Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples's high weird, perved-out, freaked out space opera comic Saga is the best visual sf since Transmetropolitan, and the long-awaited volume 4 is a feast of politics, betrayal, gore, revolution, decadence, and Huxleyesque social control through amusement technology. Cory Doctorow blew his mind with it, and is back to tell the tale.
Michael Shaughnessy reports the untold story of Frieda Thiersch—and the mysteries of her life, her motives and her books
Maciej Cegłowski's Webstock 2014 talk is called OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON, and it's an inspired rant about the relationship of technology to power and coercion. It asserts that the decentralizing of power attended by the growth of technology in the 1990s was a blip, and that the trend of technology will be to further centralization. — Read the rest
A Flickr group called "The Art of 3D Print Failure" chronicles the beautiful monstrosities that emerge from glitches in 3D prints. In addition to providing aesthetic pleasure, it also serves as a compendium of advice for preventing errors in the future. — Read the rest
I wasn’t too chuffed about the weird changes I saw in my favorite start-up guy. Crawferd was a techie I knew from my circuit: GE Industrial Internet, IBM Smart Cities, the Internet-of-Things in Hackney hackathons. The kind of guy I thought I understood.
I relied on Crawferd to deliver an out-there networked-matter pitch to my potential investors. He was great at this, since he was imaginative, inventive, fearless, tireless, and he had no formal education. Crawferd wore unlaced Converse shoes and a lot of Armani. He had all the bumbling sincerity of a Twitter Arab Spring.
A roving, flaming, booze-dispensing art-car that's a staple of Burning Man.
You don't play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. Etchings made low on the sheets make low tones.
Bruce Sterling gave a speech at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) on the eve of the Alan Turing Centenary, and delivered a provocative, witty and important talk on the Turing Test, gender and machine intelligence, Turing's life and death, and art criticism. — Read the rest
My latest Locus column is up: "Artist Rights" describes the terrible risk to artists that arises from expecting online services to police everything their users do for copyright infringement. If YouTube, Scribd, Blogger, LiveJournal and all the other sites where we're allowed to put our work have to hire lawyers or erect technical filters that attempt to prevent infringement before it happens, it will dramatically raise the cost of expression. — Read the rest
