Taylor Swift

“Fordite” is what people call lumps that build up on paint racks that have been slid in and out of spray booths hundreds of times. The lumps are formed of layer upon layer of thick bright auto paint. After they’re cracked off the racks, people polish them, carve them or turn them into things like cuff links, pens, and rings. See also this graffito-based analog.

Elleanor is a friendly English-speaking 19-year-old Japanese student who works at The Circus Harajuku. She’s got a cute short multi-colored hairstyle accessorized with tassels.

Elleanor is wearing a sheep sweater from Labrat with Yip Yip Yip leggings from the Circus Harajuku and a Kinji Harajuku resale bomber jacket decorated with many pins (6%DOKIDOKI, Galaxxxy, Born to Talk, etc). One of her bags is shaped like a fried egg, the other is a handmade tote featuring various embroideries. She is also wearing Tokyo Bopper platforms.

Elleanor likes shopping at Wall Harajuku, and she’s a fan of the Japanese idol group Dempagumi.inc. Find out more about her on Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

This description of a Minecraft-based computer implementing Brainfuck had me laughing:

The program code is stored using villagers with different names for each command. While the program is running they are moved between three compartments …

[These] are the 8 registers that store the data. Each consists of two droppers and two hoppers that exchange dirt blocks

Not unlike some web frameworks I’ve seen, quite frankly. Someone needs to implement PHP in Minecraft hardware.

This is Mika, a friendly girl with a cute short hairstyle who we met in Harajuku. She told us that she is 19 and she’s a freeter (part time worker).

Mika is wearing a pink sweater from Heather with a midi skirt from Kastane and a bomber jacket from Jouetie. Her tote is American Apparel, and her ankle boots are Heather.

Find out more about Mika by following her personal Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

This dog, according to its shirt, is “Missing Husband And Dildo. Reward for Dildo.”

Between 1851 and 1862, there was located in Leicester Square as a tourist attraction a giant, hollow globe, 60ft 4 inches in diameter, which visitors could enter; to see, from the inside, and from various layers of platforms, a complete and three-dimensionally contoured map of the world as it was then known. Largely forgotten now, Wyld’s Great Globe was one of the most popular sights of its day. Built by James Wyld, a sometime Liberal MP for Bodmin and enthusiast of cartography, it was one of the first populist attempts to present to the public The Map as a fixed and objectively scientific image of what the world was like. This was the age of the Railway Timetable, and of the origins of the Ordnance Survey. The trends exhibited by Wyld’s Great Globe are insightfully presented by Marx and Engels in the first part of The Communist Manifesto: the world having been ‘discovered’ by capital, capital now moves endlessly over it, transforming it in the process, building lines of communication and imposing ostensibly objective descriptions over it that allow every aspect of it, no matter how foreign and distant, to be made useful for industry. In this attraction, itself imprisoned in a neo-classical hall in Leicester Square, the public would flock to see presented the positive account of this vision: the whole world, reduced to the means by which it could be controlled.

…

Since then, capitalism has moved on; grown beastlier, subtler, more complex. But the mode of reification that it practices has largely stayed the same. Until, perhaps, now. Wyld’s Great Globe has long ceased to stand in Leicester Square, but it is now the site of the M&Ms store.
Leicester Square is, of course, a great monument of hyperreality, perhaps the UK’s only truly hyperreal place (proof, if necessary, that the UK is at an insufficient stage of capitalist development, because it has so few of them). It is a world of massive Pizza Huts and Burger Kings; of teeming crowds going nowhere; of megalithic cinemas where you are served buckets of popcorn and soda that seem designed for a race of giants, not for humans; of casinos and shitty nightclubs full of sixth-formers; of bright lights and dodgy street vendors. It is a place where at all times you feel both something and nothing could happen, which you want to give yourself totally over to in a moment of intoxication and nihilism, but which you know already has been set up as a practical joke, with yourself as the victim. In short it is a perfect image of capitalism: blown up, as hyperreality, to a clearer and more objective projection of its tendencies. But of all the sights of Leicester Square, it is the M&Ms store that stands as the greatest clue as to where capitalism is going. Increasingly, I find myself hanging around Leicester Square a lot these days, and it is always the M&Ms store to which I am most drawn, and from which I have learned the most.
The M&Ms store is the site of the latest and most important developments in reification. We are used to thinking that reification, in the capitalist epoch, is total: familiar from the Frankfurt School is the thought that there are no ‘unreified’ relationships left anymore, that in every interaction, no matter how intimate, we can make out the profit motive, the yoke of capitalist dominion. But although the old style of reification was successful in colonising everything on the face of the earth and transforming it, the only transformation that it was able to affect was incomplete. Another familiar thought from Adorno et al is that there remains some remnant – albeit damaged but nevertheless salvageable – of ‘unreified’ experience at the bottom of reality somewhere, which we can awaken through modern art, serialist music, or suchlike. This is because the ontology of scientism, which informed the old style of reification in the golden age of capitalist industry, was insufficient to capture everything in reality: it was monistic, and attempted to reduce everything to something quantitative, which meant quality was shunted out of its universe, only to return, to disrupt it and offer the power of resistance. The M&Ms, however, offer us a new sort of ontology that will allow a total reification, thus complete transformation, of everything in our universe into something consumable: M&Ms. The M&Ms store is the herald of this new form of reification.

…

We all think that we are familiar with M&Ms. An M&M is a hard-shelled chocolate candy, which comes in bags of multiple colours that all the taste the same: the M&M does not do flavours. There are however various varieties of M&Ms: plain chocolate, peanut, almond, dark chocolate, pretzel, ‘crunchy’. Most commonly, you only see plain chocolate and peanut M&Ms for sale in the newsagent.
The M&M is round, if it contains a peanut slightly convex, and features a white ‘M’ impressed on its front. If you pour a packet of M&Ms into some beer, something that on purely culinary grounds I would not recommend, then the letters will peel off from their shells and float around the beer on their own, like a ghost trying to spell out a message from some lost past, or perhaps an all-too-imminent future, in which there is only the letter ‘M’.
The M&M is not a particularly nice or exciting sweet, and it is broadly speaking more expensive than the alternatives. It is inferior to Revels, or Maltesers, or Skittles. Indeed, the M&M has no real independent justification for continuing to exist: purely as a foodstuff it seems like it should not have a market.

