This line, a social expression from Blade Runner, is an example of the genius of the genre. In case you weren't around in the 80s, it had by then become the post-post-modern cliche to part company with the phrase "Have a Nice Day." Both sincere and meaningless in its over-use, easy off-the-cuff parting-shot. What literally appears as an intention to bid pleasantries upon person becomes a signifier that culture had slipped into dystopia. Optimism IS pessimism, the double-think of Orwell's 1984 (now in 2017 thanks to Trumps inauguration as President has rapidly become the American best selling book of all time). Everybody has ended up hating 'nice'. What exactly does that word mean anyway? While on the topic, how significant is the suffix '-ration' in augers?*
"Have a better one" sums up that we are now in the post-nicety world, retaining the original nicety of intention by admitting to the shit we live in daily. The general common understanding, 'the level' as Masons describe it, is now the wry cynical irony which is not quite yet bitchy satire. Perhaps it is but even so we have shifted over: yesterdays bitch is today's common sense practicality simply because of Normalization. Nice and Normal.
In the distraction of escapist fiction we identify with the dystopian situations of the Protagonist because it helps us to come to terms with our own. We find solace in familiarity and there is a bitter-sweet brutal-soft comfort in that. Because our generation had it hard.
Technology was the stained glass window citadel promising A Better Tomorrow if we can only get through today. Better than facing up to the depression of futility.
It changes, inevitably. In the 80s "cyberpunk" was all about integration with the machine through cosmetic consumer cyber-augmentation. In the 80s most people did not own what we now call 'computers'. The media told us we needed strap-on digital watches. People owned pocket calculators. A thing which can do what your desktop can do would occupy a whole floor of an office block. The word 'tablet' had not been invented yet. The memory size of desktop computers was measured in kilobytes. Virtual Reality was the promise of tomorrow.
It was about synthesis, replacement, although (outside of the pharmacology and petro-chemical industries which now monopolize lifestyle) that theme did not truly emerge as its own stronghold until the 90s. By the late 90s enough people had desktop computers that you knew someone who had one, or had one yourself. Their memory size was measured in megabytes. Most kids had game consoles the memory size of which measured in kilobytes. Augmented reality was the promise of tomorrow.
Linden Labs opened the worlds premier Virtual Reality platform SecondLife on June 23,2003. By 2013 Second Life had approximately 1 million regular users.** It was 2015 before Virtual Reality Headsets became a viable consumer commodity. The Oculus Rift headsets sold out just 14 minutes after being made available.***
So here we are almost in the 2020s and it is a long way from Cyberpunk2020. What cyberpunk did not foresee is that enough thought, energy and finances would be invested into cleaning up the shit left by generations of 20th century industrial consumerism that despite the oil and nuclear spills, our energy needs will be provided by ecological sources. The transition out of 80s cyberpunk and into post-millennial solarpunk (eco-punk) is occurring. Elon Musk's cost effective solar-panel roof-tiles will guarantee this even if the drive toward free energy technology is not occurring on a corporate scale because humanity has not yet proved itself responsible enough to deal with that.
Are we yet at that stage? No not quite. The oceans are full of plastic which has irreparably destroyed large parts of aquatic ecologies. The oceans are contaminated with nuclear fallout from the Fukishima disaster which has still not been plugged and is worse now than when I began writing this blog. Technologies are being (slowly, too damn slowly) developed to fix radiation by genius scientists such as John Hutchinson and his pioneering work into Scalar physics.
We are still living within "have a better one" because there is still a lot of work to do. Yet we can now see a light at the end of the tunnel, something which did not exist previously within the classic Cyberpunk milieu. The despair is lifting. We are aiming to achieve our grandkids regularly saying "Having a good one."
Cyberpunk as a genre is retro at its default setting. When it drops the dystopian outlook it becomes something else. Post-cyberpunk which is currently being described as Solarpunk due the focus on free energy technologies and ecological sustainability. The 1990s/2000s millennial rising awareness that permaculture is necessary for sustainability has two facets. That we are self responsible pioneers and do it for ourselves is made almost impossible because of state control, land ownership and poverty. That mass-produced consumerism is, because of the overriding rule of 'convenience culture' is mainstream Human lifestyle by default setting' going to be how it happens for most people. The new wave of eco-corporations will be instituting ecological sufficiency for us in such a way as to make it easy. It didn't happen overnight which "the hippies and crusties" have been trying to do since the 70s. Transition takes generations. The transition of attitude is no exception.
Femri radio-telescope 5-year view of Gamma emissions with constellations
"When the Time is Right" Bryan Charleywood
The Kohl Club is a magickal place. The masonic forms obeyed have manifest as a specific grid with allocatable references. It is an experiment but it is also by process, mastery.
It occupies a mathematical precision which resonates through mass-time (space and event). This harmony is a grid, a vortice. Kohl Club exists in a digital dream of Virtual Reality. It exists in all visitors to it, to whom it is connected energetically.
