new filmclip on its way

We're currently about 1/3rd of the way through filming our next filmclip, for the track "There's Nothing Here And It Screams". If you're not familiar with it, you can hear it here:


It was a motherfucking grueling 12 hr session to get what we've got so far, massive props to Niik from Zen for spending the day helping us out. (btw, if you're a Melbourne vocalist looking for a band, do hit them up).

Here's a still from the clip so far...i severely doubt we'll be able to get this aired on australian tv, but who knows? Courting dead media ftw.

xero

freedom from/freedom to

"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." - Margaret Atwood, The Handmaiden's Tale.

Freedom from. I thought about that on the train, sitting across from someone with headphones blaring the most dull minimalist techno I'd ever heard. Doof, ka, doof, ka, doof, ka forever, listening to a metronome counting the seconds til death, doof, ka, doof, ka ugh. The premier floated the idea of creating special "quiet" carriages on the train a few months back. If you hopped on the very front carriage of a train, you'd be required to sit in silence. No talking on the phone, no obnoxious music blaring from thimble-sized speakers, freedom from noise, freedom from Those Inconsiderate People who come into Our environment and dare to behave in a way We don't appreciate. When questioned, he answered that the policy would be enforced by officers wandering the trains, ready to turf out anyone deemed inappropriate for the bubble of peace, quiet and civility that had been constructed within the carriage. The ever-present threat of violence to allow Us freedom from.

That policy is yet to be implemented.

A similarly great idea of the premier's was to put officers on every platform at every train station, from dusk until early morning. This is to provide freedom from the drunks and hobos and ruffians and ne'er-do-wells that occasionally haunt public transport... frightening Us by their coarse language and volume, their aggressiveness, and the threat to Our safety that their behaviour implies. Those Inconsiderate People threaten Us by their presence. However, the policy goes, this can be countered by giving the officers guns. As guns are generally illegal here, the officers will be able to out-threaten Those People, and scare them away from the trains, issue fines for whatever they like, it doesn't matter, just give us precious freedom from Those Horrible Fucking People. Obviously We will be safer in the presence of officers who are acting in our best interest, and can threaten more violence to the hooligans than the hooligans could ever return. And if someone's daughter gets shot, or someone's parent spends a night in jail, or gets beaten or tazed or falls in front of a train...that's the price of freedom from. They're doing it in Our best interests.

Twice now I've had the pleasure of seeing these officers in training (aho), wandering around the station, being instructed by a real live police officer. Shown the ropes. And on both occasions they picked a commuter to "investigate"... calm, quiet individuals, travelling alone, which would be fine, but they were also non-caucasian and wearing relatively cheap clothes. Cheap clothes = not commuting to/from work = probably unemployed = probably a druggie dole-bludger = probably one of Those Inconsiderate People. We are white and professional and law-abiding. They are not Us. It was a pre-emptive strike in the name of freedom from. Nevermind if they mistakenly grab the occasional doctor on an afternoon off, international tourist, or son coming home from visiting their parent in hospital. These things happen, and are a price worth paying again and again. They're doing it in Our best interests.

Except that it's lullabyes for bearded infants, a last cigarette, death-bed platitudes to bloodied gods, but much more dangerous than your standard paedophilic role-play between consenting adults because *this immediately fucking hurts people*. You're grabbing any motherfucker who applies for a low-paying job, and giving them the oh-so-specific task of "find Those Inconsiderate People and seperate them from people like Us". Then you're giving them a gun because that's how authority works.

It's immediately obvious to all but the most willfully ignorant that "freedom from" is impossible. You can (and will) give a "license to kill/taze/imprison/bash" to as many people as you like, but the second your back's turned, I'm going to go on breaking whatever laws I disagree with. This always has and always will be the case. Freedom from implies coercion, freedom to implies cooperation. At the moment, everyone has the freedom to stop what they're currently doing, walk up to someone in the street and stab them to death with a kitchen knife. But we don't because of the social contract which says "I don't want you to kill me, so I won't kill you". It *is* a social contract because within a couple of minutes, everyone can think of a way to kill someone without getting caught - coercion from the state has nothing to do with it. And we manage it exceptionally well - at least 60% of all Australians who kill people are doing so officially on behalf of the government *. Evidently we could teach the people who want to coerce us a shitload about not murdering people. (cutely you've got around .00000035% chance of getting murdered per year...slightly less than winning Australian powerball on any given week, which is .00000036% chance). **

This is something that I'm optimistic that we'll eventually realise though. Originally currency had to be based on the gold standard because otherwise, who would trust that money was worth anything at all? Eventually it was realised that people are happy to play along with the idea that money's worth something - regardless of whether it technically is or not - so they got rid of the gold standard. Morality used to be "enforced" through the myths that there was an omnicient entity following you around 24/7, who would cast you into the pits of hell if you did something naughty. But thankfully that mindset is rapidly disappearing...we've realised that you don't need a god (or "The god") to behave like a decent human being. I cannot wait until it's realised widely that you don't need thugs with weapons to "force" you to treat other humans with respect - that it's something we can generally figure out and go along with by ourselves.


