How can we forget those endless days of yesteryear whilst tomorrow endlessly crashes ahead? 30'000 days of bliss/misery index; (New m)
A radical art concept that transcends ears.
A punk philosophy with a rock sound.
The musicians wear masks. Not like Daft Punk though. This is different.
Surface mics on surface mics to create a well of sound.
Fuck the audience.
A concept album based on Basket Case 3: The Progeny.
A f*cked up prog album available for download with gifs. £5.
No practising. Only jamming.
As confidence grows actions will become more bizarre such as; photo shoots.
At least two or three members need to take everything personally and occasionally storm out muttering "Fuck you all."
A no-smoking policy.
Significant increase in dog attacks.
There should be more focus on image than music.
Upon the death of the weakest member of the group they shall be venerated with rose wine.
It feels better this way.
Now moreso than ever before.
Animal nature in the face of cruel geometries.
29.1.14
The History And Future Of Work
Roughly seven thousand years ago mankind shifted from it’s hunter-gatherer way of living to that of working the land. It is likely that the ‘gatherers’ were some of the first to realise plants would grow from seed and began to plant them, meaning that there would be guaranteed food rather than requiring that members of a community go and hunt or gather. It also helped that the world was exiting the Plasticeone era and into the Neogene, early man now lived in a world a lot more hotter and wetter than it’s ancestors had. With the certainty of food brought more time for people to specialise in pottery or weaving, both of which became more useful for growing and storing crops. And so marks the beginning of work that has more or less remained unchanged up until the Industrial Revolution.
It is deemed one of the highest virtues in our society to engage in work, either paid or voluntary, though with people looking for favourably on the former as doing something for free is seen of as reckless and ignorant. On the flip side, working hard is seen as more virtuous than being paid a lot. People will often boast about the time they might have to get up at or the shifts they cover but not as much what they get paid. Normal reactions to those who say they work hard are often a raised eyebrow, a look of concern or a story about how they work harder. It is recommended that everyone work forty hours a week, following on from the concept of the eight hour day, with the remainder for rest and play, yet society is slowly realising that there are too few hours in a week for everyone to work. Similar to the housing bubble, we are quite deep into a ‘work bubble’, though rather than rising house prices and fewer properties we have excess people available to work and hours in a week. One only needs to walk around the streets during the day and wonder what everyone is doing not at work. “I haven’t worked a job for six years, it’s the government’s fault.” is often a snappy comeback, yet the fault actually lies with the implementation of the production line by Henry Ford in 1913.
Production lines had been in place since the 19th century, yet it was the end product, an affordable motor car, that had the biggest impact on Western society in a more subtle way than changing entire landscapes through road construction, pollution from oil or the millions of automobile fatalities. It set into motion a series of events that shifted work away from humans and more towards automation. The term ‘Luddite’ is used now to mean more someone against technological change, yet its roots are with workers against technological unemployment. By destroying the machines which had replaced them the early Luddites were preconceiving a world where the work that they carried out could also be carried out by machines, but cheaper. The only reason why every job isn’t done by machines is that it would be too expensive to invent the robot which could do the job as well. To hire a person on minimum wage to work at a fast food restaurant is easier, at the moment, than the research and development of a robot to do it. Things such as customer services over the internet or self-service checkouts are preludes to absolution automation (as seen in many factories), though with the trend of technological advancement I don’t think its too forward to think that by the end of the century any job will be able to be done by a robot.
Though this leaves us in an awkward area. If all the robots have all the jobs, what are people meant to do with their time? They won’t be earning money as they don’t have any jobs and so won’t be able to do anything. Meanwhile all the robots will be fabulously wealthy and spend a lot of their time on luxury boats. Nobody will even own the robots as that is a job that can be fulfilled by a robot. Which brings us back to the beginning. People will spend their time hunting and gathering, sheltering in caves and painting crude symbols on the walls. The robots will leave the planet after removing every trace of their existence in the search for more work to do. As has happened at least twice before.
IF MAN IS DECIDED WORK AND MACHINE CAN DO IT WHICH IS MORE MAN?
W = M/R
Maybe if we all worked twenty hour days in sweatshops and practised the lost art of Christian Socialism that'd get this world back on track! Moreman tomatoes grown by real agricultural humans! Milk from cows rather than a lactoseless chud made from recycled oestrogen! Broken lightbulbs laid into sandwiches on a truck heading to the conference of 'droid 'twerk. Most likely rip out the brains of humans and put them in robobodies as that's cheaper than a platinum computer. Measure the distance taken between the higher primate and the consciousness of a water bear, panspermicide, tattooed wooden bones, six million dollar running shoe, will England still be able to play Euromillions if it leaves the EU, does the empty blackness of the self ejaculate an ego, do the bleeding mouths of the Great Barrier Reef taste the motes of atom bomb, do the roars of the dinosaurs echo around the world for as long as their is air, maybe, maybe distribute wealth, maybe wait for a malthusian disaster, maybe believe in God because it's more fun.
It is deemed one of the highest virtues in our society to engage in work, either paid or voluntary, though with people looking for favourably on the former as doing something for free is seen of as reckless and ignorant. On the flip side, working hard is seen as more virtuous than being paid a lot. People will often boast about the time they might have to get up at or the shifts they cover but not as much what they get paid. Normal reactions to those who say they work hard are often a raised eyebrow, a look of concern or a story about how they work harder. It is recommended that everyone work forty hours a week, following on from the concept of the eight hour day, with the remainder for rest and play, yet society is slowly realising that there are too few hours in a week for everyone to work. Similar to the housing bubble, we are quite deep into a ‘work bubble’, though rather than rising house prices and fewer properties we have excess people available to work and hours in a week. One only needs to walk around the streets during the day and wonder what everyone is doing not at work. “I haven’t worked a job for six years, it’s the government’s fault.” is often a snappy comeback, yet the fault actually lies with the implementation of the production line by Henry Ford in 1913.
Production lines had been in place since the 19th century, yet it was the end product, an affordable motor car, that had the biggest impact on Western society in a more subtle way than changing entire landscapes through road construction, pollution from oil or the millions of automobile fatalities. It set into motion a series of events that shifted work away from humans and more towards automation. The term ‘Luddite’ is used now to mean more someone against technological change, yet its roots are with workers against technological unemployment. By destroying the machines which had replaced them the early Luddites were preconceiving a world where the work that they carried out could also be carried out by machines, but cheaper. The only reason why every job isn’t done by machines is that it would be too expensive to invent the robot which could do the job as well. To hire a person on minimum wage to work at a fast food restaurant is easier, at the moment, than the research and development of a robot to do it. Things such as customer services over the internet or self-service checkouts are preludes to absolution automation (as seen in many factories), though with the trend of technological advancement I don’t think its too forward to think that by the end of the century any job will be able to be done by a robot.
Though this leaves us in an awkward area. If all the robots have all the jobs, what are people meant to do with their time? They won’t be earning money as they don’t have any jobs and so won’t be able to do anything. Meanwhile all the robots will be fabulously wealthy and spend a lot of their time on luxury boats. Nobody will even own the robots as that is a job that can be fulfilled by a robot. Which brings us back to the beginning. People will spend their time hunting and gathering, sheltering in caves and painting crude symbols on the walls. The robots will leave the planet after removing every trace of their existence in the search for more work to do. As has happened at least twice before.
IF MAN IS DECIDED WORK AND MACHINE CAN DO IT WHICH IS MORE MAN?
W = M/R
Maybe if we all worked twenty hour days in sweatshops and practised the lost art of Christian Socialism that'd get this world back on track! Moreman tomatoes grown by real agricultural humans! Milk from cows rather than a lactoseless chud made from recycled oestrogen! Broken lightbulbs laid into sandwiches on a truck heading to the conference of 'droid 'twerk. Most likely rip out the brains of humans and put them in robobodies as that's cheaper than a platinum computer. Measure the distance taken between the higher primate and the consciousness of a water bear, panspermicide, tattooed wooden bones, six million dollar running shoe, will England still be able to play Euromillions if it leaves the EU, does the empty blackness of the self ejaculate an ego, do the bleeding mouths of the Great Barrier Reef taste the motes of atom bomb, do the roars of the dinosaurs echo around the world for as long as their is air, maybe, maybe distribute wealth, maybe wait for a malthusian disaster, maybe believe in God because it's more fun.
Video Games For The Blind
Everyone plays computer games or knows someone who does. This hip new hobby is sweeping the national papers in cry storms of black ink and primordial jokes, with citizens experiencing literally hours of fun on the new Medal Of Honour game or racing each other on The Grand Theft Auto. The visceral nature of this high-tech, low brow pastime is often lost on those that are visually impaired, they often have no idea how the 64-bit graphics on the latest xbox is any different from the olden days gone by of Pac-Man and it's hit DLC, Ms. Pac-Man. Of course, blind people are able to play some modern games by listening to sounds and memorizing patterns, some manufacturers have experimented with lycra suits fitted with vibrating paddles that give an extra-sensory perception for enjoying the latest beat-em-up. But what about a video game made for blind people by blind people? Well what about it?
Ryan McBiudden is an entrepreneur using crowd sourcing to fund his mad-cap idea. We talk over Skype in separate coffee shops, talking loudly. I ask him to tell me all about the game as I slurp my Americano.
"It's simple. In this first-person shooter you play a blind man. There are no visual graphics at all, not even menus. Gamers have to rely entirely on sound." he says.
