tziteras

Sir, Melanie Reid's article "I don't want to live in a scratchy world of hemp lingerie" made me reach straight for a pen to reply (this email is a transcription of that, you see), with many references to women's impending return to a boring dark age devoid of skiing, exotic food and sleek accessory porn, forced by "eco-purists" to go back to sewing buttons, wearing rags and to the absolute unhappiness of the world that preceded household appliances. I'm sorry for Melanie, but these are in themselves dark times, in which our senses and ability to experience emotion are dulled by the intensity of the world around us, where any exotic meal, place or piece of information is seemingly at our fingertips, or as Daisaku Ikeda, the Japanese Buddhist philosopher puts it, "This imbalance takes the form of a dulling of our natural responsiveness to life and the realities of daily living". And I believe this dulling has in many ways been brought about b...

Yesterday I went to the shops, in a desperate last push to get some new curtains, the inner liner white £1-a-metre ones that people put in a drawer when they move in somewhere, and then put back when they move out. And mine were all mouldy... Bleah! Anyway, I stopped in Waterstones for ages and bought 3 books: Clay Shirky's "Here comes everybody" , Noam Chomsky's "What we say goes" (hope I don't get in trouble for linking to a torrent, but they're interviews, and that link will give you the full original audio for them) and Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook . All these purchases were devoted to my quest for finding a way for the re-use and investment in technology to become a strong part of the Transitionista's vision. I think we've got loads of equipment these days that we can recycle and make use of for a long time, and if we all have generators or solar panels, some of that charge can be spent on the laptop... So no matter how stupidly ...

Julian Oliver is a brilliant artist! He's also done a workshop like the one I'm doing now - Loads to look at!!

We live at such a key time, when on one hand we're waking up tragically to the effects of our use of fossil fuel and our extraordinary growth in the past few hundred years to this blip where revolutions can happen at any point, and go unnoticed, because it's given us an incredible luxury as well. As food prices increase and the skies punish us, we are more in touch with all our friends, family and community than ever before through the benefits of telecommunication. I mean the Digital Revolution, or whatever is at the base the geekiness of ham radios, and at the top the equally geeky virtual worlds which start to take a strange grip on the real world - Second Life, Facebook, Myspace, Email, Instant Messaging, Texting and all the other ways we have added to the written and oral communication we had before. In a sense, all the virtual worlds are just an elite's pinnacle at the top of the incredible communications we're capable of as a global population, aided at this time...

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well. The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough. There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher e...

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies. But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments? Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it...

Yesterday's Dumped (new eco-reality programme on British TV where people are left at a rubbish dump for 3 weeks) was wonderful! Great mix: surreal post-cataclysmic landscape, lazy people having tea, and lots of more extreme eco-talk than I've ever heard on TV - like to what extent do we really need to adapt, where do we stop in our efforts, how far will we have to go etc. The sad possibility I saw was that not only will we one day walk the mounds of rubbish in the dumps, but we'll also fight over them, as some have called them the treasure troves of the new millenium. When there is no other way to get that kind of stuff here from other countries, those will be the only places to get them... So I was spellbound until I realised I'd sat through 1 hour of TV when I usually just catch the news for a second, in that time pondering how to word my letter to TV Licensing about how TV sucks and why I don't want to pay for it anymore.

This Sutra, handed down by Ananda, the Buddha's companion, then found and translated to Chinese by Kumarijiva, is part 1 of a trilogy consisting of the Lotus Sutra, The Innumerable Meanings Sutra and the Meditation Sutra. It is studied and known among others, by Nichiren Schools of Buddhism, and it's his interpretation that I probably share most with: http://nichiren.info/OngiKuden/text/Muryogi.htm First of all, it is meant to be read by Bodhisattvas. Boddhisatvas are people who use what they learn to teach others about how to be Buddhas. When I think of Boddhisatvas, I think of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King etc, people who fought beyond their own lives for the greater good or peace, perhaps even without knowing what the right way or right practice is. The Innumerable Meanings Sutra says these people will attain the supreme enlightenment that the Buddha attained, eventually, although the short term effect will be that everyone is a lot better off. Laws, people and so...

