Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it.
Michael Chabon on The Clock of the Long Now.
I am looking forward to reading this biography of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon.
The story is familiar enough, and Phillips takes it as true, which it almost certainly is (to a point). Alli and Ting are shopping in town. Alli needs a pseudonym for the stories she’s about to put in the mail. She sees a jar of Tiptree Jam, and says “James Tiptree.” Ting says “Junior.” So far so good. Good joke: Except that nothing in Alli’s life was ever just a joke. She is more retentive of the meaning and shape of every aspect of her life than anyone else I have ever met, in life or print (Severian excepted, maybe).
This take on popular websites such as Boing Boing, Dooce, and Fark provides an interesting view of how these sites read to someone who is not already immersed in internet culture. I especially like the description of BB:
A premier Federated Media site is Boing Boing. It seems to feature a group of tech journalists writing about the great new articles they’ve written for other publications, as well as some blurbs about quirky computer news. It also has big traffic for a blog, reportedly some 70,000 unique visitors a day. No Drudge Report, or even Gawker, but it’s good traffic. My newspaper website friends say that’s a decent number for a smaller city’s newspaper site. Boing Boing writers are regularly featured on “old media” programs such as the NPR news, so this property has potential.
It’s from a slightly insane John Battelle hate site authored by a former Industry Standard writer who holds Battelle to blame for his misfortune.