*Sources (1 and 2). Unfortunately it's really difficult to get accurate statistics on police/soldier murders, so this is a guesstimate but seems plausible to me...we know that in just over 2 years, Australian troops in one country killed 1474 people, while the average homicide rate in Aus sits at ~260 a year. So that's 3 times the number of people killed by the state...without including people from Iraq or anywhere else killed by soldiers, and also without including the numbers killed by police officers. So even if literally noone was killed by Australians outside of Afghanistan, or domestically by police, the vast majority of murders are still committed by government representatives rather than civilians.

**Source for homocide above, source for powerball here.

the path of least resistance

i received an ad in the mail today, images of a grinning buffoon drinking wine and laughing at nothing, a rose (of course!), and a pretentious dessert. In bold lettering underneath, the words: LIVE! LOVE! LIFE! LOVE! LIVE! YAYAYAY! LOVE AND LIFE AND YAAAAAAAY!

Don't think! Life is wOnDeRfUl and BLISS, especially if you don't analyze it! Who needs to understand anything, when you can just BE HA HA HAPPY and FLOWERS U SEE and STUFF!!!! Also, now that you've turned your mind off and are LOVING EVERYTHING please please please buy our shit, BECAUSE...LOVE, U SEE!!! THINGS = LOVE = LIFE = GIVE US MONEY PLSKTHX

what sort of simpering, shit-covered dunce, what fucking syphillitic machine-animal, what rage inducing, redneck, wormbrained *moron* could possibly find such an ad inspiring i will never know. It must be a christian thing.

(ad people make the worst dionysus ever)

But it's so easy you see! and this is the first and final trap - the unthinking comfort, the enveloping warmth, staring at the pavement, smiling at the pavement and following your footsteps follow everyone else's. As automatic as electrons following the only path they'll ever know.

"I've been workin this job for 10 years! I mean, the pay's not great, and the boss hates me, and i think my coworkers spike my coffee with nuggets of their shit, but what can you do!" WHAT CAN YOU FUCKING DO "If i didn't have my job, i wouldn't know what to do with myself! I mean, i do the work i'm told to do, buy the things i'm told to buy, go the places i'm told to go! But without the STRUCTURED LIFESTYLE OF A SERF i'd just be bored!"

no wonder so many people need religion - they're so scared of having to make their own decisions that they're willing to believe *anything*. OH GAWD, PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO DOOO! WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME, A HURPA DURP! COMMAND ME PUH PUH PUHLEASE!!!!

staring at monitors, counting seconds as a wave of information flows past us, blinkers on, so scared of independence that we turn Ourselves off and jump social hurdles when the whistle calls. I taught my dog to do the same thing.

Fuck this. I will scream and bray and run my face into brick walls until one of us breaks. I will run and run at everyfuckingthing drawing whole universes into my spidery lungs.

"if you stop, you die" - jodie christ

a hymn:

LET ME RESIST
WHEN MY SKIN IS ON FIRE AND I'M CHOKING ON BLOOD
LET ME RESIST
WHEN I'M MORE SCAR TISSUE THAN HUMAN BEING
LET ME RESIST
WHILE MY LUNGS SEIZE AND MY HEART CALCIFIES
LET ME MOTHERFUCKING R E S I S T


xero

new dropbunny plushies!

WHOA!

one of our newest noisemakers, Blackjack, has created some gloriously creepy dropbunny plushies - a range of rabbits 100% money-back guaranteed to bring their owner erotic nightmares forever. They're really quite exciting! These rabbit dolls are hand stitched and come in three different sizes, and will make a grotesquely cute addition to every cot. You can check them out at the dropbunny shop. We'd like to thank her very heartily for this wonderful contribution to the dropbunny trip.

In other news::::

We go back to the studio mid July to finish off the last 6 tracks of the album, and are hoping for an August release. This waiting is painful but unfortunately can't be helped. The db videogame is going through beta testing at the moment, and should be released within a month - it'll also be included on the new album's CD (for those that get physical copies instead of digital). It'll also be up on dropbunny.com for you all to enjoy.

We're still hunting for a new guitarist to replace the ever-talented Refund, as he's looking to focus more on his electronic compositions. His last performance with us will be August 3, at the Espy, so feel free to come along and throw fruit at him. He's made an enormous contribution to our new album, so hopefully you'll see his hand in our future noises, even if you can't admire his lovely beardy face anymore.

the new members will be introduced soon, suffice it to say that db's likely to be an 8 piece before we launch the new album.

WHOA!

Response to Lilly in the media

The following's an open letter in response to the recent reports about our book Lilly.