Here are all the areas of the Section 4 open exhibition, with comments on how they were received and where they could develop: Symbolic Jumble Sale: This was a strong piece - as it constituted the full first week of the Pierian Centre exhibition on it's own and a lot of people saw it. It is basically all the items I picked up when my friends Cristina and family were deported, on display on a table. At first I thought it hadn't gone well because a lot of people looked very upset looking at it, but it's an upsetting thing to see. A visitor reminded me of this, and said it probably really affected people. I thought success would have been if some wealthy visitor had offered to buy for example, the extension lead or the phone charger for £2000 as a work of art, so I could send it back to Bolivia, but although I think this is viable as an installation, I need to do just that, and none of the other things, or it loses focus. Just each item, with a huge price tag. The fact that th...

mp3 excerpt : Father Richard MacKay talks about deportation as practiced in the UK. Here are my preparations for an exhibition on section 4, failed asylum. Feel free to join in :) STILL TO PRINT: Father McKay http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/3961289.stm Labels for recordings World Map (and pins) Failed Asylum Snakes and Ladders Letter for Co-op on the triangle. Copyright document: The material in this collection is licensed under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa license. This entitles re-use of all material donated for further work, as long as it is attributed to "Section 4" and used for non-commercial purposes. Any other uses will require contact with the original author, via the exhibition organiser, Alejandro Fernandez, 12 Bruce Avenue, Bristol. By submitting material for this exhibition, you are agreeing to put your contributions under this license. I agree [ ] I wish to remain anonymous [ ] Signature Call montpelier health centre, ask for 192.com - ...

My love With peace I have placed loving flowers at your feet With peace With peace I stopped the seas of blood for you Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come Come and live with me my love Under a blanket of peace I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes And your song will be for peace let the world hear, my beloved and say: Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come And live in peace These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website . It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song " Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero " by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably...

In my nightly jams with Ninjam I've recently found out loads about how it can be improved. Firstly there's now a linux client (there's always been one but this one is gui based). It's called gninjam. Best of all is that in doing this, Tobias the author of this first derivative, separated display from core functionality creating libninjam and a front end which he wrote in Glade. Setar and Tabla improvisation on very cheap microphone I want to write a new front end for it then, using libninjam and wxpython which looks simple enough , although this is all very ambitious, and I may never actually get to do it, but here's all the ideas meanwhile: a last.fm-like client that is able to : * Simplify the process of setting up audio: loads of ninjam users get in, but cant' hear themselves, some other player, or are coming through distorted etc and have to rely on the irc window to help them. For this I'd make a "testing room" - a room run on a standard serv...

Right under our very doorsteps, on the streets of Greenbank that have such lovely names, there are people who look like the rest of us but live under house arrest because they would not sign documents agreeing to leave this country for somewhere more dangerous. There are people being deported all the time . There are also some broken bin bags at the end of Bellevue Road, containing some of the lost clothes of a small boy who used to go to Bannerman Road Primary School. Up till Wednesday 17th January. Felipe came home that day and barely had time to settle down after school before a helicopter pulled up outside his house, in the sky. Last time the police had come for them, on December 8th, they had been taken at 6am, out of the blue and in a very traumatic episode, to a detention centre with the idea that they would be deported as soon as a plane was free. But they were not together, the father had left the house just before they had come, and called with his lawyer and they were freed....

There is a racist in all our hearts And it has to come out and face reality That's the ultimate reality tv - the people around us. But no-one should be abandoned: we all have prejudices, and great good can come from the worst person turning around. Because they take with them their distorted environment, and it gets to see it too. Fitting that it happens to India from it's old decaying invader, when the Buddha himself tried so hard to make a change in the barriers between different castes in Brahmanic society, castes which continue to this day to affect society there. This means there is lots of Buddhist teaching to choose from when looking at this. I'm, I guess, now just a Nichiren Buddhist, so to name a few from my adopted tradition: dependent origination, the oneness of life and the environment, but mostly the possibility that all people being living beings intrinsically have Buddhahood within them, and no-one should be excluded, no matter what they believe, from the pos...

