New trailer for Ghost in the Shell: ARISE [border 1: ghost pain] emerges

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hulAZGTEY3c

In 2027, one year after the end of the Fourth Non-Nuclear War, the guttural town of New Port City is plagued with one mass tragedy after another. Enter Public Security Section's Daisuke Aramaki to lead an investigation along with Batou better known to the criminal scourge as "the man with the eye that does not sleep." Running parallel to this investigation is the military's clandestine 501st Secret Unit, which happens to count Motoko Kusanagi, the cyborg, wizard-level hacker amongst its many members. Also investigating these events is the Niihama Prefectural Police detective Togusa. When all three investigations cross paths, secrets will be revealed and terrible truths unearthed. (via comicbookmovie.com)

The Ghost in the Shell universe gets a four-part OVA prequel (50 minutes each) about the very early days of Section 9 and how Motoko Kusanagi ended up how she is in her thermoptic camo at the very beginning of the visionary GitS movie. Part 1, Border 1: Ghost Pain gets a limited cinematic release in Japan, on June 22, 2013 and there's a currently ongoing manga entitled Ghost in the Shell: Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ in Kodansha's Young Magazine. (here's some more merch and background info for you, Wikipedia page is actually full of great extra info as well - I'm quite sad though that Atsuko Tanaka, the voice of the Major got replaced - but then again, a young Major probably sports a different personality and mindset - or not, we'll see quite soon)


THE GONE HAPTICS: William Gibson reads first chapter of his new novel The Peripheral

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They didn’t think Flynn’s brother Burton had PTSD but that sometimes the gone haptics would glitch him, they said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he had worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction, what range, so they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer by the creek. An alcoholic uncle had lived there before, a veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother.

There's a relatively recent video out there with William Gibson at the New York Public Library, reading the first chapter (entitled The Gone Haptics) of his upcoming novel The Peripheral, and what you just hopefully read in the blockquote is the first sentence. Or the first few, depending on how exact the transcript is. The Gone Haptics also confuses me, bringing me back to wasp nets, military implants and post-war trailer reality oozing Agrippa and that's a good sort of confusion, something very similar to the feeling when I first read Neuromancer when I was thirteen. Go figure.

Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Walmart amber.

This video comes from IO9 and if you want more, hop on to the NYPL event page where you have an hour-long video of the whole event (with downloadable audio, video and transcript links) that's going to give you some great insight on Gibson's life and also some teasers on The Peripheral - two timelines shifting in the book, one being cca thirty years from now, the other terribly far ahead, consequently very hard to write? As I said, watch the whole thing.


NERO HOMME: Slutpunk interview with Actually Huizenga

'I give you a few pages to fill and give me something great,` says Sophie Rotas, queen bitch/empress for fashion mag Nero Homme and I love this game, complete creative freedom gives me a hard-on and it ain't different this time. We've gone switch with divine slut extraordinaire Actually Huizenga and interviewed each other, basing our questions on Tarot trumps, making it all sound like sex, smut, art and magick. Our interview in its entirety is printed in the first issue of Nero Homme - here's a longer teaser for you and here's their Facebook page for more info on launch dates, stockists and great weird fashion art. This comes from a couple of months back - teaser just found me once again and I couldn't resist the repost allure.
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PLANETDAMAGE S13E02: The Damage Report PDF (and other signs of life)

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Since late last week my debut book Damage Report has been available free for download, all DRM-free, in PDF format, with an extra ninth chapter missing from its print version. Unfortunately for English speakers, it's only in Hungarian. Worry not, though - there are some wonderful people I'm teaming up with on the English translation/proofreading and when it comes out (should be at the end of this year, if all goes according to plan), it'll also have some updates on the current state of things, cultural references and whatnot. I've finalized the manuscript last January and however much Damage Report is a freeze frame moment on our current lives and possible futures, it was outdated the very moment I stopped working on it.. update time again.

If you read Hungarian or have Hungarian friends who you think would enjoy this monstrosity of a gonzo fiction blog novel with its 444 pages of future re/search, porn and batshit craziness (as likers and haters both call it), give this a go. Newscasts already appearing on Origo and Cink.hu.

Also on the PD bandwidth: still researching stuff for Book Number Two, this is a hydra. Also researching and learning designwork: mostly infographics and Processing. The new Dose issue is also in the works. I don't know how I have time for this all. Going back to Satie, Cage, Varèse and Scriabin, also re-listening most of the suicidal black and post-black metal albums in a very obscure corner of my Google Music account - and randomly trying to keep this blog alive. If you want more regular content feeds (or more like, a continous neon piss streak of information, head over to my Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Have a great new upcoming whatever.

