Review: Max Brooks – World War Z

I finished WWZ and as much fun it (mostly) was while reading the more appalled I am by how reactionary and racist it is beneath all the action.

The obvious point is of course the Redeker plan to „sacrifice“ part of humanity so others can survive. At least it’s not only people who are somehow more „worthy“ than others who are allowed to live (that would have been too fascist even for this kind of militant garbage). Note that this plan has been thought up by an (at least white) South-African (though admittedly it is taken up world-wide, including the US). The idea is just so disgusting and inhumane that I think it could happen in reality.

Then there’s the glaring American patriotism: Sure they „almost“ get their asses kicked at Yonkers, but only „almost“ while all the others seem to bloodily loose their battles most of the time. And it’s of course the fucking AMERICAN president who makes this speech how they have to take back earth to get everyone’s spirit up.* And how the Americans take back their „house“, they just have one ultra-efficient line of well-equipped soldiers roll once straight over America and erase the zombies in a total war of glory, while Russians struggle with weapons from WW2 and the French are too stupid to take their time (and both therefore get their soldiers infected all the time).

And what is this bullshit paragraph about the queen being all heroic and a role-model for her people, refusing to go to a safe place and staying at Windsor instead? What is this royalism, are you crazy, Mr. Brooks? Role-models, my arse.

Continue reading Review: Max Brooks – World War Z

FYI: Lovecraft was a fucking racist

And by that I mean a real racist as fucked up as it gets not the (also disgusting) „As everybody back then he didn’t like people of color“ but the stinking, disgusting, completly deluded kind of racist.

Next time I’ll be home, I’ll throw the two Lovecraft books I own into the bin. I’m not going to resell them, I’m going to make sure no one ever reads that kind of crap.

Oh and before I forget: Robert „Conan“ E. Howard was also a mindless sexist, racist scumbag (via).

I can’t believe that they’re both featured in this Penguin Classics-series, the latter without ever touching his crazed views on woman and race in the preface. Not a single word!

„Rather Be A Pear Than An Apple“ Mac OSX Wallpaper and Login Screen

I stumbled over this unhappy Apple logo on yay!everyday yesterday and my immediate reaction was: „Wow, that’s exactly how I feel about Apple nowadays.“*

I’m an Apple-User (’cause there’s no Adobe Creative Suite for Linux, that’s why), I kinda like the product (OSX is an okay OS and the hardware is still nice) but I just loathe what Apple has become. It started of with the shameful Mac Guy/PC Guy-Ads, went downhill with the iPhone and the whole close-system model accompanied by various outrageous Terms of Use-Fails of Apple products and culminates in the ridiculous patent battles with other companies. These patent wars might not (all) be Apples fault but they have the distinct smell of a boy who wants the whole playground for himself. This feeling of Apple being a company I don’t want anything do to with is further deepened by the news-bits I happened to read when the biography (*argh*) of Steve Jobs was released, that he said he wanted to „smash Android“ or whatever it was. I have no idea about running a business that scale and maybe you have to be tough but this just doesn’t sound „nice“ or like a gentleman I want as my role model or look up to at all. Then again I never bought any Apple product that wasn’t second hand anyway, so …

Long story short: When I saw this adorable unhappy apple logo I decided to steal it. I did a login screen (they can be changed with the free maintenance tool Onyx) and a desktop background both 1280 x 800 px (comment if you want another resolution). Here you go:

*Little did I know that this was just another Fanboy being sad about the death of Steve Jobs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tragedy that anyone ever dies of cancer (in Germany every fourth person dies of cancer nowadays) and I have absolutely no idea what Jobs exactly did at Apple – nor am I going to waste time finding out – but the picture drawn in the media that he single-handedly created EVERY FUCKING Apple hardware plus iTunes and wattnot is obviously plain wrong. I don’t know why people like Jobs more than Gates, they are (were?) both bosses of huge (= evil) companies that want your money. Maybe Apple gave you a product that was a little more shiny and easy to use but Microsoft’s product is cheaper (not the OS though …). And with what I’ve seen in sneak peaks of Windows 8 and Apples awful design decisions lately – of which a 3d Dock was only the first – there seems to be little difference between the two at least aesthetic-wise.

So: if you fanboys out there think you have to waste your life adoring someone, adore Arundhati Roy. Wise woman, read what she has to say. But Steve Jobs? Grow up.

