SRF Heavy Industries

Video from the Zombie Symposium lectures and panel discussion appears to be available for those of you who missed it — or for those of you who were present who want a repeat viewing. I expect dance remixes will be available shortly on YouTube.

Here it is in it’s entirety, chopped up piecemeal for easy digestion:

Stan Woodard’s introduction: archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (15MB)

Dr. Dianne Diakite’s presentation: “Some Plausible African Antecedents of the Zombie Phenomenon in Haiti” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (52MB)

Dr. Andrea Wood’s presentation: “Tracking the Zombie in Popular Media” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (47MB)

My own presentation: “Fashionably Late: Zombies Among Us in Nature, Technology, and the Business World” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (62MB) | My presentation slides in PDF format (with the correct fonts, bitches) (May later also be appearing on the archive page as I have submitted it for inclusion…)

Panel discussion/Q&A session: archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (48MB)

Share and enjoy!

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From Alexandra:

What blew my mind so much was that if you look at our universe’s beginning as a mere ripple in something larger that slowly oscillated into our Big Bang, not only are WE merely a speck in a vasty universe, but our universe is a mere speck in a much more vasty…something. I mean, whoa. And then the idea of how matter is encoded into the folds of spacetime, and how our perception of what we’re seeing in terms of time and light speed could be totally incorrect because of these folds, and how that can explain how the probe heading towards the sun is slowing down when we didn’t predict it would, because instead of traveling straight through space it’s having to navigate these folds of gravity, like a lure bobbing on the waves. I need some serious drugs to dig deeper into this.

My reply:

Different observers under different effects of accelerating forces already see such differing views of reality (with regard to distances and elapsed time, but also with regard to perceived forces on other objects [for instance, if you are traveling with two electrons and perceive them as stationary you see them repel each other, but if you see them zipping past you see them attracted to each other by the magnetic fields they generate as moving charges]) — well, we tend to (mistakenly, in my view) discount ourselves from the equations as sacks of mud propelled by self-willed spirits, but the photons and other particles that inform us also inform everything else in the universe and those things aren’t as easily confused as us. Causality itself is actually warped by the lens of warbling translucent structure and is literally physically different all the way into the past and all the way into the future as we simply walk around, just like a view into a holograph changes as you view it from different angles. Is the lion’s mouth in the image open or closed? Are the bird’s wings up or down? The image is simply undeniably different depending on where we stand, and, as consumers of light, the image is all we have to go on. That’s what holographs do.

Also our concept of gravity is permanently fucked and really needs to be discarded. Items leaving a gravity well leave under more acceleration than Newton predicted, items approaching a gravity well aren’t pulled in as strongly as predicted — there’s obviously at least one more variable. People have tried several times to explain it every time they’ve seen it — the mass/inertia-based hypercharge force, the expansion force/dark energy, gravitic “force lines”, presence or absence of dark matter — it’s exactly like when people had figured out that Ptolemy was wrong but Copernicus hadn’t come along yet to make the math all simple again by suggesting that the sun was at the center. Newton is our Ptolemy here. We love him too much to put a stake in his heart and cut his head off with a shovel, but his lurching stinking corpse is really ruining the party.

In my more mystical moments I feel it ought to be possible to push ourselves along the wall of the holograph in whatever direction we choose until the picture more resembles what we want to see. We’re already coasting along it in a time dimension at a pretty fucking huge clip (at least, all the way out on this edge of the hologram) and every choice we make and every causal interaction changes our trajectory a tiny smidge… possibly as much as a child dragging a line in the water from the deck of a cruiseliner changes its course, but sometimes a good deal more dramatically, I would think.

My point is if the collections of photons we call an image is our view of a holographic universe, than each separate collection (yours, mine, give or take another seven billion, and that’s just observers on our twirling rock) is completely, causally speaking, a completely different literal physical universe, with “uncertainty” being the quantifiable distance between my viewpoint and yours, or Heisenberg’s and his measuring device of choice. Is this the Copenhagen “many worlds” view? I still only see it as one so I don’t think of it as such….

But it does make it unimaginably big. Especially if there are more completely separate holographs. But that’s all extrapolation based on the big bang thing, which I’m not sure is the right explanation either….

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So here’s one of the current business scenarios, translated into the language of metaphor.

The boss says, “Let’s run the Iditarod.” Not my usual scene, but I’m paid as a consultant. Figure out how. That’s my job.

