Sdtrk: ‘Anti 12/12/90’ by Emil Beaulieau

I do (sorta) try to pay attention to this sort of thing, but when the hell did ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ break the 600k visitor mark?? I mean, that totally slipped one past the keeper. Huh!
Well, thanks to all of you! Do come back for more of the same!

Sdtrk: ‘V of IV’ by Pauline Oliveros

Even though I’m sure most of you are just trawling my blog for photos of Dolls, or looking for info about muntjac deer — seriously, I’ve had a shedload of hits across the past couple of months thanks to people typing deer, muntjac deer, deer hit by car, etc into Google — I do want to say Thank You for stopping round to ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’, particularly to those of you who take a few moments to comment. Hope you lot had a satisfying Thanksgiving (US only), and here’s to another 500,000 hits! *raises glass*

Sdtrk: ‘High speed flight’ by Daphne Oram

Now were it not for The Great ‘Shouting Etc Etc’ Blackhole that happened on the 30th of last December — I thought I could upgrade WordPress without the use of a clever plugin, but Fate had other plans in store — this would’ve been posted earlier. But I’m fairly sure no-one would have noticed, what with all the New Year’s Eve revelry taking place. So all according to plan, then! *strokes chin*

A week or so previous to My Personal Blogpocalypse, alert reader Azusa brought another artist to my attention recently: his name is Yoshitaka Hyodo, and he works almost exclusively with CandyGirls. You simply can’t go wrong with Dolls as your photo models!

‘Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve got us both into’

Contrary to all appearances, this place rated five stars in the Michelin guide

The above pics are from his series, ‘Haruna’s Room‘. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge of this bloke! There’s no English on his site, and it’s mostly text, so I wouldn’t even know which block of kanji to translate in order to find out more. I should point out that that link might be not safe for work, incidentally, but as I always say, it depends on where you work. Perhaps you work at Orient industry, which would be an eerie/amusing coincidence! If that’s the case, then… would you like to help me translate some text??

And continuing the Orient industry-related vibe of this post, you may not recall back during February of 2009, I’d mentioned an artist by the name of Becky Yee, who was exhibiting a photo-essay of hers entitled ‘More than a Woman’ at a New York gallery, which would be the results of having spent time with esteemed iDollator ta-bo-san, taking photos of his cadre of affictitious girls. I’d managed to locate an interview conducted by the website Bongoût, which is an interesting wee read.

Bongoût: How did you connect with this particular collector?

Yee: I frequented a fan website for Dutch wives. Writing undercover, I played the role of a connoisseur of dolls, and got an intimate glimpse inside the head of these men.
The site first originated as a place to go for advice, including maintenance, such as cleaning and repair for your doll. There are chat groups you can join where men will swap stories of how to fix a doll if you break her arm or leg since there is no shops to repair them.

I met many men through this site, but the most interesting to me was the one I decided to work with. He is educated, successful, and career driven. So why is there a need to have Dutch wives? And not just one, but 70 or 80!?

After speaking with him, I learned that he is a spokesman for his cause. He desired to see the flipping of his sub-culture, to have it become acceptable to the public. This is why he agreed with interviews, and was willing to share his story as long as I did not show his face.

Bongoût: At this point, who is it that he can speak with openly about his lifestyle?

Yee: He only speaks openly with the people he meets online. And of course, it takes time for him to build up trust before he would meet anyone in person. However, he has quite a network of men, and some evenings they all meet out at a restaurant and bring their Dutch wives along.
the entire article is here

Finally, surely you lot must know by now that Abyss creations will be unveiling their newest lass in the Wicked RealDoll line? That’s right, now you can have an artificial Kaylani Lei reclining on your furniture at home, small as life (she’s 4’11”), and twice as rubbery.

Being 70 lbs and only three apples high makes her easy to take anywhere

If we were to witness a Jell-O wrestling match between a CandyGirl and a Kaylani Lei RealDoll, who do you think would win? Apart from all of us, that is

Sdtrk: ‘My time’ by Ann Steel

I would like to blame Twitter, and the prevailing weather conditions, and preparing for a cluster of iDollator-related interviews for my tardiness. Cos without PB Shelley mentioning a couple of days ago that ‘Shouting etc etc’ was on the verge of hitting the 400,000 hits mark, I honestly wouldn’t have noticed! Well, I’d have noticed later. Thank you sir, and thank you, the viewers / readers / data miners that visit this blog so very, very often! Thanks, visitors! Thisitors.*

Up next: the latest instalment of ‘Any Synthetiks-related news, Davecat?’, some catching up on the ‘This was the Future’ series, and some posts reporting on some things that Sidore and I may or may not be doing in a media-related context. Yes. All this, and so much more!**

Once again, thanks to the lot of you for stopping round! As blessed, temperate Autumn approaches, we should be back to a normal posting schedule! Whatever that may mean, exactly. Nevertheless, happy Friday the 13th!