Nevertheless, the M&M is a decent-enough object of desire. Its hardness and roundness gives it the satisfactory weight of money in your hand, they jingle about like coins in a purse in an opened packet; and the sweet itself, once you come to eat it, can be approached in various ways: shovelled into the mouth in palmfuls, carefully bitten in half, you can eat the shell first and then the chocolate second, and so on and so forth. Certainly they are the sort of thing that, despite the brackish flavour of the chocolate, you find it hard to stop eating once you’ve started. For all that, of course, they seem an odd candidate for something on which you might build a whole universe. Yet this is, apparently, what is happening today. At a guess, I would say that it is precisely because, as product, the M&M is so inconsequential that the edifice of the M&Ms store and all it represents can be constructed on them. The new ontology of the M&Ms is, ultimately, built on something entirely fungible.

…

The London branch of the M&Ms store (there are also locations in Las Vegas, New York, and Orlando, Florida) opened in July 2011, a personally terrible time in my life. 13th July 2011 was the day I was finally, definitively, left by the woman who is still, really, the only person I have ever properly loved, outside a bad pub in Manchester where I had just smashed an empty beer bottle in heartbreak and frustration, and meanwhile in London the world’s largest candy store, 35,000 sq ft of floor space spread over four storeys, was opening to great fanfare and with all 5 official ‘spokescandies’ in attendance. I had no idea, at the time, of course, that this was going on: even if I read the sort of publications that might have informed me about it, I would have been beyond caring.
I first encountered the M&Ms store a few months after that, in October of the same year, on an occasion when I had been drinking in Soho with this girl I had been seeing in the aftermath of that break-up. We’d stumbled down to Chinatown to get some food, and then I think it was after we’d eaten, about ten thirty at night maybe, when we found ourselves walking, with no particular aim or direction in mind, into Leicester Square, when we saw it, and really it is impossible to emphasise how strange and delirious a sight this is when you’re not expecting to see it there: this giant shop, this really baffling huge store, which is just M&Ms. Why does it exist? Who would make this? Who would go to this? What could it possibly, really, contain?
The streets outside stank of an M&Ms smell analogous to, but more overpowering than, the bread smell that Subway pump out of their shops, and the bright yellow lights of the place gushed with equal allure onto the streets, even in competition with the rest of Leicester Square. There could never have been any possibility of us resisting this shop. We staggered in, grinning and giggling like idiots. The place was huger and more busy than we could have possibly imagined, even from outside. And every single thing in the world was for sale there, only branded with elements of the M&Ms Gesamtweltanschaung.

This really was the most delirious thing of all, when I first realised what this store exactly was. It is not just a large shop, selling M&Ms candy: it is so much more than that. In fact, you can’t even buy a regular bag of M&Ms there, not like you would in a newsagent, although you can pay around £7.50 for a box of them, or more for a different sort of novelty box, less perhaps for another, and there is a ‘pick and mix’ area where you can create your own M&Ms mix by colour. But you can buy, for instance, M&Ms keyrings. M&Ms fridge magnets. M&Ms mugs, M&Ms shot glasses, M&Ms beer steins. M&Ms t-shirts, M&Ms pyjamas, M&Ms underwear, M&Ms headgear, M&Ms winter woollens, M&Ms swim-wear, M&Ms beach towels. M&Ms cutlery, M&Ms plates, M&Ms teatowels. M&Ms plush toys (my favourite is the Blue M&M dressed as a policeman), M&Ms pillows, M&Ms action figures, M&Ms yo-yos, M&Ms electronic memory games, M&Ms poker sets. And this is just the tat. There are some genuinely expensive, luxury items that you can buy at this store too. For instance, if you really wanted to, you could spend around £200 on a limited edition statuette of the Yellow M&M surfing, or about £950 of one of them all in a band. The M&Ms Swarovski Crystal leather jacket will set you back £2,500, and it is one of the most hideous artefacts I have ever laid eyes on in real life: an anticipation I think of something very special, the extravagance it represents one that has yet to fully come into existence.

The shop itself is officially called ‘M&Ms World’, and this is an accurate name for what it represents. The whole world, forced into M&Ms form. Everything that has ever happened in human history is represented in the store in some shape, the shape being that of M&Ms: football, London public transport, the sexual objectification of women, and the Beatles are all variously represented in large-scale form at points in the store. In one section, the walls are covered with mock-up oil paintings of great figures from British history and folklore: King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Lancelot and Guinevere, and Sherlock Holmes are amongst those represented. The suggestion in them is that an entire subterranean history has been going on parallel to our own, an M&Ms history, and that it has followed the exact same course as our own, just in M&Ms form. A further suggestion, that any close engagement with the pictures would be able to discern, is that, given how ridden with murk and misery the course of our own history has been, maybe it, totally straightforward in its progression towards the consumer freedom and felt plenty of our present mode of life, is after all the truer.

But for all this, perhaps the weirdest thing about the store, or at least what struck me most during my first visit there, that left me most disturbed, is that, despite the fact that, as I have related, this is a massive shop in a very prominent location in the centre of London that is really just M&Ms, and, moreover, is very obviously attempting to reproduce the entire human world in M&Ms form, the vast majority of people in it at any one time do not appear to find this fact at all strange. People of all ages and from all walks of life – OK, most of them look like tourists, but you know: individuals, couples, groups of young men and women, old people, families – are walking around this shop, one of the strangest places I have ever encountered, perfectly happily, shopping for all the tat it contains and getting their pictures taken with the M&Ms characters, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. It is precisely this normalisation, which apparently had been successfully affected towards everyone in the store who wasn’t me or this girl that I was with, that struck me as being the most sinister thing about this place, if not the source then at least some sort of confirmation of what I even suspected then as being a truly evil power; the way that everyone could just go there, to this utterly ridiculous place, and just kind of accept it and buy their stuff, without even finding it in the slightest bit funny, when I was completely mindblown and giggling off my head. Why couldn’t they see it? What had the M&Ms done to these people? That night I had a dream in which I found myself in a giant shopping mall in what appeared to be a sort of star station drifting through some distant solar system, maintained only by totally synthetic food, where an infinity of replicas of myself were being purchased by people with no eyes.

