LINK: THE PSYCHONAUT FIELD MANUAL

psychonaut-field-manual-bluefluke-chaos-magick-1

psychonaut-field-manual-bluefluke-chaos-magick-2

AKA an introduction to chaos magick. This illustrated digital booklet holds some great guidelines and info and it is exquisitely presented. It’s s easily one of the best things I’ve ever laid eyes on, especially since we don’t get to read about esoteric stuff like that in such a form very often. That said, I can’t say anything about whether it works or not or how—that might have to wait a while still! Check it out here or download a .pdf of the latest version here.

Bluefluke’s Tumblr.

tumblr_static_7p6pv55gj94wkk4w80wwggsgc

Me & My Shadow

me&my_shadow

It’s a resource for the privacy policies of different large and small websites, how they enforce them, what you can expect to have surrendered knowingly or not and, perhaps most importantly, measures you can take to use the web with a little bit less transparency.

It’s an expertly, fantastically designed website that you can’t resist not using once you get there. The information and sources are also top-notch. Very informative in this  cultural representational way that always makes me feel warm and cozy inside.

It’s important, very important information, too. There’s just so much being revealed about privacy online: Snowden, Greenwald, Prism, Xkeyscore (the “God terminal into the Internet“), NSA -along with every secret service in the West at the very least- and I honestly believe that even now we know next to nothing about what’s really going on. Like a lot of things, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Thankfully, people who work on projects like Me & My Shadow give me back my trust -if only just for a little while- in the power of the Internet to make the world a better place.

PS: I just found out about Data Dealer through them, an online tycoon game in which you get to be one of those data mining corporations. The objective is to collect millions of profiles to take advantage of through various websites such as “Tracebook” and “Schmoogle”. Check it out!

Genealogical Mandala

Translated by yours truly from the original article in Greek:
http://hallografik.ws/archive/?p=2775


How many were there of your parents? 2. Of your grandparents? 4. Of your great-grandparents? 8. Of your great-great-greandparents? 16.

How many generations until we reach 64? Only 7, going back roughly 150 years, if we assume that every birth comes 20-25 years after the last. At 10 generations back, not too long before the Greek Revolution of 1821, this number reaches 512. If we go another 10 generations back and touch the early 16th century, when the Ottoman Empire was at the peak of its power with Suleyman the Magnificent at its reins, when America had just started being conquered by the Spaniards and when Michelangelo Buonarroti was sweating under the ceiling of the Capela Sistina, the number of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents alive at the time will have already exploded to 1,048,576. At this rate, of course, and if we take into account that we humans have existed as a species for over 100,000 years (even if we steer clearly away from counting our humanoid ancestors, and before them the Common Ancestors, and before them some obscure mammals, and before them some synapsid and his lot and the beat goes on), it doesn’t take long to reach trillions of individuals and beyond, extraordinary numbers that humanity never saw, even if we put all the homo sapiens that ever lived in its history and prehistory together! To be exact, it’s said or theorised (which doesn’t count as much if you get down to it) that all of us are descended from a small group of homo sapiens that survived the last Ice Age. The answer to this apparent mystery is that there has simply been a lot of incest around — incest that we would probably not even count as such. If my great-great-great-greatgrandfather from my mother’s side was the brother of my great-great-great-great-grandmother from my father’s side, it wouldn’t remotely count as incest, etc.

Our genealogy is as mysterious and magical as is our history: we know, we can know so little about it, that we easily fill in the rest using our imagination’s colourful palette. As we do with anything unknown and mysterious, that is to say with everything.

The matter is definitely a chaotic mess. I shall incist however on the initial number. 7 generations, 64 ancestors. It seems to me like the perfect combination of control and proximity: were it larger it would soon be out of control and any form of sense of closeness to those distant ancestors would be lost; any smaller and we would lose most of the magic and complexity lying therein. Not to mention that 7 and 64 are nice, round, culturally powerful and significant numbers that please the eye, our aesthetics, and that thing deep inside of us that complains when a frame is crooked or that makes us wait observantly for the split second in which the green and red lighthouses at the entrance of the port will synchronise their flashes of different frequency.

