SARS-CoV-2
tl;dr I’m sick, my attention is sapped, and I’m bored, so I’m making a little retrospective scrapbook on Covid-19 changes in tech, culture, and political institutions that I can update daily-ish. (originally written 16 March 2020) For weeks now, my entire social media world has caught Coronavirus!, and for absolutely good reason. Surely visitors to my small corner more »
Voter Theory 03-2020
This is the kind of post that may not age well, but might instead act as a snapshot of a particular time, post-2016 electoral predictions. (Though at least the model is somewhat testable here.) I was also spurred into pushing links because Bitecofer et al. appear to be mainstreaming, so actually it sounds like I more »
The Marveliad: A summary
ACN: A summary of a series of posts by Matthew Ball and Jonathan Glick titled “The Marveliad“, with periodic injections of my own biases and of Nayar’s Before Literature. The Death and ‘Rebirth’ of the Epic A/N The Epic as an “Actual History” is mostly still dead (so far). Modern Epics as I’ll describe them more »
Pre-Lit 2: Orality as a mode in Visual Media
Agonistic Storytelling More evidence that the statues, cathedrals, fossils, and transcriptions that we are left with deny us the color, behavior, and flavor of the monuments, animals, and storytelling media as they lived. Believe it or not, our engagement with the plays of William Shakespeare may have gone this increasingly, if accidentally “literized” direction. Historian more »
Pre-Lit – Some Context, Feb 2020
Attention Conservation Notice: This post is primarily a prompt setting myself up for several posts springing from my recent reading of Before Literature: The Narrative Without the Written Word, which hit me at the right time and connected to other ideas I’ve been exploring. This series of posts represent a thread of thought I couldn’t more »
Liminal Passage 2019
It’s the end of the decade, I should write something! Why not. In 2009, I graduated High School. In 2012 I graduated college and started work as a consultant. (In 2013 I started writing here.) In 2017 I left my job and left the country to explore and work with some college friends in India more »
Excerpt: Chaos Management
Those who, like Pavlovsky, know from the inside how the [Russian] system works, those who have seen the beast from close quarters, come back impressed by its chaotic nature. It is certainly not the case that President Putin has established a clear power channel by which decisions are transmitted down to the lower levels of more »
Filippo San Martino of Agliè
Hyperbolic fantasist real-estate developer becomes spectacle-based political power broker (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) A small pantheon of schemers vs the tolkienic hero Filip St Martin and Power in Fantasy Bruce Sterling and his parter work in an old palace in Turin called the “Vineyard of the Royal Madame”. Their residence is more »
Sterling on ‘Cyberpunk’ in 2019
Some disconnected notes branching from Sterling’s 2019 SXSW talk Contrasting cyberpunk with the mass market New Sincerity aesthetic Changes in the cultural role played by sci-fi, “The New Courtiers” [2012] If Land’s cyber-futurism can seem out of date, it is only in the same sense that jungle and techno are out of date – not more »
Sterling on “How to be futuristic”
Attention Conservation Notice: The value of an ACN is to tell you why you may not want to read the following post. This post is the continuation of a synthesis of Bruce Sterling talks, this time about the ‘process’ of futurism. It is shorter but much dryer than his actual monologues can be, and will more »