Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 781

Watching Those Imaginary Gadget Ancillary Rights

http://www.scifi.com/warehouse13/

*I see. “Warehouse 13″ would appear to be a supernatural-fantasy TV adventure cop show,

entirely centered around its special effects props: in this, steampunk gear.

*I can’t say this development surprises me: it really seems logical and clever.

What a cool way to monetize a sci-fi show.

*You have to wonder what kind of *ads* would support an enterprise of
this kind… Maybe they wouldn’t even *have* ads. You oughta be able
to just retail the toy rayguns on Etsy, or

Male Libertarian Americans In the Computer Industry

*In case you were wondering why “Scientology Vs Anonymous” somehow

felt so much freakier than “Mythbusters Vs Creationists”…

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133865.html



20,000 Nations Above the Sea

Is floating the last, best hope for liberty?

by Brian Doherty

July 2009 (((

Ideas evolve quickly along the Friedman family tree. The late Milton
Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, was one of the 20th
century’s most respected and influential advocates for cla

Sea Arrrgh

*Normally I don’t post this strange outpourings of this “organization,” but the blog

here is swarming with big glossy seductive Scientology ads this week.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Sea Arrrgh shivers the timbers of Scientology

Worldwide - In this month of June 2009, Anonymous launches OPERATION CRUISE CONTROL, also christened as Sea Arrrgh II, an international event which brings attention to abuses in the Sea Org, the management structure of the Church of Scientology. Child labor, coerced abortions

Bollywood for Beginners

*We haven’t had a Bollywood post in a while. But a Bollywood guide from

American leftist radical mag “Mother Jones”?! Gee whiz, gotta blog that one.

http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2009/06/video-bollywood-beginners

*Features embedded video!

If you don’t like the CandyFab, I don’t even wanna talk to you.

*Mark Frauenfelder, hardest-working geek in show business… No wonder

Martha Stewart loves that guy!

*Speaking of drawing firm moral lines in the sugar, Adam Savage of Mythbusters

just told his Creationist Twitter followers that if they believed that the Earth is 6,000 years

old, then he wants them to get off his Twitter list pronto. What Adam said was, “don’t

let the door hit your behind on the way out.” Mr. Adam Savage has got it going on.

*I’m sure he’d fully appreciate a CandyFab.

Dead Media Beat: ‘Essentially Impervious to Degradation’

*Bring the nanocarbon noise, brother.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/immortal_information/

“A NEW NANOSCALE STORAGE DEVICE COULD PRESERVE ALL THE DIGITAL INFORMATION YOU WANT, FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT—AND LONGER. (((You don’t say! My! That sure would be handy!)))

“For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of information i

Lift-France coming up

*Of course I’m going.

http://liftconference.com/lift-france-09

*It’s summer and clearly the South of France could do with some lifting.

Russian Jingo Cinema At Its Finest

*Okay, certain sissies are complaining that this Russian bodice-ripper about Cossacks

has got way too much violent ethnic slaughter in it. What the hell do those people think

Cossacks were about? They were the freakin’ Cossacks, they weren’t Stay-Puff

the pleather-wearing Marshmallow Man.

*You know what would be awesome? A Tamerlane movie where a peaceful
town is slaughtered to the last man, and the heads of the citizenry are
stacked in pyramids — *in one take.* Like movies are gonna outdo the
h

Dead Media Beat: Dead Blogs

*Other people’s dead weblogs a perennial favorite here at BEYOND THE BEYOND.

*This NYTimes article probably needs to be paired with a blog article

about the dying New York Times (but there’s about a zillion of those

and blogs don’t last very long).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

Published: June 5, 2009

“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”

Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother a

Dead Media Beat: Well, There Went the Big American TV Switch

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/us-declares-victory-as-dtv-transition-goes-rather-smoothly.ars

It’s official: all full-power television stations in the United States have made the switch from analog to digital broadcasting. The last 971 did the jump on Friday in 195 markets. Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Copps was characteristically circumspect about the final move, warning of a “period of adjustment as we all figure out how to make this new technology work in th