eldredge reloaded

 
With the video Jeffrey "cwtrain" Eldredge uploaded to YouTube yesterday, the story of the inverse tie-knots finally seems to have come to an end. In the video Jeffrey demonstrates exactly ↵the sequence I had come up with on 19 October 2008. This knotting-sequence I had christened 'Eldredge Variant,' because all I did was adding two through-the-loop moves to Jeffrey's original sequence, thereby making it into a knot. Since then I regularly wear the knot in public and even made inverse tie-knots the core topic of my Habilitationsvortrag '↑There is no Merovingian! Tie-knots, Neo-Dandyism and Cyberculture,' presented on 03 February 2010. Because I only added two twists to Jeffrey's sequence, I shied away from giving the knot a new name, although I like to call it 'xirdalium' in private. In order to give due credit to those involved, and to clear some matters up, here are the landmarks in the history of the inverse tie-knots:
 
On 21 June 2003 Luke "edeity" Housego invents the inverse tie-knots. The day before he had seen 'Matrix Reloaded' at the cinema and wanted to have a tie-knot as cool as the one the character 'Merovingian' sports in the movie.
On 28 September 2003 Luke publishes a .pdf-tutorial for his knot on the Internet. He calls his invention 'edeity's knot.'
On 03 February 2006 Victor Allen "Lord Whimsy" Crawford III publishes a .pdf-tutorial for a tie-knot he calls 'The Merovingian.' In fact it is edeity's sequence, but rendered much more clearly than in edeity's original .pdf. Whimsy had the idea from said .pdf, but was not sure, if he had matched the sequence.
On 16 February 2007 Henry "SimplyJustHen" Hu publishes a video on YouTube wherein he shows how to tie a knot he calls the 'Hen Tie.' In the video Henry makes clear that he has the idea from edeity's .pdf-tutorial, but that he was not sure if he had matched the sequence. In fact Henry's sequence slightly differs from edeity's.
On 18 February 2007 the knot called 'Merovingian' appears in the German version of the Wikipedia, linking to Lord Whimsy's tutorial.
On 04 May 2008 Jeffrey "cwtrain" Eldredge publishes a video on YouTube, demonstrating how to tie an even larger inverse tie-knot he calls the 'Eldredge.' Luke "edeity" Housego gave the world the inverse tie-knots, and Jeffrey Eldredge invented a subterfuge in tie-knotting not to be found in the literature so far: He simply tucks away the rest of the tie's narrow end under the collar, thereby making possible the largest tie-knot known. This move rightfully can be called 'the Eldredge tuckaway.' But there is a problem with Jeffrey's knot: It's not a knot, but more a 'wrapping.'
On 19 October 2008 Alexander "zephyrin_xirdal" Knorr publishes the description and sequence of the 'Eldredge Variant' in his weblog, making the 'Eldredge' into a true knot.
On 19 June 2010 Jeffrey Eldredge publishes the video 'The Eldredge Knot: Revisited' on YouTube, demonstrating how to tie the sequence of the 'Eldredge Variant.'
 
In detail and with background information, pictures, sequences, diagrams, and movies the, more or less, full story can be read in my old blog-entries (in chronological order): ↵merovingian ties, ↵more merovingian ties, ↵the eldredge, and ↵eldredge variant.

foot 2010

 
Just in time for the World Cup, ↵Rémi Gaillard "défend une nouvelle fois les couleurs de Montpellier et tire n'importe où," thereby appropriating urban landscapes ↵by mastership.

life and live
In a way '↑Second Life' (SL) is the online analogon to a social club of sorts—"↑Quake Live" (QL) in turn emulates a boxing gym, or any other sports club centred around a competitive pastime. In the end both of course are social institutions, but differ in terms of qualities, differ in culture.

nimportequi
Rémi Gaillard, or: Sapeck is back
 

 
This I simply had to repost—already because of the tiny astronauts appearing in my header pics. Beyond that ↑Rémi Gaillard in my opinion simply is ingenious. in the ↑video section of his website ↑nimportequi.com there is a plethora of hilarialities. My favourites at the moment are 'Rocky is back,' and 'Foot 2008,' not to forget 'Put it where you want it,' 'Decathlon,' and ... well, every single piece is a gem.
    Over here in Germany we have some so-called comedians on private TV-stations whom the broadcasters' marketing people credit with 'breaking all taboos.' More often than not this reduces itself to harrassing people in public space, which is most of the time hardly funny, but embarassing ... for the 'comedians,' not for the people.
    Rémi 'harasses' people in public space, too—and I love it, when the French police comes into play—, but what sets him far apart is the fact, that his pieces are intelligent to the core. If you have seen Stallone's 'Rocky,' then watch Rémi's take on it, and you'll get what I mean.
    Besides the category 'funny movies,' there is another one, the '↑impostor movies.' In this genre Rémi also is perticularly sucessful, up to mingling himself amongst the players of the winning team of the 2002 French football cup. After the game Rémi celebrates with the players on the field, is congratulated by then president of France Jacques Chirac, and finally is interviewed as a player by a TV-journalist, autographs a football, and all.
    All in all Rémi is in perfection tradition of the art group the ↑Incoherents, including the prince of pranksters, Eugène 'Sapeck' Bataille, who were on the road during the late 19th century.
    Thanks a lot, KerLeone, for finding this.
 

