Blog Profile / Futurismic
| URL : | http://futurismic.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Genres / Sci Fi | |
| Posts on Regator: | 2994 | |
| Posts / Week: | 10.9 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Personal Information, Part 2: episode 12
Personal Information is a serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals. Wondering what’s going on? Try winding back and reading from the start… Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness! Share and Enjoy: Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
Infamous 2: Mindless Fun and the Basis of Aesthetic Judgement
It rained on Saturday afternoon. It rained and it rained and it rained. It rained so much that I couldn’t go out, not even to the cinema, not even for a walk. I was trapped, so I decided to invest some serious time in a video game. I powered up the PS3, slid the armchair [...] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
How long do we have?
How far are our necks from the afore-mentioned Grim Meathook Future? When will the magical thinking at the core of economics finally be revealed for the hand-waving bullshit it actually is? When is soon, probably. We could keep rolling sixes and spin it out another 22 years, but we’re getting to the point where relatively small [...]Show More Summary
The future of Futurismic
I’ve been thinking about the future. Time forms a frame for our narratives about ourselves, a scale for organising coherence out of a formless flow. Thinking in terms of months, years, decades is a convenience that I’ve come to suspect actually keeps us from understanding the true causality of things until we get a significant [...]Show More Summary
Personal Information, Part 2: episode 11
Personal Information is a serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals. Wondering what’s going on? Try winding back and reading from the start… Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness! Share and Enjoy: Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
When You Hate Your Novel
Writing a novel can be a little like a troubled romance, neh? Perhaps it started out with a flurry of excitement. Your idea swept you away and fascinated you–this was the one! This was the novel that was going to get finished or be your first sale or make a name for you. At the [...] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
This is London
Map of London colour-coded for social deprivation index; the darker the red, the poorer the area. Little volcano icons represent riot actions as of ~9pm GMT Tuesday 9th August 2011. Click through for full-size interactive/zoomable version. Of course, these riots are nothing to do with poverty or deprivation. After all, they could all have decent [...]Show More Summary
Aftermath
I’m not going to be writing here today, and maybe not tomorrow either. If you want to know what’s occupying my mind, look at the news coming out of the UK today. And bear in mind that just a week ago, a vast proportion of people in this country would have said that it would [...] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
Makers and breakers
Hmmm. Here’s a piece at Wired called “Big DIY: The Year the Maker Movement Broke”. Much as with the rockumentary whose title they’re alluding to, though, I suspect at least some folk are misinterpreting the use of the word “broke”. The Sonic Youth tour diary movie – featuring much footage of Kurt Cobain at the [...]Show More Summary
Personal Information, Part 2: episode 10
Personal Information is a serial sci-fi webcomic from Sarah “Does Not Equal” Ennals. Wondering what’s going on? Try winding back and reading from the start… Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness! Share and Enjoy: Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
Martian water: back on again
I’ve lost count of the number of times that the scientific consensus on whether or not there’s liquid-phase water on Mars has changed, and that’s just within the span of me blogging here at Futurismic (so, six years or thereabouts). But it looks like we just flipped back toward certainty, as images from NASA’s Mars [...]Show More Summary
Because the word “addiction”…
… is in no way devalued or debased in its colloquial usage by people without any experience of a genuine and debilitating addiction (as opposed to a strong preference for the presence of something rather than its absence, perhaps, or the sense of being accustomed to ready access to a tool which facilitates social exchange [...]Show More Summary
Slogans and logos
Via MindHacks, here’s Language Log dissecting some recent research into the persuasive power of logos and slogans. A recent paper by Juliano Laran et al. (2011) suggests that resistance to persuasion can be triggered in a highly automatic and unconscious manner. The work builds on some interesting results involving commercial brands and implicit priming effects. For example, [...]Show More Summary
BERG’s Robot-Readable World
I was on a focus group panel last week, and had a real fanboy moment when I discovered that one of my fellow panellists was employed by the notorious polymathic design consultancy BERG. When I expressed a fascination with their output, I was assured that their studio – far from being the Wonka-esque factory of [...]Show More Summary
The Golden Age of Introversion
Via Kottke, a piece at The Atlantic that offers up the internet as the best thing that ever happened to introverts: For introverts like myself, it takes energy to engage with other people. Doing so requires thoughtfulness. It’s tiring. Expending energy, for us, isn’t energizing. Please note: we’re not talking about shyness, some character flaw. [...]Show More Summary
Stupid responses to wicked problems, part [x]
Seems lots of people can see the potential long-term problems with the plans of Foxconn (and doubtless many others) to replace human manufacturing labour with robots. Sadly, that doesn’t preclude them coming up with the most myopic and reactionary response possible: Despite my love of robots since childhood – as the high point of technology [...]Show More Summary
Flash fiction: The Dog at the End of the World by Nancy Jane Moore
I like to do what I can to support the writers we’ve published here at Futurismic, so when Nancy Jane Moore asked me if I’d post a super-short story of hers to promote her ebook anthology of flash fiction, Flashes Of Illumination, how could I refuse? You can pick up a copy of Flashes of [...] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
Wicked Problems and ends to limitless [x]
That Steelweaver post on Reality As A Failed State I mentioned a few days back really did the rounds. So I’m going to link to Karl Schroeder at Charlie Stross’s blog once again, and without any sense of shame – he’s been quiet for ages, but he’s spooling out a year’s worth of good shizzle [...] Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!
Dark Silicon: an end to Moore’s Law?
From the New York Times: A paper presented in June at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture summed up the problem: even today, the most advanced microprocessor chips have so many transistors that it is impractical to supply power to all of them at the same time. So some of the transistors are left unpowered — or [...]Show More Summary
ProtoTXTSPK
Via Chairman Bruce, another piece of ammunition against the Rejectionistas who rely on the old “digital messaging is destroying language through compression and abbreviation and slang!” canard; turns out telegraph operators of the 1890s were rockin’ the txtspk to save on time and limited characterspace: In their conversations telegraphers use a system of abbreviations which [...]Show More Summary