"Whoa."
"This is the world experienced by the visually impaired. It's heavily imagination based, with gamers having to construct a 3D map in their heads in order to navigate the post-apocalyptic city."
"Whoa, post-apocalypse? Now you got my attention." I say, dribbling coffee from my grinning mouth.
"It's a prequel to Day Of The Triffids. You play a character called Jack who wakes up completely blind and have to explore a world invaded by...alien plants? I think it's an invasion. They might have been there all along, I can't remember. Anyway, that's the game."
"Sounds good, I'll give it five stars. What's the multiplayer like?"
"We wanted to focus on delivering an excellent single player experience, though we're also working on-" he says. I pick up the laptop and smash it to bits against the table in front of me, hitting it over and over again, screaming as my brain boils inside my skull.
Ryan McBiudden is an entrepreneur using crowd sourcing to fund his mad-cap idea. We talk over Skype in separate coffee shops, talking loudly. I ask him to tell me all about the game as I slurp my Americano.
"It's simple. In this first-person shooter you play a blind man. There are no visual graphics at all, not even menus. Gamers have to rely entirely on sound." he says.
"Whoa."
"This is the world experienced by the visually impaired. It's heavily imagination based, with gamers having to construct a 3D map in their heads in order to navigate the post-apocalyptic city."
"Whoa, post-apocalypse? Now you got my attention." I say, dribbling coffee from my grinning mouth.
"It's a prequel to Day Of The Triffids. You play a character called Jack who wakes up completely blind and have to explore a world invaded by...alien plants? I think it's an invasion. They might have been there all along, I can't remember. Anyway, that's the game."
"Sounds good, I'll give it five stars. What's the multiplayer like?"
"We wanted to focus on delivering an excellent single player experience, though we're also working on-" he says. I pick up the laptop and smash it to bits against the table in front of me, hitting it over and over again, screaming as my brain boils inside my skull.
24.1.14
Bog Standard
Science. What's it all about? Since early Greek times the scientific method has been thought of as the correct way of transferring reality into concepts and has lead to some big advances for mankind. Numerology, the hammer, the water wheel and so on. Yet can we really trust science? Four hundred years ago scientists believed that the Earth was shaped like a torus, yet now we 'know' it's not. In another four hundred years what else may we look back on and think 'lol'? A group of scientists working out of a laboratory in Salford are trying to find that out, but not in the way that you might expect.
A woman at one end of the room is holding a torch. Next to me stands Dr. Stansfeld. The scientist turns on the torch and Stansfeld clicks his stopwatch.
"Ah, I thought so." he says, marking down a number on his clipboard.
"What's happening here?"
"We're measuring the speed of light."
"What have you found so far?"
"Well...it's the same as what's in the book. So that's good." says Stansfeld glumly. I can understand his glumnitude. For the last seventeen years Stansfeld has been rigorously testing every known scientific fact, starting from scratch.
"In school we take it for granted that what's in the book is correct. But what if it's not?"
"Well, I imagine people have been doing experiments on this sort of thing for...well, for centuries really." I say. Stansfeld shakes his head.
"You think they have, but where's the proof? I haven't seen it first hand, I need to make sure. That's what we're doing here. Making sure that science is right." he says. We walk around the lab, that resembles more a junk shop than a state of the art facility. He goes over to a desk and picks up a notebook and begins to show it me.
"This is where it all began. I retook the measurements used in which we measure everything against. The second, the metre. Time and space. From there you can work out speed, velocity, location and so on and so on." he says. Inside the book there are page after page of numbers and sketches. I ask him how long it took for him to prove that a second was actually a second. He responds by simply raising his eyebrows.
He then shows me some more advanced experiments. He went travelling around the world collecting ore samples in order to rebuild and prove the periodic table. He had his grandfather sign over his body to him upon his death so he could see for himself human physiology. I ask him if so far has he found anything different from what is already known.
"Not yet, although we are getting closer to 20th century science. Quantum physics, psychology, antibacterial medicine, that kind of thing. Because of all the advancements that happened then, I'm sure someone must have made a mistake." he says with a slight shine in his blue eyes. I ask him how he intends to replicate the experiments done at the LHC. He shakes his head.
"That damn thing. How do they expect anyone to be able to see for themselves a Higgs Boson? Still, I have been writing letters to the government to use sewage pipes under the M25 as a sort of replica. We're going to call it the Large Shit Collider." he jokes. I thank him for his time and leave promptly. Such valiant efforts all in vain, yet who knows what kind of crazy thing Stansfeld may uncover in his search for finding what is already there. Maybe orange is actually a shade of yellow or the world is actually upside down? It is people like he that which more the berry rub.
A woman at one end of the room is holding a torch. Next to me stands Dr. Stansfeld. The scientist turns on the torch and Stansfeld clicks his stopwatch.
"Ah, I thought so." he says, marking down a number on his clipboard.
"What's happening here?"
"We're measuring the speed of light."
"What have you found so far?"
"Well...it's the same as what's in the book. So that's good." says Stansfeld glumly. I can understand his glumnitude. For the last seventeen years Stansfeld has been rigorously testing every known scientific fact, starting from scratch.
"In school we take it for granted that what's in the book is correct. But what if it's not?"
"Well, I imagine people have been doing experiments on this sort of thing for...well, for centuries really." I say. Stansfeld shakes his head.
"You think they have, but where's the proof? I haven't seen it first hand, I need to make sure. That's what we're doing here. Making sure that science is right." he says. We walk around the lab, that resembles more a junk shop than a state of the art facility. He goes over to a desk and picks up a notebook and begins to show it me.
"This is where it all began. I retook the measurements used in which we measure everything against. The second, the metre. Time and space. From there you can work out speed, velocity, location and so on and so on." he says. Inside the book there are page after page of numbers and sketches. I ask him how long it took for him to prove that a second was actually a second. He responds by simply raising his eyebrows.
He then shows me some more advanced experiments. He went travelling around the world collecting ore samples in order to rebuild and prove the periodic table. He had his grandfather sign over his body to him upon his death so he could see for himself human physiology. I ask him if so far has he found anything different from what is already known.
"Not yet, although we are getting closer to 20th century science. Quantum physics, psychology, antibacterial medicine, that kind of thing. Because of all the advancements that happened then, I'm sure someone must have made a mistake." he says with a slight shine in his blue eyes. I ask him how he intends to replicate the experiments done at the LHC. He shakes his head.
"That damn thing. How do they expect anyone to be able to see for themselves a Higgs Boson? Still, I have been writing letters to the government to use sewage pipes under the M25 as a sort of replica. We're going to call it the Large Shit Collider." he jokes. I thank him for his time and leave promptly. Such valiant efforts all in vain, yet who knows what kind of crazy thing Stansfeld may uncover in his search for finding what is already there. Maybe orange is actually a shade of yellow or the world is actually upside down? It is people like he that which more the berry rub.
17.1.14
An Arrangement Of Skulls
Which is your favourite Homo? Mine is Homo Erectus, obviously, yet there are many other kinds of Homo that have lived on this very planet. There is Homo Habilis, meaning Man House, as the first hominid to build it's own shelter from mud and antler. There was also Homo Floresiensis that stood at only three feet tall and had prehensile tails! The story of human evolution is one of mutation, danger and conquest, and to celebrate the 2014th year that mankind has walked the Earth the Manchester Museum has put on a special exhibition, titled 'HOMO'.
Adorning the walls of the room are drawings of cavemen and large text annotations explaining how early humans used tools. From the foraging tribes in prehistoric China to the hunter-gatherer types along the coasts of Africa, there was as much variety in the way hominids lived in the past as there are today. The drawings ignite the imagination, of noble savages riding around on the backs of dinosaurs or conjuring up ghosts in the fire pits. Yet here is a little known fact that might surprise you; dinosaurs never existed! Scientists think that life on Earth starts underground as the pressures of the tectonic plates create bones in the soil and stone. When a skeleton is complete it is then swallowed up by extinct cloud beings that came to our planet via asteroid roughly 20 thousand years ago. The cloud aliens then put flesh onto the skeletal forms and breathed life into it, which is electricity. Nobody knows what happened to these cloud aliens but by looking at cave paintings we could guess that they maybe returned to their home planet after using the pyramids as a big ramp. Other facts titillate and mesmerise; that the first boat making race weren't humans but lemurs. That clothing was invented because monkeys started going bald. That early cavemen could talk to wild animals. Speaking of which, language is an important part of Homo Sapiens rise to evolutionary success. There is an exhibit in which visitors can press a short wooden stick onto their tongues and then try to talk although they will find it almost impossible! Humans evolved a much lower voice box than other primates, allowing our larger tongue to move around in amazing feats of oral gymnastics. It isn't known what the early languages of mankind sounded like, or how varied the vocabulary was, but one thing is for certain; when the first Homo Sapien was born from a Neanderthal she probably stood up and announced the arrival of mankind. The first sentence spoken on Earth after thousands of years of silence.
