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kateoplis: Chacaltaya mountain in Bolivia with an elevation of 17,785 ft once had one of the highest glaciers in South America. The 18,000-year-old glacier had the world’s highest ski run – the first built in Latin America. After losing 80% of its area in the last 2 decades, it finally disappeared in 2009, much faster than scientists had predicted. All that remains is a bedrock. Photo…
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gingerhaze: thedailywhat: Nostalgia Overload of the Day: Walden Media, the children’s film production company behind The Chronicles of Narnia series, has purchased the right to adapt Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? for the big screen. Initial reports suggested that the role of the red-hatted rogue would be played by Jennifer Lopez, but it…
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Substratum
Substratum Series of interviews with some of the amazing people in our field… THEO WATSON AND EMILY GOBEILLE MARIUS WATZ and, soon, our own CHRISTOPHER COLEMAN!
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But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emergence—it actually seems to be quite a random thing. That’s a vision of technology that’s diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popular culture of…
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One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says. Former “Seastedders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation (via bmdesign) Neal Stephenson’s Snow…
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I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet…
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I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have…
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Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled. Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 211, William…
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Bester had been doing it in the fifties—a Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera future out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the creative end of the business world in 1955. Paris…
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Tiny Wings is pretty. Just look at it! I can’t play it. I’m no good at it. But the visual work draws me back to try, and try again. At first I thought that Andreas Illiger had made or commissioned watercolor art/illustrations for the game. I recently discovered that he is actually procedurally generating the…