Read moreThough Ezekiel is the son of Obadiah, as well as a supervillain rather than a hero, Ezekiel Stane’s creator, Matt Fraction considers Zeke to be the next generation of Tony Stark/Iron Man rather than of Obadiah Stane/Iron Monger: often referring to the character as “Tony Stark/Iron Man 2.0”.[2]
Fraction states the similarities between the pair’s characteristics with Ezekiel being evolution of Tony Stark’s character: a younger, smarter, sharper futurist of a post-national supercorporate world moving into a future that Stark has no control over.[2] Overtaking Stark and his Iron Man technology by not taking the route of armored suits but upgrading the human body itself.
“Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist, he has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn’t want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete. Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop. He’s the open source to Stark’s closed source oppressiveness. He has no headquarters, no base, and no bank account. He’s a true ghost in the machine; completely off the grid, flexible, and mobile. That absolutely flies in the face of Tony’s received business wisdom and in the way business is done. There are banks and lawyers and you have facilities and testing. Stane is a much more different animal. He’s a much smarter, more mobile, and much quicker to respond and evolved futurist. ”
—Matt Fraction[3]
Author: m1k3y
Read moreQ: Your novel shows many influences, from Orwell’s 1984 to Stephenson’s Snow Crash to The Matrix films. What fiction inspired your writing?John Twelve Hawks: During one period of my life, I lived with friends in a large run-down house next to a large university. I was sleeping on the floor in what had once been the maid’s room. My expenses were about $100 a month. Every morning I would go to the university library, “steal” a novel from the shelves, and read the entire book. The next day, I would replace the novel and take another one. I basically worked my way through the entire British and American canon of literature, although I encountered the books as an autodidactic and not as a student in a lecture hall.
I’ve read 1984 twice, but a much larger influence was Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. I’ve read this four-volume set countless times, and it profoundly shaped the way I look at the world. Miyamoto Musahi’s Book of Five Rings is an inspiring book – short in length, but filled with wisdom. I’ve never read Snow Crash.
I have never owned a television. In my Amazon Short essay, “How We Live Now,” I suggest that television is the prime instrument in creating a “culture of fear” in our society. When The Traveler was published, it was amusing to hear how I’d had been influenced by TV shows and movies – such as “Alias” or “Highlander” – that I’ve never seen.
I watched the first “Matrix,” but my friends told me to avoid the next two in the series. The Fourth Realm Trilogy and the “Matrix” are completely different fictional creations. The “Matrix” suggests that our world is unreal and that we are fragments of consciousness in an environment manipulated by a computer. Everything in the Fourth Realm is based on reality. The alternative realms are not presented as cyber fantasies, but as real worlds. No one will ever fly in my novels.
As far as cinematic influences go, I’ve seen almost all of Kurosawa’s films. “Yojimbo,” “Rashomon,” and “Seven Samurai” are wonderful movies.
Q: The Traveler can be seen as many things – a response to the erosion of personal freedoms, a response to the double-talk we receive from the government, a science fiction/fantasy thriller that simply entertains. How would you categorize your own work?
John Twelve Hawks: One of the things that bothers me about contemporary publishing is the way that books are categorized – and, sometimes, “ghettoized” – by the marketplace. I was fortunate to have a publisher that tried to avoid this. Placing books in categories keeps many writers from achieving a much-deserved larger audience.
I was never consciously combining different genres when I wrote The Traveler. I could only write a story that reflected my own personal preoccupations – it wasn’t inspired by other books or films. The spiritual vision of the book, martial arts, political concerns and a feeling of dread all correspond to my actual experiences in life. I would guess that, if the book seems to have many different elements, it’s only a reflection that my somewhat unusual life has led me to see the world differently than other people. I’d guess that a brilliant writer like Philip K. Dick didn’t walk around with “Sci-Fi” tattooed on his arm; he was only writing about the world as he saw it.
Read moreHere’s what we know (or what we’re told) about Twelve Hawks:
“He” is probably a man, although his agent, Joe Regal, says Twelve Hawks uses a synthesizer to disguise or filter his voice. “When he calls, I know it’s him,” Regal says, “because nothing comes up, not ‘out of area’ – nothing.”
He’s older than 30 and could be in his 40s or 50s. Clues: In a brief question-and-answer piece e-mailed to USA TODAY by Doubleday, his publisher, Twelve Hawks precedes the answer to a question about religion with: “When I was in my twenties ” And when an editor asked him whether his book’s “realm of hell” could be compared to current conditions in Iraq, Twelve Hawks said it’s more like Beirut in the ’70s, a remark that could mean he was then old enough to read newspaper accounts of war-torn Lebanon. But then again, he could have gotten the information from old news clippings or a library.
He lives in New York, Los Angeles and London, according to Regal, though the literary agent has never met him face-to-face.
He is a first-time author, not an established author who is writing under a pseudonym, his agent says.
He doesn’t own a TV, he likes wine, and he drives a 15-year-old car, says Jason Kaufman, his editor at Doubleday, who says he has picked up those details in their numerous conversations.
“This is not something that Twelve Hawks dreamed up because it would make headlines,” Kaufman says. “Twelve Hawks is someone who lives his life and values his privacy in the exact same way as the characters he writes about. … It’s not a game to him.”