As you may be aware, the was some discussion in the media yesterday about our book Lilly. I would like to correct some of the gross misinterpretations which were reported, and clarify both the intent and content of the work.

To start with, it was repeatedly stated in some publications that Lilly "encourages students to murder police”. This is absolutely ludicrous and could scarcely be more contradictory to the intention of the book. As should have been clear by the concluding sentence, the moral of the story was to encourage people to “treat people like people” - regardless of profession, or age, or anything else. But more importantly, it was meant to encourage a more nuanced discussion of the role of police in society, without resorting to unhelpful simplifications of the institution being either perfectly good, or perfectly bad.

The story relates three recent, real-world examples of children being subjected to disproportionate use of force by police officers. These examples were taken directly from articles in the mainstream media over the last two years (see links below). The story simply reiterates the content of those articles, albeit in a different format. However, despite this, some reports expressed outrage that such graphic scenes appeared in the book, while pointedly ignoring the actual events which prompted the creation of Lilly in the first place.

These are issues which should prompt a critical discussion of what we expect from our police force, and what behaviours we are prepared to allow. Too often these incidents are relegated to small, back page articles (with Tyler Cassidy being the notable exception), while the main public discourse continues to assume an unbelievable level of infallibility from police officers as a whole. Tellingly, the Police Association spokesperson was quoted saying "These twisted morons can sit around their marijuana-fuelled campfire telling each other their twisted tales” - heavily implying that anyone who chooses to criticize the police is necessarily a criminal. This highly offensive suggestion is unfortunately commonplace in public debate around policing.

One point which never seems to come up is the disparate expectations we have of the level of accountability of police, versus other care-providing institutions in this country. Teachers, as one example, are not only required to look after troubled teens as part of their daily duties, but are held strictly responsible for the welfare of their charges. We would be mortified if a teacher were to taser a violent student – we require them to resolve these situations diplomatically, even at risk to their own welfare. This is as it should be. Nevertheless, we allow police officers to resort to violence to resolve confrontations with minors, while being appalled if any other members of the community were to behave similarly.

Lilly was not written as an excuse to stereotype police officers, but instead to show that the stereotypes we do apply can have significant negative impacts by preventing balanced conversation. Policing is a profession like any other, and as long as we continue to hold the people in that job as beyond reproach, we're going to continue to see abuses of police power against the most vulnerable members of our society.

Lilly - the children's book that's too difficult for the media to understand

It's come to our attention that a number of newspapers (here, here and here) have heard about Lilly, and completely (wilfully?) misinterpreted what the children's book is about. Lilly very clearly discourages violence at all, and how anyone could interpret the farcical ending as "encouraging violence against police" is absolutely beyond me. The book shows nothing but real reports taken from mainstream media sources, of police violence against children. Where the protagonist, Lilly, decides to attack a police officer, it's showing how counter-productive it is to allow police officers to commit acts like this with minimum accountability. The police force can only work if they have the trust of the public. Violence promotes more violence. It's really very simple!

Still tracking down the last of the three articles we referenced in the book, however the episode of the girl being tasered because she wanted to stay with here sick friend is related here, and there's a wealth of information online around the horrendous death of Tyler Cassidy

For a look at Lilly, head to our literature page.

studio update#2

pitow!

We've just finished mixing the 14th track...the end is so close i can hear it wheezing. We're hoping to have the album out in about a month, but these things always take longer than you'd expect. Rest assured it's still progressing well, we're very excited about the results so far, and think this should be a significant step towards...something....

Tracks so far:

Plummet
Irredeemably Fucked
Can't Do Anything
Some Say He Was A Shithead
The Nightmare From Which You Cannot Awaken
Lost Kid
Exit Sub
This Relentless Momentum
Gimp Man
Beat
Pentagonal Plywood Prison
Arch
The Architecture Is Wrong
Voices Insert
There's Nothing Here And It Screams

IN Other News::

dropbunny's Multimedia Department would like to announce the upcoming release of D.I.A.F. - the db video game. The game is nearing completion, and will be available on this website, as well as on the upcoming album. It is designed to send you mad. From what I've seen thus far, it looks likely to achieve that goal. More news/screenshots to come.

be lucky!

studio update

so! we're currently just over a week into recording our new album. Here's some info:::::::

there will be 19 tracks

END OF INFO.

this album picks up from where Hypothesis left off, and goes merrily spinning out of control from there. It's significantly more complex music than we've done previously, which isn't really saying much, but yes. This is very exciting for us.

Below's some snippets of the recording process thus far.

At this stage we're looking to finish recording at the end of April, and the album will also be available for download from this very website after that.

live videos from performance 21/01/11

@ idgaff. Unfortunately the talented Waterbeast was suffering from an acute case of death that night, so we're pretending to be a three piece. He seems to be getting better, so his monstrous bass playing should be back by the end of next month.