…

Strange as everything about this store may be, it could still potentially strike the casual visitor, even one reflective enough to realise its strangeness, as just a particularly bizarre marketing exercise. A really weird thing to exist that probably loses the company huge amounts of money every day, but no more than that. But the idea (which must really be how someone common-sensically intelligent would approach this place) that it is just a sort of big advert cannot possibly do justice to how total the vision is that the M&Ms store presents. Someone could live in this store forever, and they would have everything they need. Right now, granted, they will having to be relying almost exclusively on M&Ms candies for nutrients, but the peanut ones should give them enough protein, and the recent proliferation of ‘Keep Calm and Eat M&Ms’ t-shirts suggests that M&Ms cupcakes are not far off around the corner. Meanwhile we can easily imagine the M&Ms store one day containing an M&Ms deli counter, an M&Ms artisan bakery, an M&Ms fishmonger, an M&Ms salad bar, and so on and so forth. The M&Ms curry house will serve dhals made from M&Ms substituted for lentils, and you will be able to bring into it your own booze, bought from the M&Ms microbrewery, wine cellar, or distillery. The M&Ms store will expand to contain the whole of Leicester Square, owning a concert venue where they put on only bands dressed as M&Ms, who play M&Ms-related songs (you can already hear M&Ms songs over the in-store radio, vacuous autotuned pop copies going on about ‘sweetness’ and ‘flavour’ and ‘try the pretzel ones’ and not melting for anyone and world domination). The cinemas will only show films starring M&Ms in all the central roles, each spokescandy playing themselves as a version of the archetype they embody, like the figures from the commedia del’arte, or the Carry On films. An M&Ms school will be established, then an M&Ms university, so that every generation of your descendants will be able to only learn, forever, of M&Ms. You will have married your partner in a special M&Ms ceremony officiated by one of the priests of the official M&Ms cult, with statues of the Red M&M as Jesus being crucified everywhere about. This is, indeed, only a marketing exercise in the same sense that Christianity was an elaborate marketing exercise for God: it goes well beyond selling you a product. It gives you a self-contained totality, more even than a lifestyle. The M&Ms store gives you a Sittlichkeit, ‘ethical life': a society.

A few years ago, the M&Ms launched an advertising campaign that, even more than the store itself does constantly, really rather shamefacedly managed to give the game away. The title of this advertising campaign was simply, ‘Become an M&M’. The adverts in this series are alternately concerned to persuade people of the benefits of ‘becoming an M&M’ (you will have a lot of fun dancing around and hanging out with your friends), and giving advice about how you should live your life once you have become one (an occurrence that is presented as an inevitability), as well as what you can expect from the world and your life once this has happened. You will, for instance, find yourself incredibly tasty, but you will miss your ears. Your life will be a lot easier in some respects, since the M&Ms are not subject to many of the obstacles that stand in our way as humans, but you will also find yourself facing some crucial difficulties: one advert, for instance, shows a woman who has been turned into a peanut M&M being attacked by squirrels after her innards, which, of course, now take the form of a nut. Again, to a casual viewer these adverts might seem quirky and fun, albeit a little lame. But when watched against the knowledge that this is a product that has established a series of shops attempting to represent everything in the world warped into its own form, it can only seem like a horribly disturbing premonition of what is to come. “When you are an M&M…” all these adverts begin by saying to you. A line that, with full knowledge of what it represents, is seen to jolt from silliness to terrifying inevitability.

The success of the project that the M&Ms store is undertaking is predicated on the development of the M&Ms Character-Ontology, which it also embodies throughout itself. There are currently 5 M&Ms characters, or ‘spokescandies’ in M&Ms jargon, that we might consider truly canonical: the Red M&M, the Yellow M&M, the sexy Green M&M, the Blue M&M, and the Orange M&M. Each represents one of the central personality types that structure our world. The Red M&M is ‘outgoing’, the Yellow M&M is ‘clumsy’, the sexy Green M&M is ‘flirty’, the Blue M&M is ‘cool’, and the Orange M&M is ‘paranoid’. They also all have their own slogans, which are splashed around various points of the store. The Red M&M’s slogan is the sinister “Everything is Under Control,” the Yellow M&M’s is “Inside Everyone There’s a Little Nut.” The sexy Green M&M has “I Melt For No-One,” (because she is a strong, independent lady) and the Blue M&M the supposedly suave but really terribly sad, “Never Let Them See You Melt.” The Orange M&M’s, meanwhile, is “I’m a Dead Man,” which is a frankly terrifying slogan to think a marketing man must have come up with (the Orange M&M is indeed a constantly frightened and really pathetic figure, totally ill-at-ease in the world he has been thrust into by his creators; and this fear and disturbedness has been made, by them, inherent to his nature. I hardly dare speculate about the cruelty of anyone who would think to bring anyone like this into the world, one who suffers so, even as a fictional character. On the box of the M&Ms poker set he is depicted as about to attempt suicide).
A large section of the M&Ms store is given over to a ‘Pick and Mix’ area where you can ‘Create Your Own!’ unique M&Ms mix based on colour. This section of the store, on the surface level, makes no sense whatsoever: M&Ms are of course not, in themselves, meaningfully differentiated based on colour. The clue to its existence is only found on the storey below, which contains an ‘M&Ms mixology lab’, in which trained M&M ‘mixology professionals’ will make you a mix, similar to the ones you might make yourself at random or based on arbitrary whim in the Pick and Mix, informed somehow by the ‘science of M&Ms’. Accompanying the lab is a ‘Periodic Table’ of M&Ms (see picture below). Centrally important to the M&Ms Periodic Table is the line on the left, which contains the five fundamental ‘character colours’. The middle group supplements these character colours with the 17 other available colours which your M&M can be. The right column then demonstrates how these colours can be combined as the structure of some aspect of our world: Universities, Stone Circles, Palaces, etc.

