I really miss having a library nearby, not only for accessing books and other reference material that I’d prefer not to buy, but also to have a place to work with Internet access without going to a coffee shop (they do have coffee shops here, but not so many of them). The Internet makes a lot of information easily accessible at the click of the button, but most books are still unavailable online without some kind of purchase, and that content almost always comes with DRM protection.

So it really made me sad to hear that the library in my hometown of Troy, Michigan, will be shutting down in May 2011. As the Oakland Press reports : “Following Oakland County’s example, the Troy City Council approved a three-year budget…cutting more than $4 million in services this year from last year’s budget level.”

In addition to closing the library, the city is also closing the community center, museum, and nature center. However, the city is allocating “$1.1 million for Civic Center improvements.” The Civic Center was built about ten years ago, in the spot where the original Troy High School stood. It’s a slick structure that probably cost millions of dollars to build. But it’s mostly used for the gym and pool facilities, and as a senior gathering center.

This is a city, after all, that was rated #22 out of 100 of the “best places to live” by CNN Money in 2008. What kind of “best place to live” doesn’t have one of the most basic features of so-called “modern” civilization???

Apparently this all stems from four failed library millage proposals in 2010, as stated on the Troy Public Library website. According to a comment from Ronald R. Lambert, this was not the decision of the public alone. Someone ran commercials telling voters to turn down the proposals (which were already confusing in themselves). And the very idea may have arisen because the Troy City Council had other priorities.

As Lambert writes, “One of the great features of Library Millage Proposal 1 was that it provided for the library to be administered by an independent board, taking it out of the hands of City Council.” Millage Proposal 1 needed only 338 more “yes” votes to pass (15061 yes, 15736 no).

I used to spend a lot of time at the Troy Public Library as a kid, listening to stories, playing computer games (this was the early ’90s, before we had a personal computer at home), and checking out books and music with my library card. It’s kind of heartbreaking to think that kids in Troy will no longer be able to do that. All this gets blamed on the “economy,” but really it says something about our priorities as a society.

Throughout the ’90s I had to watch Troy fill up every single open space with condos, mega-churches, and shopping centers. Any place that endorses that sort of civic development, but cuts out the means for citizens to educate and inform themselves, is a place setting itself up for disaster.

You can find more info on Troy Public Library’s post “Frequently Asked Questions About the Library Closing.”

Ellison is open about his experiments with DMT (he blogged about it on MySpace) and mescaline, as well as lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences (OOBEs). His song “1983,” from the 2006 album of the same name, brought him early attention for its use on Adult Swim’s promos (here’s a newer one from this January, containing a clip from Cosmogramma). He’s also praised for his style that’s reminiscent of classic video game sounds from the 8-bit NES era (and the video below even contains a video game-style segment).

This music video is for the song “MmmHmm (feat. Thundercat),” which, as you can see from the still shot, features the symbol of the Tao, more commonly known as “yin and yang” in the West. There’s no overt suggestion of meaning, but the symbol also suggests the “union of opposites”—an idea that is prevalent throughout all major mythologies and religions of the world. Plus, the characters in the video are a male Native American in headdress and a female Cannabis Sativa plant. The blending of all elements suggests an end of dualism between plant and animal, man and woman, cosmos and psyche, reality and video games (or virtual reality), etc.

So cheers to Flying Lotus for creating some of the most mind-expanding music (and music videos) of 2010! (By the way, his video for the song “Kill Your Co-Workers,” from the EP Pattern+Grid World, is equally stunning.)

Then the Internet created the potential for networked video games like the Sims and online worlds like Second Life. Some people spent more time (and even money) in those virtual realms than they did in “real life.” Obviously there’s an aspect of escapism at work in these cases–but in Second Life people were still sitting in front of a computer, not actually participating in a 3-dimensional simulation of the physical universe.

I know that more advanced virtual reality systems have existed for quite some time, but they’re always super-expensive–only available in catalogs for stores like the Sharper Image. In a way, it seemed like people just stopped caring about the concept itself, much in the same way that people have lost track of the Space Age feeling of cosmic exploration that persisted at least until the end of the 1980s.

But now I’m starting to think our ideas about virtual reality have been really rudimentary so far. When I imagine such a game or system, it inevitably looks and feels like “reality.” More specifically, the laws of physics would be set much as they are in the actual physical world–especially gravity. It’s not that people are against the concept of lower gravity; it’s more that we haven’t considered our other options.