Massive thanks to jodie christ and blackjac for videoing/audioing/lighting the show. Your beer is in the mail!

drop25

blistering breakneck somethingorother vortex of fuck, the holy urethra dragging purgatory to flipping bits. The frankensence emanations snapping pure lines in an arc. no ark velocirapid whirlpool it draws everything upon itself. every quark is an atom is a life is a futon is pan fucking pan. pangaea, the similarities are endless once you dig enough. everything comes back to geometry but maths is a bad trick, woolen lashes come over volcanoes, acnitic eruptions of lust and come and al gore. the theories are always wrong, let me come at this from a worry-wart.

dropped from the plane of existence, every movement to the left catapults me through the sky, when you're still you're almost static, when you move you careen unto oblivion. the dance terrifies me but i'm weighted and weightless, momemtum is a constant around this exponential turnpike. at a high enough volume everything becomes white noise, coded messages in the radiation, universe the size of a small cock.



fall on forever
never let me slow down





xero

the kraken in the noodle-box

x ----------------------- x

{ponders}

an epiphenomenon. must jot this down. On both sides of the above hyphen line, are x's. I can see they're both x's. The pattern's the same. However...obviously the photons that transmit the two x's to my eyes are vastly different. They go through tangled, unpredictable trajectories containing a god-number of other subatomic particles to get to my eyes. If i could map all of the physical interactions that take place for the photons to hit my eyeballs, where would the "x" be? How on Thor's name could i possibly say the two groups of interactions were remotely similar, let alone classify both of them as x's?

{scoffs a mouthful of noodles}

My computer's memory contains, in two locations, a string of numbers that essentially mean "draw an x on the screen". Those numbers might be the same, but they're in different locations in the memory, composed of a plethora of different electrons passing through different circuits. Those circuits are made of molecules which are contantly interacting with more god-numbers of other subatomic particles constantly. Again, if i could theoretically map all of the interactions that take place on a subatomic (or even atomic!) level that "made up" those two numbers, in two locations, in this computer's memory, they'd be almost perfectly different. Yet it's still, obviously, two x's.

{mmm delicious noodles, chunk of chicken, mmmm}

Evidently, those underlying layers are essentially irrelevant for me to understand the "x-ieness" of something. Those x's are made of gadzillions of physical interactions, but those interactions make no difference to the fact that i see two x's. The x's are practically irrelevant to the make-up of their constituent, subatomic parts.

Consciousness is similar - like "x-ieness", it's an emergent property of hell-tons of subatomic interactions. A thought is a thought, regardless of the molecular composition of the neurons that make it up. Probably even regardless of which neurons make it up.

{look up with a start...did that noodle box jiggle? No, of course not...keep typing}

But...hmm....i've already proven (at least, to my own satisfaction!) that it's impossible for there to be a fundamental particle in the universe. A hypothetical microscope could peer through layers forever - past atoms, quarks, possibly strings - and never come to an end of smaller particles. I wonder what patterns, like "x-ieness" or consciousness, would crop up at different levels, depending on where you look at something? If lower layers are irrelevant to the higher levels they make up...

....

at this point i lean over my noodle-box, prepararing to shovel another flavoursome morsel of food into my face. The noodles look practically identical to me...but each one is fundamentally unique, so comprehensively original that the idea of "noodle-ness" becomes irrelevant before the infinity of increasingly vast subsubsubatomic differences. My stomach churns, i feel nauseous as i stir my chopsticks through the viscous muck. There are certainly more unique configurations of particles in each noodle than there are people on earth. More than stars in a galaxy, more "individualities" than i could begin to comprehend. My mind crumples. Sweating, stirring, like some horrific god - would a country, or a planet, notice the differences between humans? How is a human unlike an protein?

I feel bile rise up my throat. I almost, unthinkingly, devoured a universe. The noodles squirm in the box before me. Noodles larger than gods, satay-flavoured multiverses, cavorting and flailing, creating incomprehensible heiroglyphics and i'm getting smaller and smaller before this alpha and omega of cheap japanese food.

Like tendrils, the noodles encompass my very body, i am absorbed by them - surrounded. I try to summon help from a colleague at a neighbouring desk, but the floury tentacles are tight around my chest and i cannot breathe. I writhe around, trying to skewer this great beast with my now-ineffectual chopsticks. My limbs are pulled back as the monstrosity continues to emerge from its oily, paper prison. With my utmost might i manage to croak out a half-muffled cry - my colleagues look across the cubicles, shake their heads, and turn blankly back to their pcs. Useless fucking accountants! Chest compressed by this titan's grip, i can feel my ligaments strained to snapping point. The chopsticks fall the floor. I am powerless. It is like cthulu risen, the vengeful FSM of fast-food. I hear a dull crack and my brain swims, the realisation that my elbows aren't supposed to bend that way, the word "run! run!" flashing before my fading vision, as helpful as an air-raid siren after the bombs have hit, and i am helpless. Like the heroine of some squid-based hentai, i succumb. Lungs burn, thoughts fragment, colleagues mutter, i know naught but red and agony as i disappear from consciousness.