What must I think strike us about the Periodic Table as it appears in the store in its present form is that it is obviously incomplete. In particular, the right column is far too sparse to really demonstrate what the store clearly hopes to accomplish: that it might someday capture all of reality, in all of its richness and fundamentals, with the Character-Ontology of the M&Ms. This is the great secret of the M&Ms store, really: that it is not merely, what it would be if it was simply a bizarre marketing exercise, attempting to reproduce everything in the world, in M&Ms form, self-contained in the store. Rather, it hopes to reproduce everything in the human world and then replace it, with M&Ms. The entire endeavour feels like something out of the Borges story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which the discovery of an encyclopaedia detailing a mysterious world ends up producing conditions in which the world described in the encyclopaedia ends up replacing the original one. The process described in the Borges story is of course that of reification, and the M&Mification of the world can thus be seen to be a form of reification. What makes it a historically important new form of reification is not simply the fact that it is emerging now, at our present moment of history which is after all in a sense always qualitatively the newest, but also the particular strengths of the Character-Ontology, which suggest that it could do so much more than reification of the old form ever could. Borges was of course writing in a capitalist world, a world that had already been reified, but he could nevertheless imagine an alteration of the world more complete than anything the industry of his day had managed to affect: the total replacement of our world and its history by Tlön. If he had himself replaced the word ‘Tlön‘ with ‘M&Ms’, we could now see Borges as our most important prophet.

Of course, the store has yet to succeed, exactly, in making the whole world M&Ms just yet. Speculatively, I would suggest that this is something to do with the fact that the Character-Ontology of the M&Ms has yet to be itself fully developed. Clearly, the ontology of the M&Ms, whatever form it has ever taken, is historically situated, and still unfolding. We see this written on the walls of the shop, on one of the sets of stairs, where the development of the history of the M&M character is depicted. Here, we see the M&M develop from a crude, almost humanoid figure in the 1950s, politely lifting up the top of his candy shell like a hat, to a set of two boy-girl M&Ms holding hands in the 60s, all the way up until the 90s, where something like the present Character-Ontology with its five characters begins to be developed. Thus, the M&M expands from one-ness to two-ness to a now-essential five-ness.
It is odd, in a sense, to think that an ontology would develop this way since, at least in the western tradition of ‘heavy’ metaphysics, we tend to intuitively want a sort of ‘one-ness’ to be underwriting everything or else for everything to be somehow tending towards: whether it is God, or the Big Bang, or the Absolute Identity of Subject and Object; the Peircean ‘final opinion’, Bernard Williams’ notion of the ‘absolute conception of reality’, or what have you. It is this drive towards one-ness that has shaped western philosophy, religion, and natural science for millennia. But just think about how this has always, historically, ended up manifesting itself in problematic ways. If you’ve got just some One thing at the bottom of your ontology, any project of reduction will inevitably fail: either it simply incorporates everything straightforwardly, in which case it cannot affect any sort of transformation (see trends in contemporary philosophy towards some form of ‘inclusive’ naturalism, in which the ‘naturalness’ of everything becomes some trivial fact about particulars), or else it heinously fails to reduce large chunks of reality down at all. We see this latter happen in modern natural science, which as I said at the start of this piece can only provide reification with an ontology that allows it to realise its project in a partial way. The reason for this is that, broadly speaking, at bottom modern natural science holds that what exists is what is ‘objective‘, which means, for the scientistic worldview: what can be described solely in the terms of quantitative scientific method. This means that anything qualitative is excluded from the start. Since quality cannot straightforwardly be reduced to quantity, the only option is to eliminate it. Eliminativist projects have of course been undertaken: by Patricia and Paul Churchland, for instance, contemporary philosophers of mind, a married couple who have done away with referring to the human emotions they consider to lack reality and have taken to referring to the relevant brain-states instead. But these projects always fail, because even the most violent form of eliminativism (I mean, for instance, an eliminativism backed up by bombs and tanks) would be unable to truly effect anything more than just a mere repression. And having been repressed thusly, the excluded qualitative moment would of course, at least if we follow Adorno, always return to haunt what has repressed it, this time with fangs.
A multiplicity, then, is needed. And since the world is a place of almost infinite subtlety and variation, if you really wanted to capture it truly in its fundamentals, you will need not only more than some One thing fudamental to your ontology, a Two won’t do either: you will need true mutliplicity, three-ness, four-ness, five-ness and so forth, and this is why I think that, going against all previously-established western common-sense, the M&M, with the particular ambitions that it has, has arrived at a genuinely pluralistic ontology. Minus a pluralistic ontology, it could never be the case that Everything could Become M&Ms. The best the M&Ms store could do would be to set up something irreducibly M&M-like at the bottom of reality and deny reality to everything that was not an M&M, but which nevertheless, of course, was felt by us to exist, as an ‘illusion’ (necessary or not). But this is laughably unsatisfactory, as the best efforts of every naïve scientivist since the dawn of the Enlightenment have shown (or even someone as sophisticated as Hume).

