How To Blow Up A Pipeline – Official Trailer – In Theaters April 7

A crew of young environmental activists execute a daring mission to sabotage an oil pipeline in this taut and timely thriller that is part high-stakes heist, part radical exploration of the climate crisis.

On The Nameless Episode I

Julian Langer and I often haunt the same spaces. Julian is writing a story, the first chapter of which is here. It resonates with similar forest spirit themes I am working with these days. Looking forward to more in the future.

Click to access julian-langer-on-the-nameless-episode-i.pdf

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

As the U.S. deals with a nationwide swatting wave, Motherboard has traced much of the activity to a particular swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram. Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations.

LINK: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7z8be/torswats-computer-generated-ai-voice-swatting

Hundreds of teenagers flood into downtown Chicago, smashing car windows, prompting police response

Hundreds of teenagers flooded into Downtown Chicago on Saturday night, smashing car windows, trying to get into Millennium Park, and prompting a major police response. A woman whose car was smashed by people jumping on the windshield said her husband was beaten as he sat in the driver’s seat. Police were escorting tourists and others back to their cars in the Millennium Park garage.

The Savage Reservation

Refusing the Total SystemThe Savage Reservation

Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?’ asked Bernard.

The Savage nodded. ‘I ate civilisation.’

The Machine is like an exotic gemstone unveiled before us, laid out on a cloth of black velvet. At first we gasp, then we wonder. What is this miracle? Where did it come from? Who made it? It glisters in the daylight in ways which our best artists cannot capture. The Machine glisters and it makes promises.

I will save you, it says. And then: I will become you. Entwined, we will go forward together. We have always been together. You need me.

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Xen The Zen Of The Other – The Audio Drama, Free Version

As is my custom, after a year of commercially making Xen: The Zen of the Other audio drama commercially available, I am releasing the entire bundle for free on Archive.org and Youtube. It is released with a Creative Commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International. You may download and listen to it, share it, or post it, as long as it is not for commercial purposes, with no changes and full attribution to the source. Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ezra-buckley-xen-the-zen-of-the-other-audio
Youtube: A personal downloadable version

Reviews and more info

‘Serpent’ serial killer Charles Sobhraj freed from Nepalese prison

French national suspected of murdering western backpackers on the hippie trail in 1970s and 80s

Charles Sobhraj is escorted by Nepalese police at a district court hearing in June 2014. Photograph: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images
Charles Sobhraj is escorted by Nepalese police at a district court hearing in June 2014. Photograph: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

Charles Sobhraj, the French serial killer known as “the serpent” who targeted western backpackers on the hippie trail in the 1970s, has walked free from a jail in Nepal after he was given early release.

Sobhraj, 78, had been serving a life sentence after he was convicted in 2004 for the murder of an American tourist, Connie Jo Bronzich, in 1975. In 2014, Sobhraj was also convicted of killing her Canadian companion, Laurent Carrière.

Sobhraj, who is a French citizen of Indian and Vietnamese descent, walked out of a high security jail in Kathmandu on Friday morning, after a court ruling this week that ordered his release on the grounds he had served 75% of his sentence and his health was ailing.

READ ENTRE ARTICLE: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/23/serpent-serial-killer-charles-sobhraj-freed-from-nepalese-prison

Bank robbery as performance art? Why a thief may have made a masterpiece

In stealing $1,000 and calling it artwork, Joe Gibbons assaulted reality like a Dadaist poet – or The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin

Bank robbery as performance art? Why a thief may have made a masterpiece
Bank robbery: crime or performance art masterpiece? Photograph: Igor Stevanovic/Alamy

Performance art is a kind of madness. Its greatest exponents in their greatest works often seem on the edge of some psychotic meltdown in which reality itself is exposed as a cosmic lunacy. Think of Chris Burden getting himself shot in the arm, or Vito Acconci masturbating under an art gallery floor. Or go right back to the origins of performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 when the Dadaist poet Hugo Ball babbled inchoately at the nighthawks of Zurich.

When you think of this history – and let’s not forget the riots deliberately induced by Futurist Evenings before the first world war – it seems reasonable to claim that not only was film-maker Joe Gibbons genuinely staging “performance art” when he robbed a New York City bank, as he claimed, but that it was some kind of masterpiece.

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/15/bank-robbery-performance-art-joe-gibbons

Analysis of “Joker”

The Joker Tried To Warn You

I: Introduction

Joker is a 2019 supervillain origin story film directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. Though based on the DC comic book character, this film takes many liberties with the story material by creating a background for the Joker that has hitherto been kept deliberately mysterious.

The notion of him starting out as a failed comedian comes from Batman: The Killing Joke, but other elements come from two Martin Scorsese films starring Robert De Niro—Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. This origin story nonetheless can be reconciled with the comic book canon somewhat in that, given how the story is told from the Joker’s point of view, and given his psychotic penchant for mixing fantasy with reality, he is an unreliable narrator; so it hardly matters if events in the movie contradict those of the comic books.

Phoenix’s performance deservedly won him the Best Actor Oscar. For her plaintive, brooding cello soundtrack, Hildur Guðnadóttir won the Best Original Score. The film itself has also been praised (with nominations for such Oscar categories as Best Picture and Best Director), in spite of such controversies as the baseless fear that its sympathetic portrayal of a mentally-ill loner, who shoots people, would inspire incel murders. Actually, the film–despite Phillips’s denial of having intended any political message–is clearly presenting a drama of class war.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

 

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