Then last week I found a video game called “And Yet It Moves” (AYIM) for the Nintendo Wii. It’s a small WiiWare game (meaning it’s stored on the system hard drive), and yet it’s one of the most innovative gameplaying experiences I’ve seen on any system–even compared to the more advanced graphics of the PS3 and XBOX 360. AYIM is a 2.5-D game, meaning you move on a 2D surface, but there is texture in the background and foreground for visual effect. It’s a style first developed in games like Super Mario World, on the SNES system of the early ’90s. (I posted two videos of the AYIM gameplay below, synched with songs by Bibio and Toro Y Moi; I listened to them while I played and filmed.)

In the game, you control a character who can run and jump around a course. The first surprise is that, by pressing a button, you can freeze the motion. Then, by tilting the controller left and right (and keeping the button pressed), you rotate the screen around the character. Gravity always pulls down, so whenever you release the freeze button, the character falls in the direction his feet are pointing. With gravity a turned down a bit (so the jumps are sort of graceful), it makes for a pretty remarkable gaming experience!

And after a few days of playing this game, I’ve begun to rethink the possibilities of what virtual reality could actually be like. Can you imagine how it would feel to be fully immersed in an environment like the one in AYIM? We wouldn’t be able to take for granted which direction is “up” or “down,” if that was something we could change with a button (or better yet, with our mind). It reminded me of Escher’s drawings with staircases going in every direction (and even the film Labyrinth, in which David Bowie, playing the Gnome King, navigates such a maze of stairs).

I imagine they’ll have body suits with digital sensors, and some kind of mask with a peripheral screen. My point is that the kind of augmented reality we see on iPhone apps is only the beginning. Think of how awesome it would be to be able to walk through a field of bioluminescent flowers, and then turn gravity around, stand on a tree branch, and watch the flowers swaying on the ceiling!

Another thing I noticed while playing this game is that the anxiety I used to feel playing games where you can “die”–like the old school Super Mario Bros games–was absent from the AYIM experience. If you fall too great a distance in AYIM, your character explodes into little bits of paper (everything in the game is designed to look like ripped paper)–but you simply start again at the last checkpoint without even any jolting sound effects. No punishment whatsoever. Even if you fall into one of the “black holes” at the edge of the screen, it’s kind of fun to watch the character spin off into oblivion.

Usually we consider escapism a bad thing, and some kinds definitely cause more harm than good. But this is our world to build. I think the human mind has an unquenchable thirst for wonder and amazement. What we do with our spare time is indicative of our overall priorities, individually and collectively. The way I look at it, many people waste a good portion of their life energy between a job they hate and a bar “where everyone knows your name.” If I am productive every day, I think I deserve a reward of spending some time in a mental place that’s a little more extraordinary than my immediate physical surroundings.

The first thing I tell people about AYIM is that it’s like a dream (I guess it would be a lucid dream). A lot of our “entertainment” is more like a nightmare. Perhaps this is an example of how we’ve approached all technology up until this point. It’s not the technology in itself that is diminishing the quality of human life. It’s how we use the technology, as consumers and as a society.

I think video games are undergoing a gradual evolution with parallels to the current changes in human society. Currently war video games make the most money by far. It’s sad, but like Julian Assange commented in a recent Guardian Q&A, the first thing the Apache helicopter video demonstrates is that killing people is fun. Eventually we’re going to see that those war games are promoting territorial primate behavior and Stone Age mental patterns.

Personally I’d rather float around a dreamscape of trees and mossy background, as in AYIM. Or swing from neon plants and vines collecting pollen, like in the PS3 game Eden. Or soar around picturesque meadows and canyons from the POV of some flower petals (PS3′s Flower).

For the past few years I’ve limited my video game usage while I spent some necessary time reading and self-reflecting. But I can’t ignore that the possibilities are endless for the technologies of video games and virtual reality. I look forward to seeing what fantastic worlds we choose to create.

The song below is called “Cheaters,” from their debut full-length album 7 AM. The record runs short at 37 minutes, but the replay value is enormous. They take a simplistic approach on this video—a psychedelic visualizer to fit the uplifting song. Everybody needs some day-glo action once in a while!