Character is, of course, itself something irreducibly qualitative, so by placing Character at the bottom of reality, we can see how the M&Ms store is already going to manage to transcend all of this, one of the perennial problems of philosophy in scientific modernity. Each of the characters, in the M&M world-picture, is imbued with particular characteristics which allow them to bring various aspects of reality, in all their fullness, under the M&Ms yoke. The Blue M&M, for instance, has cool, and thus can be seen to have the whole history of Hollywood leading men sedimented within him (this being his particular mode of cool: the Blue M&M would need to be supplemented by some other character if the M&Ms are ever going to absorb within them the self-destructiveness associated with punk or rock and roll; the Blue M&M is frequently depicted in-store as James Bond). The sexy Green M&M has sex, the Red M&M has power in all its forms, the Yellow M&M is a dumb workaday sucker, so presumably is able to be positioned so as to absorb much that is low-brow in culture, or perhaps just the proletariat’s false consciousness and sufferings. The Orange M&M, meanwhile, has mental illness, failure, and death (not coincidentally, he also has association football). Whereas it is impossible to really, coherently, think about ourselves as being mere collections of brain states, the emergence of which has been determined causally since the Big Bang (this all going against not just ordinary language but every aspect of our lived experience), we can perhaps we can think of ourselves as being, essentially, a Blue M&M, or a Red one. That this is something like the ultimate intention of the Character-Ontology is revealed by the machine on one level of the store which you can step into, to be told ‘what colour you are’.
But of course, the collection of characters the M&Ms have as yet, established are clearly going to be unable to incorporate all of reality within them: there is so much more richness to our world than what they can in their particular characteristics possibly contain. I predict that what we will see is, over time, more and more of the colours in the middle of the M&Ms periodic table being made into full-fledged characters: the colours, in the context of the table, are more like chemical elements, brutely quantitative and blind to all subjective evaluation. Once made into characters, they can begin to truly underwrite the parts of lived reality that the present characters cannot (something that, precisely, that which is merely ‘chemical’ could never do: hence much of the problems described above).
We can already see this happening with the figure of the Brown M&M, a character who appears in adverts and some of the merchandise in the store, but is far less prominent or developed than any of the central five characters. As yet she has no slogan, or canonical fundamental characteristic (as it might appear on the M&Ms Periodic Table), but she does seem to be a sort of confident career-woman, thus exhibiting what the M&Ms people must take to be a very different form of femininity to that incorporated within the sexy Green M&M. Once fully-developed with more figures like the Brown M&M, the M&Ms ontology will be able to incorporate into it everything under the sun, and probably we will find more and more of what it can incorporate sold in the store (this, at any rate, will be the first sign, before all of this stuff has just simply Become it… and you yourself have Become thus, as well).

But there is more to all this than just a need to fit something like ‘quality’ into the fundamentals of the world. Character, yes, can underwrite quality effectively, but lots of things can do this: a quality-involving manifold of sense-data; an abstract realm of Absolute Ideas; the Virtues; or just Language itself might all be good candidates. Why is it that the M&Ms have specifically pursued an ontology of Character, and what makes it so powerful? The answer I think is suggested to us by the figure of the sexy Green M&M. The sexy Green M&M is the M&M that you are supposed to want to fuck. There can be no other explanation for the fact that the M&Ms marketing people have had made a series of what can only be described as ‘glamour shots’, in which she poses, typically, peeling off her hard candy shell to reveal what she always calls “my chocolate,” within. Which is supposed to, I guess, be sexy, presumably because the shell represents clothing and the chocolate, naked skin (there are of course obvious concerns about this insofar as, aside from her ‘chocolate’ skin, she also has what looks like, on her arms and legs, human-like skin: this would make the candy shell the equivalent of skin for her torso, and means that in fact she is exposing her raw flesh, showing off a wound as if it was a pair of tits. I have written about this at more length here).

On the one hand, the sexy Green M&M is, in these pictures, simply incorporating some aspect of the life-world into herself, as its fundamental constituent. Specifically in this instance, she is incorporating what we might think of as the ‘mainstream’ of sexual objectification, the world of FHM’s Top 100 Sexiest Women and Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions (indeed, the first of the two images given here is a direct homage to an actual Kate Upton Sports Illustrated shoot). But of course, she is not just setting herself up as the equivalent to, for instance, Kate Upton. She is also, we know from our analysis of the character-ontology, one of the fundamental constituents of reality as such. So whereas on the one hand, we might imagine a world in which men are jacking it to the sexy Green M&M as opposed to the likes of Kate Upton, what that world would be, would be a quite different place not merely because she is a chocolate candy cartoon mascot and not a real human woman, but also because this particular chocolate candy cartoon mascot, which has taken over our (hypothetical, future) libidos, would be something that stands at the very foundations of our universe.
Thus the Character-Ontology is able to do more than just allow us to conceive of our universe as fundamentally involving things like colours and emotions: it can be weaponised by the M&Ms to construct a universe which, at the most fundamental level, we will stand in a desiring relationship to. This is thus a universe that can become, entirely, a consumer product: totally, comprehensively, reified, down to the last most minute particle, or the widest emptiness of space. It is, therefore, precisely the mode of reification that capitalism, otherwise always in crisis, most optimally needs. Not only can everything be incorporated formally, it can desire its incorporation actually. A perpetual motion of machine of constant reification.
Scientists – or, at least, Richard Dawkins, who as an apiarist who knows a bit about Newtonian physics is I suppose a sort of scientist – are always trying in vain to get us to take an aesthetic wonder in science as if it was art: the M&Ms, however, already have access to the possibility of convincing us to sexually fantasise only about whatever stands at the bottom of their reality. Think of the power of a science that was able to get the general public to centre their erotic lives around quarks. When the Higgs Boson was ‘discovered’, maybe a few hundred people got an erection. If all men generally did, this old science would seem much more durable as a world-picture. The fact that they did not, opens the way forwards for the Character-Ontology of the M&Ms.

…

Thus I would predict that one day soon, this article will seem a nonsense, because you will be, straightforwardly, an M&M, and you will see no possibility of anyone ever having really been anything other than an M&M, living in a world of Blue and Red and Orange and whatever other characters they come up with to complete the picture. What I have said here will only be able to be coherently understood as an elaborate satire on the primitive world of priests and cops and governments and banks that came before it. There will be an M&Ms store in every village: expanding outwards from London, it will have completely colonised the world, like Christianity (partially) or Industry (wholly, but unsatisfactorily) before it. Or perhaps better: every village will be an M&Ms store, the whole world will live in a series of communities focused and organised entirely around the M&M. You will see this happening in your lifetime, and so will I, although perhaps by then you will no longer think of what you are experiencing now as having been ‘your’ lifetime, only the life of something mostly inchoate that was preparing to become an M&M (and so too will I, likewise: I will not recognise myself as the author of this piece, except as proto-M&M). The first signs of your change will be when you can only achieve sexual arousal by thinking about a hard candy-shelled, round, Green woman. I consider it a matter of the gravest concern that, although I am still primarily attracted to human women, I have, outside of the M&Ms store, been impotent for months.

Paper sculptures of fictional plant forms by Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao.

Toronto’s Bob McCully, the man behind the experimental “fucked up synth” and bass project WIZARD OF, released his LP Face/Skeleton on Digitalis Records last week. Each side of the tape is assembled into a unity from a limited set of samples, which McCully repeatedly deconstructs only to build back up again like a Lego set. Loops hum and jolt over booming bass lines. It proceeds by turns from industrial to groovy, crunchy to mechanically precise.

