So in the interests of the Long Term (the halving of my internet/phone bill), I’m in the middle of Hell right now. No freaking internet connection at home. Colour me Manfred-without-his-Spex (and if you miss that ref., you ain’t read Accelerando (correct that, stat!)) After two hours being off-line I’m already looking at my FuturePhone […]
Read more "shopping in the dying days of the 20th C"So there was this post on Futurismic a while ago. Largely talking about how new cognitive drugs might usher in a Second Enlightenment. They made this parallel: Coffee debuted in the late 17th century in Oxford, England — leading to rowdy coffee houses, jittery arguments and even an attempt by King Charles II to ban […]
Read more "coffee house conferences of the future"Attention Conservation Notice: rambling rant starting with thoughts on the new Terminator tv show, and drawing on posting on Grinding so far, and the world of Doktor Sleepless. The other night I watched the third ep of the new show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Three eps was enough for me to see that yes, […]
Read more "No Fate But What We Make – lessons from the Terminator franchise"from BBC NEWS A very real future for virtual worlds … “Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not,” said Mr Rosedale. “They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise.” “Information is presented there in a way that […]
Read more "A very real future for virtual worlds?!"So it’s a fact that Melbourne’s Public Transport system is pretty much broken. With an increase of something like 20% of users. And the Vic Govt’s solution is to get new trains in 2009. That’s two years away! Yet it seems to me that we could solve this transport problem by just more efficiently using […]
Read more "the need for peer2peer transport"Today saw the launch of BoingBoing TV and it got me thinking.. is everything going video now? This especially after watching checking out those wicked cool Bright.ly guys – with their ‘the future of the web is A/V’ pitch. And my annoyance after clicking thru to a Purepwnage interview to find it was text… And […]
Read more "is video Web2.5?"Warning: the following rant includes low-level language and minor spoilers for a tres cliched new release action film. k, so the other day I was watching the new film Next. Now, firstly I’m gonna say that this was clearly made by the SFX people, because any scene that wasn’t action was horrible, cliched horrible’ness – […]
Read more "on movies eating video games…"k.. Finally got a moment to collect some thought’s on this Facebook thing. It’s very popular with the children, it would seem. To us ‘net veterans the thing seems simplistic, and almost old-hat. I mean, personally I’ve been mucking around on most of the SNS’s for years and years now – especially if you include […]
Read more "on this Facebook thing…"Been devouring the Steampunk magazines – thanks to a heads up from BoingBoing and Warren – a xerox subsidy that saw me getting caught in pre-longweekend traffic. grr. On my first pass through I’ve skipped the plethora of fiction, preferring the articles examining just what is Steampunk. Mostly defined as a sub-genre of Cyberpunk, that […]
Read more "lessons from Steampunk on Cyberpunk"Attention Conservation Notice: this is a long rant about stuff / virtual stuff and probably shows my limited understanding of economics and inability to extrapolate future-trends… There’s a line in Accelerando where Manfred’s talking to his Euro-poli friend about eliminating scarcity in modern Capitalism. The Poli replies that you don’t want to make things abundant […]
Read more "Everything wants to be free"
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 