Feel free to steal this too, it’s Creative Commons-Non Commercial.

Prevent Mac OSX Media Keys from opening iTunes

UPDATE 2015: The link bewlow doesn’t work anymore but here’s an you can still download MMFix via archive.org. Note that this does not work for 10.9 (readme says it only works for Snow Leopard). There’s an alternative but it doesn’t work for me on Mavericks. (Via)

Here’s a fix by NoMitso to disable the annoying „function“ of OSX to open and play iTunes everytime you use Media Keys on a Mac, rendering them useless for every other audio or video player.

There are articles on Lifehacker and Superuser for this but they have outdated links to NoMitsu’s MMFix.app that fixes this problem, so I thought I’d link to NoMitsus new domain. If this becomes unavailable contact me and I’ll send you the fix. Btw, the readme says it works only on Snow Leopard and was tested with 1.6.2-4, I’m running it on 1.6.8 and it works fine.

Download MMFix from NoMitsu.com

How to bypass Turkeys netcensorship

unblocking-youtube-turkey-localhost

I moved back to Istanbul some months ago and we stayed at a friend’s place in the beginning where I was delighted to find out that Youtube – one of the websites which are blocked in Turkey traditionally – was available again. At first I thought it might have to do something with Istanbul being one of Europe’s capitals of culture this year. Which is of course bullcrap.

When we moved to our own flat the trouble with the local ISP TTNET began: first there was some strange problem that I was able to chat and download via BitTorrent but not to surf the net sometimes. After some research I found out that it might be a DNS-problem. I replaced the DNS-entry in OSX’s Network System Preferences with some German DNS-Servers: 85.214.73.63 (Foebud) 213.73.91.35 (CCC) 87.118.100.175 (German Privacy Foundation). They are all German Hacker/Data-Privacy/Civil-Rights-organizations so there should be no blocking whatsoever.

However Youtube – and after some time also Google-Maps (or to be more specific: the map-data of Google-Maps) – was not available anymore. I didn’t get a »Haha, we censored this«-message from the Turkish government, if you typed in youtube.com the page just loaded and loaded until it the browser gave up.

Now I read around  a little and found out that the ISP can even filter IP-addresses when you have another DNS-server (or something like that +____+).

However you can add the addresses and their URL’s in the local host-file which is accessed even before the DNS and for me that worked. There is a Howto for OSX here, do a search for »edit host file + yourOS« to find out for other Systems. I got Youtube’s IPs from here. You can of course use any IP/Domain-lookup service to look them up. What I entered was:

208.65.153.238 youtube.com
208.65.153.251 youtube.com
208.65.153.253 youtube.com
208.117.236.69 youtube.com
74.125.127.100 youtube.com

For some reason Google Maps is working again, too.

For now.

EDIT: Okay, it worked for a day but not anymore. I just don’t get it. I am aware that it might not be censorship but some other problem but I have no idea what.

Illustration: »The Book of the Dead«

Okay, someone calling himself »amotionpicture« (wtf?) posted this entry on ifreelance.com:

ifreelance-bookofthedead

Though that is one of these things you can’t really call »illustration« because you have almost no room for any interpretation I had a vivid image in my mind and though it would be fun to just do it.

I am not going to participate since ifreelance.com is one of those sites that not only fuck up the design-business by making it possible for people to get stuff designed for unbelievable low prices – we have these kind of sites in Germany too, like 12designer or designenlassen – but at least the German sites don’t requiere the designers to pay just for an account* (huh, just saw the guy posted an e-mail-address, maybe I’ll send it to him anyway).

Well, as it has been said on fontblog, people making entries in sites like these deserve to get shit for the no-money they want to spend. Of course there are situations – as maybe the one above – were you just don’t have any money you can give. But especially if you are in the creative industry there should be solutions for that. I think it is quite normal to design t-shirts or booklets for small bands and they give you some merchandise, free entry to a show, a dvd or whatever.

Anyway, I had fun doing this and I am sure that that is completley not what this guy wants since I largely dared to ignore his suggestions (moon, media, insects etc.…):

The Book Of The Dead - Horrormovie Poster

*Coming to think of it: I have no idea if there is a fee on the German sites, I never bothered trying to sign up.