There’s a lot to be said about McCully’s beautiful and varied use of samples. It’s easy to lose track of the crazy amount of loops that accumulate in the constant motion of his arrangements. These loops are often cropped in these machine gun bursts too tightly to be pronouncedly percussive or melodic. They fly around the mix like fighter jets, slowly gathering and building to a dense climax. The closely cropped sample at the outset of Face V whirls like a broken toy siren, while Skeleton IV’s chipmunked “When I get older…” phrase gives the song a youthful, naïve feeling. The latter dainty vocal sample is flipped, pitched and chopped a dozen different ways during the course of the Skeleton I-VI suite. This is not pristine production by any means. It’s dirty, spastic fun. Check it out for an exploration of the concepts of appropriation and assemblage that will get you TURNT UP.

Cop it here.

The post WIZARD OF – FACE/SKELETON appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

Unfortunately, you and your friends have become beholden to third-party corporations who don't give a shit about preserving your data. That's because you're not the customer, you're the product. You already knew that, but you go along with it anyway, because frankly you don't have much choice.

I've fixed that for you. Mostly. Here's what I've got:

• sms-backup-iphone ~/Documents/SMS\ Messages/

  This extracts the SMSes from your iPhone backup database, and saves them to a local directory. This only works if you back up your iPhone to "This Computer" rather than to iCloud.

• facebook-rss.pl --messages $USER ~/Documents/FB\ Messages/

  This backs up your Facebook direct messages to a local directory. It only gets things in your Facebook "Inbox" folder, not things that have been shuffled off to the "Other" folder. I'd like to back that up too but I can't figure out how to read it through the API. But you probably never look in that folder anyway.

  You have to create your own "Facebook App" to make this work. It's a pain in the ass. Do that, then run this script once with --generate-session.

• twit-backup.pl --user $USER ~/Documents/Twitter\ Messages/

  This backs up your Twitter direct messages to a local directory.

  You have to create your own "Twitter App" to make this work. It's a pain in the ass. Do that, then run this script once with --generate-session.

  This will only archive about a year's worth of your DMs. As far as I can tell, DMs older than that are completely inaccessible to you now, even via the Twitter web interface. They're just gone now. You missed them.

  This is why you need backups: because companies like Twitter pull shit like that. All the time.

  (Though Twitter provides a way to download an archive of your public posts, that archive does not include any of your DMs. And the guy who wrote that code quit, so don't expect this feature to be updated again, ever.)

• AIM, GChat, Jabber, IRC and whatnot:

  If you use Adium for all the protocols that it supports, it does an adequate job of archiving everything (in "Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs/"). The interface for accessing those logs is a pain in the ass, and searching has never worked reliably, but at least the bits are there.

  If you use Adium for Facebook Messages, it archives those just fine, but if you ever reply to someone using the FB web site or phone app, Adium will only see and archive their half of the conversation, so that's no good. Thus you still need the FB archiver, above.

Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's not really yours.

Previously, previously, previously.

Though Maxis liked to play up its games’ educational content, wanton carnage is still front and center.

Origin. Bullfrog. Westwood. Their very names elicit winces; from an impassioned few, shouts and tears. Personally I skip right to ripping my hair and rending my face.

They are among the many worthy studios gobbled up and mismanaged by EA.

Yet somehow Maxis survives. You might even say it flourishes: it’s sold far more games since its 1997 acquisition by EA than it did as an indie. But despite the impressive sales figures, many gamers regard the studio’s latest endeavors as wan shadows of its early hits. That’s especially true of gamers old enough to remember SimCity.

Now that EA’s finally intent on releasing a game that resembles its namesake series, let’s take a look at the Sim that started it all.

What we have here isn’t the original SimCity box of 1989, but a “SimCity Classic” edition from 1993 (not to be confused with the webgame SimCity Classic of 2008). The ’93 version received some improved visuals and a much snazzier soundscape. Maxis put out three versions of SimCity Classic: DOS, Windows, and Mac. Today’s feature is about the DOS version; I’ll post the Windows version some other time.

The back of the box shows DOS, Windows, and Macintosh screens–perfect for agonizing over which edition is best.

Clockwise from 9:00: SimCity box, instruction manual, reference card, Maxis “Software Toys” catalog, “Maxis Maxims” insert, registration card, 5.25″ disc redemption offer, and two 3.5″ floppies.

This intro once inspired me to write an entire article on Maxis’ manuals.

Use the Police Influence map to find all the best donut shops.

What’s this? Ten whole pages wasted on educational claptrap? The laws of capitalism forbid it!

The cleverest reference card ever made.

The “Software Toys” catalog refuses to call anything a mere game. Get a load of those prices!

Maxis took its educational reputation seriously.

Full cash refunds, no questions asked.

“Pop my perforations. Use me.” Gross.

On the reverse of the registration card, a plea by the mail room staff to enliven their menial jobs.

Free disk enlargement!

This is L, a 20-year-old student wearing pastel fashion who we met in Harajuku. She told us that she likes listening to L’arc~en~Ciel and Knock-Knock Jokes.

She is wearing a Nice Claup sweatshirt with Pageboy shorts, and a white coat. She finished the look with white tights, lilac lace-up shoes, a “haters” headband and galaxy backpack.

To find out more check out her Twitter.

Update: The “haters” headband is by the Tokyo brand Le Vero (on Etsy)! Thanks to those who let us know.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Publisher: Messhof Developer: In-house Format: PC Release: Out now

Street Fighter II, Super Smash Bros, GoldenEye 007: some games are written into history indelibly for their competitive multiplayer. To play them is to have battle upon battle seared onto your mind, branded there by the white-hot thrill of matching wits and reflexes against your peers. Prepare to add Nidhogg to the list.

Not that Nidhogg’s seesawing hyperkinetic fencing matches bear much similarity to those couch classics in style or input methods. This is the multiplayer conceit triple filtered until all that is left is two eye-wateringly neon stick figures holding out two pristine white swords, each fighter with one objective: get to the final screen. But to make progress from one segment of the five-area-wide levels to the next, you need priority, as represented by a giant Go arrow. And the only way to get it is to be the most recent player to score a kill.