*with a tip of the hat to Peter Serafinowicz
**the definition of ‘more’ being, of course, entirely relative

Sdtrk: ‘I see, so I see so’ by Broadcast and The Focus group

Earlier today, I peeked through the blinds outside, and checked my calendar, and it appears that yes, it’s about time for the Q4 Davecat Writer’s Block! Which would explain why I’ve not written anything, really, since the last two posts. Technically speaking, ‘Micromoscow‘ doesn’t count, as I completed that in the summertime, and ‘Answer the Question, Mr A. Rorschach‘ was actually started round this time last year. I’ve always said that we here at Deafening silence Plus work at tectonic speeds; people chuckle and think I’m kidding, but it’s no joke, more’s the pity.
And I’m sure you’ll ruefully note that there wasn’t any ‘Any Doll/Synthetik news…?’ entry for last month? That’s cos I was simply out of it as far as writing, to be honest. It was literally a case of there was so much to report on, that my brain just kinda shut down due to information overload — a lot happened that month as far as affictitous companions, and I couldn’t effectively tackle it. So what that means is that you’ll get reports on breaking news that get reported several weeks after the news broke! My saving grace is that most of the people that read ‘Shouting etc etc’ aren’t involved in either the iDollator or technosexual communities, so it will genuinely be news to those of you who aren’t. Yessir, that would be a cop-out answer!

Now to other ephemeral bits of interest that aren’t embarrassingly late! Today, one of my favourite personalities would’ve turned 79 today, the eerily prescient writer JG Ballard.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
— Interview in Metaphors No. 7, 1983

Coincidentally enough, his birthday happens to fall one day after the birthdays of two other people I’m keen on. Turning a distinguished 70 years of age, you’ve got Wendy Carlos, the musical prodigy who revolutionised the use of analogue synthesisers, particularly through the albums ‘Switched-on Bach’, and of course the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A clockwork orange’; and, as SafeT put it, being in 37 years of operation would be yours truly.* I’m loping closer to 40, and that’s freaking me out. But I’m sure when I’m loping closer to 50, that’ll freak me out even more. I am lucky, however, to have friends and family that love me, and a very patient audience!
What’ll I do in the meantime, however? Get my head down, and get back to writing

*In the interest of full disclosure, he’d gotten my age wrong. The sentiment still stands though, I’m sure

Sdtrk: ‘F for fake’ by Wallpaper

*flips through stack of papers* According to my records, it seems that I’ve been using Twitter, the microblogging service everyone loves to hate, for exactly one year, which is a surprise to me as it is to you, more than likely. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d get that much use out of it! But it’s not a bad little service if you use it right, apart from all that timewasting I manage to do with it, when I could be writing legitimate posts. Ah heh.
It’s actually connected me with more than a few fab individuals with similar interests; or, at the very least, people who are willing to put up with me going on about how I’ll be joining the lads for another tokusatsu-watching session, or whatever videogame that’s captured our collective fancies that eve. Also, I like to view my Twitter feed as like the secret Davecat Fan Club newsletter of sorts, cos with it, I can share stuff with my followers that might not necessarily get posted to ‘Shouting etc etc’, or, thanks to this blog’s WP-to-Twitter plugin, they’re always the first to know of any new posts that get published, which they can ignore at their leisure.

One of the personalities I follow is actor and writer Stephen Fry, a man who has been likened to a contemporary Oscar Wilde due to his breezy and witty approach to things, wrote a post to his blog in defence of Twitter:

The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds. Apparently, according to Pears (the soapmakers presumably – certainly their “study” is froth and bubble) 40% of Twitter is “pointless babble”, (http://is.gd/2mKSg) which means of course that a full 60% of Twitter discourse is NOT pointless babble, which is disappointing. Very disappointing. I would have hoped 100% of Twitter was fully free of earnestness, usefulness and commercial intent.
the rest of the article is here

Twitter does a rather good job of conveying information and ideas in a pretty expedient and fun manner. You can keep your Mybook or your Facespace; I’ll stick with the birds instead.

Speaking of Wilde, yes, I’m reading my copy of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism‘ again, as it’s a fantastic essay. Also, I’m in need of new books.