out of the dark

 

eldredge variant
To my eyes ↵the 'Eldredge' is an absolute beauty, but the solution Jeffrey Eldredge chose for the final move does not exactly leave us with a 'knot' in the technical sense of the term. He simply tucks what is left of the narrow end of the tie away under the collar and the loop the tie forms around the neck. That way we depend on the pressure the loop around the neck exerts on the collar for the whole structure not to come apart. To improve this situation I added two 'through-the-loop' movements to Jeffrey's invention. Translated to Fink-Mao notation, my 'Eldredge' variant reads like this:
 
Ri Co Li Ro Li Co Ri Lo TCi Ro Ci Lo TCi
 
'T' means 'lead the narrow end through the loop you just made,' the exact same meaning Thomas Fink and Yong Mao had in mind, when they introduced the 'T' to their notation. There is no space between 'T' and 'Ci,' because it is one move— make sure that you go 'through' and really 'center in' before pulling the loop closed, else disaster is imminent. It requires a bit of concentration and inner quietude to tie, but once done you will have a luscious triangular knot of silk under your chin, which can not disintegrate. Due to the optimal symmetry Jeffrey's sequence supplies, the finished knot is open to being sculpted to perfect shape. I found it enough for me to go with both thumbs under the knot, to put all the other fingertips on top of the knot, and to slightly press the knot flat.
 
Now, the two added moves mirror the pattern visible atop the knot. Due to the asymmetry of the visible structures on the front of the knot, starting with the wide blade to the right or to the left, no more is negligible and may even gain sartorial meaning. The most common pattern found on ties are diagonal stripes. The historical background of the stripes is a thing in itself—for now only so much: In Europe it is common, that the stripes, when looked upon from the front, run from the lower left, to the upper right. Given that we are used to read from the left to the right, the stripes are pointing upwards. In the United States of America, to the contrary, the stripes usually point downwards—no metaphorical allusion to politics or even economics intended.
 
The orientation of the structure on the 'Eldredge' is dominated by the upper most diagonally running edge of the tie's fabric. If it is pointing upwards or downwards depends on how you start tieing the knot—with the wide blade to the right, or to the left, and on your choice between the original 'Eldredge' and my variant of it with the two through-the-loop moves added. No matter if you wear New-World or Old-World style diagonal stripes, in both cases you have to decide if you want the diagonal on your 'Eldredge' follow suit, or counter. Decision made, you have to choose the according procedure of tieing the knot.
 
Jeffrey's subterfuge of tucking the tip of the narrow end away under the collar frees you from any worries about the narrow end showing. Granted, there is the philosophy, that a tie has to be able to move freely. I agree—to a certain degree—in respect to the wide blade. Nevertheless some people are of the opinion, that the narrow end should be free, too. But then again every decent tie has a 'lead' on its back, a small sewn-on horizontal loop meant for sticking the narrow end of the tie through it, so it won't get visible by accident. From this I deduce, that it is sartorial consensus, that the narrow end should stay hidden. Now to the wide blade.
 
Due to the 'Eldredge' being of the largest order of magnitude possible with a regular tie, and due to it being an almost perfect equilateral triangle, the tie's wide blade blossoming out of the sharp vertex pointing downwards, a broad tie—maybe even a 'kipper' of 1970s fame—is mandatory for achieving æsthetical proportions. You may object, that kipper ties are out of fashion, but a 1950s narrow tie, like they recently seem to have come back to fashion, emerging from the voluminous 'Eldredge' just looks plainly ridiculous. I just can say, remember Lord Whimsy's dictum: 'Fashion is for those who have yet to understand style.'

the eldredge
It is uncanny, the development is still unfolding. After I learned about the inverse tie knots, invented by edeity, and clearly transcending Fink & Mao's 85 ways, I made some calculations—of course by means of the formulas devised by Fink & Mao, and spent a thought or two on the matter. The original 'Edeity' knot and the 'Hen Tie' are of size 11, comprising 4 center moves. Formula (15) (Fink & Mao 2000: 115) teaches us, that there are 80 knots within this class. Edeity's ingenious idea to wind the narrow end around the tie's wide blade, instead of the standard procedure the other way round, made possible size 11 knots, and showed the way to a lot more knots. In theory you can tie every regular knot inversely, which would double Fink & Mao's 85. But only inverse knots with odd size are acceptable. If you tie knots of sizes 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. inversely, then the seam of the tie would either be on the front of the wide blade, or on the outside of the knot. The former is plainly unacceptable, the latter might be a matter of debate. Because of this, inverse knots of sizes 10 and 12 are not feasible. 13 again would be possible, but back then (see ↵merovingian ties and ↵more merovingian ties) I deemed them to be impossible with a tie of regular length, hence I dismissed the thought. Well, Jeffrey Eldredge dared it:
 