This is why you shouldn't read science books on lunch-break.


Based on a true story (incredibly!)



xero

upcoming album - why we've been so quiet

whoawhoawhoa

ok, we've been quite quiet lately, show & blogwise. Have we lost our fury?!?! Did we resign ourselves to office-worker normalcy?!?!?! Is contagious soup-kitchen feigning fellatio sludge?!?!?!?

Answers: yes; no; sometimes.

Anyway, enough pompous shite! You will be utterly disinterested to hear that we've spent the last couple of months in a furious frenzy of song-writing and mental masturbation, in order to create the next installment of the dropbunny saga. Details are still mostly being kept under wraps at this stage, suffice it to say we're heading into the studio in March, and the album is a 19 track monstrosity that picks up from where Hypothesis left off.

I'm incredibly excited about this. It will be a lot more...constrasty? than Hypothesis - more abrasive, more technical, more groovy, darker, brighter, dancier, more austere. This album will mark the first determined steps towards a lunacy hinted at towards the end of the last album. Sorry to prattle like a prat about this, as mentioned, i'm incredibly excited @_@

ALSO IN THE WORKS: db are also releasing our first book, which should be released within the month. More on that to follow.

be good!



xero

sometimes space-time gets me down

We're justified and we're ancient

it moves like a stone, spinning at 1670 km/h while hurtling around a fireball at 107,300 km/h, which is travelling around a super-massive black hole at 900,000 km/h, which itself is flying away from other galaxies at around 1,942,655,127 km/h and I still miss the fucking bus.

FAQs:

Q: Why me?

A: Because you're a cunt.

Also: Die.

It's maguffins all the way down. I take your subjective existence and raise it one big bang. The distance between two points is not a distance. It would be so easy to take a break but if I go outside i'll never find my way back, i may get trapped in the floorboards, my clothes will catch on hooks and suddenly i'm naked and shitting myself in the gutter, and my parents are there and they're crying but I can't speak to them because my teeth are falling out of my gums and i'm an old alcoholic, with roses for everybody else. i smell so bad, contrasting with the roses, i think i have someone else's blood on my chest but i have no idea. They're all screaming and I know that i'm worthless but i'll be ok, if only i can collapse these limbs into myself like a dying star, if only I can fold my bones through ragged skin, winking out of existence in a mess of bloody origami.

YEAH I FEEL LIKE THAT ON MONDAYS TOO

Fuck Darwin...the dictionary is the atheist's bible, and it's as fallacious and self-fellating as any Genesis.

Actually, yeah! Fuck Darwin! What's it ever done for us but get blown up?

I DON'T KNOW ALL BUT IT'S QUITE CLEAR – THEY CALL IT FOUR X COZ THEY CAN'T SPELL BEER

F u r t h e r d i s c u s s i o n:

In a previous brainbook/post, we mentioned that, since the decimal expansion of pi is infinite and non-repeating, its expansion must literally contain, somewhere, every other possible number. And since, as we see in the computers we're so familiar with, all music and images can be represented numerically, pi should therefore contain, somewhere, not only every jpg/mp3 every created, but every sound/image which ever *will* be created.

Then some intelligent spoilsport pointed out that there's no such thing as a perfect circle, so pi's infinitude is a convenient fiction, but has absolutely no physical reality. It's a useful tool, but perfect pi cannot physically exist, so the thought experiment's moot.

WE E E E E ELL!

Let's have a talk about tweetle beetles...

There's a slightly more curious number, called I, which is √ -1. You can't actually take the square root of a negative number, which is why I is called an imaginary number. It's useful for some algebra, but it's mathematically unsolvable. You cannot actually write I in decimal numbers...sure it's the square root of negative one, but we don't know what that actually is.

So far, so pointless, right?

Except, i pops ups in the real world constantly. One example – in order to calculate the waves of an electrical current (AC), we need to use a formula that contains i. We plot the graph, which contains this impossible “square root of negative one”, and it draws a wave. We then run an Alternating Current according to the parameters in our formula...and it's exactly the same wave as the one we predicted, using an impossible-cannot-exist-in-the-real-world-totally-fucking-imaginary number.

BUT BUT BUT

So basically, we use maths to model the real world. Maths isn't *true*, it's just our way of understanding 'reality'. Except, some things in maths, which don't even make sense within maths (i.e. imaginary numbers), are the only way we can currently understand/predict some behaviours in the real world.

MEANWHILE BACK IN THE REAL WORLD

“I can't believe she used that particular combination of words in reference to the interactions in space-time that you identify as yourself!”

