Twilight - Change You Can't Sink Your Teeth In

Twilight

"You don't want to see me in the sunlight... I'm a monster," says vampire Edward Cullen, as a looming dynasty of blood sucking archfiends prepares to rear it's "ugly" head. Visual kei face framed by runway hair, ethereally airbrushed to allow just the faintest hints of shadow necessary to convey the narrow spectrum of 'eternal angst' to 'irrevocably smitten', darkens on cue. From Bram Stoker’s horror classic Dracula in 1897, to Anne Rice’s goth-housewife romances of Louis and Lestat, through John Carpenter's grindhouse feeding frenzies, to Kate Beckinsale's fanged Trinity, the preternatural legacy is handed on now to Robert Pattinson in Twilight. Here and now he must bite deeply into the virgin jugular of the Net-Gen teens as they giggle-text in the theatre, must make this generation of consumers forever slaves of their own Twilight heart-throb thirst, such that their dollars might continue to be sucked from their pockets for many sequels to come. He must become for them, as Isabella (Kristen Stewart), his equally angst-ridden, swooning teen co-star notes, "Exactly your brand of heroin."

Twilight, a teen love story between a vampire boy and a human girl dealing with his immense urge to eat her, has succeeded, it seems, with a 70 million dollar opening weekend. My own 14 year-old sister, having seen the film this Friday, begged and tantrummed my parents to shell out another eight bucks this Sunday for a second hit of Twilight. It's reached near-Harry Potter level of phenomenon: showing up on front pages and covers, legions of teenagers storming Hot Topic, a South Park parody, it seems everyone under 30 is turning pale. The world is a vampire, and we're rats in cages.

But as Edward at last enters the sunlight, and we expect the true horrifying, demonic, hideous face of the monster to emerge, girlfriends preparing to clutch boyfriends, Edward's face begins to sparkle like Urban Decay glitter. Boris Karloff and Klaus Kinski turn in their coffins as traditional 5-children household "vampire families" play baseball and cook Italian food together. Anne Rice rolls her eyes preternaturally as tall-pale-and-handsome is (literally) repulsed by sex as if castrated and practices abstinence till marriage. Dracula and Nosferatu let out infernal screams, drowning in holy water as they watch their Transylvanian empire crumbling into Disney drama written by a Mormon woman.

It may be for the Twilight fangirls, but for many, that's change you can't sink your teeth in.

Frog-Pot Stories

"The Frog-Pot story" is what Tyler Dupree, the protagonist/narrator of SF epic, Spin (Robert Charles Wilson) utilizes to illustrate the experience of witnessing the beginning of the event known as "The Spin". One night, the stars and moon vanish from the sky, switched off like a screen. The earthlings are taken aback, but no cataclysm occurs, and life continues on as normal. The reality that beyond the Earth, time is passing at eons per second, the sun threatening to swallow the earth in decades, goes unnoticed. Like the frog placed in warm, gradually heating water, who fails to notice the lethal temperature and dies as the water boils.

It seems a fair extrapolation, that this particular koan, this epigram of the 21st century encompassing the difficulty of the human consciousness to grasp and act to avoid threats on larger-than-human scales, would become so "mundane" as to become a figure of speech, a part of "official" language. "The 'ol Frog-Pot story". First, the pot of our climate, in which we are literally and figuratively cooking. Secondly, global poverty and over population. And most recent and famously, the financial meltdown occurring as a result of decades of book-cooking and short-sided luxuriating in the bubbly sauna of credit/debt based false prosperity and thievery. As the sun's aging is set to a human-scale clock, humanity itself is thrown into the pot, realizing the mortality of the sun and by extension all human life. From there, a millennial, Cold War mentality takes hold of the planet. Dozens of religions and end-of-the-world cults spring up, scientists go mad, obsessed with trying to discern the purpose of the Spin, China fires a nuclear missile at The Spin objects and generally the world goes through the terror and ecstasy of impending total extinction.


This week has been another Frog-Pot story for me, on the relationship side, but with a better outcome than appears to be turning out for the like of the global economy. My girlfriend and I have been flying high on the rich, blossoming emotions of our relatively young relationship, caught up in the sweeping (and potentially distorting) bubble of the heart. All night phone conversations, two honeymoon-like meat elopements (we're long distance currently), images and video through the net in a sort of co-celebritization, the coverboy-girl without the documentary.