 
In the movie Jeffrey does not follow the convention of having the wide blade to the right, seen from the wearer's point of view. Hence you can take the video as what you would see in the mirror when tieing. Accordingly I mirrored Jeffrey's moves for the Fink-Mao notation. Here is 'The Eldredge:'
 
Ri Co Li Ro Li Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Ci Lo Ci [T]
 
The knot is of size 13 and comprises 5 center moves—this class contains 240 knots. 'The Eldredge' is of optimal symmetry 0, and balance 2. The optimal balance achievable in this class would be 1, but I am not yet sure, if—due to the visible inverted-V structures characterizing the inverse knots—this parameter of æsthetics is applicable here. The 'T' for the final through-movement I put in square brackets, because Jeffrey actually does not do it. Instead he tucks away the tip of the tie's narrow end under the collar. There is not much left of it anyway. Fink & Mao added the subscript suffix 'on' for 'Onassis' to the Lo Ri Lo Ri Co T Ri Co variant of the Four-in-hand, worn by the late Greek shipping tycoon. So, in the future I might substitute the [T] by an 'E,' or 'ET' for 'Eldredge tuckaway.'
 
So, now you know about 'The Eldredge,' to my knowledge the latest in hitches worn around the neck. But stay tuned, as I still have something up my sleeve, maybe 'the last of the tie knots' ...

more merovingian ties
After having published ↵merovingian ties—beyond the 85 knots of Fink and Mao, I started to contact some of the involved protagonists. ↑Lord Whimsy was the first to answer and confirmed a suspicion of mine. To my question on how he discovered the knot, Whimsy answered: 'If memory serves, I found a few sources online (I believe it was a pdf file somewhere). After some failed attempts of my own, I finally figured it out.' So, it seems that Whimsy got hold of the same tutorial by edeity, ↑published at zgeek, with which Henry Hu started out. Like Henry, Whimsy, too, did not get to grips with the scarce information of the tutorial, and—again like Henry—created his own solution. Now it is on me, to correct an error I made. The sequence in ↑Henry's original Hen Tie video tutorial is not the same as in Lord Whimsy's '↓The Merovingian' tutorial.
 
Henry Hu's original Hen Tie:
Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Li Co Li Ro Ci T
 
Lord Whimsy's Merovingian:
Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Lo Ri Co Ri Lo Ci T
 
The detection of this difference once more proofs the usefulness of the (R, C, L) notation from the ↑Fink-Mao taxonomy.
 

 
Henry Hu already replied, too—and even more so. First he confirmed what I had written, and then posted a ↑video response at YouTube, again showing off how to knot the Hen Tie (that is the official spelling, by the way), this time using a special tie, customized by himself. Investigation of the whole matter continues—stay tuned.
 
P.S.: I love the life-feeling of the video, especially the interruption caused by Henry's cell phone—in my opinion the /baywatch-gesture is one of the most valuable pieces of content within '↑Second Life' (SL).

merovingian ties
beyond the 85 knots of Fink and Mao
 
Most of you have not noticed, I presume, because when the ↑character 'Merovingian' (Lambert Wilson) first appears in '↑Matrix Reloaded' (2003), your eyes were on ↑'Persephone' (Monica Bellucci) at his side. But, if you would have watched the Merovingian, and would have slid down your gaze from his face a bit—not quite as far as you practiced on Miss Bellucci—you would have noticed, that the man sports a decidedly strange looking knot on his necktie. Meanwhile there is a knot around which seems to resemble the one in the movie, and indeed is called the Merovingian [knot]—a tie-knot named after a character out of a cyberpunk movie of course triggered my interest, so I set out to clarify the matter. Contradicting information found on the Web made me review the movie and take some screen captures:
 

 
Both pics stem from 'Matrix Reloaded'—the one to the left belongs to the scene in the restaurant where the Merovingian makes his first appearance, the one to the right from a scene a bit later, when, after Persephone's betrayal, he storms into the Château. It is a bit hard to see, because—↵just like Fantomas—the Merovingian has it all in black: suit, shirt, and tie. But, with almost certainty, what he wears in 'Matrix Reloaded,' is a turned-around reverse Windsor. Allow me to explain. Looking closely you will discover two distinct features to be seen. First, the knot itself is covered by two diagonally overlapping strands of the tie. Second, the narrow end of the tie is in front of its wide-blade end—the other way around as usual. A regular Windsor-knot looks exactly like that, when viewed from 'behind,' like 'out of the chest,' that is. With one difference: When you look at a Windsor from behind, you also will see the centre seam of the tie. But that is not the case in the movie, hence the Merovingian's tie must have been tied 'in reverse.'
 