Let us cut to the chase. In my experience, when talking nowadays about genealogy we use two terms: trees and families.

As usual, I have my objections.

Fernando Chamarelli -- http://www.galleryad.com/art/archives/art/backroom/fernando_chamarelli_pangea/

 

The idea of using trees to describe a family when we ourselves are the trunk, as in the image above, seems strange to me. Family trees would be OK in the representational sense if we were the trunk, our roots were the ancestors and our branches and leaves were our descendants. I have never, however, seen such a tree being used for this purpose.

Next is the family, the surname. There’s something of the question “where do you come from?” nesting in their use. It took me years to understand that this question is generaly translated as “where’s your father from” and to tell you the truth, I’m not at all sure whether “from Australia!” has been the answer that all who have asked me have wanted to know, despite the almost unbearable honesty of the reply. I was born, raised, and live in Nea Smyrni, Athens, Greece, after all!

Perhaps this is happening for the same reason surnames sport certified name of origin characteristics; tell me your surname so I can tell you who, or at least where from, you are. That’s certainly half the truth — or to be exact, much, much less than half of it: only men in the genealogy share the surname, with women losing themselves in this mixture like salt in water. Many family trees even study their family’s history not based on the people but on the name, especially in older times and in noble dynasties, trying to find everyone that shares that name and are relatives or descendants, without however giving much notice to the women that joined, and still do, the family, perhaps only because of the sheer necessity of the matter. Besides, I believe it’s relevant that in much of history, definitely in Christian and Muslim history, men wanted sons so that their family as reflected through their name could endure throughout the ages.

Thus I wanted to portray the above and more in some creative and imaginative way. What I ended up with is this (as you must have noticed at the top of the article):

Why mandalas?

Mandalas are radial, symmetrical shapes, symbols of wholeness, cyclicity and at the same time of the moment, the greatness and insignificance of the now, at least in the context of the philosophy that gave birth to them, Hinduism and later Buddhism. Carl Jung was deeply inspired by them: he used to ask of his patients to draw mandalas and he later used the results as aids for his diagnoses. He believed that within the symmetry and the shapes there was a sequence to be found, a meaning to be discovered behind the use of the various drawings that they comprised. The uniqueness that emerged was, he believed, the essence of the individual him-or herself.

This clean-cut geometricity indeed has something soothing and wholesome about it; I can’t describe it any other way. Furthermore, the concepts of repetition and expansion and the one significant centre fit genealogy like a glove.

Not to mention mandalas can be stunningly beautiful.

Symbolisms

The symbolisms behind genealogy under the prism of the mandala are many and will vary depending on the person. The ones I choose, the connections I discovered that I found inspiring, are the below:

Man-woman equality

Any given great-grandmother is just as important as any given great-grandfather…

Devaluation of the surname.

Because, someone, somewhere, could have been a woman, and then I’d have a different surname, which I’d cherish as much as the one I have now…

…even if I’ve inherited my surname from that great-grandfather.

Disconnection of family history with surname history.

64 ancestors, 64 names (except if we have the cases of knowing or unknowing incest mentioned above). Only one prevails. Why?

Those 64 people your existence connected 170 years after their birth, are all equally responsible for your existence today.

Emergence of local roots and emmigration. Abolition of national false pride.

If I filled in my own mandala, one quarter of it would have lots of “Smyrni”/”Izmir” in it, which would soon dissolve in the depths of Turkey (and who knows where else… the city was the “New York of the Eastern Mediterranean” at its time, after all). Another half of it would have “Australia” writtern all over it but even that would turn into England, even Wales if my sources are correct, the further back I went. Again, who knows what else.

Who knows what 64 parts of the world I’m from?