The main exhibit at 'HOMO' is a series of skulls depicting a theoretical lineage of humans. The skulls, all printed out using a rapid prototype machine borrowed from Manchester University, start with some kind of small half-rat, half-lizard. Gradually the front of the face keeps shrinking whilst the top of the cranium expands. Encephalitis over the decades caused hominids to get smarter and smarter, with brain capacity increasing about twice with each new species. The first men were likely to resemble chimpanzees, but with longer legs as they became more terrestrial. They also started to grow taller and taller whilst being less robust. The pinnacle of humanoid evolution came about with Homo Erectus and the Neanderthalic species, with brains and muscles being about twice as good as modern people. A curious kink in evolution means that when a trait becomes desirable it is emphasised heavily until regressing in later developments. This is why most animals nowadays are smaller than their prehistoric counterparts, with shorter teeth and often having allergies. When seals evolved from crocodiles they lost their noses and became cross-eyed, a strange selection by Mother Nature but nevertheless one we all have to deal with. This poses the inevitable question; are people more stupid now than they were in ancient times?
To answer this one has to crack open a history book. Any historian will regale you with tales of French peasants in the 16th century being able to recite the entire Bible in both Latin and English from memory, be able to complete complex algebraic equations in their head and would often wile away the hours discussing macro-economics through free-form poetry. The Romans managed to build cities of such opulent organisation they are often referred to as 'the ant people'. Going even further back the Ancient Egyptians spoke in hieroglyphics, making the very air around them form bizarre shapes through a form of quantum telekinesis. Who knows what the first Homo Sapiens were capable of!
One leaves the exhibition with mixed emotions. Awe at the endurance of our species. Sadness at the loss of our not-to-distant cousins. Anger at the future and it's lower gravity. And happiness at being a human being, the pinnacle of evolution and the master of the universe.
Adorning the walls of the room are drawings of cavemen and large text annotations explaining how early humans used tools. From the foraging tribes in prehistoric China to the hunter-gatherer types along the coasts of Africa, there was as much variety in the way hominids lived in the past as there are today. The drawings ignite the imagination, of noble savages riding around on the backs of dinosaurs or conjuring up ghosts in the fire pits. Yet here is a little known fact that might surprise you; dinosaurs never existed! Scientists think that life on Earth starts underground as the pressures of the tectonic plates create bones in the soil and stone. When a skeleton is complete it is then swallowed up by extinct cloud beings that came to our planet via asteroid roughly 20 thousand years ago. The cloud aliens then put flesh onto the skeletal forms and breathed life into it, which is electricity. Nobody knows what happened to these cloud aliens but by looking at cave paintings we could guess that they maybe returned to their home planet after using the pyramids as a big ramp. Other facts titillate and mesmerise; that the first boat making race weren't humans but lemurs. That clothing was invented because monkeys started going bald. That early cavemen could talk to wild animals. Speaking of which, language is an important part of Homo Sapiens rise to evolutionary success. There is an exhibit in which visitors can press a short wooden stick onto their tongues and then try to talk although they will find it almost impossible! Humans evolved a much lower voice box than other primates, allowing our larger tongue to move around in amazing feats of oral gymnastics. It isn't known what the early languages of mankind sounded like, or how varied the vocabulary was, but one thing is for certain; when the first Homo Sapien was born from a Neanderthal she probably stood up and announced the arrival of mankind. The first sentence spoken on Earth after thousands of years of silence.
The main exhibit at 'HOMO' is a series of skulls depicting a theoretical lineage of humans. The skulls, all printed out using a rapid prototype machine borrowed from Manchester University, start with some kind of small half-rat, half-lizard. Gradually the front of the face keeps shrinking whilst the top of the cranium expands. Encephalitis over the decades caused hominids to get smarter and smarter, with brain capacity increasing about twice with each new species. The first men were likely to resemble chimpanzees, but with longer legs as they became more terrestrial. They also started to grow taller and taller whilst being less robust. The pinnacle of humanoid evolution came about with Homo Erectus and the Neanderthalic species, with brains and muscles being about twice as good as modern people. A curious kink in evolution means that when a trait becomes desirable it is emphasised heavily until regressing in later developments. This is why most animals nowadays are smaller than their prehistoric counterparts, with shorter teeth and often having allergies. When seals evolved from crocodiles they lost their noses and became cross-eyed, a strange selection by Mother Nature but nevertheless one we all have to deal with. This poses the inevitable question; are people more stupid now than they were in ancient times?
To answer this one has to crack open a history book. Any historian will regale you with tales of French peasants in the 16th century being able to recite the entire Bible in both Latin and English from memory, be able to complete complex algebraic equations in their head and would often wile away the hours discussing macro-economics through free-form poetry. The Romans managed to build cities of such opulent organisation they are often referred to as 'the ant people'. Going even further back the Ancient Egyptians spoke in hieroglyphics, making the very air around them form bizarre shapes through a form of quantum telekinesis. Who knows what the first Homo Sapiens were capable of!
One leaves the exhibition with mixed emotions. Awe at the endurance of our species. Sadness at the loss of our not-to-distant cousins. Anger at the future and it's lower gravity. And happiness at being a human being, the pinnacle of evolution and the master of the universe.
15.1.14
Insomnambulist
Sleep. The word conjures up images of being asleep. Yet sleep is one thing severely lacking nowadays. Insomnia is suffered by 1 in 4 people in the UK and is one of the leading concerns with visits to the GP. Yet what exactly is sleep? And why isn't anyone getting any?
Sleep is a natural response to neural stimuli. One has to will themselves to go to sleep to actually achieve sleep. It is through the act of lying down and closing one's eyes whilst relaxing that one achieves a sleep state which quickly goes...to the REM state. That stands for Rapid Eye Movement, REM. Nobody knows exactly why we need sleep but experiments have shown that without it things die in a matter of days. Sleep is more important than food in this regard, so it is curious that being gluttonous is acceptable in society yet being sleepy isn't. A way sleep scientists have learned more about sleep is by looking at animals that don't sleep. And that's where things really start to get wacky, as it turns out the only things that don't sleep are jellyfish. From the worms to the eagles, every other thing tends to sleep at some point or another. It is thought perhaps things with brains require sleep in order to give the brain a rest from it's conscious state, yet the brain waves are still active during sleep. Gamma, Theta and Beta wave patterns appear throughout the night, each of them giving more dreams of varying complexity. Dreams are caused by the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) of the sleeper beneath the eyelid, the patterns the dim light makes against the vein structure forces the sleeper to make sense of the abstract. Somewhere along the way this gets translated by the subconscious into a mental image. Scientists have experimented on people's eyes when they're asleep and discovered that if the eyeball is held in place the dream is just a still image. All night the sleeper will dream of one thing, say a vase of flowers, and like leaving a computer on without a screensaver the image is burned into the subconsciousness, in this instance everything in the waking state will somehow resemble a vase of flowers. People often need to sleep for several hours in order to feel totally energised. Bizarrely, tiredness causes errors in brain function more so than anything else.
So now we know what sleep is and why it's so important, it's curious why people struggle with getting to sleep. I went to visit a self diagnosed 'insomniac' in order to see what they were doing wrong. Abigail McGregor lives in Cheetham Hill in Manchester and works as a graphic designer. She's on a good income, lives a healthy lifestyle and says she is pretty much happy in her day to day life.
"It's the night time I don't like. I can't get to sleep for hours, I've tried going to bed early, going to bed late, nothing works." she says. I ask her further questions and find out she's tried every trick in the book.
"Have you tried all of the tricks at the same time?" I ask.
"I find one of the most relaxing ways is to drink a herbal tea and take the valerian route a few hours before bed, but I can't say I'm happy with the results." she says. I suggest that I spend the night in her flat, watching her sleep and then have a discussion in the morning. She agrees.
It is about 11:00 PM and Abigail turns off her television.
"About now I start to get ready for bed. Usually I go to my bedroom to check everythings in order." she says. I follow her down the corridor to her rest chamber. Though she's paying a five figure number for this exclusive apartment situated on the top floor of the state-of-the-art Green Quarter building, her bedroom is still quite small. She turns the light on and looks at the bed.
"Usually I get changed into my nightie and take out my contacts." she says, going over to a mirror.
"I'll step out of the room." I say, turning the light off as I go out. No wonder she can't get to sleep with all this electricity surging round. After roughly four and a half minutes she steps back out.
"Now what?"
"Well I go to the bathroom and y'know. Sort myself out."
"I'm sorry?"
"Have a wee, brush my teeth." she says. I nod and follow her to the bathroom. Although I don't watch her urinate I kneel by the closed door and listen intently, which is perceived as less transgressive in our society yet is, perceptually relative, the same. I open the door again and watch her brush her teeth.
"Hold on, hold on. Do it longer." I say after she gives up after half a minute. I keep encouraging her until we have reached the recommended time of two minutes.
"Oh, I forgot...I sometimes get a glass of water." she says. I roll my eyes and follow her back to the kitchen, where she takes a 475ml glass from the cupboard and fills it from the tap. I shake my head.
"You should only drink bottled water." I say. No wonder Abigail had problems sleeping, she was infusing her body with fluorides! Begrudgingly I follow her back to her room and watch pull the covers back and sit on her bed.
"Now what do you do?" I ask. She picks up her phone from the bedside table and waves it.
"Check my alarms on. Sometimes check twitter." she says. I restrain myself from pointing out the obvious. If you check twitter before bed you won't get to sleep because twitter is too exciting. I watch as she lies down, turns off her bedside lamp and begins to fall asleep.
"What are you doing?" I ask after a few minutes.
"Well, I can't get to sleep." she says.
"But what are you doing?"
"Lying down...I have my eyes shut."