To start with, no one has the advantage. But as soon as the first gout of pixellated blood wets the ground, a deadly and hilarious battle of tug-of-war ensues, as each player tries to steal priority and push the battle to their end zone. The simple goal makes the game: every sparring match is in service to a higher aim, each push imbued with purpose and stomach-churning risk. It transforms Nidhogg into more than just a lightning-fast deathmatch. In fact, it is perfectly valid to skewer your opponent once and spend the rest of your time legging it to the finish. It’s just that you’re going to need to get good at fighting to survive long enough to get there.

As quick as most deaths are, Nidhogg also routinely leads to glorious standoffs, as combatants inch together to test their opponent’s defences, or even protracted waits followed by flashes of intense swordplay.

That means crossing swords, and this, too, is governed by elegant rules. Rule one: let the pointy end of a sabre touch you anywhere and you’re dead, your corpse disintegrating into a shower of level-staining pixels. You’ll be spawned back in your foe’s path in seconds, but those are precious seconds where they are pressing their advantage.

And you’ll be amazed at what can be derived from such a simple control scheme. One button jumps, another attacks, and the arrow keys (or a stick, since Nidhogg yearns to be played with a pad) move you. But with each input sensitive to context, a broad spectrum of actions is at your disposal. Run forward and hit down to enter a roll that might carry you past your sparring partner and might leave you ignominiously impaled on a lowered blade. Jump and press attack for a quick disarming divekick to make Viewtiful Joe weep. Hold up to position your sword for a deathly fast, but easily blocked, throw.

This being a fencing game, however, most attacks are lunges, which buy you range at the cost of leaving you open as you pull your blade back. Timing is everything. Well, not quite everything: posture also counts. Your sword is held at one of three levels – hip, chest or eye height – switched between with taps of up or down. Attack at the same height as your foe’s foil and you’ll be deflected, a scrape of metal your only reward. Find an opening first and the match’s impetus is yours.

Your prize, and the justification for the game’s odd name, is to become worm food on the final screen. It’s a surreal but somehow fitting way for these tense matches to end.

The disarm is perhaps the clearest evidence of designer Mark Essen’s delicate touch, though. Flick your sword’s position to match an incoming attack at just the right moment and you’ll swipe the blade from your opponent’s hands with a whoop. It’s hard to do purposefully, but immensely rewarding. And while an unarmed enemy is far from defenceless – Nidhogg is made for last-second comebacks – the surprise should have given you the upper hand.

The rest of the package is minimalist. There are just four stages, each one comprised of two areas mirrored around a central segment. Castle is of the Prince Of Persia school of ancient architecture, all cavernous grey block halls and death pits. Mines has conveyor belts and tunnel chokepoints too claustrophobic to chuck a sword around in. Clouds is the weakest of the bunch, its central screen bright enough to render swords and even players invisible, although dissipating cloud bridges add new tension to Mexican standoffs. Then there’s Wilds. It’s a treasure trove of tiered platforms, long grass to conceal yourself in and gorgeous pixel foliage. Every stage is primarily rendered in dark, muted hues so as to contrast against the retina-searing player colours and gore, with an animated background that puts us in mind of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video. We wouldn’t exactly call it easy on the eyes, but it’s distinctive even among the pixel art crowd.

Even despite the limited variety, local multiplayer is blissfully easy to lose hours to. The same can’t be said for online matches, which are hampered by sporadic disconnects and varying degrees of lag, the latter a real problem when success is measured in fractions of a second. The chat is less ambiguously poor, unable to deal with long messages and cursed with a confusing font. Let your sword do the talking.

Every time you puncture your opponent, they’ll explode with a death cry.

And while multiplayer is evidently the raison d’être of Nidhogg, there is a time-attack singleplayer mode to attempt, where you rip through matches as quickly as possible against AI swordsmen. Sadly, the bots are prone to stupid exploits, lingering on vanishing clouds or tumbling into pits, but they do a decent job of prepping you for real opponents.

Still, Nidhogg is not about lengthy stage lists, improvable online systems, fussy control mapping or AI. Nidhogg is about the purity of two friends on a couch duking it out as Daedelus’s moody dynamic electronica frames acrobatic displays of wits and reflexes. In that sense, it has no equal.

The post Nidhogg review appeared first on Edge Online.

Free tagging: 

• Public Garden
• Guns

Neighborhoods: 

• Downtown

Topics: 

• Crime

You all know about Twitch.tv, right? I can’t actually hear your answer, so to be on the safe side I’ll go ahead and explain that it’s a website that makes it super easy to stream your gaming sessions out to the Internet and for Twitch viewers to find those streams. All it takes for PC gamers is a little software configuration, an Internet connection, and a webcam if you want a picture-in-picture showing your grinning face. More advanced users have also been streaming console games for a long time, but the Playstation 4 features built-in Twitch streaming and the Xbox One will implement the feature later this year. So the practice is only going to grow in the coming months.

I’ve thought about creating a Twitch channel, but honestly one of the things stopping me is that I’m afraid of sucking at games in front of an audience. I’m not even talking about hardcore competitive DotA 2 or Street Fighter matches. I’m afraid of loading up ANY game and sitting there going “Herpa derpa DERP DERP!” into the webcam while my avatar just walks into walls. Should I worry about that? Can knowing you have an audience affect your performance in video games?

Research says …yes! It also says …no! Because it depends!

Studies on what’s called “social facilitation” were all the rage during the early 1900s, but they started out noting how competing with others spurred people on to better performance on tasks such as cycling or reeling in fishing lines.1 Unsurprisingly, we tend to perform better on tasks while in competition, which can be chalked up to increased motivation to look good and/or using information about the performance of others to figure out how much we should be doing.

Eventually, though, people began researching what effect the presence of mere spectators had on solo performance –something dubbed “the audience effect.” Early investigations found that yep, having even a small audience caused people to perform better on tasks like solving easy math problems or simple demonstrations of hand-eye coordination.2 Other studies, however, showed that having an audience caused people to perform WORSE when the task was difficult, like memorizing lists of nonsense words.3

What was going on?