Is one born or does one become Greek? Hm… Good question. My father got his Greek citizenship after he had lived in Greece for more than 20 years — what is he, Australian or Greek? Similarly, many 2nd generation immigrants, young and old, choose to be Greek because they were born and grew up in Greece. Their children — the 3rd generation– will probably search for the roots their grandparents abandoned by force, while they themselves will by then be indistinguishable from “normal” Greeks. This has happened countless times in Greece’s history. Before the Albanian emmigrations of the early ’90s, there had been many others, centuries ago. The same holds true for the Asia Minor Greeks who were treated like Turks when they first arrived to the shores of Attica and Macedonia but are now bragging about their “macedoniality”, even if their ancestors haven’t been living in Macedonia but for 2 or 3 generations (Google Translate is acceptable for this page), from 1922 onward. On the contrary, they might cut their emmigratory personal history short or forget it altogether as they prefer feeling descendants of Alexander than “merely” Greeks from Pontus, Asia Minor, Capadocia etc. Besides, the national sentiment must stand high and proud against the menacing FYROMites, North Macedonians or what have you… Just remember that those Macedonians might be more Macedonians than the Macedonians. Not descendants of Alexander or some other pitiful misguided conclusion, mind you, no: more Macedonians than the Macedonians because maybe their family has been living in the general region called Macedonia for centuries. Have I come across as wanting to be controversial? Mission accomplished!

Naturally, it’s not just Macedonians, Albanians, Pontians or other more recent immigrants that have decided that Greece should be their home country. Vlachs, Arvanites, North Epirotes, catholic Greeks of Syros (and other catholic islanders) and many others who were and are some of the greekest of Greeks, are now treated as minorities in the Greek state which is trying so hard to retain its purity and its Single Story. In vain of hatred, discrimination and national complexes, we all sacrifice eachother’s family tradition. We have no IDEA of our history and thus we believe the first simplistic fairytale we come across. THAT’s what national identity is about: leveling out and simplification. It’s a goat herder’s pen with the minimum common denominator of historical ignorance as its criteria. It comes as no surprise then that being historically ignorant we learn to disrescpect and even hate, again and again, generation by generation, all that is different — a deviation with which we might have common roots or even be descended from, more or less. Wise were the words of George Bernard Shaw: “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”

A better understanding of our individual family history can help us be a little more sceptical when dealing with simplified and kitsch national stories. It might help us see that our home town or country is of course very important when it comes to our identity but is not more than a point in time and space which is significant to us just because it is our own. In the age we are going through, let us not allow oral history, that of pain, emmigration, pain, co-existence and complexity be lost under the weight of national epics.

Never allow others to force your roots down your throat: discover them on your own.

The roots are tangled, the past is mysterious and complex.

Of course, the above isn’t at all easy to pull off. The more back we go, the more difficult –in a gemetrical progression– it becomes to keep track of everyone! Perhaps in future generations, now that we record everything, it will be easier for our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren (if we of have any, that is, for there’s also the problems of aging population and infertility…) to find us. The cases, however, of people who are alive now and know where the ancestors of their great-grandparents were from, are few and far between. We can rarely go back more than a single century, let alone two or three. This mystery, as forbidding as it might feel, is just as worth it to embrace and accept. In the example mandalas this is clear: the 7th generation is appropriately mixed up and it becomes more obscure(?) and harder to keep track of. But that’s just the way it is.

As you set out for the Past…

Creative freedom.

I think it’s very important for us to be able to colour all aspects of life and beautify them as each one of us sees fit, for us to be free to create even with and on the simplest of things.

Mandalas don’t have too many rules and they are simple enough. I don’t believe that any special kind of artistic inclination is needed for anyone to fill in their own genealogical mandala exactly the way they like.

By far the toughest part of making our genealogy into a mandala will be to give it a soul and substance, for it to be a work as beautiful as it might be complete with meaning, a piece of cultural representation that will satisfactorily represent its own story.

I put my trust in us.

Here is a blank mandala in the circular shape of the second image. Print it out or open it on Photoshop and…

…happy creations!

Colour me, draw on me, fill me in, make me yours...

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived

[…]Dear Nicola Tesla,

I’m sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.
You were a man diplaced in time;
an Archimedes, Steve Wozniak, Tony Stark of the 19th century
You were the greatest geek who ever lived
in a time when humanity was crappier than usual.[…]

 

The Oatmeal gets it again!

