Asia's Rise: the West's demise?

asia is turning out to be a big pain in the ass to the, ahem, west. why are the coolest countries in the world, with so much "power", beginning to fear the third world and developing asian nations?

unfortunately, the answer is more of a retrospective. history's habit of repeating itself is what seems to be Asia's power. we might be wintessing the second 'funky 60s' very soon indeed. with a booming majority of the expanding population between 18 and 25, the asians can more than overcome any hurdles through mere quantity of workforce. best part is, they also have quality on their side.

the west has always undermined the asian intellect. now's payback time.

armed with open minds and determination, the asian youth's drive, intelligence and innovative capabilities are a force to be reckoned with. with the next dot com boom around the corner with web2.0, and an outsourcing industry already depriving the west of jobs, south asia's only doing too well. will it last?

Guerilla see, Guerilla do

What was originally a form of displaying disrespect to predominant authority is now the 'coolest' new kid on the media block. ad agencies coin any untried form of advertising 'guerilla' these days.

wikipedia defines the term as follows:
Guerrilla (also called a partisan) is a term borrowed from Spanish (from "guerra" meaning war) used to describe small combat groups. Guerrilla warfare operates with small, mobile and flexible combat groups called cells, without a front line. Guerrilla warfare is one of the oldest forms of asymmetric warfare. Primary contributors to modern theories of guerrilla war include Mao Zedong, Wendell Fertig, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara....

so guerilla marketing is the bastard son of the then innovative guerilla warfare. why coin new terms to solve old problems?

in all probability, the first cave paintings were frowned upon by cave-society. grafitti artists, or taggers are prosecuted for defacing public property. these artists are far ahead of the advertisers. they take their art to where it really matters. in new york, LA and detroit, you will see sexy anti-AIDS and anti-political advertising on street walls. even awesome branding concepts. beautifully executed, with amazing attention to detail. sometimes spanning whole lengths of streets. whats illegal/shameful to some is 'art' to others.

no wonder, trendwhore designers these days take a spraypaint splatter or a funky 'drip' [see above] to spruce up their web-pages or ad layouts. looks good, don't it? take out that dormant spraycan and deface a road sign today.

The Attention Deficit Generation

first, there was radio. it was good.

then came the TV. and f*ed up radio's scene. its still around. the mindless media machine. while radio only occupied human ears, TV occupies almost all our important senses. screw the smell and taste and touch. would you really smell/taste/touch when your eyes and ears were completely occupied with a barrage of audiovisual violence, sex and other interesting content, aiming at documenting reality? if reality was so sexy, i'd be really happy to walk around peddling narcotics, with a gun in my pocket to take out anyone bothering me.

then came the net. brilliant technology. it lets me tell you all this, right? for some time, it was good. then, media [read: advertising] came and f*ed it up for the net. with a media so instantly gratifying as the net, the advertisers had to come up with new strategies to capture the attentions of poor, info-overloaded minds. their products are the pop-ups, the banners, the spam, the interactive flash ads, and all other kinds of crap.

finally, advertisers have succeeded in numbing the minds of generations of educated folk. if they keep looking for ways to intrude our consciousness, there will come a day when they'll be left selling their products to themselves.

and what happened to all the real creativity? the only creative people left are, i truly believe, tiny little kindergarten children. for many of them have yet to be destroyed by advertising. bring on the play-doh.

Freedom and Money

the best things in life come cheap. or better, free.

im posting this on a free blog. google has given us the opportunity to freely publish any thoughts. it may be politically incorrect / blasphemous. freedom itself is free. especially after the advent of the WWW.

information wants to be free, said Bruce Sterling in the book the Hacker Crackdown [this was the best seller he distrubuted freely, online]. sterling is considered to be one of the planet's foremost technology wirters. he now writes regularly for Wired if he isn't giving a keynote speech at some geekfest. this free informations exists. information always exists. its just naive to think nobody knows. anything can be found on google. provided you know where to look.

one might think google's the noblest- what with the sole puropse of "organising the world's knowledge". why are they doing it? question upon question upon question can make google the scariest corporation ever.

they've invested in brainpower. not in technology. what started as a college project is now making the likes of Microsoft and Skype and Yahoo shit in their tight, formal pants. they've invented new technology to get around problems. theres 'GFS' a distributed filesystem. there s google maps. theres google sms. theres gmail. theres google pages. theres 'AdSense'. see the little ads by gooooooooogle thingy on the bottom right, below the links? this thing reads whatever is posted here and puts relevant text ads in the box. so if i put a paragraph about a particular model of a laser printer, that box would probably sell one to you. scary.

the terms and conditions from google's services, if read carefully doesn't really tell us about what happens to deleted accounts. basically, if i use gmail all the time, i can be pretty sure that google knows me inside-out. even after i delete my mail account. what gives me comfort is the fact that google is hardly dangerous. they gave me free email. and a free blog service. unlimited space, almost. almost no ads. so why should i care? google knows millions of people inside out. respectable. cool.

the best things really are free. but freedom is, again, relative. free of money doesn't mean free of cost, right? if a global catastophe arises, i'll know i should goto google for help. for they'll really know.

Aeon's Flux

seen aeon flux yet? the makers of this slick sci-fi flick have taken the original, brilliant, anime series by Peter Chung, and repurposed it with hot, hot charlize theron for us to trip on.

the story is set in a dystopia- this beautiful, futuristic city called 'bregna'. i say dystopia, because despite the fact that the city's beautiful, the inhabitants face great pains [constructed reality, yadaya, yes- like the matrix] and try to make sense of the world around them.

thats all i'm gonna reveal, for the benefit of those who haven't seen it yet. the film is filled with brilliant gimmicks from the anime, like the blades of grass, tommy-gun like trees that shoot spikes from fruit pods, water with colloidal particles that send messages from another person straight into the brain, bio- implants that enhance human functions like a zoom eyeball, implanted telecommunications. the arsenal of sci-fiism is killer. a must-see movie for action and charlize theron freaks.

but again. taking something classic and repurposing it has its limits. they've represented peter chung's vision well. but they haaad to overdo it. sigh.

click on the image to get a hi-res version from my DeviantArt page. its' a desktop wallpaper.

Why we can't be Let to Be

we all dream of doing crazy things. some of us go and do these crazy things. some of us keep them in their dream-like states. now what differentiates dreamers from dream-doers is what makes the difference.

see. the dreamers come up with stuff that the non-dreamers call, very often, 'crazy'. now this might seem crazy only to the non-dreamer who has no clue of the dreamers' original dream. for instance, galileo was put behind bars for blasphemy. the non-dreamers used religion as an excuse to prosecute the innocent. our world is full of such troubles. this galileo thing couldnt possibly have been the last time someone's been in trouble for his/her insight. edison? same scene. einstein? same scene. poor, poor, poor buggers.

the non-dreamers? they're good people too. their only problem is probably narrow-mindedness. these fellas cant see the dream. because society wants the people to conform. conformity kills dreams.

when will we learn to shun society? will we ever?

I Hate CSS

What i thought was going to be a simple task has turned into a monster i hate playing with. this damn blog will never comply. to my wishes that is. i've been editing the code on and off for days now. this officially sucks.

Does anyone know how to fix the comments section? i need to make everything appear in the DesignScience template. no blogger bullshit. i've succeeded in getting rid of the blogger bar. how do i rid of the 'floating' text? which part of the code controls the comments bit?

sorry, i dunno CSS. anyone who can help will be very welcome.