speaker dolls
Fungus Amungus of Flickr made these Munny figures.
And with the same cuteness factor, dolls of Jason Siu. (via make)
slobsofgaming's eleven hot cosplayers
Slobsofgaming collected eleven of their take on the eleven hottest female cosplayers, from mystery Mai Shiranui cosplayers to Francesca Dani, pay extra tribute to Yaya Han and the girl on the photo above, Nozomi/Rave. If you look at the pics very intently, though, you'll come up with the same thought that one of the guys in the comments did. Very different girls. (link to collection)
fhm: chinese girls anime massacre
Dawe sends us this gallery taken from FHM China, originally shot by Chen Zhun. (gallery at designyoutrust)
yamaha deus ex machina: motorcycle exoskeleton
The Yamaha-branded DEUS EX MACHINA concept is a motorcycle exoskeleton with 7 artificial vertebra and a pneumatically attached helmet. The motor is in-wheel, powered by ultra-capacitors and doped nano-phoshpate batteries similar to those already used in hybrids. It's also capable of 0–60mph in three seconds. Top speed is 75mph with a recharge time of 15 minutes and cycle time of one hour, adds Hell for Leather.
The concept was created by Art Center College of Design student Jake Loniak and according to Engadget, that's an electric, single passenger, vertically parking, wearable motorcycle, and the bike would theoretically be controlled via 36 pneumatic muscles and 2 linear actuators.
attigo tt: touchscreen turntablizm
Dundee University student Scott Hobbs is all responsible for the new zeitgeist here. DJ's can use the ATTIGO TT touch screen turntable for looping, sampling and scratching waveforms, the size is basically the same as a standard turntable and what you can see on the vid is a working prototype. (via psfk)
nippon connection 2008: day 2 (polip, pornó, gigajapán alsónadrágok)
A második reggelünk a kávéról, a pornónegyedről és a wifi üvöltő hiányáról szól. Nem tévedünk el a már teljesen feltérképezetlen területeken sem, ezért cserébe viszont folyamatosan esik, amikor nem, akkor kávét nem találunk. Ráakadunk viszont egy olyan boltra, ahol 50 euróért azonnal magunkévá tehetnénk az Appleseed Ex Machinát, kicsivel olcsóbban az első Blame! kötetet, aztán maradunk mégis a biztos Vapianonál (ami, jut eszembe, a Deákon is megtalálható már), a város pedig ragyogóan néz ki teleszórva a dél-koreai tévéműsorokkal, az égbe szökő várostornyokkal, az eurójeles szoborral, a kimérten-szikáran sietős, tehetősnek tűnő pornómozi- és bordélylátogatókkal, Marty meg nyilván nem akar basejumpolni továbbra sem az égből. Második napunk a Nippon Connectionben, Frankfurtban.
washing the walls with lip sync
Sinred sends us this wonderful piece of cosplayness. [via somewhere along the lines of myconfinedspace]
between the gas mask baby and the pripyat ferris wheel
Something close to [another étape of Hungarian cyberpunk] is coming along. Marvin, an active member of the LD50 community (which is, if you're a new visitor here or something, the definitive Hungarian community portal for people with alternative minds and tastes for music and stuff) has his book of short stories published after a loooong time: entitled Külső gyermek (or Outer Child).
If you're English, please be aware - his Hungarian takes a huge effort to translate into English, it's not just ironic and gritty, it's dense and has a few layers that are very hard to decode even for us, who're into the same kind of stuff that he is. (Except for RPGs, of which he's a massive fan. We're not that much.) Book design made by me and if there is a god (or something close to it), it'll make me redesign this into one fancy piece of art.
