Sociologist Frank Furedi recently published an article at Spiked about “Our unhealthy obsession with sickness”. The arguments he makes all, it seems to me, are mistaken. It’s rare I disagree with someone so completely on a topic outside of politics, so I thought I’d go ahead and explain why I disagree… not with a few simple facts, but with his assessment of those facts. Furedi writes: We live in a world where illnesses are on the increase. The distinguishing feature of the twenty-first century is that health has become a dominant issue, both in our personal lives and in public …
Month: March 2005
On Manufactured Realities…
Check out this article at mssv.net, by Adrian Hon, for a fascinating look at alternate reality games in the context of a much older tradition of reality-artifice stretching back 3900 years (at least).
Cat And Rabbit No Love Can Be Make
Laura posted a link to a sorta funny Korean animation. I grinned a couple of times, so maybe you’d even laugh!
The Smack Shack Attack… (and Philosophical Excerpts.)
My friend Marvin’s been a busy boy lately. Aside from posting links to things like films about Kung Fu Fighting toy hamsters on heroin, he’s also posted a magum opus on postmodernism and empiricism to New Sophists’ Almanac. You can see the first post here, and follow up with part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. Marvin and I are seriously discussing the shortcomings of postmodernism, using an essay by a historian as a springboard, and the discussion is quite involved, but also, I think, not just interesting but related to the core of what’s going on in …
You Belong in Pictures
So there’s a theater where you can watch an animation that includes characters based on the face scans of everyone in the theater. Yes, you get your face scanned and show up as a character in the movie, in Grand Odyssey Futurecast System. As the blogger at The Speculist from whom I thieved the link from suggested, this is technology made for game software. Of course, as Bill Hicks once said about another entertainment technology, “This is technology made for porno films!” I guess it’s a race to see whether the pornographers or the gamer-geeks start using the tech first. …