Teengirl Fantasy will be accompanying Crystal Castles on a short tour this spring, which should make for some amazing shows!

I had originally intended to feature Oneohtrix Point Never in this post, a similar electronics-in-outer-space outfit. That one-man act has released at least five albums in the last couple of years. Both Emeralds and Oneohtrix remind me of the music they play in the Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot Center, which of course is a huge geodesic dome—a “bucky ball,” nicknamed after R. Buckminster Fuller, that under-appreciated visionary.

The space age sort of died in the late ’80s, when the alien paranoia starting building up in the X Files era. I think we’re entering a second space age, and this time we’ll be aiming much further out (and inward). Each human mind contains a universe. And the Earth is a space shuttle, constantly rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. “We are all astronauts,” as Fuller said. I think Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never understand that idea (maybe just intuitively, not consciously). Some of their songs also remind me of Pink Floyd during the Dark Side of the Moon/Wish You Were Here/Animals era.

I started writing about music in 2005 because it’s always inspired me. But for the past 9 months I’ve been widening my topic coverage quite a bit. I’m still a voracious music listener, and lately I’m even more excited about audio/visual experimentation. Music videos have always been great for that! Plus, I figured everyone can thrive on some positive energy.

With that in mind, I’m planning five brief posts about the artists and albums from 2010 that I had on repeat over and over again, with an official music video from each album. More specifically, this series is about MIND EXPANSION—the kind of music that you’d want to have if you were leaving tomorrow on a tour of the galaxy. The styles and sub-genres that I consider to be at the forefront in that regard are dubsteb, ambient techno, experimental electronic, glo-fi, glitch hop, and a few others.

But enough about labels. The first entry in this mini-series is the album Lucky Shiner by Gold Panda, a solo artist from the UK (myspace.com/goldpanda). This was his first full-length album, after releasing a few exciting EPs over the past couple of years. The music video below is for the song “Snow and Taxis,” which is strange, because it contains neither snow nor taxis. However, it does contain a dreamlike stroll through a forest, which is at times phosphorescent and vibrational. It makes me miss living in a place where forests are more plentiful. (Sigh)

For more of my music writing history, please check out my old MusicEdge blog or my personal website. Stay tuned for more great music from 2010!

Many of us continue to use Facebook even as their privacy standards decline in favor of giving companies access to our preferences and background info—essentially our demographic statistics. As long as we have the option to increase privacy settings to the necessary level, we can keep using web services for all the obvious benefits.

However, now sites like Spokeo.com will be aggregating and offering our personal information to anyone who buys an account. That includes photos on sites like Facebook, videos on sites like YouTube, home value, credit score, income, age, sex, relationship info, occupation, hobbies, etc. And members can search by name, phone, email and username, so it’s pretty easy to find anyone.

Previously someone would have had to do a lot of digital legwork to get all this info, even if it wasn’t confidential—but not anymore. Ironically, Spokeo is partnered with ReputationDefender, a web privacy service! ReputationDefender also has paid services that help make your online info and content more private. Luckily you can request to remove your Spokeo listing for free. Here’s how:

1) Visit http://spokeo.com
2) Search for your name
3) Click on your listing in the table or the map
4) Copy the page URL once the info box appears
5) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “privacy”
6) Paste the URL in the appropriate box, enter your email and the code, and click enter
7) Check your email to click or copy/past the confirmation link (They require this so that you don’t remove other people’s listings)

Hope this helps!

Kaliptus sent this to me on Facebook. I also posted it on my Evolver blog.

Why are we alive? The answers are many and none. It is up to us to define our own purpose, our own reasons, our own aims, goals, and responsibilities. Can you name 10 Reasons of Purpose for the Human Existence? If so please copy this, and type 10 reasons as a Note of your own. Life is important, don’t miss it

(I’m going to twist this a little bit and list 10 reasons I’ve discovered behind the purpose of my own existence. There will be some overlap with the reasons I see for mankind. I’ll explain as necessary.)

1. To procreate. In college I had settled into a purely Darwinian view of things and could see no other apparent meaning or purpose behind life than to create offspring, to pass on the DNA and keep life going. This was a rationalization based on the strength of the theory of natural selection, which I now see is only the beginning of our purpose.

2. To turn the dead order into chaos and then chaos into improved living order. To act as a human decomposer and reconstructor. To use the decay as fertilizer for starting a garden. To grow something sacred.