Here's the original Hungarian press material and the thread of comments on ld50.hu
wanted (russian trailer)
The beautiful violence of Wanted's Russian trailer just makes the movie more appealing than it actually looked like a couple of days ago: gratuituous violence, skullfucking trajectory physics as we know it, sniper scenes on par with Golgo 13 and of course, Angelina Jolie. This has glorious office violence, sniper rifle porn and unreal car sideflips. But this one's been done by Timur Bekmambetov and this means it can't be bad at all.
we are the world (japanese impersonators)
Sugoi! If you're such an old fart as myself (and I'm sorry but ladies can also qualify as farts, you'll probably hate me for this), you surely remember the charity song We are the world that brought lots of mainstream singers under one roof from Cyndi Lauper to Stevie Wonder (whom recently Zoog from Angelspit had publicly recommended to you all. Shocking, isn't it?). Now this is all done by Japanese impersonators and even by my standards (and trust me, I've seen a lot of this kind of stuff) this is amazing.
shells
Today I was asked three times what I need for the up and coming big day. I said, a gun and six poison bullets. Because four doesn't hurt me at all. The fifth will most probably give me the shitcramps. And the sixth is a mercy kill for the one holding the gun. Which basically boils down to the fact that I am still immortal. Because that's probably the funniest thing to do after I've been basically told that what I waited for three years is not going to happen. Cheers.
blood death ivory previews on last.fm
Angelspit's new album BLOOD DEATH IVORY (with a release date of June 2008) has 30 sec previews up on last.fm, key points are Skinny Little Bitch (full track) and Paint Hell Red. And basically, all the rest.
manga, manga and more manga: hungarian comic con loot
A brief conclusion of the latest Hungarian comic con: first volumes of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order and Blame!, full versions of Ghost in the Shell 1.5 and 2 and the Hungarian version of Alive released by Mangafan (who happened to present me with the first volume of Nana as well that somehow got lost in the process of making this photo. On second thought I might have left out the Steampunk: Manimatron trade paperback, too.)
friday zen (reader version)
PinkTsunamii sends you all a MonicaBot of Doug Williams of Sketchwich. It might be just me but all these things really remind me of Tsutomu Nihei's work (later volumes of Blame!, to mention just one). Doug has his own blog here which basically contains the same stuff that you can see on Sketch. Monica also has a head on a tray here (neatly named Lunch Art).
Oizys on the other hand is back with a Blade Runnerish BMW ad and Rivet's various takes on the bunny motif. Amazing shit. Mustn't forget about posting more bunnies in the next post.
requiem: bloodymare
There just isn't any MMORPG that would keep me interested after three days. The game that was the closest to an MMORPG and had me playing for years was Diablo II and that was just because of the loot system and the hysteric urge to level up and get more items, possibly because I couldn't really cope with the very mundane tasks of my own life. But I digress.
Hellgate:London was - and still is - basically, dead babies in candy cover. Mythos - the second game of Flagship Studios - is in beta now and as I'm enrolled as a tester and no NDA binds me - it's a revamped and rehashed version of Fate set into multiplayer, having the same kind of lame-ass bad perspective cartoon graphics that World of Warcraft has. (I tried it as well and I got to hate it for the graphics only. And that was just an hour's work.) Guild Wars looks marvelous but it's monotonous. Very. Grinding was fun in Diablo II, it got very frustrating there.
Now we've got another horror MMORPG that got into its public beta stage. REQUIEM: BLOODYMARE has nightmare boss monsters, weapon enhancements, beast possession system, epic PvP and a DNA system that sounds very promising. The concept art looks very kinky. You end up with screenshots like these, though, and you think it's pretty much Lineage 2 mashed up with Painkiller. Painkiller meets Diablo 2 meets Guild Wars graphics, now that would totally rock. But I digress again. 2.3 gigs installer arrives in ten minutes. And I only give myself one hour to prove it has bad tentacle power.
fringe: the world is a huge scientific experiment
When a Flight 627 lands with all the passengers and crew dead, FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is called into investigate. A search for someone to help leads her to Dr. Walter Bishop, our generation's Einstein. There's only one catch: He's been institutionalized for the last 20 years, and the only way to question him requires pulling his estranged son, Peter, into help. Under Agent Phillip Broyles, our trio will discover that what happened on that fatal flight is only a small piece of a larger, more shocking truth.
