3 Items for a Monday

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It's Monday, but don't worry about it, it's almost over. And there's been some exciting developments around the world and across the solar system that may reaffirm you're faith in the value of being alive all weekdays, Monday included. I'm going to list some now, but if you don't feel particularly inspired by them I refute any responsibility for your continued hatred of the work week and the rest of existence.

Item 1: Vintage Science Fiction Magazine Omni has been released on Archive.org

Founded in 1978 by co-founders Kathy Keeton and Penthouse publisher Bob Giuccione, Omni Magazine was a monthly collection of science news, science fiction, science speculation, with some spiritual / paranormal fuckery mixed in for finishing. This publication had consistently on-point cover art, original fiction by some of the most famous names inside and outside of genre fiction, and a hedonistic enthusiasm for the bizarre future they knew would soon devour their culture. They were the original publisher's of stories by William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, William S. Burroughs, and also had a hand in popularizing H.R. Giger's paintings.

There are a lot of issues up, and I barely had a chance to look at any of it. Topicly they can be everywhere, but the same theme pervades: the psycho-social effects of knowledge and technology on our fragile little societies. I need to take a day and a six pack to look through it as much as possible. Who knows what kind of tech-anxieties and science dreams we've forgotten about that are waiting there for us to find again.


Item 2: We landed a thing on a fucking comet seven months ago and that shit's finally working!

I'm using "we" very lightly so you can feel like you did something. You didn't do shit, and if you're in America or any other non-European non-member state (with the exception of Canada) you did even less. This comet lander was the product of the European Space Agency, or ESA. To ensure conspiracy theorists have enough to occupy their time, the lander was named after an ancient Egyptian obelisk which, along with the Rosetta stone, helped humanity understand what the Egyptians were saying with all those little pictures.

It's news because one: The spacecraft didn't land where it was supposed to land, bounced a couple times and almost escaped the comets gravity altogether, then fizzled out of functionality for 7 months, before waking up a couple days ago fully functional and ready. Before it fell asleep it took some amazing pictures of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from a distance. I remember seeing these ominous photos a while ago and being amazed, and then being devastated that it looked like the mission was an almost complete waste due to a crash landing. So it's an inspirational comeback story.

And because two: As far as we can tell no one has landed on a comet before. That's important somehow. Here are a couple of those beautiful pictures:

Item 3: Better bullshit through technology

Have you ever wanted to invent a story and make it reality? Of fucking course you have, man. Thanks to flash-research in the age of Wikipedia and Google, you can almost sorta maybe do that, if enough people don't have the resources or interest to look into the facts. Yes, it happened, according to this article in The Kernel.

In 2002 a couple of movie nerds, haggard from from a day in the film industry and perhaps knocking back Belgian trippels at just the right pace, invented a man, a maniacal film director who's methods were toxic to his film crew's psychology. Their names were Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker. A venting session at a Belgian restaurant (in London) turned into an 11 year journey to turn this fictional psychotic director, dubbed Yuri Gayudkin, into a historical fact using Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and any other internet information channel available to them. Their hoax was so convincing, that a completely unassociated hopeful playwright was getting ready to pen a script about the entirely fictional auteur. He wrote to the author of a blog about Gayudkin, who was a friend of Boyter and Ducker, asking for more facts about Gayudkin, as "information is really sparse on the web." All of the information he needed was of course lodged firmly in Boyter and Ducker's asses.

Feel better yet?