And so it begins.

Posted by Marco Sparks on May 11, 2012

If you’re reading this, then I have sad/happy news for you. And perhaps not the most surprising of news…

This is post #900 on ye olde Counterforce. We haven’t been as prolific as we used to be, and we haven’t been as loud and verbal, and maybe we haven’t been as excited as we should. We’ve enjoyed a moment together and we’re going to enjoy many, many more as well, but I don’t think this next part will shock you: Counterforce is going to end with post #1000.

Why end it there? Why not just end it here, or tomorrow, or four months ago? Because it’s going to end with #1000, that’s fucking why. Because the time is now and because I think this particular iteration of what you know as Counterforce is ending – if I can be as heavy handed as possible – and it has to end before the next aeon can be born. But it needs to go in its own way, in its own style, and with a little celebration. And a little dark forecasting of what lays beyond.

We’re not planning to bury it. At least, that’s not my intention. It’s coming to the end and I hope to leave its exquisite corpse just laying around for people to enjoy. But this isn’t a funeral. This is going to be a fucking dance party with eulogies and crazy LOLcat GIFs. There’s plenty more YouTube embeds and shit talking and Jackface pictures and theorizing about the fate of Don Draper to come before we sign off at this particular URL. We’re still going to talk about the things we like and love and hate and detest while also being super mega self-referential and taking this thing so far down the rabbit hole and up our own asses that the sunrise/set will seem like a perpetual strobe effect.

In short, we’re going out with banging and whimpering, and hopefully both in rhythmic and wonderful succession.

I remember that when the 80s ended, as U2 had their final concert of the decade, they went out on this intensely ominous note, telling their audience that they had to go away for a while and dream it all up again. Most people walked out of that decade thinking their favorite band was over, gone forever, but that wasn’t the case.

Again, that’s a bit heavy handed, but I’m this close to embedding Semisonic videos and telling you that every new beginning starts from some other beginning’s end. Perhaps instead I’ll just tell you that you don’t have to go home, but you just can’t stay here.

Not forever, anyway.

Anyway. Count your fucking blessings. You were lucky enough to know us and enjoy this time and this place and moment. We were lucky enough to know you and fap fap fap fap fap about things we liked or thought were important. And we’re doing to keep doing that here for another 100 posts, and we’ll keep doing it elsewhere. There is, for example, the podcast to brighten and enrich your days now. That’ll be an ever evolving thing. Put it in your ears and your mind. And keep your eyes coming back here for the next 100 posts. The final 100 posts.

And then when you close your eyes, all will go dark. But when you open them again, perhaps there’ll be something new there, just waiting for you to see it.

I hope everyone will come back. Everyone who has ever done anything with this site, or wanted to, and everyone who has ever read it. I want to bathe in all the old jokes and callbacks and motifs and references and the things we loved. I want the old shit to make friends with the new shit and then take the new shit behind the middle school and get it pregnant. And, with any luck, Counterforce will end this year. It’s kind of exciting to think that our last dance would take us right up to the stroke of midnight at the end of the world, right?

Sweet sensation.

Posted by Marco Sparks on May 20, 2011

In honor of what will and what will most likely not happen tomorrow…

Sonic Youth’s “Do You Believe In Rapture?”

I walked with a zombie.

Posted by Marco Sparks on October 22, 2010

from here.

Meanwhile on the internet:

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while…

Steven Spielberg commits to next direct ROBOPOCALYPSE.

…which I think we’ve mentioned before in some context.

The trailer for Strange Powers, the documentary about Stephin Merritt.

Julie Newmar on The Monkees.

Shocking news: James Marsters and the rest of the rest of the cast of Buffy The Vampire Slayer are so much cooler than Luke Perry.

There is so much fucking water on the moon.

from here.

Liam Neeson to replace Mel Gibson in the celebrity cameo department in The Hangover 2. The downside to that? There’s a sequel to The Hangover.

Why I want to fuck J.G. Ballard.

The replacement cover for the “banned” cover to Kanye West’s new album is ugly.

An interview with Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino.

This site hits far too close to home.

The School of Night.

The comic above: That’s Cyanide & Happiness, which I found over at The High Definite, but after you’ve read that, I’d highly recommend checking out Part 1 and Part 2.

What your favorite movie characters would do if they were attacked by zombies.

Inside the minds of Daniel Clowes and Johnny Ryan.

Conan O’Brien announces who his first week of guests will be.

Interesting video concerning New Zealand actors and The Hobbit, which just cast Martin Freeman in the titular role.

Life on Earth could be transformed by NASA space technology.

Incredibly creepy website promoting Black Swan.

And below, from here:

Dies Infaustus.

Posted by Marco Sparks on July 9, 2010

It’s Friday. I’m tired. I can’t brain today cause I have the dumb, sorry. So, I’m just going to share some gems from the internet with you and then we’ll call it that, okay?

It starts like this:

from here.

Then it comes to this, with how Willy Wonka should’ve ended:

from here.

I actually kind of smiled and laughed as I watched that video. I don’t know. It’s just hilarious to me.

And then it ends like this:

Cyberspace.

Posted by Marco Sparks on April 23, 2010

from here.

Play it in a never ending loop. It’s oddly hypnotic.

The words of your enemies.

Posted by Marco Sparks on March 26, 2010

President Barack Obama at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, from here.

