Jared Shurin's Blog, page 33
June 15, 2016
The Manhattan Projects; or, ���These Ain���t Your Momma���s Physicists���
The Manhattan Project was a now legendary U.S. military programme responsible for the creation of the atom bomb, operating between 1939 and 1946. The scientists that worked for the project have become legendary figures in their own right; Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi to name just a few. Regardless of the moral implications of what came out of it, the Manhattan Project was an undeniably impressive feat of science and a major step forward in the human understanding of physi...
June 13, 2016
#loveislove
#loveislove Other vetted national and local charities can be found hereincluding The Trevor Project. The Trevor Projectprovidea24/7 hotline and webchatfor LGBTQ youth, ensuring they always have a safe space and someone to talk to.
Weirdness Rodeo: Follow More Strangers
Archigram concept for the Trocadero, Piccadilly Circus Virginia Woolf goes to the movies
No, seriously, she does.
We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement,...
June 10, 2016
Friday Five: 5 Favourite Books of the Half Year
Six month check-in! It has been a blissful productive year for reading, so I'm - of course - cheating this list with a lot of subcategories.
The onlyrule is that I've excluded rereads (which knocks out things likeNeuromancer andModesty Blaise, which, as we all know, are two of the bestest books ever).
Five Favourite 2016 Books So Far
Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims
Glorious. Life and love and coming of age in a rural Scottish trailer park. While the world quietly dies. A lyrical book abou...
June 9, 2016
One Comic Makes Its Own Laws With Punisher #1
Hot off a guest appearance in Daredevil season 2 on Netflix, and last seen in comics at the start of Secret Wars killing allthe supervillains as the world ended... It's The Punisher's turn to be relaunched! A new number one and a new creative team - well, new-ish - as one of them is a very old hand at depicting the terminal adventures of Frank Castle.
Amongst many other subjects,we also discuss: who to root for if you can't root for the protagonist;heroes that kill;how best to use a charact...
June 8, 2016
Readers of Gor: Tarnsman of Gor
In which Silvia Moreno-Garcia of Ka-Na-Da and Molly Tanzer of Ko-Lo-Ra-Do discuss Silvia's re-read and Molly's first read of John Norman's famous (notorious?)Tarnsman of Gor.
Silvia: Tal, Molly Tanzer of Ko-lo-ra-doh. I guess before we get into this review of both the first Gor book and the first Gor movie, Id like to ask how you discovered these things even existed.
Molly: Tal, Silvia Moreno-Garcia of Ka-Na-Da. May your tarn never get lice.
I actually heard about Gor from John C. Wright, th...
June 3, 2016
Space, Fashion & Con-Running
Miguel Marquez
When worlds collide
This 2012 piece from the MIT Technology Review looks at how artists take advantage of (and battle the stigma over) computers and digital tools in creating their work:
People see I use computers, so they say Im making computer art, he said. Its not about making computer art; its just using the new thing. Everybody uses it. To carry out certain ideas, new technology is essentialor to put it another way, computer technology is making possible projects that...
June 1, 2016
Who wanted to #SaveAgentCarter and #SaveNashville?
Last month, several popular TV shows got the axe- including Nashville, Agent Carter and Castle. Fans were outraged, and when outrage and fans come together, you get hashtags.
But which of these cancellations triggered the most outrage? And where? And with whom?
I was curious, I used social media monitoring toolAudiense to answer these burningquestions.
Which cancellation generated the most outrage?
For all of these, I tracked use of the #Save[whatever]hashtag between 1 and 27 May.
The first...
May 31, 2016
Radio Drama: "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" (1945)
"The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" first aired May 21, 1945, onThe Weird Circle.
Thoughts Before Listening
Ok seriously though, how can this not be good, its called "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" for hecks sake, at the very least this should be about a disembodied ghost toe that comes back to haunt people and that is just rad as fuck. I am scared though.
Thoughts While Listening
This is an adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce story COME ON AMBROSE DONT FAIL ME NOW
The weird circle meets in a...
May 27, 2016
Nerd is the New Black: D20 Fashion
We live in marvellous times.
Where once we nerds, geeks and fanfolk needed to haunt thrift stores and charity shops, comic book stores (which could be very unfriendly places for young women), bead shops and the local counter-cultural neighbourhoods of our nearest cities to find clothes and jewellery that proclaimed our love for Star Trek/TaleSpin/Squirrel Girl, we now have Etsy, Society 6, Redbubble, Amazon, Bay and ten thousand million specialist websites.
And, where we once worried about ge...