Comprehension of importance of number 7 in our practical working context can be found HERE. The symbol 7 is of import for it mirrors Gamma: together these two components form a Tau Cross, the column as direct path to Horizon. As Ankh: to Divinity symbolized as Circle of wholeness.
Observation that 70 viewers observed the original Kohl Club blog within its first 21 minutes, then 170 observers viewed it within its first 13 hours.
This weekend Friday the 13th followed by SaturnDay the 14th (7+7). Tomorrow 3x5=15th will be SunDay (in our context of 'Black and Gold' this will be JoveDay). Alignments. We can recognize the grid and those who dance it, those who conform to it, and those who avert it (three castes). Catalysts and Slaves.
This filler blog is waffle about the excitement of getting somewhere recently having been developing the Kohl Club VR build texturally and it's fittings. It exists as a link between esoteric subject matter of recent blogs and how they 'inspire' my art. This alone justifies its existence.
The Kohl Club is a goth nightclub influenced by Aegyptian magickal ritual of the Hermetic school (astro-numerology).
So here we are about to enter 2016, which according to the Mayan Calendar I go by is Year 3 given that 2013 was Year Zero like the NIN album which has my dads house and Zooport city on its cover.
I entered the Gregorian millennium having graduated with Honors from Cheltenham School of Art, University of Gloucester with a BA (hons) degree in the Fine Arts. It was the culmination of seven years of academic study including two years National Diploma (Distinction grade) preceding three years at Uni (and of course two years of Art GCSE grade A).
Contrary to allegations I was not in prison during that time - I have never been to prison although I have on several occasions been illegally imprisoned under duress due to policing methods and hate crime.
In the early noughties of the 21st century, along with two other guys one of whom recently retired college lecturer and BBC film editor as well as a member of the Magicians Circle, founded Underwood Studio Animation. The council gave us a grant with one hand and took it away with the other by conditionally renting us one of their expensive new facilities to use as our studio. Officially, the only people with keys to the facility were the security firm and ourselves. After months of arduous work, days before we were due to finish filming; the stop-frame animation camera’s and our film were stolen with no signs of a break-in. Police immediately closed the case as an unsolvable crime having written off industrial espionage.
Following this and Alan's death, I was living in a council flat. In one room I had art project, in one room I had music project. The music was the soundtrack to the movie which the art project was the set for. A sci-fi using puppets, something like thunderbirds because filming to video is quicker and much cheaper than digital. I made paper mache puppets and sewed their clothes by hand and using a sewing machine. They are rod puppets requiring two hands, one for the head and one for the body. A second person, or studied-training in using the hands and body at the same time, was required; these are custom designed. They looked crude but were meant to, painted paper pulp looks like scarred faces of people living in an acid rain environment. Everything was made from recycled materials but for thread, glue and the silver spraypaint all from poundland.
Despite and indeed due to over-qualifications, I was struggling on state benefits and could not afford to hire a cgi studio of my own given that the animation company had already recently received a grant from European Funding through the Welsh Assembly (and taken it back as a condition of accepting our proposal, to pay for the construction of yet another otherwise empty building). The complexity and the difference between what the EU say makes people eligible compared with what the WA say makes people acceptable would likely get the WA closed down for fraudulent behaviour were it ever looked into. This was fifteen years ago so it might have changed since then.
What little money I had went on electric to run the music machines and datacards. I wrote profusely into poundland notebooks with poundland biro's. The stories were sci-fi about people attempting to escape a grim city environment to the off-world colonies and generally failing because the police state. There was also magick rituals and daemonology involved in the running of the city by the city rulers; drug cartels and masons (typically the same entity). The only real hope was the main characters girlfriends heart, her attempts to build a nature garden and teach how to filter rain water.
When people heard what I was doing, they got jealous. They looked at my flat - breaking and entering regularly occurred - stressing me out completely. They covered their tracks by telling people I was insane. My parents told the police that I was on heroin, which I have never had anything to do with and never will. I am a qualified counsellor and friends of talented musical friends I was working with, got into heroin; so I got to know a few of them in a professional counsellor relationship. The social report is that I was having gay sex with street scum. It was more believable to the state professional abusers than that I am an artist attempting to make a film on zero budget - because they could collectively capitalize on victimizing me. The room of my flat with the art project, to them it looked like a trash collector. They totally ignored the movie sets which had been painted and the spaceships held up by invisible thread, they acknowledged only the boxes of unpainted, unglued empty boxes, bean tins, vacuum-formed food packaging, all the things everyone else recycles. I was collecting and washing broken plastic parts which looked to me like sci-fi city backdrops. The grit in my movie was real; unlike cgi grit which looks digital sleek and fake. It was all about atmosphere and they did not like it.