The singularity is near.

Posted by Marco Sparks on March 5, 2010

Or is it? I ask you: Is “the future” that we talk about and theorize and plan for and fear and hope and lust after, is it just another piece of art that we’re creating? Or destroying?

Are you afraid of tomorrow? Or looking forward to where the humans go? Or is it just too far off to accurately discuss?

Beyond the pilot, I’ve yet to catch an episode of the Battlestar Galactica spinoff, Caprica, but I’m desperate to before – and let’s face it – they cancel it:

The music video for “In Repair,” a song by a band I used to like quite a bit, Our Lady Peace, from their album, Spiritual Machines, which features the thoughts and ideas and voice of the futurist Ray Kurzweil quite a bit:

And here’s the trailer for The Transcendent Man, a documentary about Kurzweil. Interesting stuff. Especially, and I hate myself or saying this, the celebrity cameos. See:

You can see Kurzweil on Glenn Beck here.

Or, you can see Kurzweil explaining the coming singularity here.

He also made an old resting list of ours, which you can find here.

You can flash back to Maria and I talking about related things (and Megan Fox and the robots who will fuck you) here.

And while I enjoyed the pilot to Caprica, which is on the still ridiculously named “SyFy” channel, part of me is sad that it’s associated with Galactica. I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more if it was it’s own thing. Hopefully it’s still on Hulu, because I need to catch up. Also, I think I’m in love with “the first cylon,” played wonderfully by Alessandra Torresani.

Other craziness:

FLASHBACK! Why the internet will fail (from 1995).

Old people, lifecasting, and the future of the internet.

Other great Our Lady Peace songs include: “Clumsy,” as well as “Superman’s Dead,” I guess, and “Is Anybody Home?” and the epic and immortal “Starseed.” And a song called “Will The Future Blame Us,” which is okay, I guess, but the title is hilarious to me. The answer is yes. Time travel will be created in the future mainly due to posterity’s desire for revenge.

Ray Bradbury on predicting what the future will look like:

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

from 1979′s Beyond 1984: The People Machines.

Oh well. The future’s an interesting place that I want to live in someday. And who doesn’t want to be on the team of architects who designs it? But there’s a massive gaping difference between desire and talking and just doing and building. And talking about the future tends to be elegant masturbation.

And a last thought:

“The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said.”

“Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays.”

“What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

-Eugène Delacroix, via here and here.

The lovely Liberty Leading The People, 1830, by Eugène Delacroix, which, sadly, you last song on the cover of the last fucking Coldplay album.

I found a reason.

Posted by Marco Sparks on February 5, 2010

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

-William James

from here.

“Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.”

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

-Henry Miller

“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

-Bertrand Russell

“I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”

-Immanuel Kant

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”

-Richard Bach

from here.

The Year We Make Contact.

Posted by Marco Sparks on January 1, 2010

It’s finally here, people. 2010. Pronounced “Twenty Ten.”

I remember first watching the movie version of 2010, the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when I was a kid and thinking about how far off that was, how ridiculously deep into the future that was. Oh, science fiction. How you captured and enraptured my stupid little brain even back then. How you can give me such enticing glimpses of a far off tomorrow (not that 2010, the movie, was all that enticing), and through it all, I don’t stop to actually notice how similar tomorrow is to today.

It really hits me now, especially, since tomorrow is now today.

This is our science fictional future? I want more. And who knows, maybe more is right around the corner. This is “the year we make contact,” after all. Right? And if it’s not, then why can’t it be? Why can’t it be the year that we make contact?

And I think we will somewhere in the vicinity of the next 365 days. We’ve been hovering around a vein, I think, us humans, us earthlings, and I think we’ll tap into it in some way. Maybe not with aliens, but with something. With science. With space. Maybe, and this is more importantly, maybe with something within ourselves, something beautiful and precious. Or maybe something deep and dark.

from here.

Sitting here and reading this right now, you, maybe you’ll be the one who makes contact with something. The next act of your journey. Maybe one of our readers will win the lottery or finish their novel or self portrait or get their blog-to-book deal that they’ve desperately longed for. Maybe we will, but who knows, it might be you. Maybe this is the year you find inspiration, or inspire someone else to greatness. Maybe we’ll meet the love of our life. Or, more importantly, the love of our life will meet us.

from here.

But “The Year We Make Contact” shouldn’t be about “maybe this” or “maybe that.” It’s not just about new understandings and expanding. It’s about conquering. When you’re done reading this blog, quietly minimize the internet, and go do. Go be. Become something.

Two things, and stay with me just another few paragraphs even though I know you’re hungover, but two more things and then I’ll finish my say and let you have yours. One is slightly raunchy: I have this aunt, old as shit and half crazy, I’m pretty sure, but she’s always had this ridiculous saying. She’d always say, “At some point you have to stop jacking off and start coming.” A dirty little bit of wisdom, that.

And secondly, and lastly, like the song says, this will be our year. And it took a long time to come. Make it worth it. Earn it. Go make contact.

The year in pictures, part two.

Posted by Marco Sparks on December 31, 2009

Almost there. Not quite yet though…

But, man, what a frustrating year.

I felt like Tyler Coates‘ picture here summed up what my attitude was going into this year. And what all of our attitudes should’ve been. As it always should be.