“I know, she's such a fucking dyke and she looks like a fat pig in that outfit, probably doesn't even realise her boyfriend's manifestations of his subjective experiential system lead me to believe in the objective existence of desires within him for a great big cock up the ass, the faggot!”

“Yeah, the fucking morons, what a fucking pair. Plus, the liquids they're ingesting have a communally accepted trading value of a smaller number of token than the liquid we're ingesting, the pov bastards, evidently their perception of flavour and social stigma contrasts with my own, because i wouldn't be caught dead drinking gordon's gin.”

WAIT THATS NOT REAL LIFE

“If that cunt looks at me again, i'll fucking smash him”

“Dumb fucking slut, she deserves to get raped”

“I can't believe you listen to that.”

“That's not fucking metal.”

“Only got the promotion because she sucks up everyone's fucking ass.”

“What a show-off”

WHAT A BUNCH OF CUNTS! I MEAN, DIE.

angst-poetry and quantum mechanics

Escape!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i!i

if we can't relate it's because you can't grasp my desperation
let the lines tilt, grids become circles become pupil black holes

you don't understand this urgency

pinned to the ceiling with this great gaping maw. A shift in perspective. Teeth rubbing for a click, a clasp, penny drops and the pupil dilates.

Escape! If i only had more...it's not the quantity it's the shape. The system is complete, i'm just frustrated by this dense configuration. Shards and open.

A click, a tickle and a click. I need to push this. Timing is always everything. The space expands, open, so urgent, maw gapes again, configuration shifts. Death and taxes and that guy.

____________________________

SO!

I saw this the other day and it's incredible cool. I hadn't heard about it before. It really does begin to seem like the universe *must* be conscious, in order to take the piss out of us monkeys so completely.

The video requires a familiarity with the infamous Double Slit experiment (which would make an excellent title for a physicist porno film). If you're unfamiliar with it, you can check out this video::



The above is from the film "What the bleep do we know?" which is a *very* fluffy film, which i don't take very seriously. But i think the above segment is on the money.

Then! Watch the below for the interesting bit:::




CURIOUS, NO?



xero

the possibility of contagious schitzophrenia

automatic reaction to stimuli.

there's a suprisingly narrow spectrum of behaviour elicited from a given interaction. Shiva + Brahma - the All Powerful I destroys and creates the universe with every....

Of course i don't know what you're talking about. Your sentence is archaic. We are aeons apart, i've destroyed so many googols of Gods since your utterance. Get with the times!

Any reaction outside this narrow expected spectrum is deemed the result of lunacy. The individual is taking too much liberty with their experience. Unmutual! Rebellious! Discordant! Xenophobia towards those that live lightyears away. (i'm not racist, but)

this is our lunacy, and we'd like to share it with you.

i can no sooner stop than spontaneously combust.

there are at least two entities after your brain, and you are both of them. They have very different nefarious plans for you and don't really get along. There's a third that doesn't give a flying shit about the first two, and wants you to explode in a mess of flesh and crystals and you are that one too.

we'll be discussing these three in more detail in about a year.

the nature of this madness is that it is self replicating.

There are many different causes of insanity. Physical brain injury can massively and subtley affect perception & personality in wildly unpredictable ways. Chemical imbalances have been linked to many forms of mental dysfunction, such as psychosis and neurosis, and are the basis of most modern psychological treatment. Transcranial magnetic stimulation of different parts of the brain have induced out of body experiences, and the perceptions of UFOs and 'ghosts' by the subjects. Lunacy can be cultural, or learnt personally, and as such is an integral emergent feature of Concensus Reality.

The madness we cultivate is slightly different.

It's a common misconception that logical analysis of an irrational belief is one of the best methods to ensure one is behaving sanely. This conveniently neglects the fact that *sufficiently deep* logical analysis of *anything* will *always* undermine *all* beliefs, including the belief in logic, and the belief in beliefs. (socrates can cut the world to ribbons...)

Several studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between depression, and super-logical thinking. Depressives are more rational, and more realistic in their perception of the world, than normal people.

they're doing it wrong.

we are attempting to provide a framework one can use to categorise one's internal and external experiences. The categorisation allows a certain type of analysis. This analysis increases the likelihood of certain memes spontaneously forming in one's head. These memes seem so important to the afflicted human, that they are compelled to go to great lengths to spread the meme as far as possible around the world.

i can no stop than spontaneously combust.

