Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 766

Dead Media Beat: Forging the Future project

http://forging-the-future.net/

"The need: a tool for preservation

"Today's writers are blogging political events and contributing historical accounts to Wikipedia; musicians are remixing tunes using Garageband and sharing them via bitTorrent; artists are posting Photoshop images to Flickr or burning iMovie documentaries to DVD.

"Yet while the number of tools for making and distributing culture has exploded in the last half-century, it's hard to find a tool for preserving these ephemera. New media

Bollywood break

http://deviswithbabies.blogspot.com/2009/02/brown-girls-post-slumdog-world.html

*What eye-witness encounter is mimicked here, I wonder. Note his "Indian sci-fi movie" pitch.

*This "Brown Girls" comic is very hip, and it's written from a demographic — young, female, upwardly mobile, globalized, childbearing and "brown" — that has got futurity written all over it.

Ballardian blogosphere crammed into abandoned missile base

*Okay, it's a daffy series of hipster in-jokes, but you might wanna cruise over there

and click a few of those links. That's an impressive social network — even if they don't

actually live in a defunct retrofitted "stuffed animal" atompunk Titan missile-base (yet).

http://www.ballardian.com/minimal-concrete-city-for-sale-serious-interested-parties-only

FOR SALE

Titan 1 Missile Base

$1,500,000

Terms: $300,000 down; Balance @ 7% interest only; 3 year balloon

Contact: Bari Hotchkiss
(949) 842-9479; baho

Reading injection-molded plastic

*Man, this is the stuff. This is the arcane design wisdom. This is the modern urban equivalent of being a Stone Age hunter-gatherer who learns how to read the tracks of tiny lizards.

http://idsamp.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/ejection-mark-on-angled-surface/

"I thought it would be useful to start a series I like to call, "What's That?" where I point out little details on parts and products I see that help designers understand better how they are made and how that might affect their designs… This is

Airport Workers Live in Los Angeles Airport Parking Lot

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-...

(((I suppose it could be argued that the *entirety* of Los Angeles is either

highways or parking lots… Anybody who has spent any time around LAX should

not be surprised by this outbreak of jet-set working-class Favela Chic.)))

(((What's really surprising is the drifter community that nucleated there and
had to be chased off. Makes one wonder who would dwell in the parking lots
of *abandoned* airports. Whoever th

Timeless Objects by Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym

PRESS RELEASE

July 2009

TIMELESS OBJECTS by Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym

Amidst a flurry of new trends, yearly promoted by mass media, there exists an often-voiced desire for timeless everlasting values, for design described as permanent and archetypal.

Our new collection Timeless Objects attempts to make the pieces as timeless as ancient bronze monuments.

Inside each piece there is "a found object": either a disposable item or an anonymous thing culled from the mundane texture of our everyday l

Open-Source Arduino Robot Beer Brewery

*You may have noticed that I'm something of a skeptic about small-scale urban agriculture interventions. But this one? This is different. 'Cause it's beer! Small-scale stills and illicit breweries have a history that is literally as long as the invention of alcohol, tobacco and firearms laws! A revenuer-unfriendly gizmo like this has got proven legs!

*So the basic scheme of this device is: you read the instructions, get the hardware, wire it together, plug it in, dump in some grain, walk a

The Onion amuses itself with design fiction

"Yum E Freez Eel Milk."

http://www.yuwanmei.com/products#9

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/american_consumer_masses_agree_it?utm_source=a-section

Subsidiaries

Though only the most foolish do not know that demand for fish by-products can never be sated, Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Group has further ensured its already unassailable success by diversifying into myriad subsidiaries that offer goods and services whose sheer overwhelming scope and breadth is grea

The nineteenth century, that golden age of witty salon conversation

*Especially in Italy.

*It was like the bon mots of Oscar Wilde, except with, you know,

conspiracies and executions. And opera.

*Google Books is fantastic now. The public-domain antiquities they've got

scanned on .pdf are enough to make one's head explode.

Dead Media Beat: early rollouts of the Moscow-Washington Hot Line

*Be really glad the world didn't blow up.

http://jproc.ca/crypto/hotline.html