 

Regular tieing of the Windsor implies, that on starting out you hang the tie around your neck, wide blade to the right, and the seam-side towards your body. Reverse tieing means placing the tie with the seam away from your body. In order to achieve the knot seen in the screen caps, you have to reverse tie a Windsor, then take it off over the head, turn it around, and then pull it over the head again. Which is, to say the least, an inelegant, awkward procedure. As far as I remember Gianni Versace, at about the beginning of last century's 90s, sold a tie accompanied with a tutorial of how to knot it the described way, so that the narrow end finally was in front. Back then a schoolmate of mine sported it at a club one night, and told me about it. I contacted him on this yesterday and he confirmed my memory, adding that it was a night-blue tie with a black Versace-Medusa, from wherever he is at the moment, checking his Blackberry—he became one of those ↵top-notch Nazgûl.
 

 

As mentioned above, meanwhile there is a knot around, which is referred to as 'The Merovingian'—at least by ↑Lord Whimsy aka ↑Victor Allen Crawford III in his excellent ↑tie knot tutorials (scroll down to 'No. 14: The Merovingian' and download the stylishly designed .pdf), and ↑by the German Wikipedia. The origin of and story behind this knot is what I am after, although it is not the knot to be seen in 'Reloaded.'
 

 

The movie was released on 15 May 2003—on 28 September 2003 edeity posted a .pdf-tutorial at zgeek.com, wherein he explained how to tie a knot he had envisioned. Years later New-York based banker and magician Henry 'SimplyJustHen' Hu got hold of the tutorial, but could at first not decrypt the four pictures, and hence thought the tutorial to be faulty. So he created his own solution, which he posted on 16 February 2007 at YouTube as a video tutorial—↑you can see a true master at work there. Alluring to the abbreviation of his first name, Henry christened it the 'Hen-Tie,' pulling of a pun on 'Hentai'—in the West a common term referring to Japanese pornographic anime, manga, and computer games. 'Hen' alone in Japanese means 'weird,' so one can read 'weird tie' also.
 

 

At first SimplyJustHen was of the opinion that he had recreated the Merovingian's tie knot, but on 31 March 2007 a video response on YouTube by frank77dk, called ↑'Matrix Reloaded Tie,' clarified the matter. Frank expertly explains and demonstrates how to do the knot, and even uses a special two coloured tie to get the tutorial clear as glass. His comment:
 

About two months after the initial posting of SimplyJustHen's video tutorial edeity and he agreed, that the knot in the video indeed was the one described in edeity's .pdf tutorial—Hen immediately gave due credit and changed title and description of his video.
 
So, as it stands, what the German Wikipedia and Lord Whimsy refer to as the 'Merovingian' rightfully should be known as the 'Edeity.' The Merovingian himself never wore the tie-knot which now bears his name. Misnoming has quite a tradition, when it comes to tie-knots. The Duke of Windsor never wore the according knot. He tied his ties in a Four-in-Hand, but used unusually thick, upholstered ties, resulting in voluminous knots. Most probably the Windsor-knot was invented in an attempt to emulate the Duke's hardware-supported style. There is also some confusion in respect to the 'Pratt,' which sometimes is referred to as the 'Shelby.' In fact this knot was invented by Jerry Pratt, a member of the US chamber of commerce. He regularly wore the knot for about twenty years, then showed it to his friend, television presenter Donald Shelby. Via the latter the knot became popularized, and the name at least partially stuck.
 
All right, we know now what kind of knot the Merovingian sported in 'Reloaded'— a turned-around, reverse full Windsor. But what about the Edeity/Hen-Tie now known as the Merovingian? It is an inverse doubled up full Windsor. In this context 'inverse' means that the wide blade of the tie is 'passive,' meaning that it remains in position, while the narrow end is wound around it. In contrast all traditional tie-knots are bound by winding the broad end around the narrow end. More precise, using the Fink-Mao taxonomy, the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian is a knot of size: 11, symmetry: 1, balance: 3, and knotted status: yes—if I haven't made a mistake anywhere. Its tieing sequence in (R, C, L) notation is:
 
Ri Co Ri Lo Ci Lo Ri Co Ri Lo Ci T
 
I have not added a super- or subscripted 'inv' for inverted, because the starting of the sequence with Ri already implies this, as regular tie-knots only can start with Lo or Li ... What the hell I am talking about, you ask?
 