“Sure,” I said. “Dogs, a sled, cold weather gear, spare parts, supplies…. I’ll hire a consultant, we’ll make a list, raise some capital, and go shopping.”

“No money for that. Capital is hard to come by,” he says. “Let’s run a few races first, start small, and we’ll expand to actual huskies and a sled and a trained driver. Meanwhile, we have an old refrigerator box, some dental floss we can weave into whatever ropes it takes to tie dogs to it — whenever we can get them — and I found us some chickens.”

“Chickens.”

“Yeah. They cost less than a twentieth what a dog costs, they’re cheaper to feed, and if we tie hundreds to the sled –“

“Box.”

“–whatever, we’ll fuckin’ fly!”

“So let me get this straight. We’re going to spend the next six months weaving reins out of dental floss and making snow shoes and parkas for chickens so that in a year we’ll have won enough prize money to afford an actual sled and a dog or two?”

“Sure! And when we have a dog or two we’ll put ’em behind the chickens to make ’em run faster! But not months. Weeks. And maybe only four of them. If we don’t get the prize money rolling in fast we won’t make payroll.”

…

And six weeks pass. We’re up to our armpits in snow, pulling a cardboad box piled high with shivering chickens and ruptured and pillaged sacks of chicken feed, with ropes made out of dental floss cutting into our bodies.

“This would go a hell of a lot faster if we ditched the chickens,” I say. “And it would leave more chicken feed for us to keep up our strength.”

“We’re not ditching the chickens,” he replies. “I paid thousands of dollars for enough chickens to pull as much weight as a team of dogs. We’re not leaving them behind. We just have to find a path where the snow is shallower….”

“Have we won any prize money yet? It’s been hard for me to see anything like a finish line through the blinding glare of the absurdity of this situation.”

“Not yet. Keep pulling!”

…

Does anyone really want to see where this scenario is going to end? Because I don’t. And I’m sick to the teeth of chicken feed.

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In honor of H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday, I refer you to an article of mine from a couple of years ago from my old Letters from Heck column over at The Footnote:

Today’s sermon is taken from a passage in the Necronomicon, which translates from the Greek roughly as “The Book of Dead Names” or “An Image of the Laws of the Dead” or somesuch. Originally the text was in an Arabic-language incunabulum titled Al-Azif, which, depending on your idiom of preference and/or your emotional state, translates either as “The Sound of Wailing Djinn in the Darkness” or “The Sound of Crickets and/or Other Nighttime Noises, Probably Just the Wind.” It’s possible that azif and hatif are somehow linguistically related, as hatif means “to cry out” and also “telephone.” Al-Hatif is a telephone company in the Middle East and not much loved.

It’s probably most accurate to say none of the above matters as the book mentioned above is an artifact of fiction that originally appeared in the early twentieth-century short stories of H. P. Lovecraft. But a lot of what passes for modern religion these days has a significant basis in fiction, so I don’t care.

This is the passage:

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING — IF YOU DARE.

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Free fiction in the most annoying format on earth: first person, present tense. Also, depressing as fuck. Enjoy it if you can.

This minute was pretty much like the last one. I’m sure a connoisseur could tell you the difference, but as far as time is concerned I’m no connoisseur. I’m a gourmand.

I bite off time in huge chunks and devour it without much regard to fine detail. I have learned to prefer a good time to a bad time, but that’s all in keeping with the gourmand thing. It’s a matter of lifestyle and affordability. Gourmet time in such quantity that it is wasted on the palate, and one untrained at that. Experiences hand-crafted by an artist and a team of artisans, flung down the gullet of a glutton. That’s my diet; that’s me. I am what I eat.

I am fat with time. Fifty million minutes down my gullet so far.

Does this make me a bad man? For taking more than my share? For being temporally wealthy?

I’m not the worst in the world. There are people who have lived more.

I have spent a whole year on a luxury cruise liner. I have been beaten and raped in Calcutta and paid for the privilege. Children carrying knives have climbed me. I have sat in solitary confinement, in sensory deprivation, in vats of caustic filth. I have served as a soldier, as a nurse, as beast of burden. I have had my brain deliberately damaged to remove memories, to make room for more, like visiting a vomitorium so I could enjoy another huge meal.

Regardless, those days are over. Now I sit in meditation, the equivalent of sipping bland tea and gnawing a handful of rice for daily sustenance. I no longer remember whether I am unable or unwilling to stand. I sit in a chair with wheels. People move me around as they see fit, dress me and clean me and position me in harmony with the décor. Or so I imagine. I don’t pay attention.

