Adventure Rocket Ship

An odd idea from an earlier conversation: what has become called 'the internet of things' by a set of tedious marketing departments has already turned into a nasty balkanized set of demographic-slurping ad platforms.

We've already seen/read the stories about 'internet' tellies having cameras and microphones and c0de that grasses you up to $manufacturer, and yesterday or the day before we learn that VTech (purveyors of 'child' 'friendly' devices to the chattering classes) have/had server s/w so old and shite that none of my hyperbole or simile is up to the job of describing its hatefulness.

Follow those things to their twitterlogical conclusion and reality quickly turns into Brass Eye.

I have no idea what the Tivo box is telling Virgin. If I had a Nest rig, I would have no idea what data was being archived.

(Your data will be collected. I work for a small web/publishing shop and we graph the shit out of every metric we can squeeze out of the kit. Everyone does now. Well, everyone with any sense anyway.)

So I would be jolly interested in instrumenting my abode and fondling the data to see what tumesced. I would also be jolly interested in making damn sure I (or machinery under my control) was in charge of the data that travelled in and out of said abode. It would also be really jolly nice if kit that didn't want to play well with the other children (over-clever tellies, etc) was given a bloody hard time by that machinery.

I have no idea what form this device might take, but I envisage it as some sort of anti-cuddly object. the antithesis of Nabaztag, IPV4-Barney or network-Barbie. Harry the network bastard, who nmaps everything it finds, fuzzes the shit out of open ports, and sits on your default route so it can transparently and maliciously fuck about with the traffic it does not like.

A thing (or rather a person) that I noticed the other week while pottering about the Tate like some vaguely middle-class oik pretending that standing next to some capital-C Culture would rub off on me in some as-yet undetermined manner, perhaps in the same way that people think/thought that fondling the preserved body parts of an alleged saint and/or Socialist Personage makes/made them more saintly and/or Stakhanovite, was a chap in an old black suit. He was wearing his beret pulled down towards his ears in the manner of my grandfather, and seemed of military bearing. Artist's Rifles, perhaps, although more artist than rifle.

Since it was rather warm in that there Londons (in fact the light was positively Ballardian), he hauled off his jacket to reveal a long-sleeved t-shirt of strikingly dark lilac. (At least I think that was the colour. The version of purple that leans towards Blancmange with a hint of Potassium conflagration.)

... Which is a somewhat long-winded way of failing to explain that I dug his style daddio.

I'm probably terrible for thinking this, and likely destroying many years of peaceful teachings, but every time I see the Dalai Lama I can't help thinking that he just needs a cigarette holder and a pair of LL Bean shorts. At that point a remarkable transformation would occur and the world would be a more interesting place.

(And not the Gloucester version - dijicul)

Mad dad mangles strad.

Portrait of the artist as a fat bastard.

Early furry.

Feral bollards.

Woolf vs. Dali.

The church at the edge of the world.

Big black cock chicken.

The dusty age of wireless. (Or is it HF/DF?)

What all the cool kids will be wearing.

Guns. Lots of guns.

Tank-fondling. (Well, APC in this case.)

You'll have to wait a while for the Lomo version. I piled all the reels together and I've no idea which is which.

http://www.hotrod.com/thehistoryof/53078/index4.html

180+ mph in an ugly American garden shed of a car that destroys a rainforest every time it crackles into life. A thing nearly as old as me that's had a hatfull of money spent on it to make it stop and go around corners in a manner that the original designer never intended.

I should hate the thing and lust after howling Italian metal like sensible people. Or hate it for its fuel hoovering and terrible waste like even more sensible people.

Bollocks to that. Fuck the lot of them.

See, I could probably blame exposure to Bullitt and The Dukes at an impressionable age (oh, and seventies footage from Santa Pod on World of Sport's Sports Special One) but I suspect it was the lungful of nitromethane (don't stand downwind of a fuel-car when it sparks up. You go deaf and the unburnt fuel works just like teargas.) that I experienced in 1990. At the time, I'd every intention of buying some Detroit iron while I was still young enough to have a laugh with it, but as is the way of these things, poverty got in the way.

A few years later, while house-hunting in Bristol, I met a chap with the same ambitions. He'd settled for scale models of the things in display cabinets in the living room.

Fuck that for a game of soldiers. 'Settling' is an anagram of 'mediocrity', and that's a terrible place to live.

(And in the meantime, the car-hacking movement called 'pro-touring' had become popular. Take V8 shed of a car, make it stop and go around corners, profit! And with any luck make the Clarksonistas shit themselves with hatred.)