Though Twelve Hawks won’t talk to the media, his publisher supplied USA TODAY with an e-mailed quote from him about why he lives the way he does: “The Vast Machine is the very powerful — and very real — computerized information system that monitors all aspects of our lives. I live off the Grid by choice.”
But is it really possible to live that way in 2005?
“It is possible,” says Lisa Pankau, a white-collar-crime investigator in Chandler, Okla. She adds quickly, however, that it would be “very difficult” and would take “a very devoted person.”
Pankau guesses Twelve Hawks could have credit cards with an offshore bank — if he even uses credit cards. She says he could have a passport from one of the Third World countries that sells citizenship, and he could have his agent send his money to a dummy corporation or an offshore account that is listed under an assumed name.
She guesses he could have registered a car under a pseudonym. As for a driver’s license, you can buy a book from Amazon.com on how to create that and other forms of identification on your home computer.
Most important, she says, Twelve Hawks, in all probability, would have needed his secret life in place before the 9/11 attacks tightened worldwide ID requirements.
His agent, Joe Regal, won’t discuss financial arrangements. “But I’m not sending wire transfers to a bank in Dubai”
Read moreDear Yahoo! userbase:
It has not escaped the attention of new management that, yes, I now possess 30,000 Tumblr followers.
Thirty-thousand of you! That’s pretty massive, eh? Wow!
What’s more, I have also been a loyal Flickr user ever since January 2005 — “Flickr” being an obscure, formerly with-it Yahoo! photo-sharing site where I have over a million page-views. Over there at Yahoo! Flickr, they still count in pages. Millions, but pages.
With these elite credentials, I was quickly recruited for some R&D work on Yahoo!’s fully-consolidated Tumblr-Flickr service, “Tumblickr.” Yes, I’ll be helping to create the new, conceptual, diegetic services that the rest of you will some day enjoy!
What’s more, you people — my mighty legion of thirty thousand followers — are the very first people to hear early warnings from the leaky Tumblickr development R&D lab. You’ll notice that the “heart” and “forward” commands have been disabled for this exclusive news post. Do not attempt to use those grayed-out commands! Violations of the new terms-of-service will be swiftly noticed and permanently recorded, and offenders may well be deprived of their obligatory Yahoo! log-in.
1. Automatic image enhancement. Any group photo featuring a “Tumblickr Pro” (formerly called “Flickr Pro”) will be automatically groomed for elite user benefit. This means red-eye removal, gray hair re-colored, bent shoulders straightened, sagging features sharpened, unseemly wrinkles shooped out of their 1980s-style clothing, etc.
The opposite applies to the dead weight of the 47% Tumblr “taker” underclass, who will be depicted as even youthier, grimier and more downmarket than they already are.
2. The new “Ignore + Throttle” feature. Newbies, trolls, teens, cat-fanciers and other vermin who annoy a “Tumblickr Pro” will still suffer the useful, time-honored Tumblr “ignore” command. However, randomized DDOS lag-moments of three to fifteen seconds duration will also be introduced into the service connections of these offending parties. This is an innovative service of “Unit 63198,” our new Chinese Tumblickr offshore support battalion.
3. Automatic Mobility Filtering. Tumblr users are notorious for posting from “mobiles.” These cheap, careless Android snapshots are easy to distinguish from genuine camerawork, linked through top-end Apple desktop media-production units, owned and deployed by those of us who can still think differently enough to take real digital photographs.
Our new Tumblickr feature allows us to filter-out these low-net-worth “mobile” vagrants, especially those who lack any mortgage or a retirement plan. These way-too-mobile insta-bums will henceforth be gently guided into a “Tumblickr Favela” where they can pay in Bitcoins and be seen only by their own kind.
Here at Tumblickr R&D Central, we’re soliciting further input about our services from our users — but for God’s sake, not from just anybody. Do not send us email. We own the Big Database now. We already know who you are. If you’re likely to do anything useful for us, we’ll know that long before you do.
Forward to 40,000!
Interdome: “Who dares to dodge Google’s information tax?”
This article that has been making the rounds about how Google is somehow a state is straight-up idiotic bullshit, and it’s pissing me off.
The idea that “paying tax” is what defines a nation-state is a political conception somewhere between the most child-like sense of socialism and Tea Party…
Something I’m only now wishing I put into my piece on The State: when my mate and I went to drink the cool aid at the cult of the Long Boom, we wound up hanging back, chatting with McKenzie Wark. My mate now works at Google.
Interdome: “Who dares to dodge Google’s information tax?”
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* Or to put it another way: we’re gonna have some awesome nostalgia 😉
* when humanity reboots itself again in another thousand years, those of us near-immortals that managed the great posthuman flight will be getting our lulz watching future archeologists puzzle over these, from our secret base on the dark side of the Moon.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Read more*The nature of the mid-21st century. You can tell we’re getting there, because we get a little older, a little bigger, and quite a lot more scared of the sky, with every passing week.
Read moreBut my experience with BldgBlog is that following your voice and the things you find interesting actually does work and does find an audience. It underestimates audiences to say you have to dumb everything down or make it sarcastic. You can share off-kilter ideas with tens of thousands, if not millions, of people.
And you shall know us by our external battery packs.
Or replacement batteries sticking out of pockets
The first android phone to have a small internal capacitor and replacement batteries you can slap into it like an extra magazine will win my eternal allegiance.
Oh my god that would be so awesome
So I’m not the only one walking around, hand at the hip, ready to draw my phone then 🙂
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 