Maths and insanity

This is a concept drawn' for the book I am slowly working on (click the image for a better look).  The final should be somewhat journal-like, telling a story about somebody who starts having strange images and concepts jammed into their brain like a torpedo of junk mail being hammered into a letter box.  The human in the story will provide their interpretation of the signal, and in doing so, will introduce some neat ideas about mathematics.

There is some detailed stuff written elsewhere about this project, see this page, and also this blog post, which probably links to this gallery, too.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, ENJOY YOUR DAY

Electric Blue

This is based on a painting I am solely implicated in the creation of in 2000 AD, called 'Blue on Blue.'
That painting was specifically created for a dear friend of mine, and has been in their possession ever since.  I wouldn't have it any other way; it is theirs to display, modify or destroy as they see fit!

Any number of hilarious fates could have befallen it by now; the last time I saw it was early in the century. This is only a little upsetting because B.O.B. was one of my favourite crappy attempts at 'Art'...for me it only exists in a recently-taken grainy mobile phone photo of a photo of it alongside a number of other crappy paintings I did in 2000 AD, and also in the form of memories stored under 'difficulty with blue paints' in the back corner of my brain.  Now I have finally used that grainy photo to create a derivative work - in 24 hours or less! The original lurks in the foreground of its "spiritual suck-cessor" as a "testament to the power of the imagination, and the limited conduits through which it leaks into the so-called 'real world'" -  or more likely,  as a visually interesting and totally self-indulgent tribute.

I hope you enjoy this fine example of exhaustion art!

Strange Transmissions

I've been receiving some strange transmissions lately - a series of patterns, schematics and vistas of alien worlds. I seem to be the only one receiving these images; NASA, the CIA, ASIO, the ADF and the PLA seem to know nothing about it! So now I have a project to work on: accumulating and cataloging these things so that everybody can see what I'm seeing.

The gradually-expanding catalogue can be found here.

For all of you non-believers, I've set up a mundane, perfectly reasonable 'cover story' over at mindcloud.org. This is where to go if you want to hear my 'explanation' of 'what I am doing' 'here'. It's really just a condensed version of my interpretation of the images I've been receiving, so it may 'spoil' some of the mystery for you, or unfairly influence your interpretations. You've been warned!

For an education that kicks...

Commentary

1. This advertisement is silly! It says nothing about the university at all, unless they've got degrees in fashion engineering nowadays...
2. What does such a shoe have to do with Flinders University? You could hardly walk (especially around mountainous Flinders), let alone kick anything, in that shoe! The advertisement should read, "For an education that is impractical and uncomfortable..."
3. First they switch to a very conservative, beige colour scheme in 2008, now, in 2009, they're out with the crazy stilettos! Is there some kind of internal struggle going on in the marketing division?

Rating

POORNESS FACTOR 6/10

This advertisement doesn't offend the intellect so much...it is just ridiculously bush-league and reeks of forgotten deadlines! Somebody threw together some clip-art, some words and added a neat shadow and thought "that'll do!" Unfortunately it did - and now it graces "Bob" knows how many bus shelters. It's pedestrian-grade annoyingness, only slightly less so than this website.

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Advertising has long been famous for being idiotic, but I've been noticing some disturbing trends in the world around me lately. One is the general lack of thought put into the advertisements: this can result in anything from silly incongruity like in the image above, to incredible racism and sexism. It may just be that I notice it more these days, but I wonder if there is a feedback loop here.

If advertisements, plastered all over every surface and transmitted into our homes via TV, can change people's ideas about 'what goes', then this thoughtlessness should increase over time. The standards of the community are only modified by advertisements that slightly push the envelope of what is acceptable - an advertisement that completely offends will be quickly censored. There is a tendency to push this envelope in order to elicit emotional responses like shock, in order to get the attention of the audience. Eventually, all advertisers are pushing that envelope the same amount for long enough that the wider population are no longer shocked.

Not only does this mean that the advertisements can be a little more shocking next time, it also means the population from which the next generation of advertisers are drawn has a higher threshold for shock. The second of these points is most important because it allows the trend to exist without the existence of some malevolent scheme perpetrated by 'standardless' advertisers. It's likely that both of these things are happening in marketing departments, they just vary in their relative importance from organisation to organisation.

The increase in shock value of each generation of advertising is roughly the same, because the shock threshold of the community increases with each generation. However, to somebody who manages to hold onto their original standards, the advertising would appear to be getting more and more atrocious.

So that's my model, made of pure handwavium...it doesn't account for the influence of government, disaster and other things that might quickly and radically transform the way people think.

Strength

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Think globally, act stupidly

Crapping on about injustice is all very well and good, but how the hell are you going to "cahnge the world™ (sic)" when you're too afraid to upset even the stas quo that exists in the misery of your backyard barbecue? Who needs a police state when everybody is a self-oppressing automaton, whose main outlet for rebellion is alcohol poisoning when not required to be a 'responsible employee'? The whole time you are answering the uncomfortable question in your head 'is this OK' with a resounding 'no but I don't want to cause a fuss'; you're a starving man eying off the buffet at the other table, but you're worried about looking like an idiot if you knock over your chair getting up. So you stay right there with your fellow starving inmates, publicly despising but privately admiring the misshapen weirdos who are messily stuffing their faces with all of that food, hoping for the tiniest wet chunk to glance off a blackened tooth and land in your lap so you can suck the grease out of the weave of your pants when nobody is looking.

In short, you are doing what you hate because you are concerned with maintaining the situation that causes you to do what you hate. You masquerade as something you hate so that people who you should hate like you BUT they hate you anyway because YOU IN ALL YOUR INFINITE COWARDICE are causing them to LIVE THE EXACT SAME SHADOW LIFE you are! YOU ARE THE ENEMY - maybe if you all weren't trying SO HARD to get along, you might just get along. The effort that you've expended in DESTROYING EACH OTHERS' LIVES probably precludes this though, as you've now got plenty of reasons to hate one another, whoever they are.

You are part of a rich foundation of viciousness that allows the most horrible crimes you can read about on Wikipedia (and worse) to be perpetrated! It's not apathy or complacency that is at the wheel of the semi trailer of human suffering - it's YOU and your desire to FIT IN! Your response to the isotropic curse-rays of NORMALITY, emanating from EVERYBODY ELSE, is to bury all of your truths deep inside and become yet another broadcast tower for LIES FM. This is a level of containment that only appears in the wet dreams of nuclear waste merchants - the overfiends stride comfortably on the surface formed by this desperate nobodiness, picking out locations for Their latest self-aggrandising missions. If They somehow noticed you in the grain of this concrete of wasted life, They would laugh at your attempts to avoid offending anybody; the overfiend can only be the overfiend BECAUSE offense is meaningless to Them. It is Their capacity for not caring about offense that allows Them to cause maximum offense to EVERYONE. Mind you, these are the ones lucky enough to survive the mockery and beatings issued by their peers, and to not be eaten by other overfiends upon burrowing out of the substrate. If it's the future of human civilisation you're trying to cahnge(sic), then this is the challenge that awaits you.

If, as I suspect, you have really given up on "the world™", then at least you can live your life in such a way that you don't notice when the hammer falls. Stop being the enemy of yourself and those around you - and prepare to become the enemy of yourself and those around you in a way that gives your existence some kind of pep. Praise "Bob".