A minute. Another minute. Another handful of rice, another sip of tea. Another ten strokes of the cane, another eyewatering twist of the nipple, another ten miles of diluted airline whisky, another hundred meters of dodging debris left behind by the parade, another rinse of the remaining hair, another six snores. Another algebraic solution mapped out to the satisfaction of a nun. Another pullover tried on, frowned at, and discarded. Another four bowls filled with uproarious laughter at the soup line. Another pop-fly into the stands. Another thirty-secondth of an inch in the rain barrel. Another paper bag stuffed with leaves and small branches. Another six blocks in the taxi to nowhere. Another ten sutures to the stab-wound in the thigh. Another water-balloon filled with cow urine, tied off, and handed to a child. Another marshmallow roasted and sent in a flaming arc into the deep woods. Another gurgling rattle in the throat of a dying wife. Another five exposures to the laugh-track. Another advertisement for the Saab 900S. Another stick of incense turned to cinders. Another cigarette suckled inside-out. Another minute squeezed from the throat of a woman who begged you to murder her anonymously in an alley, and another minute of her drumming her heels as you hold her. Another half-inch of tattoo. Another half-inch of skin graft. Another, another, and another. Each minute identical to the last, at least in terms of the most important detail.

Fifty million minutes, all alike. Fifty million minutes burned to the ash we mix with whisky and drink down.

Another minute of sunblock applied to the face and arms before I am wheeled into the garden and left on the path to burble to myself and leave an anonymous puddle in the growing shadows. Another minute of the smell of cherry blossoms and woodsmoke, of the feel of musty quilt, of the sound of outdoor nothing when the birds are quiet and the traffic is distant. And another. And another. Another minute of dozing. And another.

And another minute awake staring at a golf-course lawn and a dry fountain. Another minute watching an airplane cross the sky. Another minute rolling my chair in a circle. Another minute remembering how to stand and pushing my chair in front of me like a toddler with a walker. Another minute of standing in an anthill I found to better remember when I did it before as a boy. Another minute of stinging and burning, reminding my legs and calves what it means to feel fire. And another minute. And another.

One minute is pretty much like another.

The staff here, the tenders who water me and turn me so that I can grow toward the light, watch in confusion as I shuffle my way down the hall, trailing ants. Someone notices, shouts, and starts slapping the ants off my legs, lifting my pants legs to slap them off my calves and thighs.

Once they are done, I resume my journey. It takes a minute, two minutes to get to the elevator, a minute to take the elevator up and shamble down to the lobby of my floor, another minute to orient myself and locate my room. By now I have a small entourage of attendants who are marveling at me doing this for myself, hovering out of the way, ready should I slip or need assistance.

I am sorry to disappoint them, but I and my flaming legs are just going to bed. Someone helps me off with my loungewear, helps remove the last few stray ants, summons ointment for the stings. There is mindless chatter about how the ants invaded my chair perhaps and induced me to get out and walk for myself. I do not correct them. The ants are becoming heroes as they tweak and revise their fantasy. Who am I to interfere?

Another fifty million minutes pass and they are leaving me alone. I pull off my t-shirt and wave off the attempt to help me on with pajamas. I climb into bed and lie atop the bedclothes, cooling and burning from the numbed ant venom. My legs feel like heavy wood.

Fifty million minutes is a very long time to wait to be born. I am sure it will happen tomorrow.

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You see something and it’s magic. It behaves like nothing you’ve seen before. You trap it, you study it, you research it, you learn all about it. You try it. You practice it. You master it. You make it your bitch.

You perform the trick for other people — and it works exactly as expected. People ooh and aah — but not you. You look for the magic — and now it’s missing. It’s just a trick.

The only place you see the magic now is in the eyes of other people, watching.

It’s the worst kind of buyer’s remorse. Look at what you’ve traded away.

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Admin:

I finally recovered my WordPress blog from one of their famous “upgrade” accidents. Things to note: Always log out of WordPress everywhere before you hit the upgrade button.

This is difficult for me, seeing as I use around thirty computers on a daily basis, including a couple of handheld devices, and since some are at home and some are at work, it’s really hard to keep track of where I might still be logged in. And there’s no (at least not that I’ve found) button on in the admin area to log out everyone who’s logged in (that would just be me, but about thirty times). So every other maintenance upgrade I seem to lock myself out and have to determine whether it’s worth the effort to recover manually or just wait for the next upgrade.