Brief info of Fox's new series FRINGE that comes to the wired on August 26th. The trailer explains it all. IO sez it's basically about a mad scientist who hangs out with the FBI. Wonderful. I want to be a secret agent who hangs around with mad scientists. I have the skills, believe me. (link at fringe-online.net)
And if someone can help me how I can exactly position the youtube embeds to the center because neither p nor align and not even center helps, I'd be uber glad.
nano-noir: the digital plague by jeff somers is on amazon
Too bad I didn't get Somers' first book in Zürich when I had the chance - if I recall this well I had two problems with it: worldshots had only one slot for a book in his bag (and that was for End of the World Blues, which turned out to be more Japanese imaginative literature than cyberpunk) and the typeface was too big for a volume too small, so I though I gonna buy the omnibus in three years' time. And now IO9 says he has a nano-noir on Amazon and yourmomsbasement has a lengthy interview with him.
recommending: made in DNA
The net is vast and infinite and it just gave a me a five-seconds window to the realm of Niigata-based bizarro-writer Made in DNA. Hello there, friendly bastard, I like your twitterfiction and you just gave me another powerboost to research deeper into burst culture. But more about that later, really.
Made in DNA is apparently a telephone stall with a backup speaker (look at his myspace, not lying here) but he's got quite a hefty collection of outlets - JunkDNA fiction, for starters (that's a tumblr with lots of fragmented literature, Headshots with Free Headshots for a LIMITED Time is quite a beast) and he's also publishing to Burst Fiction - which is about brief blirps, really, short stories of 1000 characters or less (if you know the Hungarian writer István Örkény and his concept of one-minute prose, you're getting there - but this is just for cultural blasé, really. SMS-prose drives the point home as well).
No, we have more, because the telephone of Truth is on a diet of pills the size of baby heads and his cum is sizzling with mescaline drops that kickstart the pain when they meat the urethra. Really, I've seen it on the internet, we have separate webcams just for these kinds of things. You also have a Twitterfeed of his fiction Bukkake Brawl at junkdnafiction, which is a very raw piece of work in terms of literary mechanisms and even rawer in terms of approximating it to how we process TV material - and also very, very similar to processing manga. Read this to know how much you can cramp into one image. Make your own. Grow your wings. (And you can read it at his myspace blog, too.) And finally some non-fiction by him about his life in Japan, the blog Moped Ronin. (And order his Media Whores ebook for a $.)
madworld
Platinum Games, the guys who did one of the most unique and compelling game on PS2, Okami, is developing a new game for the Wii platform called Madworld. Madworld is all about black-and-white visuals with red splatters of gore, giving bloodsport TV fans hours of enjoyment. Our protagonist is a very weird robotic-looking brute with a chainsaw hand and if the trailer's just the bare minimum of features, then you have a wide variety of environment to execute your rivals. Look for the signpost fatality at the end, it's awesome! (via 1up)
russian roulette with research chemicals / never wanted to dance
I planned this post meticulously and for a perversely long time, making it as elaborate in the process as it could get and by the time I got to write it, I realized I have already said what I wanted to say and even that very brilliant moment on the event horizon was years ago. And really, it's been a shady long time since anyone tried to kill me and now when we get to that point again, that's me who has the knife. Fucking riddance.
Have you ever realized that the secret of meditation is untold? The Shakyamuni was wise to inspire laymen to meditation and he was wiser still not to leave any trace of the meditation how-to. Meditation was his untraceable divine icebreaker and he hacked the brains of thousands of millions of people, spreading culture memes based on folly and powerlust and ninety kilogramms of beef with the painfully real facial adaptation of Dalí? I surely had a bad time, being a kid and all.
Whoever reads this post - I have a message for you.
My keyboard is missing the MAXX GO button and I have last seen it while flying over the Atlantic (I have a very expensive sports car but no ignition key), I'm playing a one-man russian roulette with whatever came out of test tubes and in the past days it's been The Birthday Massacre's Shiver and their remix of Never Wanted to Dance for Mindless Self-Indulgence.