Well, in their book 'The 85 ways to tie a tie,' (Fink & Mao 2001) physicists ↑Thomas Fink and ↑Yong Mao
 

In order to understand what I was babbling about above, Fink & Mao's mathematical representation and taxonomy can be scrutinized in the two journal articles (Fink & Mao ↓1999, ↓2000), out of which the book grew, and on the ↑according part of Thomas Fink's website. Best of course is, to buy their book—have not got it myself yet, but just ordered it. Hence, in the following I refer to Fink & Mao 2000.
 
The two men set out to settle the matter of tie-knots once and for all. But they based their work on some limiting axiomatic assumptions, thereby introducing a bit of cultural bias. My argument is, that the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian is not an element of traditional mainstream occidental culture, but an instance of the cybercultureal. For this context let us have a look on Fink & Mao's assumptions. On the hardware side only 'regular ties' are taken into consideration. This is fine cyberculture-wise, too, because it has that '↵Origami air,' creating the unusual out of basic, untampered-with material. Reverse knots are mentioned by them, but not explicitly those of the 'Reloaded' kind with the narrow end to the audience. I guess this is just too far away from societal consensus. Even my Nazgûl friend said, that he found the reverse Versace-thingie awfully cool at the end of the 1980s, but today smirks on it. Anyway, what the Merovingian wore is in Fink & Mao's table, because it is just a regular tie-knot turned around. So, the reverse versions of regular tie-knots are covered by Fink & Mao, but the inverse knots are not. Here the two stick close to tradition, because it simply has been bequeathed, that when tieing a tie, you start out with the wide blade to the right and wind it around the narrow end. Principally the regular and inverse knots topologically would be the same, if the tie had no orientation, the ends would not be distinguishedly marked. But a regular tie is oriented, it has a wide and a narrow end, and Fink & Mao are perfectly aware of that: 'The finite length of the tie, as well as aesthetic considerations, suggests an upper bound on knot size; we limit out exact results to h [smaller as or equal to] 9' (Fink & Mao 2000: 113)—h being the number of half-winds, the 'size' of the knot. Herein lies the reason why they come to a result of 85 knots and not more. Size 9 is a sensible limit, not just because of the fact, that after a certain number of winds you simply have nothing more to wind around, but because of the wide blade becoming ever wider until the tip starts, the results begin to resemble a mangled football, but no more an acceptable tie-knot. Enter the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian: Its size 11 is possible, because the in this case active narrow end does not build up volume as fast. In terms of volume it is not larger than the Windsor (size 8), and hence still æsthetically acceptable. Furthermore, balance and symmetry are all right as well, and, like with traditional knot-ties, the wide blade is to the front, and the seam of the tie to the back. So, it is a new knot, doing justice to Fink & Mao's—and occidental society's—criteria, but going beyond their 85 specimen. Naturally, the visible inverted-V structure is a matter of debate, but, in the words of Fink & Mao, I leave that to the reader's sartorial discretion. Me personally, I deem the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian to be beautiful—especially, of course, because of its background. Judge for yourself, here are some renditions of it by Yours Truly—I used ties of different lengths and materials, from polyacryl to pure silk:
 

 
Now for why I take the new knot to be a cybercultureal tidbit. First of all it has been created in the attempts to reverse engineer the tie knot a character sported in a cyberpunk movie. True, reverse engineering is an important, but not an exclusive element of cyberculture—as we saw, the Windsor knot, too, was most probably invented by the attempt to recreate a particular style. Hence you could interprete this as a continuity in the tradition of the invention of tie knots, but the protagonists were not aware of this.
 
My second argument asks for the motivation, for the point in desiring to wear what the Merovingian wore. The principles of association, allusion, and referencing are core elements of cyberculture—for the outsiders mostly invisible, cryptical at best, for the insider and his peers demarcations of identity and ultimately communitas. Henry Hu himself said that the knot is 'a nerd thing, a geek thing,' ... and that it 'looks like alien penisses,' to complete his hentai allusion. Wearing this offline ↑easter egg the knot is, already constitutes a ↑thrill to 'the geek,' a source of positive, identity-congruent sentiment. Like pouring your tea out of a Melitta original of the ↑Utah teapot would be.
 
My assuming, that the majority of the younger online generation loathes wearing ties, is an educated guess, but highly probable. There are multiple reservations against ties, but by means of its background, the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian got metaphorically so powerful, that it might serve as a blockbuster. Here is an excerpt from what cyberpunk-drenched computer game pundits and expert Second-Life content creators ↑Detect Surface and ↑acid Zenith—the latter cyber goth on- and offline—remarked, after I had told them about the knot:
 

Third, by means of the work of Fink and Mao, tie knots have been popularized as topological artefacts—for those 'in-the-know' wearing a tie now means sporting a piece of mathematics around the neck.
 
