technomad inspirations

Next day David got out his tool chest. He made a little
unconscious ritual of it, like a duke inspecting his emeralds.
The toolbox weighed fifteen pounds, was the size of a large
breadbox, and had been lovingly assembled by Rizome craftsmen in Kyoto. Looking inside; with the gleam of chromed
ceramic and neat foam sockets for everything, you could get a
kind of mental picture of the guys who had made it-white robed
Zen priests of the overhead lathe, guys who lived on
brown rice and machine oil…

Pry bar, tin snips, cute little propane torch; plumbing snake,
pipe wrench, telescoping auger; ohm meter, wire stripper,
needlenose pliers … Ribbed ebony handles that popped off
and reattached-to push drills and screwdriver bits . . David’s
tool set was by far the most expensive possession they owned.

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling
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He grubbed around in his bag as he progressed past Grand on his way down the Bowery, walking in the glow from the electric showrooms of the many lighting stores fringing the street. He had a few pieces of dried squirrel meat in there, wrapped in plastic and cloth. The hunter, working by touch alone, claimed a small piece and reclosed the wrapping. He bit a morsel off and chewed, slowly and methodically, matching action to footfall. The flavor was somewhere between chicken thigh and rabbit. There was better squirrel to be had farther up the island; the animals in Central Park inevitably took in enough pollution to render their meat blander, and sometimes more bitter, than it really should have been. But it kept him moving, and it kept the saliva flowing, so that he avoided thirst and didn’t deplete his physical reserves.

…

THE HUNTER awoke gently from a peaceful sleep at the break of dawn, its rosy fingers softly touching his face as he slept beneath a great Central Park cypress by the water. He sat up, cross-legged, silent, breathing deeply as the rising sun warmed him. The hunter then stood, pulled some leaves from the cypress, crushed them in his hand to release their oils, and rubbed them under his armpits to minimize his odor.
Walking quietly around the park, he gathered cattail shoots from the water’s edge, lamb’s-quarter leaves, hen of the woods mushroom flesh, a little mountain mint, and wood sorrel, and he returned to his spot under the cypress to eat it with a piece of squirrel meat. He was always careful never to take too much from one plant. He was a hunter, and that meant he never knew when he might have to rely on foraging to live. The moment he allowed himself to believe that the movement of seasons was perfectly repeating and broadly predictable, he would be creating the conditions for his own death.

Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
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Though 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]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeke_Stane
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Here’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”

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-06-27-traveler_x.htm
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