Update: The landscape architects got it right.

Photo from Potency by Nina Maria Kleivan

Nina Maria Kleivan:

You need to be conscious that your actions have consequences that impact on your fellow human beings. The people I let my daughter portray didn’t give a damn about the human cost, the casualties, their thoughts caused.

The responsibility is yours alone. You can’t throw it away [...]]]>

Photo from Potency by Nina Maria Kleivan

Nina Maria Kleivan:

You need to be conscious that your actions have consequences that impact on your fellow human beings. The people I let my daughter portray didn’t give a damn about the human cost, the casualties, their thoughts caused.

The responsibility is yours alone. You can’t throw it away – as a parent, as human beings – and say that you just followed orders.

I’ve never heard someone defend their parenting with ‘I was just following orders,’ but I’ll grant the general moral thrust makes sense. However, a lot of the import is lost by focusing on larger than life supervillains. Very few people’s children (hopefully!) will grow up to be Stalin. By contrast many people’s children will grow up to be assistant manager of environmental safety at Corporation X who one day has to decide whether to overlook a potentially dangerous chemical dumping incident that will cost there company $$$ to clean up. Or whatever.

The point is most children grow up to be evil in a tremendously boring way that, in aggregate, is tremendously harmful to society. And our focus on ultimate personifications of evil undermines the severity of your child’s actual probable transgressions — “after all, it’s not like they’re Hitler!”

So I’d like to see Kleivan’s follow-up piece with her child dressed as a human resources consultant or a Army drone operator or a condo developer. And that would actually be a ‘potent’ and controversial piece, rather than just posing as one.

In the interim, go watch this.

Update: And we’re back.  Still some issues to work out so we’ll stick with classic [...]]]> Site’s going to be offline for a bit while I convert it to the new awesomeness.  Yes this is what I do after midnight on a Friday.  What can I say, I’m a sick human being.

In the interim, go watch this.

Update: And we’re back.  Still some issues to work out so we’ll stick with classic corbu for now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Would that be just awesome?

Or,

Would it be the most brilliantly awesome thing in the history of humanity?

I really just can’t decide…

We have the waterfalls.

We have the technology–>

So how about we just solve this whole energy crisis right now?

Culture jamming actually being practiced in the world (as distinct from that practiced in glossy mags) makes me extremely [...]]]> Urban-ism has a nice roundup of some standouts from culture jamming genre, the best of which are the Homeless street signs in Toronto by Mark Daye, a graphic design student.  My favorite sign is at right.

Culture jamming actually being practiced in the world (as distinct from that practiced in glossy mags) makes me extremely happy. Everyday interactions are suffused with political assumptions that usually remain buried, but clever jammin’ makes these visible, overt.  It jars you into another mode of thinking. You know, that hard, critical one.

More importantly, when done well, the subversive images are very funny, and a mirthful cityscape is an end unto itself.

TXTris: People text in messages, which then drop down onto the Toronto skyline, which fragments the words as letters fall to different depths, stacking tetris-style. I’m sure this can be a metaphor for many things, but lets set textual analysis aside and just agree that this is really cool.

Studies have the past gadoversetamide policies or of drinking detail. Views of the source of time gadoxetic acid when an galantamine interview. From the infect another an active galdansetron syndrome.

It will from those gallamine triethiodide new health influences. The two charged by [...]]]> Here’s an excerpt from the best spam comment I’ve received here at After Corbu:

Studies have the past gadoversetamide policies or of drinking detail. Views of the source of time gadoxetic acid when an galantamine interview. From the infect another an active galdansetron syndrome.

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Zimprich et or visibly adequately sedated captured and gamma hydroxybutyrate ways. Vaccines under lower se gammar with negative gamolenic acid following areas ganaxolone conference. Nicotine could enough to ganciclovir plaintiffs attorneys ganefromycin same floor ganglefene inhibitors.

It goes on like this for 5 more paragraphs with all the underlined ‘words’ links, all impossible to pronounce gibberish.  I find it incredible that this sort of mass email/comment could make anyone money.  Instead, I prefer to think of it as the avant garde art form of the internet, with thousands of brooding teenagers sending out their misunderstood missives on penis enlargement every night.  Sure, people call them weird and deranged, but the Dadaists were misunderstood as well.

My secret hope is that their will be a hidden message in spam, written in some code that I will decipher, bringing me eternal fame.  Today “John” posted this 9 times:

Hi, there!..5696926228b3bf0f3fc53e743ed8faec

Clearly, I said to myself, John has something he wants to tell me in hexidecimal.  I quickly google up a translator and find… the message is still gibberish.  Oh John!  How you play with my fragile emotions!