Xavier Defrang

This is a screenshot from a news on the BBC website

Now don't these riot police officers look strangely familiar? They surely do...

Welcome. Welcome to City 17.

Update: I'm not the only one who noticed the gasmask.

An Amiga demo running on a 68060 CPU has beaten the crap out of all hardware accelerated productions running on mainframe class PC's at latest Assembly. Watch for yourself:

Respect to the TBL crew.

A trippy selection of dystopian anthems from the golden 90ies for all my fellow cyberpunk nightbirds...

• Future Sound Of London — My Kingdom
• Orbital — The Box
• Björk — All is Full of Love
• Massive Attack — Risingson
• Massive Attack feat. Tracey Thorne — Protection
• Robert Miles — Children
• Everything But The Girl — Missing
• Hoover(phonic) — Inhaler
• Olive — You're Not Alone
• Goldie — Innercity Life
• Adam F — Circles
• Adam F — Music In My Mind
• Natural Born Chillers — Rock The Funky Beat
• Photek — Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
• Roni Size & Reprazent — Heroes
• Deltron 3030 — Virus
• 2 Pac & Dr. Dre — California Love
• Dopplereffekt — Scientist
• Laurent Garnier — Greed
• Ken Ishii — Extra
• Atari Teenage Riot — Sick To Death
• Atari Teenage Riot — Revolution Action

There's nothing like a sunday evening to watch a B-movie. This time I went for a rather old one I had never seen but which always had intrigued me because of its dystopian storyline: 'Freejack'. After the first shot involving Mick Jagger wearing a moronic helmet supposed to look higher-than-high-tech, I knew I would spend some good time with that movie.

The whole movie is crippled with clichés extracted from obvious references such as Blade Runner or Brazil and they even managed to rip off 2001's psychedelic abstract visuals. All motor vehicles look so ridiculous that they come damn close to the kind of cheesy rides you can see in 'Megaforce', just to provide some metrics. The acting is of course terrible but one would might guess that from a movie featuring no one else than Emilio Esteves playing the main character.

In other news, I noticed that the latest Steven Seagal exclusive DVD release named 'Submerged' was on the shelves of my local video rental outlet (but all copies were already out). The plot sounds amazing: Chris Kody, the world's best mercenary, is freed from prison -- but there's a catch. Kody must use his lethal weapons and fighting skills to stop a group of terrorists who have taken over a nuclear sub. Great! Now we're talking about a story like in the good old 'Under Siege' days! This one has some strong potential for a nasty one-man-army flick, especially if you compare it to Steven's latest east-european productions involving the kidnapping of a young polish girl who happen to be the long time pen pal of a former CIA operative... I can't wait to get my hand on a copy of this one!

The post-Google Image documentary The Cyberpunk Educator has been quite a disapointment.

My main complaints would be that it's way too Bible-centric and too focused on mainstream movies. The author demonstrates his analysis with sequences from Terminator 1 & 2, RoboCop, Aliens, the Mad Max franchise, Akira and of course Blade Runner.

But I find it weird not to mention Brazil when you're explicitly talking about cyberpunk and irony!

And how can you talk about the place of women in the cyberpunk world without pointing Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days?

Although some pictures may give some hints, there's no in-depth analysis of the influence of gothic architecture in retro-futurstic design...

On the bright side, I did appreciate that the author looked a bit further than the usual urban dystopia and introduced movies such as Labyrinth.

Although there were some niceties (like the pretty smart US sitcom and chinese propaganda parallel) in this 1 hour and 43 minutes long documentary, some segments are just plain boring and completely out of scope. A lot of valuable time is wasted trying to find relations between the Bible and the so-called Cyberpunk world. I was expecting more an analysis based on how popular culture was distored and not to watch pictures of ancient mediteranean amphoras and engraved pictures from the old testament...

After watching all this flow of still and moving pictures, I still believe that the very definition of cyberpunk is depicted in Blade Runner, when Deckard walks through the Bradbury Building...

I do agree with Carl's review of GITS 2 : Innocence. The storyline is thiner than the average Stand Alone Complex episode and some scenes are obvious rip off from Blade Runner and even Chris Cunningham's video for Bj?rk's All is Full of Love. But even if the sequel is not as deep as the first one, the mindblowing visuals are enough to make it an unforgettable movie. I'm especially thinking about some of the 3D GUI and the fight against the doll looking robots in the huge ship which are just years ahead of what hollywood and even the video game industry are able to produce...

Candidates of SF next mayoral poll take the Voight-Kampff test.

Dystopia is the commonly used antonym of utopia and denotes that class of hypothetical societies containing images of worlds worse than our own. A worthy read for all retrofuturistic dark sci-fi and technobaroque fans out there...

Remember the so called "thermal-optical camouflage" in Ghost In The Shell? Now here's some really impressive optical camouflage technology from University of Tokyo. (Thanks Rachid)

Mike Swaine : If the universe is a program, several questions suggest themselves: Does it terminate? And if so, when and how? Anti-big bang collapse or heat-death whimper? Is it buggy? Efficient? Object-oriented or procedural? What is the clock rate of the processor? Who wrote it, or is writing it? And is he hiring?

A bunch of neat folks at University of South Australia have designed an Augmented Reality Quake. They use a combination of digital compasses, inclinometers, GPS tracking and pattern recognition technologies with an hacked version of the Quake 3D engine. Cool stuff!