"Try turning over." I suggest. She does so.
"The pillow is slightly cooler on this side."
"Is it agreeable?" I ask.
"It's alright." she says. I stand at the foot of her bed, examining posture and duvet thickness. Abigail has chosen a duvet with a tog rating of twelve, which seems reasonable to me. I estimate an increased temperature beneath the covers of roughly 10%, the standard difference required to keep the body warm over the course of the night. Yet before ten minutes have passed Abigail has already moved again, this time facing the opposite direction.
"Stop. Abigail. Abi, stop what you're doing." I say, sighing. She sits up. "You'll never get to sleep if you keep wriggling around like that." I say.
"But it's normal to move around in bed. I'm getting comfy."
"Is it normal? How do you know?"
"I've slept with people before." she says.
"Forget what you think you know. I've watched a lot of things go to sleep and none got their by moving their bodies except maybe fish and birds which only go to sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time. But mammals don't. Maybe giraffes sometimes. Pretend like I'm not here." I say.
The hours pass. By looking at her through an infrared camera I see she has finally got to sleep. I get down on all fours and begin to crawl up to her side of the bed, staring at her as she sleeps, memorizing every facial tick and change in breathing rhythm. Partway through the night she wakes up to go to the toilet and returns. I have now positioned myself at the bottom of the bed and watch her get in under the covers. I begin to crawl towards the pillow, using my phone as a torch.
"What are you doing?" she says.
"Gathering data. My phone is linked up to stream into The Cloud where it's compiled into a rich format .xlsb file." I say. She goes back to sleep and I work my way out of the bed and explore her flat, paying close attention to the contents of both the fridge and her bookshelf. I go back into her room and check through her phone, downloading some fun apps for her to try tomorrow. The sun begins to rise behind a ceiling of grey cloud, it is morning. Her alarm goes off and Abigail wakes, I go to the kitchen and pour us two glasses of orange juice.
"Sleep well?" I ask when she comes in.
"Yeah, not too bad actually all things considered. How about you?"
"I didn't sleep."
"Oh."
"Abigail, do you mind if I give you some feedback?"
"Sure." she says, drinking the juice.
"It's mostly good. You slept for exactly six hours and twenty three minutes, which isn't too bad. Could get a couple more in there, but not bad. I noticed you got back to sleep pretty quickly after visiting the bathroom, so, good job on that."
"Thank you." she says.
"Now for the bad news. Heh. You remember telling you about moving at the start of the night? Well...you moved again at about two in the morning. I was surprised to see you managed to do it in your sleep. If that was me, that would have woken me up, but somehow you managed. You also did it again about ten minutes before your alarm went off."
"Wow."
"I know. It's like you can't stop moving or something." I say, laughing mildly. "All joking aside, I think I found the reason for your insomnia and the cure is pretty simple."
"Really?" she says.
"I think tonight you should lie in the bath and cover yourself with sand. It might sound crazy, but trust me, I've seen these problems before and it works."
"So I should sleep in a bath full of sand?"
"Not full, that's too much. But enough so that it covers your body."
"Dry sand?"
"Dry to start off with, then you turn the hot water on."
"And this works?"
"It can take a few nights but about 75% of insomniacs benefit from this new form of sleeping." I say.
"Well...I'll give it a try. Thanks."
"Not a problem." I say. "Now if you don't mind me, I really could do with going to bed myself." We both laugh and I leave her apartment, pleased with my discoveries throughout the night.
So there you have it, a cure for insomnia. Comments or questions can go below or fire off an e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com/thepile@gmail.com and I'll get back to you ASAP. Also check out our youtube channel for the latest updates and our new segment 'Cooking With Daria'. Thanks for reading.
Sleep is a natural response to neural stimuli. One has to will themselves to go to sleep to actually achieve sleep. It is through the act of lying down and closing one's eyes whilst relaxing that one achieves a sleep state which quickly goes...to the REM state. That stands for Rapid Eye Movement, REM. Nobody knows exactly why we need sleep but experiments have shown that without it things die in a matter of days. Sleep is more important than food in this regard, so it is curious that being gluttonous is acceptable in society yet being sleepy isn't. A way sleep scientists have learned more about sleep is by looking at animals that don't sleep. And that's where things really start to get wacky, as it turns out the only things that don't sleep are jellyfish. From the worms to the eagles, every other thing tends to sleep at some point or another. It is thought perhaps things with brains require sleep in order to give the brain a rest from it's conscious state, yet the brain waves are still active during sleep. Gamma, Theta and Beta wave patterns appear throughout the night, each of them giving more dreams of varying complexity. Dreams are caused by the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) of the sleeper beneath the eyelid, the patterns the dim light makes against the vein structure forces the sleeper to make sense of the abstract. Somewhere along the way this gets translated by the subconscious into a mental image. Scientists have experimented on people's eyes when they're asleep and discovered that if the eyeball is held in place the dream is just a still image. All night the sleeper will dream of one thing, say a vase of flowers, and like leaving a computer on without a screensaver the image is burned into the subconsciousness, in this instance everything in the waking state will somehow resemble a vase of flowers. People often need to sleep for several hours in order to feel totally energised. Bizarrely, tiredness causes errors in brain function more so than anything else.
So now we know what sleep is and why it's so important, it's curious why people struggle with getting to sleep. I went to visit a self diagnosed 'insomniac' in order to see what they were doing wrong. Abigail McGregor lives in Cheetham Hill in Manchester and works as a graphic designer. She's on a good income, lives a healthy lifestyle and says she is pretty much happy in her day to day life.
"It's the night time I don't like. I can't get to sleep for hours, I've tried going to bed early, going to bed late, nothing works." she says. I ask her further questions and find out she's tried every trick in the book.
"Have you tried all of the tricks at the same time?" I ask.
"I find one of the most relaxing ways is to drink a herbal tea and take the valerian route a few hours before bed, but I can't say I'm happy with the results." she says. I suggest that I spend the night in her flat, watching her sleep and then have a discussion in the morning. She agrees.
It is about 11:00 PM and Abigail turns off her television.
"About now I start to get ready for bed. Usually I go to my bedroom to check everythings in order." she says. I follow her down the corridor to her rest chamber. Though she's paying a five figure number for this exclusive apartment situated on the top floor of the state-of-the-art Green Quarter building, her bedroom is still quite small. She turns the light on and looks at the bed.
"Usually I get changed into my nightie and take out my contacts." she says, going over to a mirror.
"I'll step out of the room." I say, turning the light off as I go out. No wonder she can't get to sleep with all this electricity surging round. After roughly four and a half minutes she steps back out.
"Now what?"
"Well I go to the bathroom and y'know. Sort myself out."
"I'm sorry?"
"Have a wee, brush my teeth." she says. I nod and follow her to the bathroom. Although I don't watch her urinate I kneel by the closed door and listen intently, which is perceived as less transgressive in our society yet is, perceptually relative, the same. I open the door again and watch her brush her teeth.
"Hold on, hold on. Do it longer." I say after she gives up after half a minute. I keep encouraging her until we have reached the recommended time of two minutes.
"Oh, I forgot...I sometimes get a glass of water." she says. I roll my eyes and follow her back to the kitchen, where she takes a 475ml glass from the cupboard and fills it from the tap. I shake my head.
"You should only drink bottled water." I say. No wonder Abigail had problems sleeping, she was infusing her body with fluorides! Begrudgingly I follow her back to her room and watch pull the covers back and sit on her bed.
"Now what do you do?" I ask. She picks up her phone from the bedside table and waves it.
"Check my alarms on. Sometimes check twitter." she says. I restrain myself from pointing out the obvious. If you check twitter before bed you won't get to sleep because twitter is too exciting. I watch as she lies down, turns off her bedside lamp and begins to fall asleep.
"What are you doing?" I ask after a few minutes.
"Well, I can't get to sleep." she says.
"But what are you doing?"
"Lying down...I have my eyes shut."
"Try turning over." I suggest. She does so.
"The pillow is slightly cooler on this side."
"Is it agreeable?" I ask.
"It's alright." she says. I stand at the foot of her bed, examining posture and duvet thickness. Abigail has chosen a duvet with a tog rating of twelve, which seems reasonable to me. I estimate an increased temperature beneath the covers of roughly 10%, the standard difference required to keep the body warm over the course of the night. Yet before ten minutes have passed Abigail has already moved again, this time facing the opposite direction.
"Stop. Abigail. Abi, stop what you're doing." I say, sighing. She sits up. "You'll never get to sleep if you keep wriggling around like that." I say.
"But it's normal to move around in bed. I'm getting comfy."
"Is it normal? How do you know?"
"I've slept with people before." she says.
"Forget what you think you know. I've watched a lot of things go to sleep and none got their by moving their bodies except maybe fish and birds which only go to sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time. But mammals don't. Maybe giraffes sometimes. Pretend like I'm not here." I say.
The hours pass. By looking at her through an infrared camera I see she has finally got to sleep. I get down on all fours and begin to crawl up to her side of the bed, staring at her as she sleeps, memorizing every facial tick and change in breathing rhythm. Partway through the night she wakes up to go to the toilet and returns. I have now positioned myself at the bottom of the bed and watch her get in under the covers. I begin to crawl towards the pillow, using my phone as a torch.
"What are you doing?" she says.