The first crack happened Tuesday night. As her dad found and handed her passport over, he said he did not want her to fly to Hawaii to see me, because he did not want her to continue down the road with someone she might not be able to be happy with in the long run. That first rising to the surface of toxic love-debt popped the bubble and cascaded into a full blown romancial crisis that night. There was a problem of confidence with a lack of transparency at the heart of the problem, and so the Twilite Minotaur and Green Robot masks came all the way off to reveal the raw Chris and Haly. We put all our dreams and out on the table; family, child rearing, religion, locational, vocational and financial, and did an all-night Skype triage to decide whether the relationship could survive or if we were underwater. The heat was on, but in the end we pulled through.

There was just one more step to fully avoid systemic meltdown and that was having the Meet The Parents talk un-edited version with her dad that we should've had while I was up in Canada. My head was spinning, my blood pressure boiling as I mentally paced for most of the day, playing out all the possible scenarios in my head, "What if he doesn't trust me? What if he says no? What if he wants me to join a cult? What if he has a shotgun?" It was the single most anxiety-filled experience I've ever had. When the moment of truth came, as I stared at the little green Skype phone-icon "call" button, her home phone selected, index finger hovering over the left mouse, I could've sworn I saw a white flash in my field of vision, then my life flashing.

Once I pressed call and her dad's friendly Canadian voice, like a cartoon bear came on, the tension sort of cut in half, and I noticed he actually seemed as or more frightened of the call than I, unsure of what to say, and so I kind of took the initiative to get the conversation going. There were a few concerns. Whether I realized and was ok with her desire to have a more traditional, family-centric household, how I was going to deal with the fact of our separation physically by an ocean and politically by the 49th parallel. But it was infinitely easier than I anticipated, and once I reassured him that I had her best interests in mind and was up to the job, the heaviness evaporated and it was actually a rather enjoyable conversation. He had only good things to say. And with that final injection of relational capital, trust between parties was restored, collapse was averted, and she and I are growing in our relationship. (When I jokingly brought up my shotgun scenario, he jokingly mentioned that several of his friends offered to loan him their shotgun, and we further joked about his prison-shank collection which he'd showed me during my stay.)

Climate Defender

Been tinkering and debugging my Scratch demo game that I brought to the digital media teacher job interview. Adding enemies and weapons here and there, tweaking the skill curve. I just e-mailed the new version in. The Scratch site is like an open-source Youtube for games. You get your Scratch Creator profile setup, and you can start sharing your games right from the Scratch development environment. Once up, others can play, comment, rate, etc.. and even remix your game by downloading the source.

Climate Defender



"The classic arcade space-shooter with a green twist. As carbon emissions in the atmosphere cause the planet to heat up and the climate crisis grows more imminent, it's up to the Climate Defense Force to prevent global catastrophe.

Scrub carbon from the atmosphere to reduce CO2 levels and earn money. Once you get enough money you can invest in renewable energy such as solar, wind, or wave power, which will continuously reduce carbon emissions for you.

Get the CO2 level down to a safe 350 to save the world. But if CO2 goes over 550, I hope you know how to swim!"

The Sick Man Of The West

Xiao Chen's boss at the port let him off early today, told his hours would be scaled back, but was relieved he wasn't one of the dozen laid off worrying how they will support their families. He rides his bike home around a great, snaking wall of 18 wheelers full of Blackberries and iPhones, turned back from the dock because the shipment was canceled. Mountains of cotton slated for this month's Abercrombie and Prada lines surges out into the streets, blackening as they soak up the carbon and sulfur stew of Beijing atmosphere like great cotton balls. Xiao coughs, he feels like a fish trying to breath air, having adapted to the heaviness of concentrated pollution.

But back in the USA, we're trying to keep The Eternal Friday Night going. Fists pump to the thundering bull-beat on the dance floor of the New York stock exchange. Each time the music goes off and the market tanks again, DJ Henry Paulson, the news network cheerleaders spin up the next track of "systemic stabilization" news. The virtual confetti of e-trade paper flies in celebration of "the bottom" as the Dow indefatigably climbs and falls again like the Little Engine That Could. "If we could just get more liquidity, get more credit out there so people can borrow and spend again, we can get back to last year's levels."

Unfortunately, No We Can't.

