Mind Gangsterism, more than anything, is the art of colonising other people’s brains. Grabbing their attention so that you can stab your art into their heads. …You need to set up ways to talk to people, to tell them what you’re doing as well as what you’re thinking. Most people get nothing but crap in their email. Everyone likes getting interesting mail. You should think about setting up a mailing list. BUT – you want to set it up so it’s announcement-only. So people on the list only receive mail from you. That is crucial. As a Mind Gangster, you interact with the peasants and livestock at your convenience. And, as a Mind Gangster, you want people to listen to YOU, not all the jabberings of the aggregations of genetic rectal sweat populating your subscribers list. (By which I mean, of course, your Beloved Audience. Yes.)

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Mystique creates a devoted audience. Warts-and-all frankness creates an army of ferociously masturbating nutbags who think they know you and want to rescue and/or kill you.

Latest From Oshii A trailer for Mamoru Oshii’s upcoming Sky Crawlers, scheduled for theatrical Japanese release on August 2, is screening on its site. From AnimeNation and Tokyograph. Mamoru Oshii (the Ghost in the Shell movies) and Shusuke Kaneko (director of the live action Death Note movies) will be directing episodes of TV Tokyo’s the Takeshi Miike supervised, 51 episode live-action sci-fi detective drama Keitai Sousakan 7. The series, which premieres April 2nd, revolves around a high school boy and his transforming cel-phone robot, and his six detective partners that fight against an internet-based criminal organization.

if you haven’t heard of Anonymous and their internet-mediated War on Scientology you need to watch the video in that first link. And it’s not just some oddball hackers in a basement somewhere; the demonstrations in meatspace around the world are a quite impressive example of delocalized transnational internet-mediated political action that has got to be scaring the living daylights out of any number of insecure and/or corrupt politicians.

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years. One explanation could be that bronze was often recycled in the period the device was made, so many artefacts from that time have long ago been melted down and erased from the archaelogical record. The fateful sinking of the ship carrying the Antikythera Mechanism may have inadvertently preserved it. “This device is extraordinary, the only thing of its kind,” said Professor Edmunds. “The astronomy is exactly right … in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”

WARREN ELLIS: The future’s where we live. All these things exist as potential in the soil here right now. And using and examining these things gives us an interesting new perspective on the present-day situation. So, you know, maybe it’s the science fiction writer’s delusion, but I can’t imagine why everyone wouldn’t want to read about that. It’s fiction about where we are and where we’re going.

A kid whose Mom is a on-line game world expert and former professional FPS player, and whose Dad is, well, Cory … I do hope when she’s 20 and leading the cyber-enhanced wetware troops through hyperspace battle against the invading meme-bots, she looks kindly on we true humans who wished her well way back when. Luchy kis, and lucky parents.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The two burner labs, running 170 burners for 10 hours each day, seven days a week, were capable of producing over 4 million DVDs a year, with an estimated street value of over $12 million, investigators said.

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“Movie pirate syndicates have no qualms about where they operate. They will bring their illegal operations to your neighbourhood unless you put a stop to it,” he said.

Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields. It happened 40 years ago, when Stanley Kubrick, following his own ice-cold muse and his fascination with science itself, decided he wanted to create something that “extended the range of science fiction,” a genre that didn’t particularly impress him. What nerve! The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which changed the game so completely that in movies, the sci-fi genre immediately vanished for a few years while everyone surveyed an irrevocably altered landscape.

In 2000, there were 7,000 American households worth $100 million or more; in 2003, there were 10,000; and today, though the data isn’t yet in, Boston College estimates that the number will be 14,000 or 15,000, or double what it was at the beginning of the millennium. If you pare back the standard from eight zeroes to seven, the numbers are even more surprising: Boston College has calculated that in 2004, the last time the Fed provided data, there were 649,000 American households worth $10 million or more, a nearly 300 percent jump since 1992