Fifth, the last two newly invented knots before Fink & Mao, the Windsor and the Pratt, were popularized via the traditional mass medium of the newspaper. The Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian was made known to the public via the Internet—first via edeity's .pdf, then via SimplyJustHen's video tutorial on YouTube. As of today the latter has been viewed approximately 87,000 times.
 
But that is not yet the end of the story, as the Merovingian, and Persephone!, both reappear in '↑Matrix Revolutions' (2003), the third part of the trilogy. This time he sports a red tie and shirt, matching Miss Bellucci's ... erh ... tight dress and lipstick. He sports another knot, enormous and cylindrical, far from the elegance of the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian:
 

 
Although I do not know what it exactly is, it is nothing extraordinary, tech-wise. You can achieve a similar result by tieing any of the narrower regular knots, then winding the narrow end around it two times, and finally tug it away behind.
 
One last thing. The René-Magritte style cover of 'The 85 ways' features a surreal impossibility:
 

 
The tie's European style stripes (pointing upwards to the wearer's left shoulder) are oriented the same way on the tie's blade and on the knot. This would only be possible when using a special tie, on which the orientation of the stripes reverses at a certain point. Frankly, I am tempted ↑to make such a tie, only to see if anyone notices the impossibility. That would be the only reason for me to, in the future, wear a tie and not tieing it the Edeity/Hen-Tie/Merovingian style.
 
Ah, yes, just to go full circle—pun not intended—here is Persephone:
 

 

oscar pistorius, blade runner

 
To muse on this already is way over due—especially as the Olympic games in Beijing are approaching, to be held in a wonderful cyberpunk setting. I am not going to rave on the international politics aspect, human rights, Tibet and so on—↑Shashi Tharoor already ↑has said it all, in my opinion.
 
When I wrote ↵martyr fuller—a sports-journalist's biased commentary in 2006, I was not aware of the existence of ↑Oscar Pistorius, let alone in 2004, to where my notes for 'martyr fuller' date back. Time to update; Wikipedia has a ↑perfect summary:
 

Not only the overall story is pure cyberpunk—the nickname 'Blade Runner' being the cream topping—but choice of words and style, too. I mean, dig this again, Pistorius 'runs with the aid of Cheetah Flex-Foot carbon fibre transtibial artificial limbs by Ossur.' ... YUS! :-)

iron man

 
Saw that piece of ↵comic book naturalism yesterday night at the cinema, ↵Harold Schechter is more right than ever, and I fully second what ↑John Romero ↑wrote:
 

giant avatars—a tutorial
how to oversize the regular second-life avatar mesh in 13 steps
 

 
A lot of people in "↑Second Life" (SL) are craving for larger-than-life avatars, but the sliders of the appearance menu only do allow body sizes within 'human limits'. You may have seen large furries or robots (like Detect's ↵Kravatac), but those are constructions out of attached prims, completely hiding the avatar itself inside, and equipped with an animation override, containing a new set of animations for the huge figure. This strategy is a workaround, as the size of the avatar's character mesh is not changed beyond the set limits. But then there are ↑rumours, like: "Due to a bug in the current code of Secondlife it is possible to generate avatars of huge size if you know how to do it. [...] Enjoy the pics and no I’m not telling how to do it." ... Thank you very much :-(
 
As I was fascinated by this possibilities, I did some research. Obviously, if the phenomenon really existed, it had to be a bug exploit maybe similar to the one resulting in mega prims. I'm not much of a coder, and gave the thing up. Then, about a year ago, I saw some work in progress on a website. There it was attempted to trick the appearance and building interface of SL, in order to achieve the desired huge avatars. As no working solution was provided, I forgot about the matter. Till recently. A random guy in a chatroom could not keep his big mouth shut, but was reluctant to give precise information, when asked directly. I dug in my files and went back to said website. Unfortunately meanwhile it seems to have been taken offline, and the Internet archive does not have a copy.
 
But now I was farely sure that the effect really existed, and worked on from the information I saved to my HDD back then. After much trial and error and a good deal of frustration I finally succeeded :-) There is no coding required, no scripts are needed, as the method indeed cleverly tricks both the building and appearance feature. It is not hard to do—clean sculpties are way harder, but a bit of patience is needed, though, because absolute precision is required! As an open-source follower, I will exactly tell you how to do it, step by step:
 

 
1) You need a single frame animation, forcing the avatar into default position, meaning having every joint of the bone rig at a rotation of exactly zero degrees. You can make an according animation in e.g. QAvimator [right side of the above picture], import it into SL, and then play it 'in world' (do not play it 'locally,' as then the process to follow will not work—locally means that the animation is only visible on your screen, as your client [the SL 'viewer'] won't relay the data to the server, but we have to alter the server data). Many posing stands already feature the required stance, so you can use one of those instead, and it is easier to position the av precisely on the grid. In case you are using a posing stand you have not made yourself, have to make absolutely sure, a) that the av poses exactly above the stand's center, b) that the pose really is the default stance, and c) that the hand morph, at both hands, is forced to the awkward 'splayed fingers' pose. The face morph does not matter, it can be any.
 