Always,
The Damage


LOOT FOR THOUGHT: Future Glitch Art Porn

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I call the overlap of the personal microenvironment and the comfort zone a bubble. Bubbles are best maintained by porn high-intensity intellectual stimuli. This week I've managed to sink my teeth into a ludicrous amount of great stuff - go and sample them yourself.


FETISH: Horse Gas Mask

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Without further ado - horses and gas masks. Sent in by @dawe_ who thinks this is a "damage combo breaker". Indeed it is.


TRAILER: Now You See Me (second trailer)

Street magic still amazes me and illusions on small and large scales both makes me think how much we're hardwired to work on pre-suppositions and expectations and how much we fall back to these. In this sense, this is another deconstructionist work, mainstream, yes, but can make you run the right tracks.

First rule of magic? Always be the smartest guy in the room.
Could't have said it better myself.

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BOOKMARKS: 2013-04-13

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  • BRING YOUR OWN BODY - How open source video nights liberate the post-internet art movement: Freed from limitations of specific object-based media, Beuys coined the term 'social sculpture' to describe the way in which art could be a collective endeavour - a practice that could somehow change society itself.
  • The Logic Problems That Will Eventually Pop the Bitcoin Bubble: Bitcoins are not a currency, at least in any traditional sense of the word. Rather, they have transformed more into an investment, like a stock. I could certainly purchase items with shares of Google Inc.—I would just have to find a seller willing to accept them—but no one would rationally say that makes stock into a currency rather than an investment.
  • The Cluetrain Manifesto -The End of Business as Usual: ...markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
  • Nearly 1 in 10 Americans would have sex with a robot: Forty-two percent of Americans indicated that such a dalliance would constitute cheating. Another 31 percent said it wouldn't, and 26 percent said they were unsure.

  • PERSONAL: Foursquare Hiscore 39, Hang Yours Higher

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    `Photo or it didn't happen` is the general consensus for the recent 39-point checkin, so bam, there you go, here's the untampered screenshot proof. Yes, there's a tampered one for a classified niche porn site which is often visited by wrinkled accountants with a more than respectable credit history with a fetish for jerking off on spreadsheets, license plates, bills or even screenshots with a certain number on them. That one finances my new corneas, so... do your googling, me, I'm outta here. 39. Drop me screenshots for higher Foursquare check-in scores in the comments.


    BOOKMARKS: 2012-04-06

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    (via katiecaro.tumblr)

  • AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL NIELSEN OF TYMPANIK: Artists like r.roo and Access To Arasaka say, represent more of the type of material I tend to gravitate towards when considering new releases for the label; a darker, more cerebral and complex electronic sound that can still manage to sound beautiful and inviting.
  • Upstream Color is the first masterpiece of the year: But Upstream Color is way less of a puzzle than Primer was -- it's much more about burrowing inside your head with the weird lovely pictures, and making you identify with two characters who are fatally dysfunctional. Also, where Primer was a film about technology, with lots of sequences of the main characters geeking out about their invention, Upstream Color is about biology, and the ways in which it shapes us beyond our understanding.
  • This New Camera Stabilizer Could Change Cinematography Forever: Shots like [the iconic Goodfellas scene] are based on a counterweight system, where heavy weights are suspended below the camera, which sits on a low-friction gimbal. The new system gets rid of the counterweight completely, allowing the camera person to move around much easier. For added control, the camera's movements can be operated remotely via joystick.

  • It’s Almost Impossible To Believe There’s a Robot In This Suit and Not a Real Human: Boston Dynamics—the folks behind the brick-tossing BigDog—has released some new footage of one its other incredibly unsettling robotic creations. Petman's designed to serve as a testbed for hazmat suits and other military garb, and is so realistic it's hard to believe there's not a real dude inside that suit.
  • The Knife Made The First Social Justice Goth Album: Shaking the Habitual is not dry and academic, or strident, or overly cerebral. It's actually one of the most physically and emotionally evocative records in recent memory: a collection of songs that explores issues of identity and gender with the visceral urgency of a great horror movie.


  • W0RK: Machete Girl 8, the teaser

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    Back in London after nine days of Budapest - expect more content and catching up with the rest of the future extra soon! Fragment number 1: cyberpunk powerhouse magazine Machete Girl runs my gonzo article on the merging of magick and technology in their Issue 8 - here's a teaser with a few paragraphs!