Install driver only for USR 5423 USB-Wireless-Stick

I just spend an hour on finding a way to only install the driver but not the Wireless Manager Tool that comes with the package for the US Robotics Wireless USB-Stick Model 5423 on Windows. I needed to do this because for some reasons the Manager could connect to the router but Windows didn’t get the connection. This happened to me before and in case anybody has the same problem here’s ther workaround:

Download the driver from the US Robotics-homepage. You’ll get an .exe-file which installs the driver and the Wireless Manager. Now, here’s the trick: Open the .exe with 7zip or whatever unzipper you use. You’ll find a folder called Driver inside of the package, extract it and use it to install the driver manually through the Windows Device Manager. That’s that.

Culture-flatrate

I just read an article over at ArsGeek where the author was wondering how copyright infringement and illegal filesharing could be legalized. His suggestions where subscription-sites for legal downloading and/or pay-per-view-systems (specifically on the Pirate Bay which was to be legalized just like Napster but from what I heard the deal is a good as cancelled). However that might evolve, I don’t think that one of these two business-moldels will be there on the long run because both systems are limited to what one site can offer (with whom from the industry they made contracts) and no one is going to register on multiple sites just to get everyting they want, because it’s expensive and a pain in the a.s.s. Of course it works a little for music so it will work with movies to a certain degree but most of the people will still download whithout paying anything from illegal sites.

I gave these things some thoughts recently and I think in the end the only solution is to allow people to download whatever they want from whereever they want when they pay a monthly/yearly fee. The collected money than needs to be distributed to the artists (this will cut out most of the music- and movie-distributing and -marketing people, that’s why they are not really happy with this).

The thinking on how this might be organized (how do figure out a more or less cheat-free way which artist is getting how much money etc.) is just starting and it will probably take a long time until we have a system up and running because it has to be legalized by the law all over the world.

This model is called »Kulturflatrate« (»Culture-flatrate) in Germany.

I could not find the English term or any further reading in English, but this (German-subtlitled but English) video-interview with Danny O’Brian, who is activism coordinator at the Electronical Frontier Foundation, is a good start.

Candidate for Worst Movie of all Times: Narnia 1

I watched the first part of the Narnia-chronicles mainly because I heard about the rumours that it is used by fundamental christians as propaganda (Philip Pullman’s ingenious »Dark Materials«-series is viewed as the counterpart to this). So I might have been slightly preoccupied when watching the movie but I just can’t help it: this was one of the worst things I have ever seen. I know it may be a little unfair to compare it with Lord of the Rings because Narnias target audience is much younger, but on the other hand this being a children-movie is no accuse for doing almost everything wrong that you can do wrong in a movie. What that would be can be read after the break.

Continue reading Candidate for Worst Movie of all Times: Narnia 1

»Ghost in the Shell 2« & Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer — Doll

Hans Bellmer

Coming to think of it, actually did (re-)watch a nice movie in the last time. I am doing a work on Internet/Hypertext as a theoretical background for my recent project and I thought about GitS and the network-theories they talk about there and I decided to watch Innocence again.

It was a real treat as always and just as the other times I watched it I couldn’t decide if I should concentrate on the breathtaking pictures and animation (except for some too much CGI-looking CGI I totally adore this movie’s style) or on the story/subtitles (I got a fansub that has heavy explanation for all the references and quotes, it’s unbelievable what Mamoru Oshii rubbed into that movie).

I learned from wikipedia that the design of the cyborgs is inspired by the German artist/photographer etc. Hanns Bellmer (if you know it the hint with the book is really obvious of course) and his fabulous dolls.

*shudder*

Uuah, I watched two shitty movies in a row recently, the first one was Hellboy 2, the second one Resident Evil (3?): Extinction.

I watched Hellboy for curiosity-reasions, I could not believe that del Toro could make a movie as bad as my friends said it was. But he sure did (wow, and he did this shitty Hellboy-Animated-series too. I really tried to watch that. But it was just too badly drawn and stupid). Hellboy — The Golden Army heavily reminded me of Spiderman 3, both movies left me with this strange feeling that what I just watched was not a movie but some kind of half-baked brainstorm conglomerat for the next few Spiderman/Hellboy movies (which I — for sure in vain — hope they are not going to do). It didn’t feel like a good composed story but rather a crude mix of (bad) ideas. Nevermind, I never cared much for Spiederman and Hellboy can never be as good as a movie as it is as a comic (actually, I think Hellboy works only as a comic, in a movies the ideas and characters just seem too ridiculous).