 
2) Assuming that you are using a posing stand, rezz it inworld. Then move it to an integer grid intersection, e.g. at 30,45,430 in my example— that way it will be easier to exactly align the final, and crucial, piece later on. Get your av on the posing stand.
 
3) Go into 'building mode' and rezz a cylinder. make it 1 meter large in the z-dimension, 0.1 meters in x- and y-dimensions. Right click the cylinder and 'take' it. Make four copies of the cylinder inside the inventory. Right click one of the cylinders in your 'inventory' and attach it to the right hand. Right click one of the copies and attach it to the left hand.
 
4) Right click on the cylinder attached to your right hand and click 'edit'. If it is not vertical yet, rotate it, so that it is exactly vertical. Use the degree scales for this. Move the cylinder downward in z-direction for 0.9 meters. Rotate the cylinder inward, to the body's centre exactly 45 degrees. Rotate the cylinder forward exactly 30 degrees, so that the upper end of it is still inside the hand, the lower end in front of the av's body. (We have to do that, because, except at the hands and feet, the parts of the 'stretching rig' must not be 'inside' your avatar!) Right click the attached cylinder and 'detach' it. (Now the positioning you have done is stored.) Right click the cylinder in the inventory and this time do not click 'attach,' but 'wear'. It should appear in exactly the same position on your hand as before.
 

 
5) Repeat the process for the cylinder attached to the left hand, so it is positioned exactly mirrored to the first cylinder.
 
6) Right click the next cylinder-copy in your inventory and attach it to the right foot. Make it vertical and move it upwards 0.9 metres. Untick 'stretch both sides', hold down ctrl+shift, and elongate the cylinder upwards until its upper end is on the same level as the lower ends of the cylinders attached to the hands. I can not give an exact figure here, as your av may be of a different size as mine, but that won't cause problems. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
7) Repeat the process for the left foot, but do not stretch it by mouse movement! Instead look at the size of the right foot cylinder in the object tab of the building menu. Make the 'left-foot cylinder' exactly the same size. Look at the z-coordinate of the 'right-foot cylinder' and type in the exact same value for the 'left-foot cylinder'. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
8) Left click the last copy of the cylinder and draw it in front of your avatar. Do not make a new cylinder for this! All cylinders have to be copies of each other—do not ask me why, as I have no idea.
 
9) Do not move it with the mouse, but use the coordinates given in the 'object' tab of the building menu, in order to assure absolute accuracy. Compare the xyz-coordinates of your 'feet cylinders' to those of the last cylinder and align the latter exactly in the middle of them, and rotate it exactly horicontal, so that it 'goes through' both 'feet cylinders'. Now you know why we placed the posing stand on an integer grid-intersection firsthand.
 
10) Now 'stretch both sides' has to be ticked in the building menu. Shrink the horicontal cylinder horicontally by mouse movement (see above) until its ends are completely hidden inside the vertical 'feet cylinders'.
 
11) Now again absolute precision is required. Look at the vertical size of the feet cylinder. Divide that size by two and add it to the horicontal cylinder's position z-value. That way the horicontal cylinder is moved upwards so that its center axis is exactly flush with the ends of the 'feet-cylinders'. This is important!
 
Now your set-up should look like this [note the moody lighting I added for drama just before the 'hard part' ;-]:
 

 
12) Hold down 'shift' and click all five cylinders, one at a time, making sure that you click the horicontal cylinder as the last one. Go to the 'tools' menu and click 'link'. SL may not allow this to you immediately, because we are mixing attached and none-attached prims, which have a different status for the server. In that case, leave posing stand and horicontal cylinder in place, log out, then relog, and try again. Only once I had to relog twice until the server complied:
 

 
Now comes the glorious finale:
 
13) When editing an item consisting out of several linked prims, you can not resize it in one dimension only—but you can resize the whole item! Right click your linked prims, select edit, hold down ctrl+shift, position your mouse pointer over one of the grey resizing cubes appearing at the corners of the whole construction's bounding box, left click and hold, then draw outwards as far as possible. It is pure magic, when you first see it, believe me. Along with the cylinder-rig, your avatar gets larger proportionally! Because a prim within SL can not be stretched larger than 10 metres in any dimension, this resizing has a limit. But ...
 
Once succesful, I have built another 'stretching rig'. This time I made the first cylinder not one cylinder, but consisting of ten linked cylinders, each 0.1 metres in length. The stretching process was accompanied by tremendous lag, but it was succesful. Unfortunately the Sim crashed a second later, before I was able to take a screenshot—but I will do more experiments.
 
