culture
(The Spice)
In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes. ... more »
In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Agreeing, he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. ... more »
The Man Who Lived On His Bike
No-one has ever lived in the past
Public Service Announcement
Cave Of The Book
Guy LarameeCarved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee via @cmenscher, love these.Brutal Fornication And A Fascist Theocracy
Profound Culpability
Theo Jansen and his Strandbeests
Why I Went Into The Woods, Why I Left The Woods
I was lead developer at The Onion for over 5 years. It went quickly. It was fun. It was also an incredible amount of work, usually 24/7. I hope it looked effortless. But sometimes you just need to know you have to move on and work on other things. The Onion, too, is moving on, back to the Midwest.
I'll now be working with Corey Menscher at betaworks developing for findings.com.
Before I worked as a developer I worked as a librarian and bookseller-bookbuyer -- the first job I had when I moved to NYC was at Gotham Book Mart, now defunct. This was not a Barnes & Noble, this was the anti-Barnes & Noble. There were only a few of us, it was small and dusty and seemingly disorganized, and cat habited, and conversation with people that came in (including authors) about books was not just a job, it was passionate. It was also serendipitous. I liked to think that we were agents of serendipity -- someone would come in looking for something on New Guinea, and leave with an out-of-print bio of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. The depth of the connection from one subject to another was not merely surface, it was particular and curated, with a dash of random, tripping over a stack of books.
I see a desire and a need for serendipity. Recommendation engines like Netflix are massively successful and technically impressive, but lacking. The best conversation, the best recommendation you're going to have is with other knowledgeable passionate people who are just dying to lead you to something. Given that we can now record everything we need to (hopefully not more) then what you're reading and what you think about as you read it would be incredibly interesting not just for yourself in a sort of self-metrics way, but for the purposes of discovery when compared with other people. You are what notes you take, you are what you read.
Of course it's social, everything is social (peculiar that the term would really even exist). The nice thing about gathering around serendipity is that the references aren't likely to be self-referential and the conversation likely to be more directed, substantive and less noisy. Not that I don't love youtube videos and the subsequent comments below. But they're noisy. Personally as the web grows the less time I want to spend trawling it, I need a shortcut to the interesting things. I need to keep track of what interesting things I've come across. This can be as basic as social bookmarking, but I think there's more here. The explosion of ebooks due to Kindle software changes the complexion to longer form, a bookmarked title and some terse comments aren't really sufficient (or at least, very interesting). There are a bunch of people exploring these ideas, but I think there's different sides to the approach, and I'm excited to explore it more with Corey and Findings.How Many Dots
"Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays."I should be deeply concerned about Facebook -- they've morphed into an uber-entity, a meta-culture, a global force. Recently in a plane I was looking down at all the little houses and in a sort of Harry Lime internal voice I wondered how many were, or were going to become Facebook members. This kind of calculation of course has huge corporate implications. It has large social implications. But I don't care. Why? Because it is now not just "majority", it's no longer moving upward, growing, but entirely ubiquitous.
Ubiquity is barely functional, always complained about (in fact if someone isn't complaining you aren't really ubiquitous). It has impact only in that it is ever-present but since it isn't on an edge, and since it appeals to the lowest common denominator, it's ancillary to what's inspiring.
I worry about Facebook now the way I worry about political and criminal institutions, not the way I worry about cultural trends or individual events.
∴ notes from ebyx
The original nomadic inhabitants of Cbyx rode Modar from one oasis to the next, beasts captured and trained as cubs. The riders developed an extremely close relationship with the animals, the bond was carried over by legendists as ancient, noble, spiritual. While horses, as large as they were in the north, were not Modar. What were written as saintly men and women of Cbyx nature, quitely and stoically enduring, became Northern horsemen, cantankerous, drunken, combative, wild. And they in turn became fable for teleplays, books, programs. Their iconography graced everything having to do with the North. Of great fascination, and State disapproval was the brief war between the horsemen and the expanding industry of the previous century. The purposing of horses for labor was anathema to the tradition of the Cbyx riders, enough so that the horsemen, who rarely organized, did so enough to cause twenty years of havok for any State loving midlander who happened into their hills.
Feb 18 4:40 a.m.
Brynja took a streetcar. She was entitled to her own automobile, but disliked the quiet resentment that the privilege caused. The streetcars here were old style, electric, clattering. She found them comforting. She wondered about a world where everyone would be allowed an auotmobile, the chaos and inefficiency. She rode with other citizens, the cold night causing them to have bundled up, warming their hands on cups of tea sold at the back. A radio next to the driver relentlessly broadcast static peppered State news.
Feb 13 3:43 a.m.
524F474552 moved carefully around the crater. It had taken days. Before the uplink was removed he’d have had telemetry. Now all robots simply talked to one another. Many had no audio, so a system of semaphore was worked out. Some used lights, some used moving parts. As he rounded a small hill he saw, in the distance, another unit. The other unit acknowledged him by raising an arm. Then it raised another. And another. Its arms began to move directionally, independently. A message. 524F474552 focused attention. “B … E … W … A … R … E”. Well, he thought, that was intriguing.
Feb 06 4:13 p.m.
∴ findings
Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium
To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal.
Here one may recall Jane Jacobs's important distinction between visual orderliness on one hand and functional working order on the other. The city desk of a newspaper, a rabbit's intestines, or the interior of an aircraft engine may certainly look messy, but each one reflects, sometimes brilliantly, an order related to the function it performs.
Introduction -- Eloquent JavaScript
JavaScript is the language that is, at the moment, mostly being used to do all kinds of clever and horrible things with pages on the World Wide Web.
∴ knotesy
Krautrock - The Rebirth Of Germany Feb 22 9:25 a.m.
"This Is My Home" - Unique Dwelling In East Village Feb 21 10:38 a.m.
Financial Globalization, Inequality, And The Raising Of Public Debt Feb 21 8:44 a.m.
Ptak Science Books: History of Holes series: Holes in Airships (1919 and 1937) Feb 21 4:22 a.m.
Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness Feb 20 11:49 a.m.
