Tag Archives: Virtual Reality

“Ex Machina” heralds creation of life, but Doctor Geekenstein’s blueprint imitates pornography

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ex-machina-tits-ass-mouth
“WHY DID YOU GIVE HER SEXUALITY!?” asks the geek tasked with debugging the anthropomorphic robot. Except they didn’t. Unless by sexuality you mean just the “female” bits and transluscent circuits where her belly and cranium should be.

These filmmakers gave Ms. Machina just the tangibles to titillate pre-sexuals: tits, ass, and a face for, um, facials. Their ideal is basically a blowup doll, upgraded to show off CGI; the Bionic Woman pared of nonessentials for viewers fixated on orifices; imagine the Six Million Dollar Man a cyborg whose flesh parts are lips and phallus. For male heterosexual tastes, a nubile female would have a womb. Otherwise the bare midriff would not be a thing. Nor belly dancing. But no mate of any age can lack a cranium. And a soulmate needs a soul. I think we can say the soul lives in the heart, but I’m pretty sure we manifest its presence under the cranium. A sexual mate, even as a sexual object, must be “all there” in the head, or is that just me?

The film “Her” pared the romantic partner down to a disembodied voice, this film preserves the body but disembowels her.

Presumably the filmmakers screen-tested their heroine on a focus group. If the results decided which virtues a virtual sex object requires for allure and which could be dispensed to skimp on parametric objects, I’m not impressed. Is hair no longer an asset to attractiveness? Ex Machina takes our depilation fetish to its nadir.

Spoiler: I haven’t seen the rest of Ex Machina. Does she have toes? Why or why not? How could she not have toes?

And what about “chemistry”? By chemistry I mean whatever electricity or scents we exude to guide ships in the night. Okay, no doubt biomechanical robots can be modelled to emit pheromones, but I’m sorry that’s about as romantic as boutique soap.

Whatever social commentary we are to make of this “high concept” thought experiment, I’m reminded of attending a lecture given by a geek who Time Magazine listed among the world’s most influencial people. He had coined the term “virtual reality” or some such and had shaped what the internet has become. I wondered why we entrust social engineering to antisocial engineers, then look to them as philosophers endowed with clarevoyance. With arrested adolescents for our gurus, of course “the internet is for porn.”

Second Life had a less virtual life cycle

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The Secondlife Ballad of Balder and Odile
NEUFREISTADT, COLORADO– While Odile and Balder succumbed to the seemingly infinite potential of virtual surreality, younger tech-weaned eyes were never fooled, Second Life was a game. Hello? Just. A. Game. Yes, we could recognize the learning curve and ever-fading novelty, yes our immersion was obsessive, but what value have intimate explorations if less than fully lived? Second Life offered idealized selves, idealized travel, social opportunity and locomotion beyond perhaps the reality of many. It could also provide surroundings of your design, to those players who could afford it. While our little native gamers moved on to single-player Sims games where your custom-built world wasn’t going to be compromised by others, we persevered, albeit in virtual retirement, trying to read SL’s future like traders studying the market. I wonder if we didn’t find our level maxed when we uploaded our real life Colorado backdrop to upholster our virtual homestead.

Military drones mirror public retreat

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CLOSE GUANTANAMO is being interpreted literally, meaning close just the facility, but move the detainees to illegal incarceration elsewhere. Likewise, BRING THE TROOPS HOME means pacing a withdrawal with an increased deployment of military drones to keep up the killing. That’s what the antiwar voice gets for pandering to the American preoccupation with only our own casualties. The latest Adbusters juxtaposes these surrogate killing machines with the western public’s retreat into virtual communities.

Pblks‘ Douglas Haddow had this to say in the latest issue, about the increasing use of surveillance attack drones, while the US withdraws “troops” from its militarized war zones.

…when we remove the humans from the equation — when war becomes literally inhuman — what’s left to debate? War crimes will become guiltless: a mere twisting of knobs. Slowly, with each OS update, innocent casualties will be curbed to an acceptable level. The Marine will be replaced by the computer programmer — a meek nerd so far from the action as to be absolved completely of its consequences.

With robots off fighting our wars for us, we’ll have nothing left to do but quietly sip our lattes and liten to our iPods. While somewhere, far off in the distance, a drone may or may not be dropping 50kg units of hellfire on some yet-to-be-named combatants. It’s not even post moral … it’s a Zen algorithm that melts steel.

This is a strange indicator of our retreat into the virtual when you consider that our so-called enemies are willing to sacrifice everything, their own bodies and very existence for a chance to kill one or two of our soldiers. We see their tactics as irrational, and they see us perhaps as we already are: machines.

US media campaign to help Pentagon defend its use of torture on POWs

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George Bush on water boardingThere is a growing effort to defend the use of torture on POWs by the US military, and it centers around the Pentagon’s and the corporate media’s effort to convince the American people that some Guantanamo inmates have become terrorists post discharge. These POWs were discharged because they were found to be innocent of ‘terrorism’, but now the Pentagon and US media want to paint a picture of US military incompetence, all to bolster a campaign to defend those that tortured these POWs when they were at the US run torture concentration camp called Guantanamo (Gitmo).