Sound clip of me playing this (Setar (or) Rabab) My brother went to Kazakhstan recently, and bought a Setar (or Rubab, or maybe it's a kashgar rabab) when he crossed through to Uzbekistan for a part of his trip. I think he got it in the city of Samarkand. It's a small rounded mandolin sized instrument , with four strings - which seem to have very different tunings, not mandolin like at all. From looking at Wikipedia, it looks like some of the strings are sympathetic strings , i.e. drone strings. Two drones and two strings that play mostly solos, punctuated by some fast strikes of the drones. In gamelan music it's the only free instrument, that only has to abide by the rule of stopping on the beat. As a rebab it's played with great style in the afghan city of Herat, in slowly reawakening musical traditions . It is played with a bow in general, and is considered to be the precursor of the violin. In the tradition of Uzbek and Kazakh people it's an instrument of gre...

Once upon a time there was a mouse called Lauchito, who was very crafty and worldly and had been in all kinds of kitchens stealing little bits of food from the humans. The humans didn't mind too much because he was a very clean mouse and always tidied up after himself, and because long ago he had befriended a small boy who had given him some food in exchange for some of the little night that he kept in his cave, back when humans didn't have night and had to sleep in the bright sun instead. The mouse was always playing tricks on the fox, who was very greedy and not very nice. Most of all the fox wanted to be like a human. And one day he managed to marry a princess who had a baby daughter and later became king. But he was not a very nice king and made everyone very poor by taking all their money and keeping it himself. The princess became a queen and her daughter became princess. The fox king didn't like the princess and kept her locked up in the castle all the time. She h...

The Comic version of the 911 commission report is really inspiring - both as an art form following from trends in documentary film and as a way to make information accessible to the masses - making a difficult and dense report easy to understand. This is what I feel the Chocolate Box network needs - a way to communicate our issues simply so that we can truly be representative. I'm hoping a good publicity group springs from our midst. We could take Milly's popular exhibition from the Mivart St Open Weekend - a collage of community meeting notes, videos of our meetings and encounters with the head of Elizabeth Shaw, historic and present photos and plans of the factory and what interesting ideas have been put forward for ideas that fit the 5m budget it's got to make (at least!). We are also due to do a fundraiser in December, at the Lego Church - which I plan to take part in. __Sustain My HEAD!__ I attended on Thursday the Sustainable neighbourhoods workshop organised by B...

Bluetooth FAQ My only thought (one track mind) just now is how to make a bluetooth application that ran a grid over mobile phones? It would grow dynamically across any installed clients it found. You could copy in anything, and it would have metadata for that stuff. If it found a phone capable of point to multipoint, it would send all to everything around it, and it would allow things to be informally shared perhaps in various levels of secrecy, but also with various levels of social comfort: If you were in a public space you could set your phone to something like "contactable" or "surprise me!" and this would get you everything passing by on the other phones. Animations, texts, pictures, videos, ringtones and combinations of these would be the easiest things to transfer. You might choose to keep a record of what you got, and inspect it later or search. This could be good for social purposes. If you were in a conference, you might wish to reveal more, such as work ...

If only people like this could open their business and get a web designer in too!

Weaving grid computing into the Net - article about possible union of business and scientific grids. Mentions what may be a very interesting paper to read... http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-of-second-life/ Explaining some of the background to SL's grid based client/server system amongst others. Massive centralisation of object data means when you get into the world all you have is IDs for objects. Your client then has to query the central db for the rendering data to all these objects even if you created them yourself. But how could any other kind of setup allow people to relate to the real world? For example, an online world where objects were only there while their client was connected to the grid, so where client software was responsable for storing data too, a bit like with some more distributed p2p clients. It would perhaps match buddhist thought - that each person is a protagonist and creator of their own environment through past causes they made. In...