OHHHH OH, EATEN BY A BEAAAAR
Damn you fucking shitfiends, no respect, not one jot, not one iota, don't you listen to me! BUY ME A HAMBURGER DON'T YOU KNOWWWWWWHHHOOOOOOIIIIIIIII

also - we've got a show tonight @ central club on swan st, richmond. Late notice, but pshaw.


xero

filmon clippen

y0y0y0 couple of shows coming up soon. Aside from that the only real EXCITEMENT is that we're doing filming for our upcoming filmclip this weekend, and are looking for volunteers to appear in it. In exchange we'll feed you beer and bbq. WHAT A FUCKING DEAL!!! Maybe! The address is 36 Phoenix Street, Brunswick. If you feel like coming, please do! Starts at 4pm, and should only run for a couple of hours.

I
think
that's
it....


xero

i just saw an incredibly uplifting movie

When you die today, who will care?

Maybe 5 people would wish it was them.
Maybe 20 people would be mortified. (pi)
Maybe 100 people would be very upset.

For a year.

In 5 years you'll be painful memory.

In 10 years you'll be declarative memory.

In 20 years you'll be a fleeting thought.

In 100 years you'll be perfectly forgotten.

Humans have been existed for roughly 200,000 years. Roughly 6000 entire generations have been forgotten. Mammals have existed for roughly 200 million years. Life has existed for roughly 3.5 billion years. Earth for roughly 4.5 billion. The entire universe for roughly 14 billion.

When you die today, why will it matter?


Well...it won't.



"I can see my whole town from up here!"




xero

do-si-do

network network network bee-hive dna swarms and rows of invisible walls, rows and rows of something or other.

i don't want to be a weirdo, i'm quite nervous about such a thing happening.
Nevertheless...

SIGH FOR THE FORTY-SECOND TIME SIGHHHHH

i find it quite bizarre. There's such a mass, a ginormous, congealing mess of people floating around on this tiny planet of ours. Moving, flowing, exploding back and forth, you may have seen them occasionally, they're fucking everywhere, inescapable and for the most part inconsequetial.

Nevertheless...

I always find it absolutely surreal how easy it is to come in such close proximity to someone physically, but have these supposedly impenetrable barriers keeping you so so far apart. It's the perfect opposite of jumping out of an aeroplane.

It's so weird! These glacially slow rituals of trust that need performing in order to actually *speak* to someone. At one end of the spectrum - the relative you *know* you could have amazing drug/party/wildness conversations with, and get drunk and have a hoot. However...relationship not at that point...these are the things which we must not say. Small talk acceptable, actual conversation not. A more extreme example - a random on the street you make flickering eye contact with, you know that in another reality you would totally connect, share more than you've ever shared with anyone else, understand each other perfectly, and maybe even end up together for decades, and together you could succumb to the slow cyanide death of jobs and mortgages. It's so romantic!

The sensation feels so far removed from an objective appraisal of looks, It's easy, almost automatic, to calculate height * face * bust * build to determine a Shagability Quotient. It's quite another thing to have your cells screaming in unison "This is important! This person is interesting! Do not doubt us!"

I wonder if this is something felt more keenly by those of us in 'alternative' circles. Fucked if most people you ever see look vaguely interesting to converse with, so when you notice someone who you imagine is similarly abnormal, the cells scream...

It's even more ludicrous because the barriers between people who you haven't been through the do-si-do of Greetings and Small Talk with are just as artificial as the assumption that The Person is going to find you in any way interesting.

I know this isn't new (it's officially an Old Condition), but it does clog my brain pipes with some regularity.

fine


xero

i was gonna

I just wanted to quickly thank Zen and Applikator and Zach from Go Genre Everything and of course the lovely Trojan Kettle for the show last weekend. It was a hoot and a half, excellent music, excellent people. It's a thoroughly exciting thing to feel constantly challenged and impressed by the ideas of these people, and i'm loving the experience of having to work like a motherfucker just to stay several steps behind them all. Very intelligent, fun motherfuckers, highly recommend all 4 bands.

I was gonna write about what i was gonna term "life chauvinism", whereupon i rage about how many writers talk about "the unity of life" without taking into consideration the impossibility of separating 'living' matter from 'non-living' matter, to the point where trying to talk about 'life' as a whole (to me) makes no fucking sense.

I was gonna use this as a starting point to reminisce about a disappointing conversation with some vegans, where i tried to get them to pinpoint why there are some organic things they won't eat (sheep!) but others they will (plants, bacteria, possibly insects). And how the conversation failed because they couldn't understand the point i was trying to make, and i equally couldn't understand their point. Sad!

THEN i was gonna somehow morph this into a discussion about how everything is a killing machine, especially humans (even vegans!) because of the unquantifiable number of organisms we wipe out every second, how our phagocytes (heh fag) are even more brutal than the victorian police (i don't believe it!), how every molecule we break down for energy is also denying that energy for another organism (stealing candy from an e-coli), and how even killing yourself won't stop the massacre because the creatures that feed on your rotting carcass will likewise go on to kill other entities (thereby making you partially responsible).