The best current explanation is called “Distraction-Conflict Theory” and was proposed by University of Illinois researchers Robert Baron and Glenn Sanders.4 They say that audiences distract us for a variety of reasons, including our preoccupation with what they may be thinking of us. This causes conflict between our intention to perform a task or play a game and our intention to see (or even just ponder) what the audience thinks of our performance. In the case of simple tasks or tasks that we’re really good at, we’ve got mental resources to spare because these tasks require little cognitive juice. Thus we can handle the distraction of the audience and choosing to focus on the task benefits performance.

But say the audience is full of jerks who are screaming at us, or the task is really difficult or novel. In that case the total demand on our attention and mental energy is higher, and performance suffers. Even if the distractions go away, Sanders and Baron found 5 that the drain on resources caused the drop in performance to persist for a while. This is why trash talking opponents in fighting games sometimes works: You’re distracting them and maybe even making them angry to the point where mental energy needed to play the game is being diverted to dealing with your incessant stream of “Yo mamma…” jokes. Other research has shown that if we think the crowd is hostile or judging us, the audience effect intensifies.

In 1993 researchers James Moore and Jody Brylinsky discovered a unique opportunity to test this theory.6 They dug up data from a series of basketball games in the 1988-1989 North Atlantic Conference season when a measles outbreak had caused the team from one school to play a series of games under quarantine –no audience, in other words. It was just the two teams facing off against each other on a weirdly quiet basketball court. By comparing players’ statistics during these spectator-free games with their performance just a few weeks earlier in front of a roaring audience, the researchers showed that lacking an audience caused them to excel in the complex, demanding task of playing a basketball game. Or to put it another way, they choked less.

And while research on the audience effect and social facilitation theory is underrepresented in the video game literature, researchers Nicholas Bowman and his colleagues do provide one recent example.7 In their study, they had subject play games of the first person shooter Quake 3: Arena on either high or low difficulty levels either in front of a small audience or alone. Even after controlling for certain aspects of skill like hand-eye coordination and 3-dimensional spatial ability, the researchers found support for the idea that at least in the low-difficulty condition, performance was better when an audience was there.8

And so I imagine it would be so for someone playing a complex and challenging game FIFA or League of Legends on Twitch.9 Even if you’re not keeping an eye on the chat or the viewer count, you’re still probably thinking about what the audience thinks and this will subtract from the mental resources that are in demand because of the game. But if you’re just screwing around with an easy game, like Minecraft or the latest Lego game, your performance might actually improve in front of an audience.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.

Shion is a 17-year-old student who we met on the street in Harajuku.

Her look features a cute Teddy Bear sweatshirt which she picked up resale over resale pink denim shorts and pink Jouetie platform sneakers (worn with ruffle socks). Accessories include a colorful necklace and a metallic backpack from Bubbles Harajuku.

Shion enjoys shopping at the Harajuku vintage boutique Bubbles and she likes the music of Icona Pop.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Note: If you can clearly hear the send script working then your speakers may not be high quality enough to produce sounds in the near ultrasonic range.

Warning: May annoy some animals and humans.

Previously, previously, previously.

When we met 16-year-old “Watson” in Harajuku, she told us that she’s a cosplayer. Her short mint green hair is what first caught our eye.

Watson’s oversized graphic jacket is from the hip Japanese brand Galaxxxy. She’s wearing it with a Forever 21 top, Sly shorts, sparkling tights, colorful socks, and cute Bodyline strappy platforms. Accessories – some of which came from Heaven and Earth, Tiffany and Bulgari – include red headphones, rings, a lion head necklace, and a polka dot clutch (to go with her polka dot nail art).

Watson told us that she enjoys shopping at Monomania, Wall, and Glad News. She enjoys the music of vocaloid. For more info and more pics, follow Watson on Twitter and Instagram.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Yesterday was interesting an interesting day, and one like no other in the last few years.

I had finished the in-game help and finalized the tutorials earlier this week.

So the first thing I did when I woke up was to speel check all the text in the game. (See, that’s funny!) I then wrote the credits, which were a bit short. I stopped full screen resolutions under 640 pixels wide from being switched to, even if the hardware supports it. I fixed a small bug with the main toolbar when the user interface was scaled. I looked over some minor balancing issues that have been nagging me.

Then I turned off asserts, (those are debug checks to make sure everything is running properly, but tend to slow things down) and then I made a build of the game.

And then I didn’t have anything else to do. And that’s a strange feeling.

Well – there are things to do – just not in the changing code, art, or data departments. There might still be minor bugs, there might be crashes that haven’t been found. But today I’m calling the game content complete. Banished is done, and so without any further delay,

February 18, 2014

I know I can be quoted as saying that I wanted the game released in January, but over the holidays I ended up taking some time off from development, and apparently writing full in-game help takes far longer than you might expect.

Testing progress has been slow over the holiday season, so the current build will be tested until release, checking everything I’ve touched in the last month and a half – the final tutorials, help system, and minor code and balancing tweaks. Just to be sure things are in working order.

Ah, I remember when I quit my job and thought I could make a game in one year. It took three times as long, but it was definitely worth it, and the process was really satisfying!

Cheers!

Did the bike skip out on its shared apartment, leaving the author to pay rent by herself? Did it sell her counterfeit Garbage Pail Kids cards on eBay? Did it fail to appear in court to act as the author’s attorney? No! None of these! “The Bike That Fucked Me” is a 3000-word story about a “dildo bike.”

If you’re into bike fucking but you don’t get into hetero stuff, the same author has written an eerily-similar 3000-word story entitled  “The Bike That Butt Fucked Me.”

The trilogy concludes with a 3000-word story about group sex, called… yes… “The Bikes That Fucked Us.”

Finding the Minimum Set of Languages to Learn All Programming Paradigms.

This is Hikari, a 19 year old student wearing a vintage style outfit in Harajuku.

Her sweater is from g.u., and she paired it with a mint coat and a resale midi skirt. Her backpack is Patagonia, and her shoes are Haruta, worn with floral socks. Her beret is a resale, and she’s also wearing a dog pin.

Hikari is a fan of C-ute, and she likes to buy clothes from resale shops. Find out more about her from Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.