 

The Scale of the Universe 2

http://htwins.net/scale2/ Very well made, excellent cultural representation. Falls into my personal “have had a similar idea for a while but would have never dreamed of pulling it off this well” category.

Thanks go to Savi for linking me to this.

Cubilone’s Dimension 3.0 — The Corkboard

Ένα απο τα μυστικά (ή και… όχι τόσο μυστικά τελικά!) projects στα οποία δούλευα ήταν η ανακατασκευή του κεντρικού site. Απο τότε που το είχα κάνει ως εργασία στο μάθημα του CSS κάποια στιγμή πέρσι, δεν είχε αλλάξει καθόλου, και γενικότερα δεν ήμουν ικανοποιημένος με το αποτέλεσμα. Με την αφορμή του μαθήματος “Πολυμέσα και Πολιτιστική Παραγωγή” της κ. Μυριβήλη και την απαλλακτική εργασία στην μορφή ενός fun και πρωτότυπου portfolio site, άδραξα την ευκαιρία για να φτιάξω ένα πιο… φλασάτο κεντρικό site! Νομίζω πλέον πως τα πηγαίνω σχετικά καλά με το flash, και αν σε κάποια θέματα με δυσκόλεψε αρκετά η παραγωγή του συγκεκριμένου, τελικά πιστεύω πως βγήκε πολύ ωραίο. Ιδιαίτερα το soundscape μου με χαλαρώνει κάθε φορά που το ακούω, μερικές φορές αφήνω τον browser ανοιχτό μόνο για να το ακούω…

Φυσικά και θα το ανανεώνω συχνά, και ήδη έχω δρομολογήσει μερικές αλλαγές οι οποίες πρέπει να γίνουν σύντομα:

-Επιλογή/απενεργοποίηση ήχου
-Επιλογή για αγγλικά κείμενα
-Χάρτης και version info

Περιμένω σχόλια για το τι σας αρέσει, τι δεν σας αρέσει για το ψηφιακό μου πίνακα!

Cubimension 3.0 is here! 😀

http://www.cubimension.net

Αναμνήσεις απο ταξίδια σε πέντε αγαπημένες πόλεις

Μέσα στο κλίμα της εξεταστικής περιόδου κι εγώ, με ευχάριστο διάβασμα και ακόμα πιο ευχάριστη δουλεία σε γενικότερα ευχάριστες εργασίες, έφτασε η μέρα που όλοι περιμέναμε! Θυμάστε όταν μίλαγα για 4 εργασίες που είχα να κάνω, η δύο απο αυτές μυστικές; Ε και να μην τις θυμάστε δεν πειράζει… Η μία απο τις δύο φανερές είναι έτοιμη, και μιλάω για την εργασία στην Πολιτιστική Αναπαράσταση Ι, Cultural Representation για το ευρύ κοινό. Την παρουσίασα σε συμφοιτητές και καθηγητές χτες, και τώρα είναι online για την δική σας ευχαρίστηση. Το θέμα της εργασίας ήταν ο σχεδιασμός (και, όπως τελικά αποδείχθηκε, η υλοποίηση) μίας εφαρμογής η οποία θα παρουσίαζει το Τοπ 5 ενός θέματος απο μία αρκετά μεγάλη λίστα απο την οποία μπορούσαμε να διαλέξουμε. Εγώ προφανώς διάλεξα τα ταξίδια.

Τα υπόλοιπα εδώ ^^D:

www.hallografik.ws/oldstuff/flash/anamniseis.html

Ευχαριστώ τους καθηγητές μου, Νίκο Μπουμπάρη και Δημήτρη Παπαγεωργίου, που με βοήθησαν σε όλα το εξάμηνο και στο μάθημα.
I would also like to thank Dad for scanning and sending me the Sydney pics, I couldn’t have done it without him!

