Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 704

American warfare in Italy, 1918

*Been rather busy writing fiction lately. I've enjoyed it. I plan to do a lot more.

*Here comes the new year, though, and it's back to the writer's-notebook aspects of BEYOND THE BEYOND. Get this: it's World War One. After many titanic massacres in ghastly frozen mountain landscapes, the Kingdom of Italy is finally breaking and permanently destroying its worst and most bitterly resented national enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The climactic battle is at hand: the Vittorio Veneto...

The Hypersurface of This Decade

*First fiction of mine to appear in the twenty-teens.

http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=437&id=4276

Mallika Sherawat blogging from Los Angeles

*At the moment, it beggars belief, but it can only get more and more like this. Yes, we need Bollywood actresses to play multiracial American politicians. You bet.

http://globalgrind.com/channel/gossip/content/1224176/From-Bolly-To-Hollywood-But-Is-She-Good/

(…)

"Lately, I've been studying Black America, simply the coolest cultural experience of my life, (U don't hear Drake on the radio in India), which will help me greatly for my new role in the film "Love, Barack." It's directed by the...

Spime Watch: blobs of monolithic functionality fragment into clusters of network widgets

http://www.orangecone.com/archives/2009/12/ubiquitous_comp.html

Ubiquitous Computing Bridges Devices and Services

Category: Social effects

Tags: presentation, social effects, ubicomp, ubiquitous computing, vitality

I was honored to have been invited to present at XD Forum, Intuit's internal user experience design conference, last week. My half-hour talk focused on the relationship between ubicomp devices and services, a topic I've been evolving for much of the past year. The presentation's...

Dead Media Beat: Internet archaeologists find ruins of Friendster

*So eerie. I'm getting chills.

Augmented Reality in low-light conditions

*Man, that's one stubborn augment. It suggests a weird environment where one turns out all the lights and the machines are still sticking augments onto stuff.

http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/12/12/augmented-reality-highlights/

Bygone Bureau's best new blogs of 2009

*Like a different universe over there. Or another decade, maybe.

http://bygonebureau.com/2009/12/16/best-new-blogs-of-2009/

Austerity Christmas

*In my email. This is their *second* austerity Christmas party. At least they're still having parties, noble Italian souls that they are.

*I used to resent the gaudy consumer orgy of Christmas… so calculated, so excessive… but a midwinter feast-day was clearly invented to prevent people despairing when the sun never seemed to show up. One senses the hard-won folk wisdom of a people with many winters.

*I like the multi-generational aspects of this picture, the Auld Lang Syne of class...

The Last of the Goths

*I don't mean "Goth" goths. We've got tons of those. I mean GOTH Goth goths.

*The Visigoths vanished into the rising tides of French, Spanish and Moslem peoples, but in the distant Crimea, in the crumbling Ottoman empire, there somehow persisted a tiny shred of Gothic-speaking no kidding Gothic Goths. There's nothing left of them now but a letter. A letter written by a Belgian guy.

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/gotol-10-R.html

*I wonder if there's anything more Gothic, more...

In principle, the Cuban government is not opposed to the blogger movement, but…

*Say WHAT? You're Cuba, yet you don't know what to do with your dissidents? Does Fidel have senile amnesia? Hint: you arrest them and all their friends! Their friends used to be hard to find, but now you just bust whoever follows 'em on Twitter. Have you learned nothing from Iran?

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/1380664.html

Cuba is counter-attacking its cyber-foes with government backers calling them mercenaries and CIA agents, but sometimes admitting it's difficult t...