    MUSIC MAKING: COSMOSf, a graphical morphing engine for sound

    “Stochastic morphing with distribution range for altering the morphing position, speed and interpolation control. Built-in mathematical functions to automatically and precisely move the morphing pointer in the space. Precise audio rate parameter update with the possibility of reaching amazing morphing speeds (44100times a second!) turns Cosmosƒ into a super oscillator by accumulating up to 4 different presets in heterogeneous micro event mixing mode prior to the morphing phase. It delivers an unheard medium by reaching the untouched points of the sonic universe.” (via evolver.fm)

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    PARKOUR: Done the right way

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    No source, but comes from Lumi.


    ARS ELECTRONICA: Spaxels in London

    Earth Hour London

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    (Linz/London, March 24, 2013) Following its world premiere at the Linz Klangwolke in September 2012, the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s computer-controlled swarm of four-rotor mini-whirlybirds—so-called quadcopters—took to the air again on Saturday, March 23, 2013 in a role and setting no less spectacular than the exciting technology itself: as high-tech heralds of Paramount’s “Star Trek – Into Darkness” that’s opening in movie theaters on May 9th. A squadron of 30 LED-studded AscTec Hummingbird quadcopters hovered above Potters Fields Park near London’s Tower Bridge and, in conjunction with Earth Hour, formed a three-dimensional Star Trek logo in the night sky. “This production was a really big challenge, but that’s exactly what made it so fascinating,” was the enthusiastic response of Ars Electronica Futurelab Director Horst Hörtner. “And this assignment from Paramount Pictures also attests to the worldwide sensation we’ve created since our debut show last autumn at the Klangwolke.” Daniel Gurdan, CEO and Director of Development at quadcopter manufacturer Ascending Technologies, was also personally involved in producing this extravaganza. “The first time the Futurelab approached us, I thought to myself: ‘These guys are totally nuts.’ But it quickly turned out that they knew exactly what they were after. Now, not even a year later, this show in London impressively demonstrates what we’ve achieved in the meantime!” (more in the official press release | and the ars electronica blog)


    Arnhem has Qlimax and now - the QR porn room

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    Hotel Modez based in the Dutch city of Arnhem (close to Germany) has launched a guerrilla marketing product: the QR-code porn room, available for just € 119 per night. During your stay you might not get a lot of sleep though. From walls to pillows, the whole room is covered with QR-codes. Walk around the room with your smartphone pointed at the codes, and they will unlock a world of erotic dreams on your screen.

    We'd prefer Qlimax, if we're in Arnhem.


    BOOKMARKS FOR 2013-03-22

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  • New Distressed Wood Figures by Aron Demetz: Working in wood, Demetz uses this material to highlight both the harmony and conflicts that exist between man and nature. These works are not only a reflection of human emotion but hark back to far more primitive origins of the first interactions between people and their surroundings.
  • How Not To Save The Scene: “We as a scene also have to stop holding to the idea that we are underground.”
  • Buckle Your Brainpan: The Primer Director Is Back With a New Film: A spaceship in the woods. This is what Shane Carruth sees one day, looking out the backseat of his parents’ car. It’s the mid-’80s, and Carruth—age 11—is being driven through the green-lined back roads of Alexandria, Virginia, his latest hometown. His father is an engineer, and the family goes wherever the work is, most recently bouncing between the suburbs of DC and Dallas. But because his father’s latest job is with a government defense contractor, Shane isn’t allowed to know what he does or even where he works.

  • We've Reached Peak Infographic, and We're No Smarter for It: I'm not ready for an infographic about the death of infographics, but I'm sure someone somewhere has already assigned that piece, and is just waiting for us all to click.
  • An Interview With Blush Response: “Those sounds were previously confined to EBM, but eventually they became less ‘strange’, and the collective consciousness allowed them into the Top 40.”

  • The Film Before The Film, A Short Film on the History of Opening Titles: “The Film Before The Film” is an informative short documentary that traces the evolution of opening titles through the history of film. The documentary was created by Nora Thoes and Damian Pérez, both students at the BTK University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.
  • Short Documentary About Immediate Music, A Studio That Produces Scores for Movie Trailers: Immediate Music is a Santa Monica music studio that creates scores for movie trailers. The studio is extremely prolific—since 1993 their music has been featured in over 7,000 trailers and TV spots. Immediate Music co-founder Yoav Goren talks about his highly specialized work in this short documentary by SoundWorks Collection.