Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 643
May 20, 2010
Design fancy from Core 77
*Not just "design fiction," but fiction about imaginary designers. Note that this effort comes with fake designed objects and imaginary tracts by fake designers.
http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/design_fancy_kurt_manchild_16269.asp
"Kurt Manchild was an author and inventor born in Jackson, MO in 1952.
"From a fairly young age Manchild found that he had ridiculously vivid dreams of finished inventions. He spent his teenage years thinking that dreams like this were normal. It wasn't...
Showtime: Ellen Allien, 'Our Utopia'
*I like it that so many of Ellen's videos are so hip Berlin-chick grungy, and they so obviously cost pretty much nothing. There really is a utopian quality to that.
*You can go cadge a new free Ellen track here on XLR8R.
http://www.xlr8r.com/mp3/2010/05/sun-rain-edit
*I've been a sincere fan of this fun, ditzy creature for years now. Ellen is always showing up on the website here. I don't think, that in all that time, I have ever given Ellen Allien one dime. Never went to her show, bought a...
Chris Turner, Euro-optimist
*Boy, this sure sends that Timothy Garton Ash piece reeling. It's like they were written on different centuries — and on different planets.
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2010.05-environment-the-new-grand-tour
GREETINGS FROM…
YOUR BRIGHTEST POSSIBLE FUTURE
"It's a real pity, Gesine Bänfer wanted us to know, that we couldn't have visited her daughter's kindergarten at the end of last week. This scene was fine and all, she conceded: The building a low-slung, primary-coloured series of...
Augmented Reality: Alexandre Rivaux
*An airborne pulldown menu. I used to write science fiction stories, in the early 1990s, where guys messed around with augmentation using airborne pulldown menus. Kinda fun years later to see somebody just hanging around, playing some pop music, hacking that out.
*Probably not gonna get a lot of traction as a real-life interface, but what the heck, there it is. Big as life, or rather, big as your screen there.
*Whatever your screen is.
*For now.
An Overview of International Science Fiction/Fantasy in 2009
*Really just, well, Anglophone words kinda fail me.
http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2010/03/overview-of-international-science.html
Compiled by Jeff VanderMeer
"Although my year's best selections included some international fiction, I thought it would be of use to compile a few "core samples" of work mostly in other languages that my contacts found of particular interest in 2009. Except for the books from places like Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, these titles are not yet available ...
World Literature Today: International Science Fiction
*The planet Earth as a regional novel — from a university in Oklahoma.
In "The Aliens Won," Lavie Tidhar writes: "World SF has become a global conversation. . . . The true Golden Age of science fiction may well be today." International Science Fiction, an expanded special section in our May 2010 issue guest edited by Christopher McKitterick, includes fiction by Kij Johnson, Davor Slamnig, and George Zebrowski; two poems by Zebrowski; an excerpt from China Miéville's ...
Augmented Reality: Layar, Sunlight Foundation, and Texas Politics
*Boy, there's an unexpected AR mashup. That one really takes the cake.
Lord of Fraud
*Wow, an article on the wicked doings of "Lord Hugh Rodley." This daring cyberfraud gang almost pulled off the biggest bank robbery in history. Then they sank right back into their utter obscurity.
*And here's an article about the heist in Reader's Digest New Zealand, of all the strange places.
http://www.readersdigest.co.nz/article/930%26pageno=1
It is 1pm on Saturday, October 2, 2004, and the City of London is deathly quiet. Two men – one carrying a laptop, the other sporting a ponytail –...
The Network-Culture Chart
*When a thing like this improves after five years — maybe nine years, he's been at it quite a while — you can see that it's on to something of real interest.
http://varnelis.net/old_network_culture_chart
*My favorite? "Autonomous — Schizophrenic/Fragmented — Subsumed into the Object"
Whack a pirate, whack a politician
*Uh-oh.
"After a German injunction took out its ISP, The Pirate Bay went dark yesterday. Today, it's back up. Just another round of Whac-A-Mole? Yes, but this time the game got more serious: Sweden's Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), a legitimate political party with two members in the European Parliament, has taken on direct responsibility for hosting the site.
"When other politicians...
Bruce Sterling's Blog
- Bruce Sterling's profile
- 1195 followers