"Gathering data. My phone is linked up to stream into The Cloud where it's compiled into a rich format .xlsb file." I say. She goes back to sleep and I work my way out of the bed and explore her flat, paying close attention to the contents of both the fridge and her bookshelf. I go back into her room and check through her phone, downloading some fun apps for her to try tomorrow. The sun begins to rise behind a ceiling of grey cloud, it is morning. Her alarm goes off and Abigail wakes, I go to the kitchen and pour us two glasses of orange juice.
"Sleep well?" I ask when she comes in.
"Yeah, not too bad actually all things considered. How about you?"
"I didn't sleep."
"Oh."
"Abigail, do you mind if I give you some feedback?"
"Sure." she says, drinking the juice.
"It's mostly good. You slept for exactly six hours and twenty three minutes, which isn't too bad. Could get a couple more in there, but not bad. I noticed you got back to sleep pretty quickly after visiting the bathroom, so, good job on that."
"Thank you." she says.
"Now for the bad news. Heh. You remember telling you about moving at the start of the night? Well...you moved again at about two in the morning. I was surprised to see you managed to do it in your sleep. If that was me, that would have woken me up, but somehow you managed. You also did it again about ten minutes before your alarm went off."
"Wow."
"I know. It's like you can't stop moving or something." I say, laughing mildly. "All joking aside, I think I found the reason for your insomnia and the cure is pretty simple."
"Really?" she says.
"I think tonight you should lie in the bath and cover yourself with sand. It might sound crazy, but trust me, I've seen these problems before and it works."
"So I should sleep in a bath full of sand?"
"Not full, that's too much. But enough so that it covers your body."
"Dry sand?"
"Dry to start off with, then you turn the hot water on."
"And this works?"
"It can take a few nights but about 75% of insomniacs benefit from this new form of sleeping." I say.
"Well...I'll give it a try. Thanks."
"Not a problem." I say. "Now if you don't mind me, I really could do with going to bed myself." We both laugh and I leave her apartment, pleased with my discoveries throughout the night.
So there you have it, a cure for insomnia. Comments or questions can go below or fire off an e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com/thepile@gmail.com and I'll get back to you ASAP. Also check out our youtube channel for the latest updates and our new segment 'Cooking With Daria'. Thanks for reading.
13.1.14
Infantilization: A Cultural Epidemic
In the last twenty years Western civilization has seen the steady decline of the adult man into a kind of prepubescent figure akin to Ronnie Corbett’s character in the television sitcom ‘Sorry’. The infantilization of adults, especially males, is due to a series of technological and cultural developments that have been put into place over decades and will go on to shape the next century. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to know someone simply as ‘man child’, though I argue ‘forever baby’ is a more fitting nom de plume. Why is it that it is culturally acceptable for a thirty eight year old man to spend all day sat in pyjamas, playing computer games and having his food brought to him by robots? The beginning of this regressive question first has to be answered by going back to the early 80s, or perhaps even further back. Probably.
Before 1981 the only alcohol available to drink in Britain was either wine or bitter. Drinking culture was deeply ingrained into the psychoemployment of communities, with working men’s clubs and wine bars dominating the cobbled highstreets of yesterday. As cheap air travel became available tourists would bring back stories of drinking a wide variety of booze abroad and occasionally had the cheek to bring it back home to slurp as a post-pub pick-me-up. At the same time groups of young men, often university students, would bemoan a lack of public drinking venues suited for themselves. Lager had been around for centuries, though with the rise of home brewing and soldiers returning from Germany, it was becoming a cool new product that eighties hipsters wanted to be seen drinking. Hofmeister was one of the first lagers widely drank across England. It’s advertising, that of a bear leaving a forest so it can play darts at a pub, was orchestrated specifically to latch onto the notion of groups of young men hanging out together. And following a bear. This was the birth of lad culture and a precursor to the further babying of adults.
Following lager came binge drinking, the illegal rave scene, MDMA, Playstation 1, The Matrix, Superhero films and Internet pornography, all of which lead to a perfect chronological storm of international infantilization. Of course women are often infantilized though externally rather than internally. They are encouraged to shape body hair, consider long term fantasies and enjoy listening to the word ‘awesome’. They are put into the role of foster mother for an entire generation of men acting like children. The reasons why this is go beyond lager marketing in the early eighties, and part of the fault falls at the feet of the film industry recreating popular films which the current generation watched as children. This, along with a general reflection on the latter half of the twentieth century, creates a sense of deep nostalgia brought about partly due to a wish to escape the present and also encouraged by post-modern parents. Time is no longer a two dimensional line of events but a crystal refracting past and present, fact and fiction, through digital recording media. Photography in the past was done by artists and hobbyists up until the invention of cheaper cameras which were easy to use. This, along with film development able to be done on the high street, lead to a tendency to record the growth of children more than anything else since the late seventies. It is from the perspective of a parent holding a camera we reflect on our own childhood and so this carries on into digital photography and camera phones. Everything is recorded and in recording the present is already thought of as the past. Almost immediately after a photo is taken it is looked upon and judged, discarded if not fitting the narrative one wishes to construct for their future. In doing this we live in a constant state of nostalgia, of trying to remember a time in which things were good, yet as the template for this started as children it would go on into adult lives like an echo that sounds every time your image is captured onto a jpg.
Overparenting. Imagine the child of a parental set earning sixty to eighty thousand bucks a year. The adults have grown through the post-modern times and decided that, through extensive regret, that their children should be a certain way. The child is then supervised throughout their burgeoning teenagehood in after school clubs and to reach academia targets, all the while with their parents looking out for them and even sticking up for them in social quandaries. This leads the pre-forever baby to attend university in which they’ve never experienced a ketamine overdose or had internal sex! This continues throughout their higher education, usually with the assistance of parents continuing to keep track of their child up until graduation in which they reach the workplace totally unprepared for the adult world of work. Of course this in itself has become infantilized through health and safety legislature in which every eventuality has been preconceived and so the forever babies live in a world in which nothing can really go wrong. The removal of lethal danger has lead to peons seeking out perceived risky activity through violence and sex during the weekend period, similar to ‘break time’ at school, further compounding the pre-pubescent beliefs of the average man aged 18-45. Hours spent whacking away at a playstation controller or exercising for the sake of exercise has lead to millions of men stuck in a state of continual childhood.
But to what end is the end of this beginning? Social media, especially Facebook, is now awash with forever babies updating everyone on their own child’s progress. Previously having a child was a benchmark into achieving biological maturity. Nowadays it’s a way to dress up a baby as Dark Vader and take some lol pics for potential miscreants to fawn over. Rearing a child is the forced conclusion for forever babies to say that they are an adult, yet they themselves will rear an entire generation of fools caught in the fractal-like pattern of babydom. This will continue until the entire world wears nappies and ingrates are forced to watch remakes of Dino The Last Dinosaur, Thundercats and Dangermouse until their eyes are smoking holes in the head and their tongue lays fat in the mouth, dribbling blood onto bibs made from recycled plastic.
Like many articles of this ilk, authors tend to bemoan the gentle fall of civilization yet offer no alternatives. Yet I offer a definitive alternative in which all of mankind can be saved from a constant state of regression, that which is of the highest importance; autoaccelerationism. Force yourself into states of economic and emotional hardship. One has the capacity to smash through the computer screen, the television, the windshield, the workplace and so one should. It might make others feel ill at ease that they could voluntarily take a hammer to their front teeth, yet I recommend that you should embrace these moments of madness. As children are not mad. They are children and act childlike. Predictable. It is the rancid, rotten egos of adulthood which drive people insane and so great personal sacrifices should be made for no other reason than the alternative is as good as never leaving the womb in the first place! Embrace chaos, the patterns flames make on metal, the eternal death structure brought about by your DNA, the implosions of suburbs, eating raw chicken, commandeering bicycles and so on. Rather zoom towards the end that clutch onto the beginning.
Before 1981 the only alcohol available to drink in Britain was either wine or bitter. Drinking culture was deeply ingrained into the psychoemployment of communities, with working men’s clubs and wine bars dominating the cobbled highstreets of yesterday. As cheap air travel became available tourists would bring back stories of drinking a wide variety of booze abroad and occasionally had the cheek to bring it back home to slurp as a post-pub pick-me-up. At the same time groups of young men, often university students, would bemoan a lack of public drinking venues suited for themselves. Lager had been around for centuries, though with the rise of home brewing and soldiers returning from Germany, it was becoming a cool new product that eighties hipsters wanted to be seen drinking. Hofmeister was one of the first lagers widely drank across England. It’s advertising, that of a bear leaving a forest so it can play darts at a pub, was orchestrated specifically to latch onto the notion of groups of young men hanging out together. And following a bear. This was the birth of lad culture and a precursor to the further babying of adults.
