When Bruce Sterling reads this Guardian article on brain implants used for treating depression, what comes to his mind is how people it could be misused by governments to induce depression instead. Whereas the first thing that pops into my mind is how it’d be nice to be watching the Olympics and seeing these modified athletes who are all operating with stimulated brains, you know, the bit that goees wild when your kid’s under a bus, and you lift it with one arm? Show me a sprinter with an implant there, baby. Oh, and the other thing I imagine is …
Month: April 2006
Me Want :: Roll-Up Keyboard
Maybe I’m just a hopeless gadgetgeek, but I want this Roll-Up Keyboard. From the list of weird keyboards Bruce Sterling linked to recently here.
ㅋㅋㅋ, k-k-k, kekeke: leet mutation?
In the Boing Boing post linking to this wikipedia article on the origins of leetspeak, I saw something I thought was unusual: it was claimed that “kekeke” was a Korean equivalent of “hahaha”. What’s weird about it is that the root of the expression is actually ㅋㅋㅋ, which is to say, kkk, without any vowels… and that, usually, when I catch students trying to render ㅋㅋㅋ in English writing, they use a simple “kkk” or k-k-k instead of kekeke. I have to wonder where the vowels got added in, or why this variant in any case arose among Korean gamers….
This Spartan Life
If you haven’t heard of This Spartan Life, well, it’s a Late-Show styled interview show that’s conducted from… inside a video game. Via this article in Wired.
fightglobalwarming.com PSAs
Recently I asked some of my students why we always advertise for things that are for sale, when some of the most important things in life cannot be bought or sold. I even had them do up PSAs. Well, they did them in print-advertisement formats, but I think sometime later, I’ll show them a couple of the ads from the fightglobalwarming.com webpage. If you want to see one of them, you can click under the “think about it” section in the sidebar, or have to look at the exended section of the post.
Some ten things things
via Elizabeth Bear: ten things I am mostly ignorant about Japanese history. Microbiology. Truck and tractor pulls. Sub-Saharan African political geography. Modern visual art. Parenthood. Contemporary Mainstream Literature. Belgian cookery. The War of the Roses. What has been going on with Macs in the last ten years since I jumped ship. ten things I, like Clive Barker, don’t really know much about–but do know enough to get myself into trouble with: The Korean language. Wacky new cutting-edge physics. Raver culture. Central Asian political geography. Modernist poetry. Keeping a pet. The New Weird. The flashy side of Indian cooking. (I never …
Elizabeth Bear’s 10 Things Learned From Writing Popular Fiction
There are some excellent points in ten things I have learned from writing popular fiction. A few favorites are: 2. It helps if you honestly like to blow stuff up. Or at least write about blowing stuff up. 3. All books are broken. Some are less broken than others. Some are broken in ways that a particular set of readers do not mind in the least. If you can find out the group of people who do not mind the ways in which your books are broken, you have identified your target audience. Unfortunately, this fact does not excuse you …
OPERATION_NUKOREA
Young Hae Chang’s OPERATION_NUKOREA is enough to make me actually worry about North Korea a little; moreover, it’s enough to make me worry about the fact that so few people I know here seem worried about North Korea. Via the now-defunct but still cool Magnificent Melting Object, which was once run by someone I bet I would’ve gotten along with.
Solaris author Stanislaw Lem dies
Octavia Butler passed away last month, and now SF author Stanislaw Lem has passed away. SF has lost two bright stars in a short time.
South Korea slaps Microsoft!
Yay!