"Tibetan Buddhists believe that saying the mantra (prayer) Om Mani Padme Hum, invites the blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. They also believe you can produce the same effect by spinning the written form of the mantra around in a prayer wheel (called 'Mani wheels' by the Tibetans). The effect is said to be multiplied when more copies of the mantra are included, and spinning the Mani wheels faster increases the benefit as well."

But because your hard drive spins, it becomes a Digital Prayer Wheel: "Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra 'Om Mani Padme Hum' on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser." Via Interconnected

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Long before the movie Blair Witch Project was to be seen in the cinemas, strange hints to the incidents later to be seen in this documentary-style-horror-thriller-flick appeared scattered around the internet. A bit later german private TV-station Sat1 tried to redo the hype to promote their mini series Aeon. But, as it happens so often to copycats, they hadn't understood the tiniest bit of the original concept and greatly offended the taste and intellect of the cyberians out there ... so the officially set up forums were spammed and flamed as they deserved it and finally went straight to hell, where to they righteously belonged from the beginning. Later the guys in the vicinity of Steven Spielberg staged"an elaborate game-cum-marketing conspiracy for the very lame movie A.I. This game positioned a rich, interlinked, and often sneaky series of texts, clues within other documents, Web sites, and even voicemail messages, which were pieced together and developed into a narrative by thousands of curious netizens around the world. I've been describing this as collaborative, distributive, interactive, mystery storytelling, and consider it a new form of writing; others use the pithier and delightfully-abbreviated term Alternate Reality Game." ... says Bryan Alexander. Now an equivalent game pointing to the upcoming "Matrix Revolutions" has appeared. Read the social-software perspective and everything about the Matrix Game at infocult. via many-to-many and infocult

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Munich's ethnological museum, Filmstadt München and the Institute Francais again organize the "Days of the ethnological movie", this time the motto is "Crossing frontiers". The event will take place from 14. Nov through 23. Nov. 2003 at the Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, Germany. All in all 15 movies will be shown, in german, french and english, including german subtitles. Luminaries like french ethnographer and movie-director Jean Rouch will be present. For more information write an e-mail to the staff of the movie-days.

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