Daft Punk chiptune cover album = win.

Daft Punk – Aerodynamic (Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours Remix)

Released by a collective of French low-fi DJs, this album takes your favourite Daft Punk tracks and gets all 8-bit on them. The Da Chip website has been downed by a cease-and-desist, but you can still score the album other ways.

I’ve been a fan of The Cinematic Orchestra for some time, but I’ve never seen the work that made them famous. I’ve had a copy of the soundtrack since the beforetimes in the frozen land, but I’ve not seen it in its original form.

In 1999 the band was asked to score Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent film Man With a Movie Camera for a European cultural festival in Portugal. They performed it live with the film, and the show ‘went off’ as the kids say.

A silent documentary with no plot, script or actors, Man With A Movie Camera is a collection of moving images of urban Russian folk going about their lives, intermingled with scenescapes and macinery.  Not that I’ve seen it yet, obviously, but that’s what our great and holy father Wikipedia tells me.

Vertov’s disclaimer at the start of the film is a wonderful peice of language from the past:

“The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.”

Ninja Tune has just re-issued the DVD. It might be time for me to go on that long-delayed Ninja Tune shopping spree…

From: Viper Pilot
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:45:00 +1000
To: Fleet Mechanical Pool / 4th Battlegroup / Sword Marches
Cc: Atomique
Subject: Calling All Mechanics

Hi folks,

So we’re trying to sell the old Commodore after months of it sitting in the yard unused.  The battery was dead, so we charged it up over the weekend and took it for a spin.  Everything (relatively speaking) was okay, and we started it up on both Saturday and Sunday.

Come Tuesday (1.5 days before the eBay auction ends) the stupid thing decides it won’t crank any more.  The lights are bright, the radio/air/dash/etc work.  I tested the voltage on the battery okay at 12.7 volts, both when off and with the key in the start position.  I’ve checked that it’s not the park safety cutoff by holding the ignition while wiggling the gear selector around.  I’ve swapped the fuses around for the ignition.

After asking Dr. Google for more help, I read something that suggested I disconnect the battery for ten minutes and try again after reconnecting.

When I went to reconnect the battery, there was some sparking from one of the two smaller cables (positive) as it hit the terminal (which scared the poop out of me).  After witnessing this a few more times I noticed that there was a dull clunk/thud coming from under the engine in time with each spark – would that have been the starter?  Is there a short in the system?

Once the battery cables were reconnected securely I tried one last time to turn ‘er over and still got nothing.  So, now I’m begging you for ideas.

Anything?

Please?

-Viper Pilot

From: Viper Pilot
Sent: Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:21 AM
To: Fleet Mechanical Pool / 4th Battlegroup / Sword Marches
Cc: Atomique
Subject: Calling All Mechanics
Subject: Now I Feel Shame [Was: Calling All Mechanics]

Hi again everyone,

I suppose I left what appears now to be an important bit of information out of the story below.  I cleaned up the Commodore the day before the auction ended, which is also the day it stopped working.

How on earth does that matter, you ask?

Well, in the centre console, I discovered two remote door-locky-thingies.  I didn’t remember ever using them, let alone having them.  Some foggy memories, coupled with the fact that I didn’t remember using them, lead me to believe they didn’t work (like so many parts of the car).  Worn with age, there were no markings on the remotes, just two equally-sized buttons.  With no one button given more prominence than the other, I bashed away at one to see what would happen.  Unsurprisingly, nothing.  I pressed the other button, and even more unsurprisingly, not only did nothing happen, but the doors made a noise like they were trying to do something but couldn’t.  Just to be sure, I went click-happy to see if anything useful would happen.  Which it didn’t.

It now appears that at some point during the above I managed to turn on the car immobilizer.

After some locking and unlocking (without the locks in the doors actually moving) this morning using the remote, I quite easily got the car to start.  I’m quite certain that I cleaned the battery contacts, shuffled fuses around, hit the starter motor with a stick, tested the park/neutral cutoff, tested the battery voltage and got my pretty lady-hands dirty for nothing.

Thanks for all of your advice, anyhow!  I learned a few things, which is better than not having learned anything at all from being an idiot.

-An Idiot

I seem to be stuck in a vortex, where time becomes smaller each and every day. You’re right: that doesn’t make any sense as time can’t become smaller. Yet it does. So here I am, a week since last post, and all I have for you is a collection of dreams, of unfinished posts and half-written essays on the future.

If I had these, I’d be able to multitask and claw back some of the missing time:

Being an ace space pilot from the future means I am most certainly post-race.  Having been one of the blackest white men on the frigid sub-arctic plains of North America in a previous incarnation doesn’t hurt either.