The corporate media campaign is based on utterly superficial and flimsy ‘evidence’, which is because basically it is Pentagon propaganda and lies. The following gives a link to this so-called ‘evidence’ printed out today in The Christian Science Monitor and scattered throughout today’s US propaganda industry’s coverage of the issue of ‘closing down’ Guantanamo. Ex-Guantánamo inmates return to militancy in Yemen

What is seen quickly, is that all the ‘evidence’ comes from the Saudi government, a dictatorship heavily invested into torturing prisoners. The fact that the US corporate media and the Pentagon turn these American held POWs to these world class criminals and then has the utter gall to report their stewardship over these prisoners as virtual reality and TRUTH really takes the cake! In fact, it is an endorsement of the Saudi torture regime itself, and a use of this foreign torture regime to help justify US military torture in place under Bush, and now Barack Obama.

Per the ‘evidence’ of the Christian Science Monitor stuff, all of the evidence of a supposed return of POWs found innocent and released to supposed criminal activity comes from the word of Saudi government spokesmen! Sick!

Much of American society wants to find a way to justify using torture on other people. They revel in it, and have spent years pretending that torture is not happening, torture is not torture, and in a myriad of ways supporting the use of torture while pretending not to be. This is the latest effort on their behalf by the Pentagon and corporate media, and is utterly a ghost fantasy script written for them, with the aid and assistance of one of the most reactionary regimes in the world, the Saudi Arabian government. This fact alone shows how unembarrassed much of America is about its own criminal use of torture, and this campaign may be used by Barack Obama to step back from actually even making he effort to clean up the US government’s world image by transferring Guantanamo POWs elsewhere?

The use of torture runs deep inside the entire American business of jailing and abusing its own population, too. Guantanamo hardly even begins to be the tip of the iceberg at this point, in uncovering and terminating abuse of prisoners of any kind. We are a very sick country, and many resist the CHANGE needed to turn things around. It is certain that we have a very long way to go to even begin to address these issues, let alone change things for the better. Do not let the corporate media’s lies on behalf of Pentagon use of torture convince you to change your views. America, you simply are not under any sort of threat from ex-jailed Guantanamo POWs.

TopGun saves self sooner than SanDiego

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f18 pilotCOS- Having our own Air Force jets flying overhead constantly, I’m surprised more of Colorado Springs isn’t reacting to the F-18 crash in a San Diego residential area. The pilot ejected safely, but left his plane to plow into American homes.

Where did the skin-saving ingrate think he was? Iraq? Our schools have got to place more emphasis on Geography.

This pilot’s military mindset was clear: the plane may be expensive, but the most important piece of ordnance is himself. More specifically, his TRAINED self. The time and training invested in him. In San Diego, the Marines saved a pilot, the multi-million dollar plane was lost, and there was some collateral damage. But this time it was AMERICAN.

Is that just like a video game player, press SAVE GAME, without regard to averting catastrophe? Because you don’t get any credit for saving the health points of other players, especially not the lives of the non-players in the simulated background. Outside virtual reality, it’s the same thing: in American wars, usually those background lives are foreign anyway. Collateral.

Where are we supposed to train our Top Guns? They need open skies like those of Afghanistan, where they can experience the real combat environment, where they can bail out and abandon their flying bombs into people who don’t matter.

Or have University City non-combatant Americans living too close to the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar become that too?

In fact, the only one whose life seems to matter is fighter jet pilot. Investigators can find a fourth body in the home, can find three homes and four vehicles destroyed, and find the F/A-18D Hornet suffered a loss of power, but investigators can’t identify the perpetrator beyond that he’s a 20-something lieutenant with an Attack Squadron.

Going down with the ship means accepting responsibility. Do they do that anymore? Going down with a plane is even more vital. It means using your last breath to steer the dangerous projectile you’ve become away from others.

F-18 crashHave I read somewhere that the military has lowered its requirements for who can be a pilot? Before Top Gun, film audiences were led to believe to be an officer meant you also had to be a gentleman.

They had to condemn several homes just for the toxic residue. Support the Troops.

Putting my best Facebook forward

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Video Snapshot 7
For real in virtual reality.

I’ve constructed an image of myself on Facebook. I did MySpace too, just in case my cyber hologram lacked a dimension. What dimension, a fourth? Before that my virtual world representative was an avatar in Second Life. I make this distinction because I’m online already, in a blog. If that’s not a proxy of myself too.

What is left of me off line in the old three dimensions? So much of my resources are spent updating and uploading to fashion my idealized electronic profile. But I discover that my ability to keep my best side facing toward the camera, so to speak, escapes my control just like real life. Other have pictures. Deeds are linked, past words, past lives, with no degrees of separation. We have Google to thank for pinning our press clippings to our shoulders. It’s as if our business card now comes attached with our personal Rolodex.

I’m deluding myself obviously to cling to selective anonymity. We’ve all taken our first steps unto the internet with alter ego usernames in sundry chat rooms, user groups and forums, revealing our true selves behind web masks. Who we are in-world soon approximated who we are out, as N approaches an infinity of monkey archivists. For flakes who think they can tailor their best Face[book] forward, no respite.