Is it really Christmas?

fuck christmas

So here I am, sitting in my room at my place in Nea Smyrni, stealing someone’s WiFi (together with 6 other people… Logging in to routers with default WEP settings and changing the keys is soo tempting… but I am not that evil), blogging when I should be working on my projects. I’ve been here for a few days already and I’m not feeling like it is Christmas at all. I look at all the constructed, fake festivities around me and I am feeling nothing but disgust for this joke of a festival centered around “love”. Just sneaking a peak at all the advertisements targeted at children, the true targets of this consumeristic parody, is borderline depressing. It’s no wonder we all have a sort of nostalgic aftertaste of Christmas which really stems from our childhood, when it all seemed so magical, so true, so happy… Is it the presents, the holidays, the sweets, the music? Maybe it is the sheer fakeness of it all, the same thing that draws children to Disneyland, that manages to enchant them so. What can indeed be said about the “holiday season”, a cultural curiosity which is one of the best examples of globalization today? I feel that if I let myself loose I’m going to fill pages upon pages of ranting about something that everybody knows is true yet decides to turn a blind eye to, preferring to drown their sorrows in ethical and guiltless super-consuming.

The fact, then, that I’m not feeling as if it’s Christmas is probably a good sign.

Maybe it is because so much has happened in my life in so little time. Maybe it’s because I have been consciously looking away from the very strong build-up that typically leads to an all-encompassing “Christmas spirit”. Maybe it is because I’ve grown mature enough to be able to appreciate being close to my loved ones and having some free time without associating the holidays with consumption, fake feelings of love for the world and this hideous “spirit”. It may be all, it may be none, it may be just one of these things, but whatever the reason, I am happy that I can see past the worryingly ultra-happy social appearances…

OK, Christmas flaming over. :] I started writing this post wanting to share what I’ve been doing the past few days and how I’m going to spend my holidays. Interesting much? It’s the fatal compulsion of blogging…


University Projects

One of the slighter reasons I’m not feeling too Christmas-y and/or relaxed is that I have a serious amount of work to get done for university. Four projects. It was going to be five originally but I decided to drop the project for Virtual Worlds and Digital Animation — my well of inspiration was looking a bit too dry for me to realise my relatively ambitious plans.

1. PHP. My project for WWW Technologies is to build a complete computer hardware online shop. That is much harder to do than it sounds, at least for someone who has little to no knowledge of dynamic website developing. This project is supposedly for two people but Garret doesn’t look like he might be a lot of help; he still needs to get his HTML sorted out. Anyway, it’s online tutorial and lab note time!

2. Cultural Representation. I chose to represent my top 5 favourite cities in the world for this one. I will have to make the workflow chart for an interactive application. I won’t fully develop it, but just designing a workable and attractive User Interface, as well as making it have the distinct Cubi style will take some full hours.

3 & 4. These are secret projects… ^^D

I promise impressive things… It’s not that I’m too bored to write about them or anything like that, no! It’s because I want to surprise everyone!


Flickr, Facebook and Online Identities

It’s been a a few weeks now that I deactivated my Facebook account. After a point, it felt downright hypocritic posting bad stuff about it but having a perfectly healthy account. Nevermind the less than impressive number of pictures I had on it.

Tell you what, I haven’t missed it a bit. A lot of people seem to find it strange that I’ve done so and have tried to persuade me to re-activate it. They say: “We miss you!”, just like Facebook said they would (and I thought it was being ridiculous…) To them, all I have to say is this. Sorry, but I will indulge in pathetic spying and “maintaining expired relationships” no longer!

Some other people, mostly from the Theatre and Photography groups, have told me that I should re-activate my FB so that I can upload photographs for all to see. I have a different reply for them: Flickr! Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t, but I’m uploading more and more of my photographs there. It’s a very good image site, well-made, professional, respectful to the applying web laws as far as content protection goes. That is where you can head for my full lowdown of pictures! Look at that: it’s even got integrated support for WordPress (the sidebar pics are from my Flickr photostream, also have a look at my previous post). What else can one possibly ask for?!

To sum up:
Facebook sucks,
Flickr rules,
if you want to see my pics,
you surely oughta choose!


Windows 7 for free! Legally! How?

