Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content

The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take [...]

Star Wars: 스타워즈 프로젝트 컴필레이션 (2008)

Star Wars Project Compilation Album cover
Quite a long time ago, K-indie insider helikoppter of Indieful ROK emailed me to let me know about an album she figured I’d be interested in. The reason she thought I’d be interested was, you see, my ongoing series about SF in Korea.
(How she stays on top of music in [...]

A Random Linkdump and Concert Tonight…

No time to post anything too significant today, or for the next couple of days.
Oh yeah: this is late notice, y’all, but…
Hwang Shin Hae Band is playing tonight. No idea if there are tickets available but I’ll be there a few hours early, trying to get one! Show’s at 8, and here’s a map to [...]

Orcs!

One of the fascinating things that keeps coming up in my Korean lessons is the generation gap. It’s not that I was unaware of this before, but my tutor has made a careful point of noting when she shows  me a word that older people either won’t find appropriate in speech, or which she considers [...]

Conchords Again, This Time Korea-Relevant

Seriously: New Zealander singing Korean Karaoke, out of nowhere, on this TV show I’ve just torn through. Strangely brilliant in the episode, since it is, as I said, out of nowhere:


(For comparison, most of the videos are like this:)

I love this show so [...]

All Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler

(Note: The “today” I mentioned at the beginning of this post was on April 21st. This has sat in the drafts pile for a while.)

Not quite the cover on the version I picked up, but close.

Today, I happened to pick up a copy of the 1970 futurist classic Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. This being [...]

It’s Earth Day!

Say what you like about Earth Day — there’s someone I know out there is snarking about it right now, if he even knows about it — but if you ask me, it’s a holiday about celebrating and embracing something that is here, visible, tangible, and unarguably real.
People survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands [...]

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