3. To learn, for the first time in the history of life on Earth going back billions of years, how to control all traits associated with power consciousness, including those connected with ego: pride, violence, anger, territorialism, authoritarianism, etc.

4. To hijack the entertainment factory, the prison for our metaphysical universe, and rebuild (or build for the first time) a truly healthy, technicolor, multidimensional public domain in a way that cannot be corrupted by power or law—as in, the kind of content seen on Tryptophanatic Netvision: http://vimeo.com/channels/tryptophanatic

5. To splatter minds on the wall with words, ideas, images, and sounds; in other words, to push people over their edge of comfort—over the boundary of what they consider “sane,” to hopefully show them that the scary, overwhelming, uncomfortable words, ideas, images and sounds are actually MUCH MORE SANE because they match the true facts found in the universe (especially the INNER universe), which brings me to #6.

6. To overhaul the Aristotelian thought system that is still prevalent 80 years after Korzybski’s general semantics should have inspired its downfall in the 1930s. To expand our conception of the universe from 3-dimensional to 4-dimensional (space and time do not exist independently), and upgrade all the obsolete thought systems: Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry, Aristotelian logic, etc. This one also includes ending thought processes that foster self-deception.

7. To explain in clear, rational terms the concepts that we have thus far had to explain in poetic or metaphorical terms. Myths and fictions only help us up until the point when we can explain them with more precise ideas. That means increasing coherence, and reducing the noise—not stating as “fact” what works better in symbolic language.

8. To inspire an evolution in psychological awareness. We’ve been kept in the dark about the ideas of Freud, Jung, and others, because that information has been used by the public relations industry to manipulate our feelings—and, therefore, our habits in buying, voting, etc.—since World War I.

9. To convince the world to let technology work FOR us instead of AGAINST us. The fear of a war between Man & Machine is an instance of neophobia (unless we’re talking about subcutaneous microchips to track people, or some other dystopian nonsense like that). Human beings have many levels of consciousness aside from simple intelligence, but we’re not very good at rational decision making and problem solving. Computers (androids) could do this for us! In some areas they already do! Except what I’m suggesting would involve us staring at a screen for less time. Also, to rid the world of manual labor (wage slavery) and really any job that doesn’t encourage the full expression of the big Self trying to manifest itself in every individual human being.

10. To find peace—inner (jedi master status), outer small scale (a place that matches my inner idea of home), and outer global scale (healing Gaia).

Oneirisms is a “collective journal of metaphysical experience,” a place to post your dreams and visions and read what other people have experienced outside the physical dimensions of space and time. An oneirism is “dream-like experience,” and in posting dreams for all to see we provide the means for others to share in the ride.

By telling and reading the stories here, we are re-creating them; they “happen” in our minds, thus building consciousness loops of increased complexity. With any luck, we will become aware of how much of “real life” is actually metaphysical — that is, it happens or is co-created in our minds.

Psychoanalysis places great value on a prolonged examination of one’s own dreams. Whereas Freud saw dreams (and the subconscious in general) as reflecting mostly personal experience and repressed desires, Jung broadened the field of dream study with the concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.

As Jung writes, “There are many symbols, however (among them the most important), that are not individual but collective in their nature and origin. …they are in fact ‘collective representations,’ emanating from primeval dreams and creative fantasies.” (Man and His Symbols)

And his colleague M.-L. von Franz: “Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering pattern over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth—the process of individuation.” (also from Symbols)

The idea for the site was also inspired by the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In his book (originally published in 1948), Campbell used dreams from real people to provide perspective on myths from various cultures throughout human history.

Most of the dream stories in Hero came from Dreams: Their Meaning and Practical Application by Clement Wood, who wrote a syndicated newspaper column on dreams in the 1940s. Campbell writes, “In contrast to most of the dreams presented in the standard works on the subject, those in this popular introduction to Freud come from people not undergoing analysis. They are remarkably ingenuous.”

The site is a subsection of Supraterranean, an experimental magazine where people can self-publish any type of creative work. I (creator of both sites) became convinced that we as a species would benefit from learning more about the meaning of dreams, both our own and the dreams of other people. As Jung writes, “The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.” It seems that our world could use some “psychic equilibrium” right about now.

Please join us on the adventure! Share your dream or vision on the Submissions page, or just poke around the site.