Swibbles

On the upcoming version of the alan moore comique classique, “You may now be asking, “Jeff, haven’t there been enough superhero movies?!?”". good question and I wonder if its going to be exceptionally terrible, or if nucule-ar terror will target us before then..

Browsing the noosphere I found out over at TerraNova that an old book of which ive only read excerpts is now freeasinfree so I took the time to read it during last weeks slew of travel around Europe to various conferences [which were a blast]. The one thing that had stuck with me way back in the when was first of course the story of Bungle. But the second and stronger impression I carried with me the last decade or so was the movement between the voice of “The_Author” in its now retro screenfont and the rest of the exposition. I have thought for awhile that the old list of literary tropes might have to be updated or reexamined a little more in the light of such moo-ly and mud-ly constructed texts. For example, it could be merely an allegory, but its more as if it is a logfile of a conversation. So do we have to make the actual conversation between the entities in the text the focus of any comparative literary analysis, or is a logfile its own? Ala Joyce, is he modern because of his choice of a logfile format to describe mr blooms daze?

I recently perused various the book reviews of Soon I Will Become Invincible, and after seeing so much about the earlier day of the triffids and nanotech plant threats it seemed only fitting to follow up with a review of agood book I recently finished over the summer, excepting for the fact that someone beat me to it. It seems a game-designing, victorian-literature-making, new-york-times-writing auteur made a stir by placing some normal people into skin tight costumes and sent them out on a planetwide rampage. The book Soon I Will Be Invincible is an excellent, humorous, funny, and did I mention humorous read, well worth it. Plus, I noticedthe book cover is designed by chip kidd. Anyhow, if you wish, the book should give enough of a taste for your reading tasting pleasures.

Radio interview today about the Ticking Time Bomb effect in real life. A common mythological trope, it was stated, it is the motivating force behind most television and movie dramas, or “page turners” to us more literary afflicted. It is also the one position that will make people support torture. “You mean, if someone is ogling to blow up the city with nanotech goo, would I kill them? I guess, in that case, I would have to!” The problem comes, it seems, in the fact that there hardly ever is a ticking time bomb, and if there is, its damage is so much more localized than the damage caused by overreacting to the time bomb: in terms of authoritative crackdowmns, smackdowns, etc etc. Unfortunately, our current administration is currently in the drivers seat of the country using this technically fictional effect. Boom.

Explosively Formed Penetrators. I knew as soon as the story came out on BBC Worldservice last night that I was going to annoy my girlfreind today, because I just cant help saying it. Explosively Formed Penetrators. Even worse than the trouble unrestrained verbiage will cause is the fact that over 170 of our Troops have been killed by them. Thats 170 families who have to say, my son or daughter was killed by an Explosively Formed Penetrator. Time to stop.

With the advent of such small, low power consumption, computing chips, what can I say… the problem is, these things arent going to make my life easier. Someones gotta make the chips, so theyll make a living, but my job, customer support, is just going to get algorythmically more complex. Not to mention that at a certain point, the chips themselves are going to start complaining. I was at a conference at Yale university years ago, maybe 1998? I think it was called the hybrid theory conference, and there was a talk given on something like Marketing Allen Ginsburg where the panel talked about when computer chips were going to demand to be labelled workers so they could get the rights to unionize and ask for benefits based on CPU cycles… utter trope-i-fication…