infomachine

For those of you who love Coco de Mer, pornography, and amusing pictures of yourself and others as much as I do, check out Coco’s new Private Poses feature.  If you go to the Coco de Mer shop in London, you can have a snap taken whilst trying on your sexiest new gear, send it to a friend, and upload it to the CdM website.  And we all get to watch.  Enjoy flicking through: the whole world really is here.

<From Violet Blue’s Open Source Sex>

For those of you who like both Peaches and the Muppets, we give you …

<found at Hear>You>Me>

For those of you who are not up to date with your web-based vlog-inspired horror cult things, be prepared for Zomblogalypse, the true story of three crazy kids trying to survive and not go weird in a world where zombies and hippie zombies have taken over.  It’s very lo-fi, but pretty well acted, so get along and check out Episode 1 (also on Youtube) before they’re killed.

(Full disclosure: Hannah, the weird one, is a long time friend)

This shit is amazing.  Coldcut played at the BBC Electric Proms this year following a panel discussion on the wonderfulness of the Radiophonic Workshop.  Although I didn’t managed to get to see them, the wonderfulness of Youtube has helped me yet again.  And now it helps you.

<From Create Digital Music>

“The land of most folks’ awareness is the Island of Mundania and the surrounding islands. Across the Straits of Fear is the portion of the continent that folks are generally aware of to some extent (gay sex, threesomes, light bondage, and so on). Beyond the Great Barrier Mountains and the Lesser Barrier Mountains, which demarcate the limits of common knowledge of different fetishes, lie the more exotic forms of sexual expression (natori, shibari, cosplay, fisting, puppy play, and so forth). In the frigid arctic wastes to the far north are those activities which only a very, very tiny percentage even of veteran, seasoned kinksters finds appealing (nullification, erotic cannibalism, necrophilia, and that sort of thing).”

Franklin Veaux has just released his version of the famous fetish map by Katherine Gates, and, most excitingly, he’s done it as a real map.  So you can spend your time fantasising about travelling the Bondage Tape lands, crossing the Great Barrier Mountains into the Kingdom of Stocks and Benches, like a sexy Lord of the Rings.  Check out the map here.

I’m going to be spending some time playing Superstruct, a new online game from the Institute for the Future.  The main blog I’ll be posting from is infornography, so come over and check it out.

Last night Rolo Tomassi played their second gig in York, at the Junction.  As we missed the first one, Jim and I decided that we had to get our asses down and catch them this time.

The first act on where a bitchin’ trio of kids called Ghosts on the Intercom.  They’re very impressive to say that they were about 16 / 17, and particularly impressive given that they were the random fill-in for when top support Mirror Mirror pulled out.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a first support at a local gig that I was this impressed by.  Playing mashup of new-school emo, old-school emo, math rock, jazz, slap bass, System Of A Down-style rock, punk, etc.  They’re not quite slick enough yet; you can still here the gaps when they shift from one extreme to the other.  But give them a year, and these kids will be one of the best bands in York.

Which, unfortunately, cannot be said of Darker Shades of Gorgeous.  I can’t remember the last time a room cleared so quickly: by the end of the first song, the crowd in front of the stage was something like a fifth of what it had been at the start.  Depending on who you spoke to, the responses were that they sounded like a shit Strokes, a shit Kings of Leon, a shit The View, or a shit mix of all of the above and every other shit pseudo-artrock indie band of the last few years.  As one charming gentleman was overheard to say in the toilets: “if you come to a math rock gig, you expect to hear fucking math rock”.

However, they were slightly redeemed by the fact that the lead singer was the spitting image of Donny Osmond.

Rolo Tomassi were good.  Really good.  Eva’s voice is incredible, going from one of the best metal screams I’ve ever heard to beautiful ethereal sounds with perfect ease (admittedly using two mics, but still very impressive), the band leaping from jazz to spazz core to prog to math rock without really blinking.  All of which makes it particularly difficult to criticise them.  But I’m going to have to.

If you’ve read any of the hype, you’ll be expecting a band leaping styles every two seconds, ridiculous gameboy styled instrumentation, and fitting every single genre under the sun into less than one minute.  Unfortunately, it’s not anywhere near as mashed up as you would be lead to believe, the keyboards are impossible to hear under the thrash-core instrumentation (which I’m fully prepared to accept is partially the fault of the Junction’s sound guy), and we are only basically talking about two genres: heavy and jazzy.  They’re just not as crazy as they think they are.

This is not to say that they’re not well worth seeing.  They are a stunning live act, a very good twisted pop act.  But, if you read the hype and think that you want to hear a band that sounds like that, check out Gay Against You, check out DJ Scotch Egg, check out Ove-Naxx, check out Girl Talk, check out hundreds of other acts.  And don’t think that Rolo Tomassi do what they say on the tin.

And now Wonderbra have beaten their previous record at amazing things, by releasing a whole video of Dita being sexy.  Using the world’s most beautiful woman performing a burlesque routine to sell your product seems like such an obvious idea, but I’m far too busy watching it too care.

Found via Jezebel.

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.  I’d love to show her to small children.

From Dabbled via Laughing Squid.

After completely forgetting about thee opening of the new Vivienne Westwood in York last thursday, Lola and I finally managed to make our way down. I now need to find £150 for the world’s most beautiful shirt (plus a suit to do it justice), and Lola needs to find £300 for the world’s most wonderful shoes. Suggestions on how to solve this quandary will be most gratefully received.