027 . Saturday Night Dope

I've been yesterday in Este for the gig of Dope Stars Inc. The band has just released the new album Gigahearts.

I still have to listen it all throught, but it seems very well produced and quite catchy (maybe too soft? I still have to listen it all till the end).
The show was nice but half of the band missing (Alex & Grace), replaced by substitutes. Ok, Este is not the WGT, but that sucked a bit, even if these guys played very well.

Btw, another interesting band, Adam (harsh EBM) was on stage. Check them out at their MYSPACE page. As far as I know, the debut cd will be released in a couple of months.

Later!

026 . A Game Of Powers

These days I'm reading Nobilis, a really impressive roleplay game directly inspired by Sandman. I know it's a bit OT, but if you are looking for something better than usual roleplay games and you're sick to death of Vampire, please, take a look to this great game. It's probably the best I've read since Kult came out.
From Wikipedia, a good description of the amazing setting:

"Nobilis draws on many sources, including Christianity and Norse mythology, but adds numerous unique details to its setting. Though the everyday world in the game appears much like our own, it is actually only the Prosaic Earth, a lie that the world told to itself in a desperate attempt to explain suffering, and a rationalized delusion which conceals the true reality that would plunge most mortals into madness: the Mythic Earth, an animistic world where everything has its own sentient spirit. In the Mythic, the earth is really flat, and hangs somewhere among the vast boughs of the "world-tree," Yggdrasil. Countless worlds dot the branches of this world-tree, but at the top is Heaven, which is inaccessible to all but the angels (only one human soul in a billion is not turned away) and is the source of all beauty. Beneath the earth, in the roots of Yggdrasil, is Hell, the source of all corruption. Around Yggdrasil, except above heaven (where it is open to the stars), is a mystical impenetrable curtain of blue flames known as the Weirding Wall.

Every class of objects and every concept is represented by a being of god-like power known as an Imperator. Each Imperator may govern from one to several of these Estates, and has effectively limitless control over them. The Imperators are engaged in a deadly struggle with the Excrucians, terrible beings from outside the Weirding Wall who wish to destroy reality; this struggle is known as the Valde Bellum. This war keeps Imperators busy in the Spirit World, so in order to maintain their affairs on Earth and in the other worlds they invest a shard of their soul in a human (or occasionally another animal or object), creating a Nobilis. Each Nobilis represents one of the Imperator's Estates; the group of Nobilis this forms, known as a Familia Caelestis, is typically loyal, both to each other and their Imperator.

The Imperator Lord Entropy oversees the actions of the Nobilis and enforces the Code Fidelitatis, the five laws he has established for them, in his Locust Court. The most notable and notorious of these, and the one most often broken, is the Windflower Law which states that no Noble is allowed to love another being. Ironically, Nobilis can turn other humans into Anchors, whose every action they can control, but in order to do this they must first love or hate the person.

To protect their physical forms from the ravages of the Valde Bellum, Imperators take a part of reality and partition it off into a self-contained, unique world which can take any form. This world, called a Chancel, both houses their physical bodies and is a spiritual reflection of it. Much like in the myth of the Fisher King, if the Imperator suffers, so does their Chancel.

Flowers have great significance to the Nobilis and their Imperators; earthly flowers are reflections of their heavenly counterparts and each has a meaning. For example, the gamemaster is known as the Hollyhock God because, in the world of Nobilis, hollyhocks represent vanity and ambition. This is because, according to the in-game story, the angels used flowers as a tool to control and direct the brunt of their powers when they created Reality. Each Nobilis and Imperator has a flower that represents them, and flowers are often used in their magical rites."

For the whole article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobilis

And, remember, the manual is FUCKING nice. Hard covered, weird size, excellent quality of graphics and drawings, amazing text. It even won the Best Graphic Presentation Book Format Product 2002. Check it out!

[ X + Y ] Singularity Upon Us!

"Although impressive in many respects, the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiological bandwidth for processing new information extremely limited compared to the exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base. Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes, not to mention the cumbersome maintenance rituals they require. While human intelligence is sometimes capable of soaring in its creativity and expressiveness, much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains.We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. We are now in the early stages of this transition."

This is an excerpt from Ray Kurtzweil "The Singularity is near". To read for free the first chapter, check this address:

ENGLISH

Italian translation here:

ITALIAN

I will order the book for sure (let's say after christmas, now getting undamaged stuff sent by post is basically impossible). Enjoy!