We're in a recession that's going to get much worse. We're all drunk to the point of poisoning on credit, on the big house + big car + dog + 1.5 kids + boxes of toys American Dreams forcefed daily, and now we're vomiting all over the dance floor. The hangover and the long and painful but necessary detox process has to happen, and more booze is only going to make the problem worse, or possibly kill us.

And what poetic justice, that the unraveling of the US financial/economic system was initiated by speculators and bankers scamming the sinking middle class for trillions in debt and price inflation on that same big green-lawned house Dream that "anyone could achieve in America".

Essentially you've got the slave class in China, just builds all the astronomical amounts of Stuff all day, makes the pyramids, milks the cows to make the baby powder, lives in a polluted hell hole.

Then there's the owner class, the top 1%, the royalty, just makes money by owning things and making sure they keep owning things which siphon money off everyone else through dividends, interest, and inflation.

Then you've got your servant class, the teachers, plumbers, architechts, McD's kids, the consumers. Their job it is to keep the infrastructure functioning and keep all the Stuff circulating so the siphoning mechanism continues to work smoothly and more 6-figure trips to the spa and G5 jets and Cancun vacations can be had by the owners. Servants get to live in the King's castle, so they've got it a bit better than the slaves slaving away in the scorching desert. The servants get the tossings from the King's table, enough so they don't up and behead the king, but don't be expecting any health care or relief from debt-slavery or anything.

Then you've got the wizards and the emissaries, the lawers and media and accountants and economists and politicians, who's job it is to make sure the owners of everything continue to own everything, make sure the servants remain stupid and don't realize what's going on, defend against rival feudal lords. Wizards get the biggest share of the king's riches, but can be exiled at any moment.

So we Americans don't actually produce much of anything. We're a nation of paper-pushers and window washers, and we keep papering over the cracks in the broken American Dream with Chinese debt, and polishing our Disney castles made of Chinese plastic.

But amazingly enough, given all that, China and the rest of the world isn't really better off than we are, and possibly worse off. Because the rest of the world has been playing the China-producer US consumer game as well. European banks in places like the UK, Germany were even WORSE in some cases than US banks with leverage ratios up to 60x, and then there's Iceland that went completely *boom*.

And China's "wealth" is just as fake as ours has been and driven by currency and trade imbalances; they are FAR more vulnerable than we are as they must maintain serious positive GDP growth in order to avoid huge numbers of their people literally starving.

So now the red-white-and-blue butterfly is flailing, and it's causing an even bigger shitstorm in China, who need to examine their own dreams as well.

Back home again, Xiao reclines in his brand new Ikea love seat as he for the first time partakes in that great American ritual that we celebrate each December -- he cuts the scotch tape from his XBox 360 box. He checked his license plate this morning -- an even number -- so it was his turn to take a bite of that forbidden fruit, eat a piece of that apple pie for the prosperity of China. Yes, by government mandate, Xiao had to go shopping.

Let's Play Bank

It's a good day to be a bank. Congress, the President, Paulson and Bernanke, everyone told us the world was going to explode if we didn't throw 700 billion of our money at buying up these "troubled mortgage-backed securities". Not a single dollar has been spent on said securities and it sure looks like ATMs still work and the financial system hasn't yet collapsed. Since approximately zero of the TARP money is going to help taxpayers losing their, jobs, homes, tuitions, grow the economy, etc., I wonder if you move to New York, live in a cardboard box labeled "Systemically Critical Bank", will you get some of that $700 billion -- excuse me -- $2 trillion dollars going to pay CEO bonuses, junkets, and buying up other banks? Seems everyone's doing the banker dance now; American Express pleaded and just became a bank holding company, guess they want some of that socialism too.

Maybe we could have a big game of buying up each other's cardboard banks, which is fitting since cardboard is pretty much what the AIG building is made out of about now. Whoever owns all of that wet, grimy, imaginary cardboard bank-matter at the end gets to turn it into a real cement-and-steel-girder institution! It would be like a big game of McDonald's Monopoly.