By the early 2010s I had got a computer to write in and do 2D photoshop. By 2013 I was fortunate enough to be able to replace it thanks to an anonymous donation from foreign investment, with one fast enough to access SecondLife Virtual Reality and awarded a Linden Endowment for the Arts grant to continue developing toward machinima. It is not what I wanted to be doing, I wanted to keep everything offline and make of real objects. Despite that I had the space to do it, society did not like what I was doing. Everything ended up in the bin except for a few select spaceships and the puppets. I went through psychiatric counseling for non-conformity to the consensus that I was a junky. Pun on the word junk. Had I refused counseling they would have sectioned me on hearsay. After a review they told me I do not require psychiatric counseling which is closer to a verdict of 'sane' than anyone else involved has got on paper.
The puppets were voodoo - myself and people I knew kept on meeting people who looked like the puppets. I had not based any of them on real people. The scripts were not originally based on real life events other than as loose inspiration. The more I focussed on what the stories should be about, the more shit my life got. Repeatedly stop and searched by the police who believed my parents allegations that I was shooting up. Never given the docket despite asking because with the number I would have collected I could have sued for harrassment. I have no problem with authorities at all - I do have a problem from abusers using job roles to get away with it. The cop crew began setting me up in all manner of ways, professionally which means a long-term intimidation campaign, they do not go for the jugular, they play mind games first because it prolongs the abuse. Wrongfully arrested repeatedly. I was insomniac, I was different. I was persecuted for desiring to achieve.
Eventually I dreadlocked my hair because it made no difference what I looked like and I wanted everyone to get to know me visually so that when I disappeared someone would ask questions as to where I had gone. I was being gang-stalked. I was a test-subject for LFO experiments; I could hear them regularly, I suffered all the symptoms. A man who fills his house with trash and hangs out with street people is evidently scum and therefore a perfect test subject for their experiments. People thought was paranoid and confused because I believed myself to be a film director and they believed me to be insane. This is the price for creative visionary in a control based society. I wrote scripts about this. My notebooks disappeared from the apartment. Five years later and some of my hand written my short stories were incorporated into episodes of Dr Who although I have no evidence of this. My audio recordings, the soundtracks, disappeared from the apartment. My musical instruments were damaged while I was out.
I was forced to go digital. Being online writing directly into social media platforms is an alibi. It changed my writing style and immediately reached an audience although no profit. I have been set up by the police and by sociopaths using the police so many times that I am used to it as lifestyle. I am no closer to making the tv series but I am now being published by a very well read internet sci-fi magazine. People know and recognize my logo and screen name. My own website has had a readership of over 150 different people per week for many months. I am getting famous now and this will increase in the future. It is coming in direct parallel to having nothing more to do with my abusive family and jealous neighbours. I am not showing off about this situation; merely using what popularity I currently have to tell people my life story - which incidentally warns about the south wales crime syndicate who I had no problem with whatsoever until they started gaming me.
What does the future hold?
I have had a dystopic life up until here. I want to be happy. I want to make enough money from my creativity to get off benefits and live in a self-sustaining community of positive, like-minded people who work together to achieve the goal. I want to have a healthy body. I want to feed my kids and dress ourselves in comfortable clothes. I want to feel safe living on this planet.
If I cut off my dreadlocks, the British state will respect me enough to give me European grants/loans funding, I have been told this by the people who dangle the carrot of golden goalposts here in Wales business circles. I question their criteria given that so far, my dreadlocks have acquired me not money but hardware and prestige wheras the council themselves have repeatedly refused to trade with me despite my qualifying. If I do earn more money than half the national average which is my current income status, then the British zombi public will respect me more although the corporates will continue to vampire me of money and soul. I have trained myself in Law and the legal system by using the internet so they don’t stand as much chance as they used to. I know what to say to police, solicitors and judges to protect myself and probably get half the trouble makers sacked from their jobs. I do not break any laws despite what the slander campaign and conspirators are saying about me. So far I have been to court four times (only once as defendant) and won every case so far as track record goes. Additionally I had a CAFCASS officer fired from duty in a family court proceedings. My sense of moral justice is that of an Indigo child. By the age of 30 my mental age was that of 40 according to the mental age test. It is a double-edged reward for honesty and experience.
I am having a cultural influence. This is the thing which frightens the ones who want to control others; that a guy like me is having a cultural influence. What frightens me is the extent to which they want to control my ability to harness shamanic power of creativity for their own capital gain. I do not trust them because; see above for the tip of the iceberg.
The sick thing is, in a few years from now when my tv series is airing and a television is programming people what to like and how to think as usual; all the nasty bastards who have abused me will be saying to each other; "I know him, he was lovely, I helped him on his way, I am so glad he finally made it." And my message of being excellent to one another will be entirely ignored by them even then.
'digital grit' VR custom texture and 3D shape by snakeappletree