Casually browsing the web, a few days ago I stumbled upon MSDN Academic Alliance through my.aegean. What’s this, you say? It is a Microsoft service that allows students to download some of their software for free, all in the name of academia. Amazing eh? I was excited to discover that the University of the Aegean is eligible for this service. Why hasn’t anybody, ever, told us anything about it?

I really did download Windows 7 Professional, as well as a valid license key, for free, just by putting in my CT user name and pass. I burnt it on a DVD and now it’s waiting for me to tidy up my laptop HDDs before I format. This might take a while actually… heh.

Check it our for yourself!


Three Sequels and a Classic.

My gaming activity in the past few weeks has centered around four games: Modern Warfare 2, Banjo-Tooie, Half-Life 2 and StarCraft. Let me tell you a few things about these games.

Modern Warfare 2 is a great game in multiplayer, haven’t touched SP yet, as “controversial” as it may be. Enough said, I believe.

banjo-tooie christmas

Banjo-Tooie. Oh, Banjo-Tooie. I am very aware that about 2 years ago I placed it #20 in my 20 Favourite N64 games. I did not remember it very well back then, having only played it once before, when I was only 11. Not long ago I downloaded it from XBLA and decided to give it another spin, especially when I had so much fun downloading, replaying and 100%ing Banjo-Kazooie this time last year from the same service.

Tooie must be one of  the deepest, most innovative platformers in the history of the genre, not to mention one of the most expanding sequels ever. The level architecture is brilliant, how each world connects with a few others is something that hasn’t been used in other games since, even though it was such a good idea. The game is truly massive — getting 100% might take me 20+ hours when Banjo-Kazooie took me around 6. It’s definitely because I remember Kazooie almost perfectly even from my early years while now with Tooie it’s like playing it for the first time… Yes, the game is massive. TOO massive and time-consuming at times, when the original was a lot tighter and pure. I just have to comment on some of the humour displayed in Tooie; there are a lot more sexual references than in the original, and that can only be a good thing.

It doesn’t feel like I’m replaying it so it all feels fresh. If remade it could easily stand next to contemporary platformers and surpass them in many ways. Still, even if I have redeemed it a bit, the original still stands proud of its proximity to platforming perfection even when it obviously offers less, is shorter, much easier and has a fraction of the content of its sequel. I guess that is what separates a very good game from a classic. And talking about classics…

StarCraft. Yes, Blizzard’s other franchise that is about to see its full revival in a few months (and then we’re going to talk about sequels, period. Any new IPs please? :P) Even though I’m a strategy game fan, I’ve never shown great interest for Blizzard games. I’ve tried to like the WarCraft universe but I find it bores me. I still cannot exactly say why I like StarCraft and even worse, explain the on-and-off relationship I’ve had with it for years. Now, this Christmas, I’ve decided  to follow its story and see why it’s a game celebrated like few. So far I’m loving it! Haven’t had this much fun with a Single Player RTS campaign in years.

Want another game I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with for even longer? That’s none other than Half-Life 2 for you. I downloaded and tried it when it was released more than 5 years ago and was blown away by its atmosphere. For some weird reason I lost interest somewhere along the way. I tried to pick it up three times since, once after I bought the Orange Box, another time sometime last Autumn and another shortly thereafter… again and again, I kept losing interest a bit further along the road. My last save was two hours or so before the end of the game, in the City 17 streetfights. I had reached this point last time I’d felt like playing, that is last February. The morning before I left Mytilini and after a good dose of  caffeine, I finally took the bold step, closing a 5-year circle: I finished Half-Life 2.


I had been thinking that the game would have a tedious ending. How wrong I was. Getting rid of the Striders, climbing up the Citadel and then… *spoilers* was just so EPIC! Not only wasn’t it tedious, it was awe-inspiring. The rest of the game was like this, what in the name of Valve made me think the end would disappoint? Silly Cubi… Now, if only I could get Episode I to run on this laptop. Oh, don’t we wish…


That’s it for now! I have more things to share but they’re still being digested. Hey, there’s still lots of happenings left for the rest of the holidays anyway, they’ve only just begun! Soon it’s going to be the turn of the decade as well. Now that’s going to be awesome