Category Archive

TIME– Photos of the collapse of Detroit. NewsWeek– Headless in Tokyo- why are Japan’s leaders so weak? NewsWeek– Learning to live with Radical Islam. -Fareed Zakaria. Mike’s Blender– Mike’s take on Nichitsu ghost town. TED– The haikyoist Miru Kim explores the ruins of NYC in the nude- here she talks about it at TED. She calls it ‘urban exploring’- the name more widely accepted for this activity. Not the name I give it normally- since my explorations are often not urban.

Wall St. Journal– Logo for the Stimulus plan io9– Website with stuff about Watchmen and sci-fi art. Grinding– Abandonments and cool urban art. Contamination Zone– Great urbex site of 21 year old woman in London, lots of asylums. The Jay and Jack Podcast– Father and son team recap and discuss episodes of LOST- great if you’re a fan. David Shrigley– Cool art.

BBC– A Florida couple pay $150,000 to clone their dog. Crazy. It’s really happening. Tokyo Otaku– Great post on the Tocho- government building in Shinjuku. I’ve got my own photos and post lined up, won’t post for a few weeks though now. Mike’s Blender– Crazy old Mike reviews chocolate-covered squid. He actually eats it. Respect. Youtube– Japanese TV show mime-attacks people in Osaka with mime-gun and sword, people react, funny.

Yoyogi Rockabillies – Excellent music video showing the Yoyogi Rockers teasing their hair, getting set, revving motorbikes, and of course- dancing. Tokyo Green Island– Tokyo Photo-shopped to be paved with grass. Nice- I saw these first at the National Art Museum’s ‘Media Arts Festival’ near Roppongi. Ugly Tokyo – Billy West takes shots of ugly city wires and bad city-planning. That’s it for this week.

Every Saturday I’ll be posting a list of links I’ve enjoyed in the previous week (if I’ve found any, if I can be bothered): Something Wicked Zine – Buy a copy now! Colbert Report – Enjoy the satiric news comedy of Stephen Colbert via streaming. TOHO Cinemas Roppongi – Great resource for finding out movie times and booking tickets. Andrew Jones Art – Amazing artist- go look. Thing Asian Press – Travel guide book publisher who will be putting out a guide to Japan called- ‘To Japan with Love’ featuring a haikyo article and a cycling article from yours truly, …

Goose Lady lives on the streets of Ginza and eats fried breadcrumbs dropped from the sweet-cream crepes of winter shoppers. At night she huddles up to the braziers outside Luis Vuitton and drinks cold mango lassi from the yaki-imo man. She sing songs beneath her breath of the days when the Emperor walked the streets as a God, with a red sun forever blazing over his head. Now she scurries and hides when the black vans roll round, beneath a park bench, in the guttering of a tall glass phone box, in the shadow of a koban. Goose lady watches …

I’ve been shooting my haikyo and structures photos for months now with a Canon Powershot compact camera. It was the best camera I’ve owned- which is not saying a great deal- though it is a nice compact. But too many times I’ve been to haikyo in poor conditions and: 1- come back with poor photos due to low-light conditions, and 2- felt shamed by other haikyoists packing dSLRs, getting more value from the location with their superior cameras. So- I sped the levelling process and bought a Nikon d90 with 3 lenses in the past few days- thanks to Jason …

HDR imaging is a fascinating sub-branch of photography that I just became aware of. HDR means High Dynamic Range, which basically means you have a photograph with a heck of a lot of information in it, spanning a range of lights through darks impossible to capture in a regular photograph. Here is my first HDR effort- taken from my 3rd floor balcony.

Cyborgs will have access to a much more massive range of sensory input data than we do. Just as we think nothing now of putting on our clothes to go outside, or getting in our cars to travel long distances, or turning on the TV to expand our direct input streams, they will think nothing of spreading their sense of touch out through the Internet, their sense of vision up through the infra-red or telescopically out into space, their sense of smell into degrees of precision down to the molecule, their sense of hearing spread throughout their whole home or …

Cyborgization is the next step forward in the evolution of humankind. Evolution as we have come to understand it, the blind watchmaker slotting together increasingly complex genetic structures at random, pushed ahead by unwitting external forces, the odds of survival, and success of procreation, is an outmoded and impossibly slow model for further advancement. Any change to the status quo will be responded to far more quickly by our technology than by our own genes. Technology and the realm of ideas are the new playing field, where idea battles idea for favor, under the pressure of an Earth with finite …