Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson
Orlando Sentinel (Free subscription) | 12/04/2009
By William Gibson, Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- A surprising drop in the nation’s unemployment rate brought new hope that the job market will improve quicker than expected. At last report, however, Florida’s jobless rate remains at least a full percentage...
Rude Cactus (Free subscription) | 12/04/2009
The Weekly Birthday . Mine, tomorrow. The Weekly Age . 24 ...no... 27 ...alright 32 ...okay 37 for realz. The Weekly Time Waster . It's called Christmas shopping. The Weekly Read . If you've been reading long enough, you'll understand my deep and abiding love for Charlie Huston's novels. He wrote maybe the best mystery trilogy ever - The Henry Thompson Trilogy consisting of Caught Stealing , Six Bad...
Orlando Sentinel (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
By William Gibson, Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Who owns the beachfront? Property owners who pay good money for oceanfront property? Or the public whose tax dollars help preserve the shorelines? These are among the questions that spilled into the U.S....
Line Out (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Def Jam and the death of progressive masculinity ... I have no words for the princess of regressive femininity, but I do have a few words for the woman on this other cover... In the age of the spectacle, all pop stars are to a certain extent an Idoru ("a completely artificial media celebrity"). But the industry the manufactured Grace Jones, the fashion industry, did something truly remarkable:...
South Bend Seven (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Confessions of an Aca/Fan | Henry Jenkins | On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part One) Many literature professors may hold 'genre fiction' in contempt as 'rule driven' or 'formula-based' yet they ruthlessly enforce their own genre conventions: look at how science fiction gets taught, keeping only those authors already in the canon (Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells, Margaret...
SMITH Magazine (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Sold! We recently teamed up with Rob Walker and Josh Glenn’s Significant Objects project to see how well Six Words works with their contention that objects with stories attached to them increase in value. The pair have recruited writers like William Gibson, Nicholson Baker, and Curtis Sittenfeld to craft significance for flotsam purchased on [...]
MacNewsWorld (Free subscription) | 11/30/2009
Cyberpunk author William Gibson once wrote, "The street finds its own use for things." That's been the case for the Mac mini since its introduction in 2005. Originally marketed as a personal computer, it quickly gained street cred as a media server for the blossoming digital living room. Now Apple has given its mighty mite a proper server configuration in the hopes of moving the white box...
Online Journalism Blog (Free subscription) | 11/28/2009
Here’s another collection of questions from a student that I’m answering here as part of my FAQ section: Q: What do you see is the future for investigative journalism? Do you still see it as having a home at newspapers? I think the future of investigative journalism is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed,as William Gibson would say. Nonprofit organisations (such as...
JSBlog (Free subscription) | 11/26/2009
Interesting synchronicity today, spinning off from going to get a cat collar ID tag engraved. How things have moved on; I was expecting it to be done by hand or using a pantograph ( for instance ). But no, they used a very nice computer engraving machine not unlike this one . It raised vague resonances, and then I realised what it reminded me of: the execution machine in Kafka's 1919 story In the Penal...
GeekMedia (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Awesome or Scary? The basic AR tools are already available - Bionic Eye does simple things really well, while Layar has the potential to do a whole lot more if mobile handsets had more memory. Face Recognition is already available on social photo editors (and on iPhoto) as long as you give it something to work from: ie tag some faces and it will recognise them in future. As William Gibson said "The...
Enik Rising (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Via Lidzville, here's a nice essay from David Grossman on why the return of "V" and other 80s shows is culturally significant. Example: Culture in the 80's was, in general, based on the concept of dehumanization. It's no coincidence that electronica and synth first really became popular during the 80's- it's also when the computer first started becoming at least somewhat commonplace. Machinery...
Click World News (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
destinyland writes "Sunday night saw a reading of the William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel featuring porn star Sasha Grey at a New York art museum, along with sculpture-props simulating virtual reality. Artist Brody Condon promised to combine "Gibson's 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction," but the editor of H+ magazine challenges that description....
Orlando Sentinel (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
By William Gibson, Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Congressman and Senate candidate Kendrick Meek reportedly gathered $20,750 of campaign contributions from medical-equipment firms this year while pushing a bill to end a new competitive bidding program for buying medical supplies through...
The Daily What (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Late Links: 19th century law still on the books orders Parisian women to go pantsless . I don’t remember seeing this in my complementary Sky Mall catalog. Cleavage Wednesday: Leighton Meester , Leona Lewis , Beth Ditto , and Jodie Sweetin . Lingerie Wednesday: Bar Refaeli . BREAKING: Carmen Electra is an attention whore . Keeley Hazell would rather go naked than wear fur . We would rather she...
the s.n.a.f.u. principle (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Love this. (via William Gibson) Video – Descente de cote en BuggyRollin
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