I knew that Resident Evil would be bad, though. RS2 totally sucked so I didn’t believe it would get any better. It didn’t of course and I only watched it because I am recently doing some research on Apocalypse. But even watching it with that perspective was kind of frustrating, because it was uninspired and unlogical. Nevermind.

Drawing Day 2008

I’ve been drawing on Drawing Day!

Drawing Day 2008
The view out of E.s window.

Drawing Day 2008
A scibble for a poster I might be doing on »Kielholen« (careen, keelhaul)…

Drawing Day 2008
… and another one for the pirates.

Drawing Day 2008
We’ve been at our favourite Dürüm-place in Taksim.

Drawing Day 2008
I have one of these brush pens, I really like it but for some reason I rarely use it. I drawed what I thought that you would typically draw with these kind of pens on one of the papers they serve the food on at that place.

Drawing Day 2008
Of course one of the millions of cats here in Istanbul wanted to have something from our food. She looked so poor that she got a piece or two. ^__^

Drawing Day 2008
E. drew my portrait. I have the pen in the right hand because I am already finished with the drawing, she explained (I draw with my left hand, usually). And I seem to be quite happy about what I drew. ^__^

Drawing Day 2008
We visited friends of E. in Kadiköy, they have a very nice flat. This is the view from their balcony (and some people from the ferry…).

Drawing Day 2008
The ferry back and scribbles at a Pide place in Taksim in the late evening.

»City of Loss«

The downtowntrains full of empty eyes
and I wish I was someone else and far away
with my hand I touch the glass, cold and slick
and crows on their way to nowhere.

No one can save me and I‘m so fucking scared
and I feel like nothing’s ever gonna change
summer‘s last flower wilting on the table
and I got lost in the City of Glass.

Somehow I lost count of the days
and clouds moving rapidly, a moment of loss
afraid of going to sleep not wanting the next day to come
and there is a thunder far and distant.

Michael Ende

Recently I rediscovered the works of Michael Ende. In my opinion he was one of the best German authors of children’s books of all time.

I’ve always been in love with his »Der Satanarcholügenialkohöllsiche Wunschpunsch« (»The Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion«), there is a really good audiobook (and a – of course – really BAD animated tv-series) of this work, produced in the 90s – read by the maestro himself – that shows what a great reader he is. I own it on casette and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it but I can quote almost the whole thing.

I had the opportunity to watch the screen adaption of »Momo« on the big screen once and I really enjoyed it. I am listening to its audiobook these days and it is really astonishing to see how this modern »fairy tale« deals with subjects I’ve been bothering myself with recently, such as: Is work/success really the center of my life? Am I doing the right thing with the time I got? How do I want to spend my life? Ende has a great way of dealing with these essential questions, creating lovely characters and telling unique, universal stories with them.

Another of these »Strange how life goes in circles all the time«-thing happened when doing some research on Michael Ende: I was really happy to read that he was fascinated by Japanese culture because – as some may have noticed – I am too. He seems to have translated some stories by Kenji Miyazawa (known best for his »Night of the Milky Way Railway«) into German with his Japanese translater and second wife Mariko Satō. And guess what: I really have a favour Miyazawa too. Don’t know if they published the stories they translated though because there is only one book with Miyazawa-stories available in Germany, I think (»Die Früchte des Ginkgo «) and that has been translated by someone else. Still pretty cool ^__^

What most people don’t know – I suppose – is that he has written some really wonderful stories for grown-ups (or rather stories ONLY for grown-ups because just like the films of Hayao Miyazaki / Studio Ghibli ALL of his stories should be read by adults) like »Der Spiegel im Spiegel« (»Mirror in the Mirror«), a collection of really weird short stories.

And don’t forget to get your eyes on the wondeful illustrated »Der Lindwurm und der Schmetterling« (beware of the new – pretty bad – version with illustrations by the same artist, Wilfried Hiller) one of my other favourites.

Spiderman 3

Wow, this was one big waste of time.