There is yet one goodie left, I have to tell you about:
 
The invisible man of H. G. Wells' famous novel had to cope with a central problem: He had discovered how to make the human body invisible, but he couldn't make clothing invisible. So, whenever he wanted to run around completely unseen, he had to go bare-naked. I already feared that a similar phenomenon would spoil the oversized SL-avatar. But, as the clothes are texture layers of the character mesh, we don't run into the inconvenience of having to be naked. But it worked out even better. Everything attached to the avatar during the stretching process gets enlarged proportionally , too! Compare my prim boots in the picture at the top of this entry to the house on the left—they are almost as high as the complete ground floor. Unfortunately once you detach an item from the avatar it 'snaps back' to regular size. Hence this can't be used as a new way of producing mega-prims.
 
Try it and have fun! If it does not work for you, go through the tutorial step by step again, and make sure that you did everything exactly as described. If it still does not work for you, feel free to e-mail me (e-mail address in the sidebar to the right), or IM me (Zephyrin Raymaker) inworld and I will help out.

syd mead

 
The ↑CGSociety recently has put up an ↑artist profile of ↑Syd Mead, containing an interview they have done with the legendary and very influential (especially on cyberculture) designer. Finally we hear the story behind his personal label:
 

bass wars
What if ↑Saul Bass would have done the intro of "↑Star Wars"? ↑See yourself.
 

nazgûl of armonk

 

the cyberpunk review

 
When I ↵found it two years ago, SFAM's ambitious project ↑cyberpunkreview.com already was thriving. In no time it became the biggest repository of in-depth reviews of cyberpunk movies. Soon its infrastructure got expanded, ↑forums and the ↑cyberpunk wiki were added to the original blog. With its rapidly growing reputation, the line of topics was expanded, too: not only movies, but although cyberpunk computer games, music and books got reviewed, and—that is what I am aiming at—the new categories ↑cyberpunked living and ↑news as cyberpunk were introduced, dealing not with artefacts, but with cyberpunkish ongoings in meatspace. SFAM was joined by Mr. Roboto, who is especially busy filling up the latter two categories. Have a look at the stories which are currently on the front page: ↑Is there a cable-cutting conspiracy in the Middle East?, ↑German Police Looking to Hack Skype, ↑Your future is in the (RFID) chips (↑Bruce Sterling's pet issue ;-), ↑RIAA taking it up the ass lately, ↑The CIA’s latest claim: Hackers Have Attacked Foreign Utilities, ↑Robot Sex Studies: Cyberpunked Living is On Its Way! With this development, the blog's title gets a whole new meaning, as "cyberpunkreview" is no more just a review magazine of the fictional, but a news and commentary magazine on the world we are living in, which has developed into something decidedly cyberpunk.

gerry alanguilan

 
The website of Filipino architect turned professional comic book writer, artist and publisher ↑Gerry Alanguilan, who, for instance, worked as an inker "on characters like Wolverine, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Superman, Batman....," not only allows insights into the tremendous richness of a comic book culture apart from the to us well known US and European traditions—especially Gerry's ↑Philippine Comics Art Museum Online—, but also into a comic book artist's everyday life. ↑His blog is full of it, e.g. when he relates, that, when colleague Leinil Yu visited Gerry for the first time, they "ended up working while watching BEN HUR and The Final Countdown on DVD. Yeah, Ben Hur! Certainly one of the greatest movies ever made." Here is Gerry's text to the pictures above and below [I do not want to deeplink, visit the ↑2005 archive of ↑Gerry's old blog and scroll down to 19 November 2005 (he has no permalinks)—there are links to hi-res versions of both drawing and photo reference]:
 


 
And of course, this again is an instance of appropriation of urban landscapes ;-)

swamp thing

 
A virus surprisingly has taken me down for two days, so quite matchingly, I reread parts of the ↑Swamp Thing saga. Especially enlightening are the transitions from writer ↑Len Wein to ↑Alan Moore, and from artist ↑Berni Wrightson to ↑Stephen R. Bissette and ↑John Totleben. The transitions show what a vibrant, dynamic, and developing art form comic books are, which may well never reach the limits of their potential.

spree killers

 
At first I really did not get it, confessed. Skimming through the first two columns of the ↑high score listing I had something like the gamemode "Dead Man Walking" of "↑Max Payne 2" (MP2) in my mind, and wondered, what game the statistics refer to. Then I realized the dates and developed a suspicion which sent shivers down my spine. Clicking on the hyperlinked name of the high score champion confirmed my most evil suspicion ... well, see for yourself. To get the complete caustic satire, do not miss the ↑about, and the ↑resources.

postapocalyptic western