A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.

Try to tell me he’s wrong! Try to tell him he’s wrong! The answer is simple:
you can’t

Sdtrk: ‘Tangier’ by Blues control

In a recent sifting through the World Wide Wet, looking for more Synthetiks-related crap to write about, I’d spotted this empathetic viewpoint on a site called Fantasy Book Critic; it’s an interview with author David Weber. To be honest, I didn’t read it in its entirety, but the section reprinted below caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

HRP-4C, in an introspective moment

I read somewhere that Japan recently unveiled the HRP-4C, a life-like female robot that can walk, talk, and smile. Do you foresee a time when robots will be so lifelike that we will have difficulty determining whether or not robotic beings have “souls?”

I don’t think it’s a question of how lifelike a robot is — that is, whether or not it’s a humanoid shape that walks, talks, and smiles. To me, as I think I indicated above, the thing that we call a “soul” really has nothing at all to do with appearances or anthropomorphic physical attributes. It has to do with recognition and the internalization of the concept of self and with that self’s recognition of responsibilities. Of its willingness — and ability — to make decisions for itself. To choose between alternatives on a basis other than an automated, pre-programmed decision tree.

In that respect, I think it’s entirely possible that we’ll ultimately see a time in which artificial intelligences, whether they happen to reside inside a “robot” or not, demonstrate what I would think of as a soul. At the same time, I strongly suspect that we’re going to find it’s more difficult to create that concept of self in a human-designed machine (whether it’s electronic or biological) than a lot of people have assumed over the years.

As far as machines with souls are concerned, I think one of the things that always drew me to Keith Laumer’s Bolos was that despite the fact that they’d been programmed and designed towards a specific end, as machines of war, they made choices. There can be no heroism, unless the possibility of cowardice exists. There can be no true virtue, unless the door is also open to self-centered egoism and corruption. There can be no true growth, unless we make decisions, abide by the consequences, and learn from experience.

I remember a conversation I had once with a man who had won the Navy Cross as a fighter pilot during World War II. He told me that he’d never considered himself a hero. Despite the fact that he was a multiple ace, he said, he really hadn’t understood the concept of heroism until he watched a 19-year-old seaman on his aircraft carrier charge into a roaring gasoline fire in dungarees and a T-shirt to pull a pilot and a rear gunner out of a blazing dive bomber with a full load of machine gun ammunition and a 2,000 pound bomb still strapped to its belly. That kid got the pilot out, at the expense of horrendous burns over half his own body, and he chose to do it. It wasn’t his job — he wasn’t even assigned to the flight deck division — but he decided that it was his responsibility.

I think the day will come when a machine intelligence — a genuine machine intelligence — will be capable of making that same sort of decision. And when that day comes, if it makes the equivalent of the decision that 19-year-old made, I think we’ll have no choice but to admit that that machine has a soul.
the rest of the article is here

I’ve never heard of the bloke before, but I rather like the way he thinks…
You’ve probably seen this already, as it made its way round the Series of Tubes during my Holiday from Blogging, but we have the first recorded instance (from 2008) of robots kissing. Onward and upward!

While at the IEEE-sponsored International Conference on Service and Interactive Robotics (SIRCon) 2009, IEEE Spectrum scored an interview with the developers of theatrical robots Thomas and Janet, who they claim are the first kissing humanoid robots.

The first kiss happened back on 27 December 2008, during a robotic performance of several scenes of Phantom of the Opera at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (known as Taiwan Tech). Chyi-Yeu Lin, a mechanical engineering professor, directed the performance in front of a packed house of about 400. The overcrowded auditorium burst out in a resounding cheer when Christine (played by Janet) and the Phantom (played by Thomas) kissed.
the rest of the article is here

Granted yes; I realise that they look awkward — the movements are still somewhat stilted — but as I always say in these situations, you don’t start out with the finished product. The developers will continue to work on them, and Synthetiks will become better, both in movements and appearance. Of course, once they get them to move like Organiks, as well as look like modern high-end ‘love dolls’, then the world will be a better place. Fact.

One more brief related thang: recently, I’ve made the acquaintance of a rather fab individual by the name of JM, who runs a blog called Synthetically Yours. As he describes himself as ‘someone who is both intrigued by and sympathetic to iDollatry’, his posts mainly feature a clinical-yet-humourous look at various aspects of being an iDollator, and it’s a site definitely worth checking out. Go ye forth, and peer at it.

And as a coda, here’s an amusing result from my site stats, from back in August. I present it without comment, as anything I could possibly add might well incriminate me