Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 773

Flarf Poetry in POETRY magazine

*Looks like the gang is in top form.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237176

"Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned.

"But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, n

Changing your urban landscape without actually getting any boring permission to do it

*I'm not gonna harp on the favela-chic aspects of having your own city government

hack its own city like this. But here you've got a Web 2.0 design outfit floating ideas

about how to build a town.

*Don't be surprised if you see a ton of this happening, mostly because it doesn't cost anything and the alternative may be watching tumbleweeds blow over your abandoned downtown.

*Next step: guys on the City Council resign because it's more patriotic for them to
leave the council chambers and just hit

Dead Media Beat: Polaroid

*A wonderful site, THINGS MAGAZINE. They really do justice to things.

http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2009/06/reanimator.htm

…as sites like The Impossible Project attest, certain technologies transcend their obsolesence through being perpetually desirable. The Impossible Project aims for the 're-invention of analog instant film', engineering a 'new analog instant film for Polaroid vintage cameras' to supply professionals and enthusiasts who refuse to give up the fight (NYT article.

'We think it's

The 'New Yorker' discovers squelettes

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/12/08/081208ta_talk_paumgarten

(…)

"A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboar

Favela Chic mashups, Doctorow-style

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/07/cory-doctorow-cheap-facts-and-plausible.html

*I think it's important that you read this, especially the last half of it, and devote some intellectual attention to pondering how totally messed-up this is.

*You wanna see me write some science fiction with this premise? No problem:

"Sarah Palin's here."

"Her again?"

"She's brought us some moose."

"Okay, great, I don't have much use for her or her monster kids, but those antlers can be repurposed for dielectri

Meanwhile, in the American digital favela

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/

"There are growing signs — from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence — that the parasite ridden American "consumer" is finally dead. (((Okay, maybe so, but if any other non-American consumer is still alive, aren't they going to use their brilliant capitalism to simply *buy* American con

American centipedes

*Happy 5th of July! Let's study recent political meltdowns in the USA and examine their electronic elements!

*First, Senator John Ensign of Nevada. Senator Ensign ruefully announced that he had an affair with a staff member — not because of sudden remorse for his affair, but because the offended husband, also a member of the Ensign staff, compiled a damning dossier about Ensign's activities and leaked it to the right-wing press.

*Partisanship is now so toxic in the US that rightwing leakers feel

Comical street-use site

*That'll kill a few holiday hours.

http://thereifixedit.com/

Web Semantics: Italian SMS abbreviations

*Imagine what this technology must be doing to Chinese right now.

Italian SMS - Standard Italian

anke: anche
c sent: ci sentiamo
cmq: comunque
dm: domani
dp: dopo
dr: dire
dv 6: dove sei
dx: destra
frs: forse
ke: che
ki: chi
km: come
kn: con
ks: cosa
mmt+: mi manchi tantissimo (((wow)))
nm: numero
nn: non
prox: prossimo
qlk: qualche
qlks: qualcosa
qkl1: qualcuno
qnd: quando
qndi: quindi
qnt: quanto
qst: questo
rsp: rispondi
scs: scusa
sl: solo
smpr: sempre
sms: messaggio
sn: sono
spr: sapere
sx: sinistra
sxo: spero
t tel + trd: t

INDESEC 2009, the Indian homeland security expo

*Real regional superpowers have a real military-industrial complex.

http://indesec-expo.com/index.html

*And it needs to work against naked, suicidal marauders with nothing but an AK carbine

and some shoes cut from tire treads:

"Prevention of trans-border and trans-LoC infiltration by militants has been one of the greatest challenges for the security forces. While there is a sizable army and other security forces deployment all along the border and LoC; there are large gaps which are exploited duri