Content:

I’ve been asked a couple of times in the past two or three weeks how to maintain public and private online identities. Also I’ve seen a couple of questions about what to do when your mother gets a twitter account and asks to follow you. Related questions.

It’s not lost on me that these questions would have been spectacularly meaningless a couple hundred years ago. Except for, you know, authors and criminals. And maybe the Scarlet Pimpernel. You only had the one identity unless you were up to something, and most likely up to no good. Now we have so many (more or less) legitimate identities that we can have them stolen or can carelessly mislay them. Someone who gets ahold of our True Name (or at least one of the truer names) can righteously fuck us up.

(As a side note I’ll mention that the future seems to more closely resemble fantasy than science fiction, or syfy, as it has come to be known. Amulets and talismans and potions and magic jewelry and faerie mistresses — that’s where to invest your money. Bestowals of curses and blessings and paying for the removal of the inconvenient ones, trapping souls in jars, deals with spirits and demons … keep an eye on that market.)

So it’s not really surprising to me that my answers to these questions lie in the dead (or never truly living – heh) fields of sorcery and necromancy. Oh. And the related field of marketing.

I write under at least one penname. It’s not a big secret deal. It’s a branding thing. It allows me to rant and rave and be an asshole in public without (directly) bringing shame to my parents and my family name. It allows me the risk of writing tripe and, when (or if) my skills improve, the ability to cut it all free to flap away into the past and establish a new, higher quality brand.

That’s how I construct identities. I build them like I’d build shamanic masks. I feel it when I put them on and take them off. It helps me keep track of them all.

I have a writing identity or two or three, some of which I wear in public places for the sake of making contacts and building publicity. A private identity I use (or reserve, as I don’t use it much) for the purposes of talking to close friends. Another formal identity for talking to family and friends of family from which I would like the ability to keep a few secrets, for their sakes as well as mine. A super-private identity for saying the things I’d only say to myself — but wouldn’t mind a complete stranger overhearing. A throwaway identity for registering with information sites I don’t care about, with a similarly throw-away password. A firmly guarded identity for financial and utility online accounting, but one I share with the wife for maintaining our accounts. A work-related online persona for being an official face of the company. An admin identity for controlling and monitoring the business’s technology infrastructure. A sub-identity to share with venders who might need access to help maintain business infrastructure for me.

Not everyone needs the entire suite. People with a strong online fantasy life might need a few more. But separating the functions of the identities into categories before you have to backtrack too much will help tremendously. And building the identites the way you’d consciously take on any important project — making lists and notes, drawing charts and sketches, choosing a Power Animal, etc. — is totally worth all the effort you need to expend.

Sites make it tough by establishing bogus arbitrary requirements and restrictions for account names and passwords, but if you tie the ones you have to remember to the mental image of the face you have to put on to interact there, it’ll be easier to remember. It’ll at least reduce it to a limited number of guesses for each login page if you can’t remember outright. And it will tremendously reduce the clean-up if one of the identites is compromised.

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artwork by fazicar

Here is the lovely and delicate story of the best new holiday for the working class, BEERMAS:

Because I’m fed up with the Christian churches hijacking pagan festivals and painting saints all over them, I’m creating a new pagan holiday right fucking now, complete with cute fuzzy animals and enslaved workforces creating and delivering goodies AND BLOODY FUCKING DEATH to the deserving. This festival involves DRUGS AND BOOZE and is for ADULTS ONLY. The kids have enough holidays already.

The festival is one of a number of festivals called BEERMAS because I don’t care that there might be other festivals called Beermas to the extent that I’m not even googling it. Don’t care. Don’t Care. Because there are no copyrights and trademarks on traditional pagan festivals even if they’ve only existed for forty-five minutes. Got that, you intellectual-property-grubbing Wiccans? Fuck you. On with the show.

On BEERMAS, the hard-working rock hyrax named Throaty Kneecap McForehead, having filled his last keg with zebra-and-donkey-piss magically transmuted into beer, whips his hordes of enslaved brewer bush babies into rolling the kegs onto the huge razor-wheeled chariot pulled by two ass-raping, man-eating honey badgers. (One, “Lefty”, female, is pictured above. “Penisface” is never pictured, as he is known to seek out and eat photographers.) Every Friday the Thirteenth, also known as BEERMAS, around 9:05 AM Throaty K. McForehead the Rock Hyrax hops into his chariot, “Rosebud”, pulled swiftly and eagerly by Lefty and Penisface the Honey Badgers, to tour the world, stuffing the fridges of the deserving with zebra-and-donkey-piss beer AND THE BLOODY HEADS OF ALL WHO CROSS ME, their mouths stuffed with peyote buttons and magic mushrooms, before the deserving motherfuckin’ workers of the world make it back home from work to find the goodies. The undeserving will find their fridges stuffed with snakes — or would, if their own heads weren’t already in MY fridge stuffed to the gills with peyote and magic mushrooms.

Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface will heartily tie up and assfuck the layabout slackers who stay home from work on a Friday the Thirteenth without being well-and-truly-and-in-Technicolor® ill and will only stuff the fridge for the slackers if they had a good time. Everyone deserves a second chance.

For the truly sick they deliver bush-baby-made chicken soup. Made from zebra and donkey piss. Be warned.

On days while the beer is brewing and they aren’t making deliveries, Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface go bowling, and the bush babies have to keep setting up the pins.

There you go.

Merry Fucking BEERMAS.

I’ve written to Throaty Kneecap McForehead the Happy Fucking BEERMAS Rock Hyrax asking if there’s any slack to be cut for the fifteen percent of Americans who would be hard workers if they chose but are currently unemployed or in an alcoholic coma from having drunk way way way too much during the Superbowl. After delicate negotiations to find a common language (finally settled on Swahili — the hyrax is African, donchaknow) I determined that McForehead is a swell hyrax with a heart of gold, but there will be NO MERCY FOR SLACKERS.

McForehead states in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that if you are unemployed, your new job, for which you shall be busting ass without any thought of taking a break to play Halo, is to find a new goddamn job.

In order to be a recipient of the Happy Fucking BEERMAS Rock Hyrax’s intoxicatingly awe-inspiring generosity, unemployed persons WILL HAVE A COMPLETED AND UPDATED RÉSUMÉ stuck to his or her fridge with some clever magnet thingy and copies of five job applications completed and submitted with timestamps on ’em dated somewhere between the sixth and the twelfth of the month inclusive and sitting on the counter nearest the fridge awaiting filing.

If the résumé on your fridge is missing when you get home, that means Penisface thought it looked promising and knows of someone who should have a look at it. Penisface is a social networking genius, as you could probably guess from the name.

Keep in mind that during this next month it is essential that there is to be NO SLACKING OFF, as the next Happy Fucking BEERMAS is NEXT MONTH, In March. February and March are (strictly platonic) buddies like that and have all their days of the weeks and dates lines up to match, at least until you run off the end of February. March is a bit longer but men don’t particularly discuss such things even when they notice.

____________________

Technically it’s the bloody heads of all who cross ladykinbote, since this part was her idea.

Using a strap-on, in the case of Lefty.

The headline is the fact. The rest of this is what I could gather gleaning, while theoretically working one of my several day-jobs:

Mike Connell was an IT professional who worked for the Republican National Convention and set up hosted services for them.

Mike Connell is mentioned as being responsible for setting up the non-White-House email server GWB43.com that was used to by staffers to communicate without recording/oversight.

Mike Connell was implicated in various and sundry “electronic voting irregularities” in Ohio during the 2004 election.

Mike Connell reported threats against himself and his family from Karl Rove with the aim of interfering with his testimony regarding aforementioned 2004 election irregularities.

Mike Connell was apparently told not to fly his plane due to the possibility of it having been tampered with.

Mike Connell had apparently decided not to fly his plane a couple fo times because he thought he detected tampering.

Mike Connell died when his plane crashed on Dec 20 2008.

MarketWatch: Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation

Larisa Alexandrovna’s blog: One of my sources died in a plane crash last night…

PRNewswire-USNewswire via Yahoo!News: Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation

Ohio Action 19 News (video): Pilot Killed In Plane Crash Thought Plane Was Sabotaged

Telegraph (UK): George Bush aide dies in plane crash

SourceWatch wiki info on Mike Connell

E Pluribus Media: Ohio Attorneys Seek Protection for Mike Connell and his Family against Alleged Threats from Karl Rove

McClatchy: Computer expert denies knowledge of ’04 vote rigging in Ohio

The Raw Story: ‘Karl Rove’s IT guru’ Mike Connell dies in plane crash (previous article/background material:Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election)

Velvet Revolution: UPDATE: 12/20/08: Michael Connell Killed: VR Demands Full State And Federal Investigation

Enjoy doing whatever homework you think might be required.

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