Following lager came binge drinking, the illegal rave scene, MDMA, Playstation 1, The Matrix, Superhero films and Internet pornography, all of which lead to a perfect chronological storm of international infantilization. Of course women are often infantilized though externally rather than internally. They are encouraged to shape body hair, consider long term fantasies and enjoy listening to the word ‘awesome’. They are put into the role of foster mother for an entire generation of men acting like children. The reasons why this is go beyond lager marketing in the early eighties, and part of the fault falls at the feet of the film industry recreating popular films which the current generation watched as children. This, along with a general reflection on the latter half of the twentieth century, creates a sense of deep nostalgia brought about partly due to a wish to escape the present and also encouraged by post-modern parents. Time is no longer a two dimensional line of events but a crystal refracting past and present, fact and fiction, through digital recording media. Photography in the past was done by artists and hobbyists up until the invention of cheaper cameras which were easy to use. This, along with film development able to be done on the high street, lead to a tendency to record the growth of children more than anything else since the late seventies. It is from the perspective of a parent holding a camera we reflect on our own childhood and so this carries on into digital photography and camera phones. Everything is recorded and in recording the present is already thought of as the past. Almost immediately after a photo is taken it is looked upon and judged, discarded if not fitting the narrative one wishes to construct for their future. In doing this we live in a constant state of nostalgia, of trying to remember a time in which things were good, yet as the template for this started as children it would go on into adult lives like an echo that sounds every time your image is captured onto a jpg.
Overparenting. Imagine the child of a parental set earning sixty to eighty thousand bucks a year. The adults have grown through the post-modern times and decided that, through extensive regret, that their children should be a certain way. The child is then supervised throughout their burgeoning teenagehood in after school clubs and to reach academia targets, all the while with their parents looking out for them and even sticking up for them in social quandaries. This leads the pre-forever baby to attend university in which they’ve never experienced a ketamine overdose or had internal sex! This continues throughout their higher education, usually with the assistance of parents continuing to keep track of their child up until graduation in which they reach the workplace totally unprepared for the adult world of work. Of course this in itself has become infantilized through health and safety legislature in which every eventuality has been preconceived and so the forever babies live in a world in which nothing can really go wrong. The removal of lethal danger has lead to peons seeking out perceived risky activity through violence and sex during the weekend period, similar to ‘break time’ at school, further compounding the pre-pubescent beliefs of the average man aged 18-45. Hours spent whacking away at a playstation controller or exercising for the sake of exercise has lead to millions of men stuck in a state of continual childhood.
But to what end is the end of this beginning? Social media, especially Facebook, is now awash with forever babies updating everyone on their own child’s progress. Previously having a child was a benchmark into achieving biological maturity. Nowadays it’s a way to dress up a baby as Dark Vader and take some lol pics for potential miscreants to fawn over. Rearing a child is the forced conclusion for forever babies to say that they are an adult, yet they themselves will rear an entire generation of fools caught in the fractal-like pattern of babydom. This will continue until the entire world wears nappies and ingrates are forced to watch remakes of Dino The Last Dinosaur, Thundercats and Dangermouse until their eyes are smoking holes in the head and their tongue lays fat in the mouth, dribbling blood onto bibs made from recycled plastic.
Like many articles of this ilk, authors tend to bemoan the gentle fall of civilization yet offer no alternatives. Yet I offer a definitive alternative in which all of mankind can be saved from a constant state of regression, that which is of the highest importance; autoaccelerationism. Force yourself into states of economic and emotional hardship. One has the capacity to smash through the computer screen, the television, the windshield, the workplace and so one should. It might make others feel ill at ease that they could voluntarily take a hammer to their front teeth, yet I recommend that you should embrace these moments of madness. As children are not mad. They are children and act childlike. Predictable. It is the rancid, rotten egos of adulthood which drive people insane and so great personal sacrifices should be made for no other reason than the alternative is as good as never leaving the womb in the first place! Embrace chaos, the patterns flames make on metal, the eternal death structure brought about by your DNA, the implosions of suburbs, eating raw chicken, commandeering bicycles and so on. Rather zoom towards the end that clutch onto the beginning.
8.1.14
Moving Road And Ting
Sick of cars? Walking? The drudgery of getting to work? The new invention by Salem Peters hopes to cure society of the messy questions of transportation. The new smart road is still being tested, though I had the chance to meet it's creator at his new Nokia sponsored laboratory.
The smart road is essentially a high speed bespoke travel surface in which citizens can join a rolling road that quickly jets them off towards their destination. Gone are the days of public transport, say hello to the days of transport publiqué. The road is made up of many narrow lines that each move at a slightly faster speed than their neighbour. This allows pedestrians to gradually pick up speed on the moving expressway, by standing toward the crash barrier people can gather up to speeds of twenty five miles an hour! And that's not including the speed in which people could run on this high tech pavement. The whole thing was a wi-fi hotspot to, and could be lit up at night. Salem Peters is hoping to add touchscreen technology at people's feet. You could order pizza or watch the news. I couldn't wait to see this in action, but the smart road is still in the developmental stage. Not to mention the extravagant cost of replacing roads with a complex set of graphene lateral microsteps, this will also mean cars aren't able to travel on these horizontal autopedestulators. Nevertheless, it was an interesting idea.
Salem Peters stands next to a glass window, his reflection doppelganging in the blackness. I stand next to him and look down on the smart road. Four hundred metres of the stuff has been built in this empty factory. I watch mannequins be moved forward, making a circuit along a fake street.
“Check your wi-fi signal.” says Salem Peters. I do and am surprised I'm getting a 4G connection.
“It's pushing five bars.” I say, impressed. “Mind if I take it for a spin?”
“Of course.” he says, turning to me and showing a mouth full of false teeth.
I go downstairs and stand on the fake pavement. Photos of shops have been printed onto high glossy cardboard as the mannequins move past me. The only sound is the gentle whirring of the smart road. I step onto it. It's an unusual experience at first, but gentle enough not to be surprising. After trying out the different speed zones it isn't long before I'm running along the smart road.
“This is fantastic!” I say, dodging between human sized dolls. The fake shops zip past me as I run faster and faster around the circuit, laughing and shouting 'woopee' to myself. I whip out my phone and take a high speed selfie, uploading it through the 3 gigabit connection onto social media streams. There's a knocking overhead and I look up. Salem Peters is standing at the window, watching me. He takes out a small touchscreen device and nods his head. The road beneath me is beginning to accelerate and so I hop to a halt, nearly knocking over a fake woman. Why is he doing this? I stagger towards the pavement though have found that the road is moving too fast for me to take a step on. I'm trapped. Mannequins zip past me, beginning to rock back and forth under the high speeds. One falls onto the still pavement and cracks into six pieces which roll inside the suit. I leap to the ground and hold on for dear life as the road accelerates beneath me. I have to get out of here! I crawl along the floor towards a fallen mannequin and use it to paddle myself closer to the pavement, the shops are now just a blur. Struggling to kneel up at the smart road's edge I lift the mannequin and shout before slamming it down onto the still concrete. I am yanked from the road and do a handstand on the mannequin as I grab onto it, skimming across the surface of the fake shop-front and straight through the window in which Salem Peters is standing, spearing him through another window. I watch as the mannequin throws him down the single storey and onto the wet grass outside.
“Help!” he says weakly.
“Looks like you got hit in the cul-de-sacs, road man.” I say, pulling a face at the sun.
The smart road is essentially a high speed bespoke travel surface in which citizens can join a rolling road that quickly jets them off towards their destination. Gone are the days of public transport, say hello to the days of transport publiqué. The road is made up of many narrow lines that each move at a slightly faster speed than their neighbour. This allows pedestrians to gradually pick up speed on the moving expressway, by standing toward the crash barrier people can gather up to speeds of twenty five miles an hour! And that's not including the speed in which people could run on this high tech pavement. The whole thing was a wi-fi hotspot to, and could be lit up at night. Salem Peters is hoping to add touchscreen technology at people's feet. You could order pizza or watch the news. I couldn't wait to see this in action, but the smart road is still in the developmental stage. Not to mention the extravagant cost of replacing roads with a complex set of graphene lateral microsteps, this will also mean cars aren't able to travel on these horizontal autopedestulators. Nevertheless, it was an interesting idea.
Salem Peters stands next to a glass window, his reflection doppelganging in the blackness. I stand next to him and look down on the smart road. Four hundred metres of the stuff has been built in this empty factory. I watch mannequins be moved forward, making a circuit along a fake street.
“Check your wi-fi signal.” says Salem Peters. I do and am surprised I'm getting a 4G connection.
“It's pushing five bars.” I say, impressed. “Mind if I take it for a spin?”
“Of course.” he says, turning to me and showing a mouth full of false teeth.
I go downstairs and stand on the fake pavement. Photos of shops have been printed onto high glossy cardboard as the mannequins move past me. The only sound is the gentle whirring of the smart road. I step onto it. It's an unusual experience at first, but gentle enough not to be surprising. After trying out the different speed zones it isn't long before I'm running along the smart road.
“This is fantastic!” I say, dodging between human sized dolls. The fake shops zip past me as I run faster and faster around the circuit, laughing and shouting 'woopee' to myself. I whip out my phone and take a high speed selfie, uploading it through the 3 gigabit connection onto social media streams. There's a knocking overhead and I look up. Salem Peters is standing at the window, watching me. He takes out a small touchscreen device and nods his head. The road beneath me is beginning to accelerate and so I hop to a halt, nearly knocking over a fake woman. Why is he doing this? I stagger towards the pavement though have found that the road is moving too fast for me to take a step on. I'm trapped. Mannequins zip past me, beginning to rock back and forth under the high speeds. One falls onto the still pavement and cracks into six pieces which roll inside the suit. I leap to the ground and hold on for dear life as the road accelerates beneath me. I have to get out of here! I crawl along the floor towards a fallen mannequin and use it to paddle myself closer to the pavement, the shops are now just a blur. Struggling to kneel up at the smart road's edge I lift the mannequin and shout before slamming it down onto the still concrete. I am yanked from the road and do a handstand on the mannequin as I grab onto it, skimming across the surface of the fake shop-front and straight through the window in which Salem Peters is standing, spearing him through another window. I watch as the mannequin throws him down the single storey and onto the wet grass outside.
