суббота, 29 марта 2014 г.
RPGCast - Episode 300: "This...Is...RPGCast!"
From heroes to Henry, the road to RPGCast's 300th episode was full of shovelware and Tidus's nipples. Celebrate with us as we reminisce about poor title choices and missed equine sales opportunities. We also learn the entire PS4 game schedule and...wait...why is Jon leveling more characters in FFXI?
четверг, 27 марта 2014 г.
How to Throw the Perfect Wedding Reception
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среда, 26 марта 2014 г.
AGAINST THE DAY: A Late Thought About The Book About The Century
Thomas Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY is a book that is almost impossible to finish. In many ways, it defeats the point of finishing it. It’s more than a thousand pages long, and each individual scene is pretty much the size of a novella. It’s a novel that you can dip into like an encyclopedia. It’s set between 1893 and World War I, and it came out in 2006. It’s in no way current. But I’m sitting down and writing this because it’s about everything. It might even be the defining novel of the 21st Century.
It is, as was much post-modernism, about settling the outstanding sociocultural business of the 20th Century. It was the first century bright and loud enough to make the mimetic novel’s tendency to want to tie up all loose ends into a joke. We live now in a century where the CTO of the CIA can proudly announce at a security conference that we can now know everything that happens everywhere in real time, but, as we have since discovered, being able to record everything is not the same as knowing and understanding everything. Every phone call in America is committed to storage for thirty days, but only the tiniest fraction are ever listened to by the state or anyone else. There are hundreds of characters in motion in AGAINST THE DAY. Even the mighty human swarm action of Wikipedia broke against the task of even tracking their action in chapters. In telling a story about the disconnected 20th Century, Pynchon’s omniscient view conjures the blare of the 21st, a world in which the number of people we can invest in and follow the lives of has been calculated by anthropologists. (It’s called the Dunbar Number. A hundred and fifty people.)
AGAINST THE DAY cycles through genres like a long-running television show entering its decadent phase. (And AGAINST THE DAY is certainly a decadent book.) There are sections written in the style of the weird boy’s-own adventures of the period, the “Edisonades” of young scientists romping through fantasy scenarios like demented Scouts. There’s a period detective story, featuring a PI who eats sub-toxic doses of dynamite in order to become immune to explosions. There’s a Western about anarchists, and a subplot about rare crystals that can split a person into two. Doubling is an important theme in the book, and sometimes I think that Pynchon is telling us that there is here: that that time is this time. For all its Zeppelins, Hollow Earth passages and psychics, there’s nothing more strange than the days we live in now.
The world of AGAINST THE DAY is as awash with scientific marvels as ours. Nikola Tesla even makes an appearance. A constant surges of wonders technological and mythical, just as ours: because we live in a world of myths too, the myths of other universes creating cold spots in the sky where they bump against ours, as in the theories of Laura Mersini-Houghton, and the ordinary technological marvels of satellites that speak to the slivers of glass in our pockets and the machines that print new human organs.
What I want to say about it is this: it’s a book about being on the brink. More so than CABARET, not least because CABARET has been defanged by the years and is now nothing more than a dumb receptacle for Weimar chic. CABARET is about being blind to the brink. AGAINST THE DAY casts the brink as an oncoming storm, the biggest one in history, the one that nobody could be prepared for. It’s the story of being in the eye of it. There were a few such eyes in the 20th Century. There will be none in the 21st, the era of what the tech community is pleased to call “disruption.” This is how we’re going to live from now on – surrounded by the swirl of strange and terrible weather, never quite knowing when the great black wall of it will shift and slam into us. AGAINST THE DAY will remain relevant, because it’s the picture of every minute of every day from now on. Amazing things, every single different kind of story we can imagine, and the altitude thrill of constantly being on the edge of bubbling fatal chaos.
AGAINST THE DAY is the double of the modern world. It’s the book we never want to finish.
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понедельник, 24 марта 2014 г.
Should You Rent an Extended Stay Apartment?
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суббота, 22 марта 2014 г.
RPGCast - Episode 299: "I Want To Buy A Horse"
RPGamer puts this episode out to pasture, along with Marc Whitten and Koji Igarashji. In the meantime, you can go play Star Trek Online on OSX and pick up the latest DLC for Blackguards. Ok, so maybe there wasn't much interesting news this week.
пятница, 21 марта 2014 г.
Keep Costs Down with A Great Pet Health Insurance Policy
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Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange stumbles on millions in virtual currency
Mt. Gox, the now-defunct bitcoin exchange, says it has found 200,000 of the 850,000 bitcoins that had gone missing and precipitated its bankruptcy in February.
Yoshi's New Island is solid, baby
Nintendo is in danger of completely sullying the meaning of the word "new" by using it in far too many recent titles - New Super Mario Bros., New Super Luigi U, and Animal Crossing: New Leaf, just to name a few. While none of these games offer anything revolutionary, they're all mostly-enjoyable entries in decades-old series, and the same holds true of Nintendo's latest 3DS title, Yoshi's New Island.
среда, 19 марта 2014 г.
