Quotes

Will blinking blue lights of servers soon fill the aisles that previously offered the Blue Light Special? Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.

With the creation of Ubiquity Critical Environments, Sears hopes to convert the retail icons of the 20th century into the Internet infrastructure to power the 21st century digital economy. Sears Holdings has one of the largest real estate portfolios in the country, with 3,200 properties spanning 25 million square feet of space. That includes dozens of Sears and Kmart stores that have been closed over the years.

With Ubiquity, Sears is Turning Shuttered Stores into Data Centers » Data Center Knowledge (via new-aesthetic)

*All the abandoned shopping malls become cyberbunkers

(via whatthezeitgeistwants)

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Nothing Lasts Forever was originally written as a sequel to The Detective so it could be made into a follow-up film starring Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland. But when Frank Sinatra declined the role, it was then changed into a sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando, but when Schwarzenegger turned down the role, the script was retooled in 1988 for the standalone story, Die Hard, which would later become one of the most famous and beloved action films of all time.

The film follows its source material closely. Some of its memorable scenes, characters, and dialogue are taken directly from the novel. The story was altered to be a stand-alone film with no connections to Thorp’s novel The Detective. Other changes included the older hero of the novel becoming younger, his name changed from Joe Leland to John McClane, his daughter becoming his wife (maiden name “Gennero,” different from the book’s spelling of “Gennaro”), and the American Klaxon Oil Corporation becoming the Japanese Nakatomi Corporation. The “terrorists” are actually capitalist yuppies that are after $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds the building’s vault and are posing as terrorists to draw attention away from the robbery. In the film, they are also not only German, but of varying ethnicities, although most remain European. The tone of the novel is far darker with underlying themes of guilt, alcoholism and the complexity of the disturbed human mind. The novel also features female terrorists. The ending of the story is also different from the big screen adaptation in the sense that it ends much less positively than the happy ending portrayed in the movie, hinting that Joe could possibly succumb to his wounds and die.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Lasts_Forever_(1979_novel)

* start your alt-history engines…

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Heather Barrington, 27, and her husband Adam, 29, sure do. Fox News reports that the couple will deliver their baby among dolphins at The Sirius Institute in Pohoa, Hawaii.

The Sirius Institute describes itself as a “a research consortium with the purpose of ‘dolphinizing’ the planet.” They recently set up the Dolphin Attended, Water, Natural and Gentle Birth Center (DAWN), due to what they claim is an increasing demand on their web site for people looking to give birth near dolphins. The Sirius Institute claims that giving birth with dolphins is part of an ancient native Hawaiian practice.

The Barringtons, who have been together for 11 years, flew to the island last month to prepare for their unconventional “water-and-dolphin birth,” an idea sparked by the book The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life by Drunvalo Melchizedek. Heather explained their choice to the South Charlotte News: “It is about reconnecting as humans with the dolphins so we can coexist in this world together and learn from one another.” She added, “Having that connection with the pod of dolphins anytime—even if the birth doesn’t happen in the water—still brings peace, comfort and strength to the mother and baby during labor.”

http://laist.com/2013/05/28/couple_plans_dolphin-assisted_birth.php

* now I am all for the extension of personhood and getting all hands, flippers and robot grippers on deck, but… wouldn’t an augmented octopus make for a better midwife?

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“Who are these people?” wondered Don on behalf of the audience about the ragtag bunch of old-money Eurotrash. They’re trotting the globe living out a sexually and economically liberal lifestyle – they’re like Midge’s pals from series one, but with a boat in the harbour at Monaco. Hanging with the rootless, beautiful rich. Isn’t this Don’s fantasy?

Mad Men, series two, episode 11: The Jet Set | Television & radio | guardian.co.uk
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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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This was how I came to realise that in actuality, the grinding.be team was a human-machine dropped into the really real world to aid in the formation of planetary rescue; a metafictional outreach program from the mind of Warren Ellis to paradoxically prevent the creation of the universe he created. To stand in the gap, as Hickman puts it in S.H.I.E.L.D. To embrace the co-evolution of human and machine and to build the best of all possible futures.

And our remit was also to give them, the readers, the Grinders, a narrative constructed for that purpose. Because narratives are ontological engines, through which we can radically reframe people’s self-awareness and vision, and thereby create Ontological Rescue Mission Squads. Along the way, as I’ve grinded my futurist stats, I’ve been fortunate to find myself a proper mentor of sorts: Futurist, inventor of VRML, and legendary techno-pagan, Mark Pesce. And having an epiphany one day some years ago now, I put it to him that I was now a Militant Futurist, fighting for a better world. And he succinctly replied, as all gurus do, “there’s another kind?”

http://www.thestate.ae/anarchist-futurism-the-lie-of-history-part-2/

Part 2 of my first piece for The State. True secrets of fictional realities.

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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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Q: 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.

http://www.sffworld.com/interview/146p0.html
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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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