Also, since banks were making bad loans from fabricated money they didn't have at 30+ to 1, seems only fair the taxpayers should be able to print up their own counterfeit money to debt-slave each other and artificially inflate markets. Oh, and since it's been discovered that the Treasury [i]illegally[/i] changed bank merger tax policy which will cost us another $150 billion in lost revenue, I think every Joe-the-clerk and Jane-the-substitute teacher should be allowed to repeal and create laws as they see fit, since that's effectively what congress is allowing. And of course they're just gonna put up the "shocked! appalled! outraged!" face and let it slide, so the deals under the giant black bandaid on the hole in the festering shadow banking system known as the "Rescue Plan" can stay under that rug. At least till the Depression, which becomes more unavoidable by the day, when they make their planned exit.

Speaking of McDonald's... it's just in yesterday that McDonald's has the monopoly with its stock up 5.4% in the third quarter as the rest of the market is tumbling, Circuit City gone under, GM nearly there. That, along with the surge of Wal-Mart commercials, must be a sure thermometer of recession. The double-cheeseburger index.

Mindquake

Felt like I needed to break up the moldy mold of a daily routine I've been in, and took a spin down to Borders to inject some new contextual and textual input into the old processor, knock that election / Youtube withdrawl out with a vente dose of populous meatspace and pumpkin-spice frappacino. Picked up Edelmen's "Infoquake", which I'd overheard thumbs-up text and audio fragments for, and also grabbed the next in the series, "Multireal".

The only somewhat diddlingly interesting conceit so far was the "multireal" bio/logic (plot) device, which allows an individual, through some quantum indeterminacy woo, to run through the outcome of hundreds or even thousands of paths for any given choice before making a decision. Would've been nice for Nov 4th I suppose. Presumably it would obsolesce marriage itself, let alone the same-sex variety.

Perhaps my brain, or at least the "Speculative Fiction" sector of the symbolic narrative lobe is teetering on that calcifying threshold, where incoming tokens are slotted with ever increasing ease and ennui into modules of closest match within the grand old model. "'Mindspace Development Environment?' Yes, we've a position for you in Neuromancerian cyberspace just behind 'Metaverse' and 'Matrix'. 'Quantum Search-Tree Decision-Making Device'? Yes, we've got a whole off-world colony of cortical columns for the qubit Qberts. Careful, it gets a bit inconsistent in there. Ah, sir, no vorpal blades over three inches allowed on board the Twi Machine."

Or perhaps the book wasn't all that good. Or it just didn't ring well with me. Either way I'm probably not willing to run an internal simulation through every possible way of reading or even every last page to figure it out.

I noticed, as my eyes wandered diagonally down pages of deliberations of what this protectorate did to that orbital colony and this High Council stole that teleportation device, that I fixated on one particular extended metaphor. It was about the "omens of passing" of a given paradigm/generation and it was spoken by 'The head of the world's most prominent scientific inquiry dynasty' in a Kenobi-koan Mastercard moment.

"You can see the inevitability. Just like you can see the stalk of wheat as the thresher approaches, and know that the time’s come for a newer, stronger crop to bask in the sun."

And I just thought, 300+ years in the future, why would Geek-Jesus, presumably raised on number theory and krill-derivative (or whatever agricultural hand-wave appropriated), speaking to his daughter, who grew up in a 'cloistered, lonely', presumably interplanetary compound, be analogizing with stalks of wheat and threshers? Would he be a connoisseur of Grapes of Wrath? Probably not biblical as it states in no uncertain terms, "He was a man of science." "Hell, I barely know what threshing is", I thought as chapters of agents in hovermachines machinated and mindspace bubbles inflated. Granted, it's just a sci-fi book and you could probably say agriculture was a part of schooling or some such, but it just struck me for some reason.

Just off the top of my head, one might change it to, "Like you can see the fading beige shells on your ebay-feed as Justin Long approaches, knowing that the time has come for marginally better, different color iPods to bask on the jeans of affluent kids like yourself."

On a multiplicit note, I scored an interview for an "Afterschool Digital Media Teacher" position tomorrow at 9, which I'm all jilled up about. It's an after-school course to help middle and high school students create computer games with the awetastic little gem of software called "Scratch", developed by MiT. Scratch is essentially *completely* object oriented, visual programming without the arcane minutia of traditional code-compile-run frameworks. It's a big lego chest of objects (sprites), movements ("forward 10 steps, turn right 90 degrees), controls, ("start when I press GO" "start when I press 'spacebar'"), which you just drag and lock up together modularly to create whole games or other programs in minutes without reading any effin manuals or nothing. The name "Scratch" comes from DJ vinyl scratching, it's meant to take existing media (images, sounds, etc) and create new content therefrom, which is shared back on your open source Scratch profile. My inner visionary was salivating at the sheer neologiety, but more importantly, the potential of the platform. For the Myspace generation, used to playing around in an environment extremely saturated with visual audio and textual content, sharing with friends, this would seem to be a great vehicle for developing design, engineering, math, and team skills.