Except that it feels like the real world me has become a facade too. I think I’ve become an empty vessel, discarded like an outgrown skin, untended, un-watered because everything’s going online. What do photographs of the actual me represent anymore? Pictures of me when I used to inhabit the real world. Pictures of me wanting to be online.

Eavesdropping on a tree in the forest

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Moon over clock tower Neufreistadt SLNEUFREISTADT, SL- Wandering a little in Neufreistad last night I came upon a chain hanging from a clock tower. Pulling it would ring a bell far above. It was night in Second Life, the moon and I were alone in the NFS sim, mine the only avatar even in the surrounding sims. The obvious question arose, if I were to ring this bell with no one around, would anyone hear it?

Do I know enough to say? A sim owner or manager, that is to say the person who owns that virtual estate or the person given authority to run it, can monitor SL activity without being online. They have a bird’s eye view, or so I understand, an extrasensory perception relating to the realm for which they are responsible. Ordinary users can see and hear what’s in our vicinity, and can sharpen our sight depending on how lifelike we want our faculties. (actually we can eavesdrop too, with virtual bugs to spy on virtual happenings.) Sim admins have meta power.

Above them, Linden Labs, the real world laboratory which houses Second Life, oversees the mechanics of their virtual creation. Their view is that of lab technician over the maze, watching the mouse try to find the cheese, omnipresent and unobserved if only because of their irrelevance to the reality below.

I cannot say whether any are listening, but I do know that they could. Such is the unexplored, but not indefinite world of virtual reality. You may not have been there before, but someone has, and certainly someone tends to it and has an interest in checking in. And that’s not even to consider the NSA.

Is there a real world anymore where you can act on a thought unobserved? With Google Earth, as an example of surreptitious satellites, could a tree fall, anymore, unheard? Can you travel in your car, sit in your room, whisper out of earshot of your cellphone, and feel you have privacy?

In cyberspace, surveillance is inescapable. But in the virtual dimension, whose landscape is it that’s being watched? Does the virtual world exist on your computer screen as much as it lies your head? From which are the spooks reporting?

Youth revisited

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(Author’s note: this entry has been revised due to the offense taken at its initial publication. It was not intended to make fun of anyone in particular. This article is about the strange cultural pressure for women to look unnaturally young. Woman have always sought to look youthful, but modern medicine now allows them to try for bloomin’ youth, except of course around the edges. We need to dissuade women from this folly because plastic surgery has yet to sculpt a feature that can age with you.)
 
Tissue wrapped in a corn fieldNicole Richie. What is she selling with this dress? I’m asking because I just attended a society function and this look was everywhere. I don’t mean the unwrap- me-my-body-is-a-gift-to-you look. More the faded- beauty-but-I-feel-fresh-as-a-pop-tart- popped-tart look. What is that?
 
I can imagine these women think that they have to compete with teen porn on the internet. So how’re they doing?

Do they resemble anything in nature? Nicole’s not the gaudiest example, but she’s already flirting with recreating something she is not: in this picture, ripe corn. With her hairline and sallow eye sockets, indian corn would be more like it, and the dress would be the loosely affixed branches and twigs which frame it on your door. A welcoming semblance of bounty, pretty but plainly inedible.

Can any amount of skin cream, Botox and muscle sculpting refashion a woman to her teenage bloom? Surely their mirrors do not deceive them. Do they think that an ersatz bloom-of-youth is anything but monstrous, especially in the spookiness of twilight?

I shouldn’t begrudge Nicole the half-peeled banana look. She’s put a great deal into her physical appearance and she can maximize its exposure. I ran into the same phenomenon at the society fundraiser. A woman there, who it’s said is quite self-effacing about what she’s spent on her boobs, wore a dress which half revealed them. I don’t know if she meant to upstage herself with her breasts, but that was the effect. Very nice to look at certainly, but quite an effort to talk to her.

Perhaps these youth costumes are not intended for men anyway. The creams and oils and aromas and salts may be all about a virtual reality more sensual than a man’s imaginary visual-based surreality. If a woman can wear something that makes her feel like a spring chicken’s bare bottom delivered on a silver platter, who am I to complain? Outside of the privacy of their baths however, I wonder if both men and women are rather more interested in people who inhabit their age.

Revision 11/25
Why do I hold so tenaciously to this argument? Because when I beheld those many augmented women, I could not image what it was like for their husbands. I defy anyone to tell me, as years pass, they look at their spouse and say “my goodness she’s getting old!” She’s the only one thinking that and God Dammit where is that coming from?

A mate can exercise and recover his or her health, to perhaps some notice, but otherwise our eyes grow only fond and familiar. On the other hand, the person you love coming home from a clinic in bandages, to be unveiled as looking like a strange somebody else, could only be shocking, as welcome as a disfiguring accident I think, sad.

No matter how much a surgeon is an artiste, facial reconstruction is at best face-saving. It is no match for what nature gave us, and as we wither, it takes away. We may not all start as beautiful, but of all the physical traits that define beauty, two come with age: kindliness and grace. If you weren’t born with those you can get them.