“Help!” he says weakly.
“Looks like you got hit in the cul-de-sacs, road man.” I say, pulling a face at the sun.
6.1.14
The Year Ahead
The year two thousand and fourteen has arrived with much fanfare and insolence, like the half dream granted through head trauma, like the constant memory which never happened. As we are in the early days of the time of the year, why not take a look ahead at the sort of things we may expect to reflect on in the past, present and future sitting from a position of absolute time as one may sit inside a glass mountain overlooking a constantly shifting landscape;;; !
JNRAURY
The first, and some argue best, month. January is the aperitif of the year and is usually dry rather than sweet, meaning the dirtiest of politicians can be found stirring beneath Egyptian cotton sheets wishing cruel death upon those that they rule over. Of course the concept of politicians wielding any real power is a lie orchestrated by History books for no reason other than it suits the public to be told what to do until they no longer feel the need to be told what to do. True History is not made by great leaders or earth shattering events, but the mass consciousness of the public ebbing and flowing beneath technological concepts and philosophy and then acted out. Hunger has been a bigger driving force for people over politics, and 2014 is shaping up to be a year in which feeding one's family various Big Macs will be more important than the soft meats of David Cameron's face. January will also be the month in which Amsterdam finally sinks to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again and only told about in myths akin to Atlantis, but with weed. Strange polar winds that are extremely localised will fly in from the Artic, freezing people where they stand, even if they only went to put the bins out.
FBEAURTY
Once the month of Janus runs its course, February will start with a big bang in the style of a James Bond film. The international spy network will introduce themselves using their real names in bars and casinos the world over, their whereabouts being pieced together through a patchwork of selfies and upon their discovery the undercover agents will gather on the secret oil rig in the ocean and zap each other with ray guns. This in itself is unimportant, but future peoples will remember February as the saturation point of mobile technology with 1 in 5 people owning a high tech smart phone. Nomad tribes will be given Google Glass in order to record their day to day lives to be streamed over Youtube for millionaires to watch, and often bet on. iPads will be flown into Sierra Leone, smart watches to Calcutta, Raspberry Pi's to Kurdish rebels and so on. All of the wi-fi information floating about will make it difficult to walk in a straight line, leading to the invention of compensating footwear that automatically forces peoples feet to veer in different directions. With the proliferation of smear tech across the globe, more people will experience the world through a four inch screen. People will no longer act as they would but conform to a mysterious status quo in which all is judged based on its radness. Marriages will break up for the lols. Business decisions will be made based on cat pictures. Prisoners will be executed as they lack social media followers. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to put it on Instagram, who gives a fuck?
MARS
The Earth's great and violent heart beats as it rotates around Sol far enough our planet edges into Spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere it is eternally Christmas. Which is more similair to the man; Sherlock, Khan, Assange? It is true that Benedict Cumberbatch tends to play the same sort of polymath in every single thing he's in, so it could be argued that he is acting more in real life than he is in front of the camera. Scripts arrive at his front door every morning in which he reads over a pot of Earl Grey. The scripts tell him to shave, drive through rush hour traffic, eat sustainable fish, and since Cumberbatch is a reverse actor he often struggles in the simple role of being a regular schmuck. Cumberpatch will also star in a hit film to be released this summer, starring alongside Idris Elba in a move to attract cat lovers everywhere. Crumberbath plays a gay butler working at Buckingham Palace in which he has a sordid affair with Elba, a blind harp player from New Orleans. The film itself is two hours of self indulgent nonsense but important as its release synchronizes with the entire palace, including the Royal Family, being swallowed by an earthquake. Rescue efforts are relatively nonexistent as all people can do is watch Buckingham Palace fade into the magma, wondering who will be on their money now.
AVRILE
If anything can be said about 2014 it will be quadcopters. The four rotored craft will be able to be bought for just two hundred bucks and provide hours of entertainment. Watch as the air fills with the high pitched noise of quadcopters sweeping across our skies, crashing into the windscreens of buses driving on motorways or hovering outside the window of women in a state of undress. We might not get flying cars, but who cares if we have flying cameras? An easy method of getting yourself a quadcopter is by ordering a book to your neighbours house through Amazon, waiting for the retail drone to come hovering over the horizon and then capture it in a hessian sack, all for the price of a Chris Evans biography. Of course the law will slowly catch up on this sexy new tech, but in the meantime consumers will enjoy the halcyon days of flying shit smeared quadcopters into banks and detonating them inches away from the managers top lip. How can governments complain about spying when they themselves spy on everyone? The quadcopter is a force of Communist justice that will seem entertaining for all until they blot out the sun and become sentient.
MAYA
You know what people like? Skyscrapers. Many architectural projects will begin and finish this year, as they have since we started pushing humongous stones into circles, but the sky is literally the limit with some breathtaking blocks of concrete popping up around the world. Bigger really is better as architects are forced to make buildings taller and taller for no other reason than being larger than the last. The Japanese will realise the logical conclusion for this is to build a building so big it encapsulates the Earth, only to be trumped by Americans who will realise that they should build a road that goes out of the solar system and into the Andromeda galaxy.
JNEU
Football will reign supreme over the mild summer, with all the favourite teams in the world getting together in Brazil, South America. The event will be sullied somewhat by the extreme poverty happening outside the stadium along with crime riots and animal death squads, but all of this will be ignored by mainstream media and gone on about in the guardian in articles with titles like 'The Favalian Underworld' or 'A Red Card For Police Corruption' written by sweating twenty something's who've never been to Brazil before nor go again after. All of this is inconsequential however as Brazilians have twitter and will then be focused on in buzzfeed lists like '23 Awesome But Sad Facts About Brazil That Will Change Your Life' and so on. Also the ice caps will melt.
JOLY
Due to the inordinate amount of celebrities dying who'd starred in films from 1968-1982, Hollywood suddenly realises that it needs a new batch of talent for the world to fawn over. Will Shia LeBouf be the new Jack Nicholson? What about him from Harry Potter, is he like Al Pacino or something? The sad answer is no. Nevertheless the vacuum created by the passing of these old fogies will create a new creative space in which the stars of the future will form, and I'm not talking about Colin Firth. The average age of the highest paid actors at the start of the year was 47. By the end of the year it will be 19. How? Acting. And sometimes dancing.
AGUST
What other tech can we expect in 2014? Good question. If you know the answer why don't you invent it? With rapid prototyping now you can! It's as easy as making toast, with children printing out guns and taking them to school to fire death into the bodies of their classmates. Even the poorest man can print out a Rolls Royce and appear in Hotel lobbies with printed money and a mouth full of crack smoke. Newspapers will cry out for moderation, yet nobody is entirely sure who reads newspapers any more and why should it shape the political landscape? Printers that can print themselves will start multiplying like aphids and eventually blot out the sun, alongside quadcopters and selfies.
SEPEMPTRO
The most important character in the history of feminism is Robin Thicke. His 2013 hit single 'Blurry Lines' was like a great bell awakening the world to the idea that half of it's population should be treated the same as the other half. Nowadays if you see a man hit a woman in the street you might shout that it's 'not on' then name and shame them on facebook. Elle, Prada and OK magazine will all jump on the gravy bandwagon and try to make feminism more girly. Why can't a feminist wear a cute crop top with Emmeline Pankhurst on it? Why should a man have to listen to a woman not wearing expensive makeup which has been force fed to an ape until lipstick pushes it's eyeballs out? Why the heck should Muslim women be allowed to wear Burkas when they should show off their hot bodies for both sexes to enjoy? The hot topic of 2014 is feminism, leading to the great gender war of 2015. But in the meantime why not catch up on some feminist theory and wonder if you can use your knowledge to have sex?
OCTOBRE
The cold bleating of Autumn will appear like a frozen fog throughout the civilised streets of Western Europe. People will complain, yet the amount of complaining is insignificant once London floods. For weeks the world will be saddened at tales of million pound flats being ruined with filthy Thames water. There will even be a photograph of David Cameron with his trousers rolled up as he waves to a camera. In the three inches of heel visible onlookers will gaze at the hairless leg of the prime minister and wonder what his flesh would taste like if he were to be held in a pitch black chamber and fed a diet of milk and honey until being taken outside and beheaded by a motorbike. Cannibalism will be rife in London post-flood, scenes of horror reminisce of the great starvations yet to happen in following decades.
NOVNOMBR
November is a cheery time as nothing in particular happens. People will check the news, talk to their friends, drive around for hours, yet nothing seems to happen. Television screens will only display white noise. All digital music will be replaced with a sawtooth tone due to a crafty virus that discombobulates mp3 files. People will begin to rot in bed as they wonder what it is they should be doing and coming up with no answer.
DECEMECEMBER
As the year draws to a close and Christmas begins to fire up its engines, one can't help but wonder what happened in 2014 anyway. Half of the events seemed to centre around pop stars having full sex in their videos or dogs that sort of sound like they can talk. But that is because people weren't looking in the right place. For the last few years the dolphins have begun to use tools, farm kelp, build simple mud nests in the underwater deserts. The first dolphin/human hybrid is born through a magical series of mutations and drags itself onto the shores of India, quoting Beckett and smoking roll-ups. It lives a simple life selling necklaces made of shells and studying the Vedas, though one of the more interesting things about this lifeform is that it is invincible and will probably be one of your favourite superheroes one day.
