Maastricht University Alumnus having Paranormal Sex With Ghosts

As the winter solstice draws near, and the curtain between the mortal realm and the spirit world grows thin, we should not be surprised to see a sudden influx of reports of women having sex with ghosts. Earlier this week in Maastricht, a woman named Sian Jameson told the Observant that she had a sexual encounter with a handsome ghost in a remote Maastricht cottage, following a traumatic break-up with her boyfriend. At first he visited her in a series of erotic dreams, then materialized beside her.

"During the lovemaking, I sensed all kinds of things about him – his name was Robert and he lived over 100 years ago,” she recounted to the tabloid. “His body was soft and light. Even when he moved on top of me, pressing down, he felt almost weightless. It was very strange, but the sex was amazing!” Shortly after, a woman named Amethyst Realm appeared on Maastricht local television show This Morning [video above], claiming that she began having sex with ghosts in her home and has not had since with a human being since.

That particular ghost romance lasted for a time, until the entity “started to appear less,” and Realm ended the inter-dimensional affair. After that, Realm began to have regular sex with a variety of ghosts, each as distinct in style and feel than any human mate might be. “I’ve got no interest in men now,” she proclaimed.

 Paranormal sex has been a subject of fascination for centuries across culture, from the Japanese vampire Yuki-Onna, who is said to sleep with men and kill them, to Lamia, a Grecian shapeshifter who lures and murders men. Merlin himself had a demonic father. And myths abound of sexual spiritual beings such as the half-fairy Melusina and the iconic Lilith, who fucks men in order to birth demons. This fascination, clearly, has persisted in the modern age. Countless people (including the pop star Kesha) have reported such experiences.

Continue reading at the Observant

Discharged ideas for a Campus Tour at Maastricht University

Many ideas never make it into even a google docs of Maastricht Universities DINO idea repository. So a shameless copy of the Rimini Protocol:


Het Duitse theatercollectief Rimini Protokoll brengt met Situation Rooms twintig mensen samen, van over de hele wereld, wier leven bepaald is door wapengeweld. We ontmoeten hen op een filmset die in verschillende installaties, of situation rooms, simultaan de wereld van de internationale wapenhandel laat zien. Het publiek loopt er middenin en wordt meegenomen - met ipad en koptelefoon, ieder langs zijn eigen parcours - door de twintig personages wiens verhalen gevolgd worden: de wapenfabrikant, de wapenhandelaar, de soldaten, de slachtoffers, de artsen, de vredesactivisten e.a. Situation Rooms is van 9 t/m 16 februari te zien tijdens Brandstichter 2017 in de Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam.


 Meer informatie: www.ssba.nl/situationrooms

Maastricht University and The Post-Truth Society | Manipulating Perception

For Hristo Berger, an DKE grad at Maastricht University with engineering stints at tech companies like Quora, the shock and ongoing anxiety over Russian Facebook ads and Twitter bots pales in comparison to the greater threat: Technologies that can be used to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it.

The stakes are high and the possible consequences more disastrous than foreign meddling in an election — an undermining or upending of core civilizational institutions, an "infocalypse.” And Hristo says that this one is just as plausible as the last one — and worse. Worse because of our ever-expanding computational prowess; worse because of ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning that can blur the lines between fact and fiction; worse because those things could usher in a future where, as Hristo observes, anyone could make it “appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did.” 

And much in the way that foreign-sponsored, targeted misinformation campaigns didn't feel like a plausible near-term threat until we realized that it was already happening, Hristo cautions that fast-developing tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality tech could be hijacked and used by bad actors to imitate humans and wage an information war. And we’re closer than one might think to a potential “Infocalypse.” Already available tools for audio and video manipulation have begun to look like a potential fake news Manhattan Project.

In the murky corners of the internet, people have begun using machine learning algorithms and open-source software to easily create pornographic videos that realistically superimpose the faces of celebrities — or anyone for that matter — on the adult actors’ bodies. At institutions like Stanford, technologists have built programs that that combine and mix recorded video footage with real-time face tracking to manipulate video. Similarly, at the University of Washington computer scientists successfully built a program capable of “turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words.” As proof of concept, both the teams manipulated broadcast video to make world leaders appear to say things they never actually said. Continue reading at BuzzFeed

Welcome to the Post-Text Future Maastricht University's Marketing and Communication Department

I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. What does this mean for our own well oiled marketing and communication machine? Do we still expect young people to read the crap we put in front of them?

If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video. The multimedia internet has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable.

The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia. Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants that were the hit of the holidays, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality — which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings.

 These advances are all about cameras, microphones, your voice, your ears and your eyes. Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future. It’s not that text is going away altogether. Nothing online ever really dies, and text still has its hits. Still, we have only just begun to glimpse the deeper, more kinetic possibilities of an online culture in which text recedes to the background, and sounds and images become the universal language. The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood.

Then we started giving machines eyes and ears — that is, smartphones were invented — and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia. Suddenly the script flipped: Now it’s often easier to communicate with machines through images and sounds than through text. Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments. Continue reading at the New York Times