I also have a question. Bet you have one now.
kildroid: androids hump goths, we rejoice
Filipino cy-fi movies are apparently crawling into the spotlight. Right after Resiklo, we have news on Killdroid, a movie in which a carnal teenie girl gets to hump an android killer from a government-funded secret project. It sounds like porn, but unfortunately it isn't - and there aren't any trailers, either. Check IO9's newsflash in which we get to know that any teenie girl who wears black and white is most probably a goth.
opening the bandwidth for the cosmic signal
Az élet apró örömei 0200-0300 CET közé vannak targetálva. Tíz éve mozog Westbam Celebration Generationje az örök adrenalinvasutak között, abból a századból, aminek alternatív (értsd, jobb) lefutását a glowstick, az Amerika Kapitánynak öltöztetett rave-drusza, Keith, annak shotgun-fogú adverzáriója, Goldie, valamint annak csaja, a nôiesség és a dilettantizmus között vérprofi nyugalommal lavírozó Björk fémjelzett. Marusha sapkája artifact, azzal a szerepjátékos felügyelet foglalkozik, két példányban, minimum 10 oldalban, hétfô reggelre.
Tíz éve Westbam, Outzider/Darkzone, $volkraq, a Future Crew jelentették a mûvészetet, a mainstreamtôl 6 órában kikandikáló unitokat, a föld alatti roham meg a Leaether Strip volt, a Front Line Assembly meg a Clock DVA, fanzinokba, kiváltságosok polcaira bújó megannyi relikvia. Heti egyszeri zarándoklat az I9-J9re, listát bámulni és másolt kazettákat hallgatni. Azóta már másnál a lista, mások bámulják, a váltópénz viszont 250 HUF helyett a friendship lett. Igaz, azt nem is lehet megenni.
Ücsörgés egy háztetôn, valahol egy körüti házról, lelátunk a hektikus pontokra. Egy sávon sincs semmi, nincs deal odalent, tinik vannak, alkoholmámor van, baszás van. A Jolt pezseg kicsit még, a telefon nôi hangon bebúg, "incoming transmission". Moll, te sem tudsz egy jó pillanatot találni a hívásra. Harminc másodperc adott a menetfelszerelés összekapására, azzal nincs gáz. "Hát te?" A szemek parázslanak a tetôn. "Felhívás van egy játékra.", mondom, aztán nekilendülök, elnagyolt a szaltó a levegôben, de még a sikoly se hasíthat bele az ívébe. Hat másodperc freefall. Visszanézek, a falba lapul a rémülete meg a hitetlensége. Nem baj. Az is jó lesz még valamire. Got your distress signal, girl.
(Death Beat Club, 014)
cyberpunk manifesto: but the net is a house of anarchy
We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks' Manifest.
Just came across another manifesto, one written by Christian As. Kirtchev, originally dated to February 14, 1997, reposted a couple of days ago. You can find the original version here and although it really feels outdated at certain points, you'll so enjoy it when the flavour really kicks in. Get this wisdom.
10/ Every man will be dependent on the net. 11/ The whole information will be there, locked in the abysses of zeros and ones. 12/ Who controls the net, controls the information. 13/ We will live in a mixture of past and present. 14/ The bad come from the man, and the good comes from technology. 15/ The net will control the little man, and we will control the net. 16/ For is you do not control, you will be controlled. 17/ The Information is POWER!
Rioting is so much fun, being nine years old. (You get the quotation source page-perfect, I owe you a beer.)
william gibson, doctor of humane letters
William Gibson, the novelist who coined the term "cyberspace" and whose novels anticipated the Internet age while home computers were still rarities, received an honorary doctorate Saturday from the university in his hometown.
Describing his "significant contribution to American letters" and "pioneering role in the genre of science fiction," Coastal Carolina University named Gibson a Doctor of Humane Letters during its 2008 commencement ceremonies.
"I was born here in the middle of the previous century, and spent the last 30 years writing about imaginary versions of the current century," said Gibson, 60, in a short address. "Somehow I never expected to see Conway in the 21st century. I think it looks very good indeed, and I'm proud to be born here."
(via - and more on - myrtle beach online)