Well, got to get back to scratchin and mashin shit up for my sample game for tomorrow!

The Bullshit Room - Nouriel Roubini

I made a little video on the financial/economic crisis, meant to put this up on Halloween but the impact of the crises has apparently been hitting my After Effects which has been crashing like home prices.

(cross post from impending collapse thread)

The Bullshit Room - Nouriel Roubini

The Real Roubini on Bloomberg





Don't forget to vote!

Halloweening

Halloween in the Waikiki strip was a smash, and not just talking about just the pumpkinheads, gourded up for epic chainsaw battles between good and evildead. Literally, few guys wearing spooky, hollowed-out pumpkins on their noggins while headbanging to street musicians kicking out steel drum jams on the sandy sidewalk in the salty tropical air. It's like being pressed through a mile-and-a-half-long meatgrinder of concentrated freak, served up hot and sweaty to the million hungry eyes of cell phone cameras, eager to taste the rubbery flesh of pop cultural communion. Hellraiser to Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins to Freddie Kreuger, The Borg to Borat, all fed to the Youtube monster. Sardining through the catwalk was a real thriller, and, yes, there was at least one Michael Jackson, played by a woman, although projected genders down on that "mahu-land" side of Honolulu are as variable as the ocean breezes. In Waikiki, it's not just the masked horror-freaks, the real fright comes from the sexual-freaks, the huge gay and crossy subcultures are out in full flaming force, women strutting their disturbing amounts of "stuff". And if you're a real grindhouse scare-buff, there are always the requisite few guys in bathrobes, giant baseball bat-sized fake penises lurking beneath, mortifying the unsuspecting Japanese tourist. Then of course you've got your legions of scantily clad, fishneted witches and vampirellas, witching-hour sluts, letting out their collectively repressed inner succubi for one night only.

Best Animatronics goes to Davy "Squid Face" Jones from Pirates of the Carribean, it looked so accurate I swear he could've eaten his fish n chips with his tentacles.



Biggest Geek Out was taken hands down by the Harry Potter crew, beating out even the flaming yellow Naruto fucktards this year.



Scariest Mufugga goes to yours truly. Seriously, I was pretty much in the scariest costume, which was kinda dissapointing, next in line was probably the chainsaw massacre leatherface guy. It's symptomatic of the horror slump we're in, probably. I got tons of "oooo!! scary! mommy!!!" from kids walking around the trick or treat area with my sister and one dad had to haul his son to the other side of the street when he started crying. It was rather satisfying }>D



Cybeer-espace Eversion Award goes to The walking Youtube and "Shape" websites. Here we see the Net-Genner in her natural habitat. Evolved to survive in an environment consisting of projections of faces on flat surfaces resulting in an inability to relate to direct physical humans except through co-cognition of the media millieu, the Net-Genner adapts by projecting the screen upon her own physical appearance.



Cutest Costume is this little skunk kiddie. Kawaii neeee!!! ^.^v



Most Popular: Borat. This guy had half of Waikiki swirling around him like a hurricane of the sexy time. Probably scared the insides of some fundamentalist grandmas into ovulation.



Borat giving the Hawaiian "shaka" sign



My jail dog, Lani.



Silver man, goes into a robo pop-lock then freezes every minute or so. This guy has been street performing in front of the Hilton for at least 15 years.



Found Waldo!



Giant Caterpillar, was circling a Chinese lion dance lion at one point.




Grandpa Sam.



five obamas, one mccain. so if we're polling there, looks like mccain is the one needs to be frightened.





So again, a blast. I think observation of Halloween is as good a cultural indicator as any. If you want to know a time, examine its nightmares. Most telling was that at my sister's school, six kids dressed as terrorists weren't sent home, everyone laughed at the one Bin Laden strolling down the sidewalk, but initiating discussion of economy strikes real terror in the eyes of everyone.



I made a Nouriel Roubini costume but I figured that would have the crowds screaming for their lives.