Post-race, you ask?

Here, let some edgy youth TV journalism explain:

I should mention: Viper Pilot’s old space ship is up for sale. Own a piece of history! Or a piece of…

(Read the description. That’s all I ask.)

Gershon Kingsley – Popcorn (1969)

Hot Butter – Popcorn (1972)

M&H Band – Popcorn (1988)

Caustic Window – Popcorn (1992)

Muse – Popcorn (2009)

Here in Australia two parents have recently been convicted of manslaughter for the death of their nine month old baby girl. The child died after five months of suffering with chronic , yet easily treatable eczema. One of the medical professionals who testified said that conventional medical treatment could have seen the girl recover in 24 hours, but the parents chose to pursue homeopathic remedies. The child had been neglected so badly that by the time she was taken to hospital, her corneas were melting. The last five months of her life (more than HALF her life) were spent in terrible pain.

As a parent I’m particularly livid about this. As someone who uses his brain for thinking, I’m also fairly incensed. If you care to read on, you’re going to hear a lot of rather strong language. You’ll learn why homeopathy isn’t medicine, too, but just be aware of what you’re in for.

Here’s a pretty picture. Post continues afterwards.

Homeopathy is NOT medicine.

Here’s why: medicine is a science, which means it follows the scientific method. In medicine, therefore, when you want to say that activity X (such as in this case, imbibing a certain substance) causes effect Y, you have to perform that activity with a large enough sample size of test subjects, and your sample size needs to include a diversity of people to ensure that your results were actually caused by the substance and not some other factor. With homeopathy, some idiot piece of shit loser just goes ahead and imagines that his magic water will cure something or other, and then babies die. Asshole.

I say ‘magic water’, because that’s precisely what homeopaths are convinced they are administering. Homeopathy involves taking an amount of water and adding a tiny amount of some element – said to be the active ingredient in the ‘cure’ – to the water, then diluting the ever-living shit out of it until NONE OF THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT REMAINS. The ‘magic water’ is said to have a memory of active ingredient, which it passes on when taken. I’m serious – that’s what homeopaths actually think is going down. You would have to bee a metric assload of retard to possibly consider that to be medicine.

Hmm, should I make some tea out of fairy dust to cure grandma’s cancer or should she get chemo? Tough call.

As an example, the allowable ratio of arsenic to water in tap water is 10⁻⁸ or 1 arsenic molecule per 100,000,000 molecules of water. The standard dilution for homeopathic ‘remedies’ is 10⁻⁶⁰ or 1 particle of the active ingredient per 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (stupid formatting – you’re missing about a quarter of the zeros) molecules of water. I would die from water intoxication (again and again and again) long before I ever found that one molecule. It is impossible for any of the active ingredient to remain in any quantity of a homeopathic remedy that could physically be consumed – by a factor of A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT. I’m talking a container billions of times larger than the Earth kind of ridiculous.

While I’m quite pleased that these two bowls of dick have publicly proven their unsuitability for passing on their genes, it’s a shame they had to do it in a manner that culminated with two months of terrible, agonizing (and AVOIDABLE) suffering for this poor child. Both parents have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Dear Mr. Thomas Sam (the father and practicing homeopath), I can only hope that one of the charming fellows in cell block D stabs you repeatedly in the anus with a sharpened toothbrush – I hear that ass-stabbing is one of the most lengthy and painful ways to die, not counting having treatable eczema ravage your whole body while your shithead parents watch you cry in pain for five months.

In closing: fuck you, homeopathic practitioners. If I ran into you in the street, I’d cockpunch you so hard you’d have to stick your hand up your rectum in order to jerk off. That statement makes no sense, and yet it’s nowhere near as ludicrous as you and your fucking magic water. Douchebags.

If you want more info (and less pottymouthed antics), there’s a good article at Ars Technica about the pseudoscience that is homeopathy.

Mondegreen: (noun) : a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung, from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”

Until yesterday, I believed that the chorus (and by extension the title) to West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys went ‘The eastern boys and western girls’ instead of ”The east end boys and west end girls’.

I suppose that that’s not a terribly bad mistake to make, except I had somehow also my mind decided that this song was about the cold war.  In Viper Pilot’s world, the song was about relationships cast asunder by the erection of the Berlin Wall. I think it’s because I was playing a lot of Twilight: 2000 at the time. Or maybe it’s just that my young imagination was AWESOME.

Australian post-punk electro rockers Art vs Science do their bit to cement warm Franco-Australian relations (not to be confused with the far more complex Franco-Austrian relations) with this killer track and its mime-enabled video.

Art vs Science – Parlez-Vous Français?