So there you have it, the year in advance, exactly as it will happen. Hope that helps when planning your holiday. Avoid Yellowstone Park on the 14th of March. Hasta la bye bye. x
JNRAURY
The first, and some argue best, month. January is the aperitif of the year and is usually dry rather than sweet, meaning the dirtiest of politicians can be found stirring beneath Egyptian cotton sheets wishing cruel death upon those that they rule over. Of course the concept of politicians wielding any real power is a lie orchestrated by History books for no reason other than it suits the public to be told what to do until they no longer feel the need to be told what to do. True History is not made by great leaders or earth shattering events, but the mass consciousness of the public ebbing and flowing beneath technological concepts and philosophy and then acted out. Hunger has been a bigger driving force for people over politics, and 2014 is shaping up to be a year in which feeding one's family various Big Macs will be more important than the soft meats of David Cameron's face. January will also be the month in which Amsterdam finally sinks to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again and only told about in myths akin to Atlantis, but with weed. Strange polar winds that are extremely localised will fly in from the Artic, freezing people where they stand, even if they only went to put the bins out.
FBEAURTY
Once the month of Janus runs its course, February will start with a big bang in the style of a James Bond film. The international spy network will introduce themselves using their real names in bars and casinos the world over, their whereabouts being pieced together through a patchwork of selfies and upon their discovery the undercover agents will gather on the secret oil rig in the ocean and zap each other with ray guns. This in itself is unimportant, but future peoples will remember February as the saturation point of mobile technology with 1 in 5 people owning a high tech smart phone. Nomad tribes will be given Google Glass in order to record their day to day lives to be streamed over Youtube for millionaires to watch, and often bet on. iPads will be flown into Sierra Leone, smart watches to Calcutta, Raspberry Pi's to Kurdish rebels and so on. All of the wi-fi information floating about will make it difficult to walk in a straight line, leading to the invention of compensating footwear that automatically forces peoples feet to veer in different directions. With the proliferation of smear tech across the globe, more people will experience the world through a four inch screen. People will no longer act as they would but conform to a mysterious status quo in which all is judged based on its radness. Marriages will break up for the lols. Business decisions will be made based on cat pictures. Prisoners will be executed as they lack social media followers. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to put it on Instagram, who gives a fuck?
MARS
The Earth's great and violent heart beats as it rotates around Sol far enough our planet edges into Spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere it is eternally Christmas. Which is more similair to the man; Sherlock, Khan, Assange? It is true that Benedict Cumberbatch tends to play the same sort of polymath in every single thing he's in, so it could be argued that he is acting more in real life than he is in front of the camera. Scripts arrive at his front door every morning in which he reads over a pot of Earl Grey. The scripts tell him to shave, drive through rush hour traffic, eat sustainable fish, and since Cumberbatch is a reverse actor he often struggles in the simple role of being a regular schmuck. Cumberpatch will also star in a hit film to be released this summer, starring alongside Idris Elba in a move to attract cat lovers everywhere. Crumberbath plays a gay butler working at Buckingham Palace in which he has a sordid affair with Elba, a blind harp player from New Orleans. The film itself is two hours of self indulgent nonsense but important as its release synchronizes with the entire palace, including the Royal Family, being swallowed by an earthquake. Rescue efforts are relatively nonexistent as all people can do is watch Buckingham Palace fade into the magma, wondering who will be on their money now.
AVRILE
If anything can be said about 2014 it will be quadcopters. The four rotored craft will be able to be bought for just two hundred bucks and provide hours of entertainment. Watch as the air fills with the high pitched noise of quadcopters sweeping across our skies, crashing into the windscreens of buses driving on motorways or hovering outside the window of women in a state of undress. We might not get flying cars, but who cares if we have flying cameras? An easy method of getting yourself a quadcopter is by ordering a book to your neighbours house through Amazon, waiting for the retail drone to come hovering over the horizon and then capture it in a hessian sack, all for the price of a Chris Evans biography. Of course the law will slowly catch up on this sexy new tech, but in the meantime consumers will enjoy the halcyon days of flying shit smeared quadcopters into banks and detonating them inches away from the managers top lip. How can governments complain about spying when they themselves spy on everyone? The quadcopter is a force of Communist justice that will seem entertaining for all until they blot out the sun and become sentient.
MAYA
You know what people like? Skyscrapers. Many architectural projects will begin and finish this year, as they have since we started pushing humongous stones into circles, but the sky is literally the limit with some breathtaking blocks of concrete popping up around the world. Bigger really is better as architects are forced to make buildings taller and taller for no other reason than being larger than the last. The Japanese will realise the logical conclusion for this is to build a building so big it encapsulates the Earth, only to be trumped by Americans who will realise that they should build a road that goes out of the solar system and into the Andromeda galaxy.
JNEU
Football will reign supreme over the mild summer, with all the favourite teams in the world getting together in Brazil, South America. The event will be sullied somewhat by the extreme poverty happening outside the stadium along with crime riots and animal death squads, but all of this will be ignored by mainstream media and gone on about in the guardian in articles with titles like 'The Favalian Underworld' or 'A Red Card For Police Corruption' written by sweating twenty something's who've never been to Brazil before nor go again after. All of this is inconsequential however as Brazilians have twitter and will then be focused on in buzzfeed lists like '23 Awesome But Sad Facts About Brazil That Will Change Your Life' and so on. Also the ice caps will melt.
JOLY
Due to the inordinate amount of celebrities dying who'd starred in films from 1968-1982, Hollywood suddenly realises that it needs a new batch of talent for the world to fawn over. Will Shia LeBouf be the new Jack Nicholson? What about him from Harry Potter, is he like Al Pacino or something? The sad answer is no. Nevertheless the vacuum created by the passing of these old fogies will create a new creative space in which the stars of the future will form, and I'm not talking about Colin Firth. The average age of the highest paid actors at the start of the year was 47. By the end of the year it will be 19. How? Acting. And sometimes dancing.
AGUST
What other tech can we expect in 2014? Good question. If you know the answer why don't you invent it? With rapid prototyping now you can! It's as easy as making toast, with children printing out guns and taking them to school to fire death into the bodies of their classmates. Even the poorest man can print out a Rolls Royce and appear in Hotel lobbies with printed money and a mouth full of crack smoke. Newspapers will cry out for moderation, yet nobody is entirely sure who reads newspapers any more and why should it shape the political landscape? Printers that can print themselves will start multiplying like aphids and eventually blot out the sun, alongside quadcopters and selfies.
SEPEMPTRO
The most important character in the history of feminism is Robin Thicke. His 2013 hit single 'Blurry Lines' was like a great bell awakening the world to the idea that half of it's population should be treated the same as the other half. Nowadays if you see a man hit a woman in the street you might shout that it's 'not on' then name and shame them on facebook. Elle, Prada and OK magazine will all jump on the gravy bandwagon and try to make feminism more girly. Why can't a feminist wear a cute crop top with Emmeline Pankhurst on it? Why should a man have to listen to a woman not wearing expensive makeup which has been force fed to an ape until lipstick pushes it's eyeballs out? Why the heck should Muslim women be allowed to wear Burkas when they should show off their hot bodies for both sexes to enjoy? The hot topic of 2014 is feminism, leading to the great gender war of 2015. But in the meantime why not catch up on some feminist theory and wonder if you can use your knowledge to have sex?
OCTOBRE
The cold bleating of Autumn will appear like a frozen fog throughout the civilised streets of Western Europe. People will complain, yet the amount of complaining is insignificant once London floods. For weeks the world will be saddened at tales of million pound flats being ruined with filthy Thames water. There will even be a photograph of David Cameron with his trousers rolled up as he waves to a camera. In the three inches of heel visible onlookers will gaze at the hairless leg of the prime minister and wonder what his flesh would taste like if he were to be held in a pitch black chamber and fed a diet of milk and honey until being taken outside and beheaded by a motorbike. Cannibalism will be rife in London post-flood, scenes of horror reminisce of the great starvations yet to happen in following decades.
NOVNOMBR
November is a cheery time as nothing in particular happens. People will check the news, talk to their friends, drive around for hours, yet nothing seems to happen. Television screens will only display white noise. All digital music will be replaced with a sawtooth tone due to a crafty virus that discombobulates mp3 files. People will begin to rot in bed as they wonder what it is they should be doing and coming up with no answer.
DECEMECEMBER
As the year draws to a close and Christmas begins to fire up its engines, one can't help but wonder what happened in 2014 anyway. Half of the events seemed to centre around pop stars having full sex in their videos or dogs that sort of sound like they can talk. But that is because people weren't looking in the right place. For the last few years the dolphins have begun to use tools, farm kelp, build simple mud nests in the underwater deserts. The first dolphin/human hybrid is born through a magical series of mutations and drags itself onto the shores of India, quoting Beckett and smoking roll-ups. It lives a simple life selling necklaces made of shells and studying the Vedas, though one of the more interesting things about this lifeform is that it is invincible and will probably be one of your favourite superheroes one day.
So there you have it, the year in advance, exactly as it will happen. Hope that helps when planning your holiday. Avoid Yellowstone Park on the 14th of March. Hasta la bye bye. x
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