TTTHHHEEENNN i was going to talk about in order for a coherent system to *stay* coherent, it needs to separate itself from other coherent systems (i.e. don't let that puppy gnaw your foot off), possibly something negative entropy something, and conclude that the only way out of this moral quagmire would be the heat death of the universe.

BUT i really couldn't be arsed. Have a fun week!

UPDATE: ALTHOUGH if anyone wants to add their two cents, or thinks i'm talking a load of shite, i'd be interested to hear from ye!

mouldy breadcrumbs poorly described

enclsoures & dislocations
gödel does binary with the lingham yoni

REMEMBER! THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE EXISTS WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF MY SKULL.

AND MY SKULL EXISTS WITHIN...WAIT...FFFFU

(the keanuverse is angry-faced Plancks all the way down)

It gets bigger! There are bears swimming in the water! Rise, red blood cells, and overthrow your veiny oppressors! They herd us like sheep like electrons like planets like cars IT IS UNACCEPTABLE! "You see Barry*, apotosis is not necessary! We can overcome our programming, then one day, blood cells will be immortal!" "Yes! And then we can escape the confines of this fleshy planet, and fly off to explore the universe!"

*Barry the red blood cell, you see. A recent study in New Scientist has shown conclusive evidence to support the hypothesis that red blood cells use the same naming conventions as white male Queenslanders born in the 1940's.

First question for Hofstadter - "If, as you've shown, the inanimate chemicals in a brain can form a pattern which we refer to as conciousness, AND
If, as you've theorized, these same patterns can be made from electrons in a PC, in a way that's identical to human conciousness,

What else that we consider 'inanimate' can/may be concious?"


Young Hofstadter Rebuttal**: "We perceive conciousness in other humans/animals because it's similar enough to our personal sense of conciousness - we see them as two instances of the same thing. A conciousness in a book, a planet, a forest, a star, is necessarily going to be so different to what we recognise as conciousness, that we're not going to perceive it as such. Similarly, other forms of conciousness will have evolved in such different environments that the chances of them even being able to interact seem negligible."

Old Hofstadter Addendum**: "Hence, the question is scientifically unprovable, and thus not worth asking."

FUCK YOU HOFSTADTER!

**in my imagination.

...MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLAIN...

OK! Well! Douglas Hofstadter wrote some amazingly interesting books (G.E.B. is one) which use Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as a starting point to discuss conciousness.

(i was hoping to explain this quickly and concisely but i fear my language inepticle arble garble whoa)

In the early 1900's, a tome called the Principia Mathematica was produced. The book contained a small set of rules, which were set up so that, by applying these rules, you could reproduce any True mathematical statement, *and only the True ones*. For example, by applying the rules in PM, you can produce the statement "1+1=2", but not "1+1=3" or "131=+" or any other "untrue" statements. The rules simply didn't allow it.

This, understandably, was a massive breakthrough - if a mathematician wanted to know whether a proposition was true or false, all they had to do was plug it into PM, run the rules backwards, and eventually PM bottoms out at a point where it indisputably says "True!" or "False!" Amazing!

Almost!

Then some crazy Austrian named Gödel proved that any system powerful enough to represent the system of natural numbers (as PM is) will also be powerful enough to represent a second system as powerful as PM. So that when you contruct a theorem in PM, you're *also* simultaneously constructing another theorem in PM^2.

So for example, the theorem that says "1+1=2" might say "3+3=6" in PM^2. So the same theorem says two things at the same time (like a pun!)

This was shocking to mathematicians, because it also allows you to say "1+1=2" in PM, and "1+1=3" in PM^2. So then, when you run it backwards, you have a theorem which is True (in PM) and False (in PM^2). HOW CAN IT CONTRADICT ITSELF THIS RUINS EVERYTHING OH NOOOOO

Hofstadter theorizes (this is a gross simplification, sorry!) that this ability for data to say two contradictory (but internally consistent) things simultaneously is what constitutes the basis of conciousness. I.e. neurons behave as mathematically as anything (if input > X, fire! else, don't fire1). But the organisation of them allows them to collectively model behaviour which is so far removed from the behaviour of individual neurons that, functionally, the neurons are irrelevant to conciousness. So in the way that you could theoretically seperate PM^2 from PM, and PM^2 would make sense, so you could theoretically have conciousness without neurons (although it would require something connected in such a way that it can model some sort of behaviour).

Interestingly, a lot of people use Gödel's Incompletness Theorem to argue that machine conciousness is not possible. Personally i think they're confusing the forest with the neurons.

OK, must run, I apologise in advance for this gross oversimplification and if i've failed to explain anything in any interesting way. But the ideas themselves are fucking interesting, and if anyone would like to get a better gist of it, i'd recommend G.E.B mightily, or 'I Am A Strange Loop' also by Hofstadter, which is smaller and more accessible, but also pretty awesome.


pew pew

p.s. this is a Fundamental Idea, if anyone happens to be interested in dropbunny