IndieWeb
This is a thing I’ve been following since last year. Willow Brugh has just taken a shot at simplifying it for stupid people like me.
Some friends of mine have been advocating for this rad thing called IndieWeb. It’s a way of regaining control of your information, data, and profile online. This is my first pass at explaining what it is they’re up to.
I post it here both because it’s interesting and because I have a strong urge to use it as the basis for developing this site in the future. This will involve depressing and time-consuming stuff like moving the site hosting and learning how WordPress works under the bonnet a little more. This site will never be the full eight-posts-a-day churn that it once was — curation blogging is probably best served on a socially connected system like Tumblr in any case — but when I do write new material for public view, I intend that most if not all of it be for a site I own. I don’t think we should be writing new material for stack algorithms to chew on and digest for ad technologies. (Unless that’s the specific intent.)
Anyway. Here’s what we’re talking about, when we talk about IndieWeb.
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вторник, 18 марта 2014 г.
понедельник, 17 марта 2014 г.
Elvis’ Legacy Lives on in Hawaii; Be a Part of It
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Leaf Broth
Hello. I’ve been reading cookbooks.
There’s a certain kind of cookbook that you — or at least I — can read like it’s fiction. Science fiction, even. I was talking with Janice Wang, a researcher at MIT Media Lab, about this at South By the other day. (That was a really interesting visit, by the way.) She was trying to put together a thing about food in science fiction, and having a little trouble finding too much about food culture in sf. And all I could think of was the three cookbooks I’d gotten recently, written by chefs from NOMA. NOMA is a Nordic restaurant dedicated to reinventing hyperlocal, firmly seasonal foodstuffs with Science. And science is still the best poetic fiction there is.
The NOMA Leaf Broth requires fallen autumn leaves of two different vintages: the current year and the year before. They employ car parks full of dehydrators to smash plants down to a perfect powdered essence. Moss is a regular ingredient. Centrifuges and frozen gasses. All the foods are found within a certain radius around the NOMA location. It is near impossible to prepare many of the meals outside that area or without their lab. But that’s not the point.
These are books intended to make you think again about where you live. They serve the essential journalistic element of social fiction: this is where I think I am today and this is what I think it looks like. And then they apply technologies entirely unexpected in the culinary context — like their forebears, people like Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria — to try and make us reconsider the possibilities inherent in our current context. Cookbooks of the Science Fiction Condition. Take your eyes off the rear view mirror for a second and see people using Mad Scientist shit to make dinner.
(Taken from the top of my most recent newsletter post. Subscribe at http://www.orbitaloperations.com )
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суббота, 15 марта 2014 г.
Kingsley Amis on Tony Benn
It is no part of my business to discuss what gets politicians into office or debars them from it, but in the case of two noteworthy contenders of our time, J. Enoch Powell and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the reason for their failure to reach the top is surely obvious. They both look barmy. I understand this as an elastic term which would include Benn's appearance of general dislocation as well as Powell's of more specific derangement...
Benn I have run into only once, early in his career, when by a misunderstanding he arrived on my doorstep expected but not heralded by any name. The door was one of the those with a glass panel affording a preview of the caller. At the first sign of the present arrival the thought flashed into my mind, "Who is this English cunt?" The distinguishing adjective is important. There are Scottish cunts, there are even Welsh cunts, and God knows there are American cunts, but the one in question could have come from nowhere else but this green and pleasant land.
Other guests arrived at the same time and my silent question went unanswered for the moment. I offered drinks. Someone asked for a gin and tonic. I turned to the cunt. "Same for you?" He reacted much as if I had said, "Glass of baby's blood?"...
Benn at any rate gives an impression of physical harmlessness: he would never, you feel, for for your throat. Not so Enoch Powell.
(Kingsley Amis, Memoirs)
пятница, 14 марта 2014 г.
Throw a Stylish 2014 Wedding
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Seniors Value Independence, Research Shows
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четверг, 6 марта 2014 г.
How to Protect Yourself when Using Online Dating Sites
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среда, 5 марта 2014 г.
MOON KNIGHT #1
Out today in most territories. First of my new comics series projects to emerge this year. A little touch of Weird Crime in the world of Marvel Comics.
вторник, 4 марта 2014 г.
'Layton' back on the case
Welcome back the world's greatest detective. No, we are not talking about Batman or Sherlock Holmes but that puzzle solving machine: Professor Layton.
понедельник, 3 марта 2014 г.
DEAD PIG COLLECTOR: The Audiobook
A little while ago, my friend Wil Wheaton was kind enough to read my short story DEAD PIG COLLECTOR, and my publisher, FSG, was kind enough to publish it via Macmillan Audio and Audible. This here should be the Amazon link.
The original ebook is still doing well in the Kindle Singles charts. I’m still very fond of the story. You can find it here.
суббота, 1 марта 2014 г.
RPGCast - Episode 297: "As Seen On Twitter"
Jon shows up but just refers us to previous tweets. Meanwhile, Manny reminds us that black is beautiful. Then Anna Marie leaks all the latest Natsume business plans while Chris listens to floppy drive symphonies.
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