The other Spidey-movies sucked too in my opinion (I mean, it’s popcorn-cinema, if you don’t expect anything they are »okay« movies). But this was so stupid. I think the main problem is that they tried to fill this already long movie with just too many story-lines and bad guys and drama and all stuff imaginable. Less would have been more. But now this is the typical »We rather do a lot of thing that make no sense on the whole than focus on just some and try to do them good«-problems.

Well, actually I don’t really bother. Let them do the stupid movies, I don’t care.

But finally there was Venom. But one the other hand he sucked too.

Discarded Illustrations for the Nord/LB-Öffentliche

I’m doing my very first official, paid illustration job with two fellow students for a charity organisation called »Stiftung Nord/LB-Öffentliche«.

It’s a hell lot of work but I really feel like I am learning a lot too so it’s kinda fun.

We figured out that we wanted to base the whole concept of the work on a tie in the colors of the organisation and that tie goes kinda mad and changes into all kinds of things that make a good metaphor of what the foundation stands for, so that in the end it has nothing to do with a tie anymore but the colors are still left.

So here are some of the pics that did not make it into the final report:

Fernrohr

Karte

Hosenträger 1

Hosenträger 2

Sprechtüte

Strohalm

A rich man’s privilege

Student ID

This is a doodling I did on the trainride back from my hometown Lübeck last weekend. With all the beautiful landscape outside the trainwindows I somehow always end up drawing trees and stuff.

And yes, that is my adress. It’s actually the envelope this semester’s Student ID came in. Thanks to our f***ing antisocial, conservative government these things are now only available for guys that have 500 € on the loose per semester (can I say that?…).

So I am officially putting this drawing on sale here for 500 €. ^__^

EDIT: Well, ACTUALLY my parents just bought that drawing without even knowing it (and they got a »Special Parent’s Price Reduction« from me of course…). They always give me money for everything and I am very grateful for that and at the same time I feel bad taking it all the time.

So thank you so much.

Again.

»The God of Small Things« Teaser

The God of Small Things Teaser

I totally forgot that I put this teaser online for the portfolio I handed in for the Sokrates/Erasmus exchange-program.

This was one of the tasks in a »Macromedia Director« class from the basic studies. We were asked to do a short teaser for an imaginary movie only with typography and graphic symbols. I know that it is not very good (it’s much too long) but I still like the atmosphere.

Because of Director‘s unability to export the teaser properly, I‘ve done the clip for a second time with »After Effects« in far less than a quarter of the time it took me in Director. What do we learn from that? Director really sucks. It does.

Please note that this is not a real trailer.

I don’t think that Mrs. Roy will ever give permission for an adaption of her book and I am quite happy about this because »The God of Small Things« is one of the best books I’ve ever read and a movie would only destroy my very own images I have while reading it.

In addition Arundhati Roy is one of the very few people I consider to be a role model. Her political writings and engagement is very encouraging. I adore her.

Studio 4°C’s »Arete Hime« / »Princess Arete«

Another wonderful film already, I’m so happy. Like everyone else it was quiet surprising for me to watch such a film coming from Studio 4°C in 2001 because it’s a classical fairytale with the look of an 80’s anime. Very beautiful though (and I think they used some 3D-effects what was kinda fun to see in such a classical looking anime and they were really good because inconspicuous made). But that was Studio 4°C is all about in the end: being versatile.

Anyway, this is a totally amazing medieval fantasy story that could perfectly be one of the good, early Studio Ghibli-movies, with a sweet yet independant, young female main character, beautiful music an interesting story and actually some philosophical background.

Of course there seems to be no (subtitled) DVD around like for most of the great Studio 4°C movies.

A nice, funny thing, here. You, sick, sick internet. Sweet.

Tery Gilliam’s »Tideland«

Brilliant. Just brilliant. I’ve been longing for just one good film for so long now and here it is. I’ve been watching Gilliam’s »Brothers Grimm« recently which was one of the »not too bad« movies that I’ve watched so many of in the last time and I expected that »Tideland« would be better but I didn’t expect it to be THIS better. So this is a movie about a young girl with a fantastic imagination, who happened to be born into an American white-trash hill-billy surrounding. You start wondering if it isn’t little odd that this young girl is preparing the shots for her father’s »little vacations« but this is one of the least odd things about to happen. Everyone’s a freak, some are nice and some are not.

This is an elaborated, fantastic, sick, wonderful hell of a film. Watch it.