(no subject)
I'm home for Thanksgiving but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm on break. I've got a project and a debate to present the Tuesday after I get back, a sprawling list of supplies to buy for studying abroad next semester, scholarship and internship essays to complete, a metric ton of Italian to catch up on, and relatives to entertain all week. Oh, yes, and I'm working 9:00-5:30 on Black Friday at an outlet mall. I may die.
Still Wriso-ing, or attempting to, at any rate. I've done a bunch of worldbuilding and plotting for the Catalyst 'verse and am in the midst of reworking a short story about the consequences of futuristic iPods. I'm on a pretty hard transhumanist kick after playing some Deus Ex (or more accurately having a friend of mine at the controls while I made the decisions) and reading The Rapture of the Nerds, a book with an intensely specific target demographic which I was surprised to find myself in.
Unless you know a great deal about the Singularity, Objectivism, classic SF, theoretical physics, and the culture of Southern Baptist megachurches, you're not gonna get a lot out of The Rapture of the Nerds. There are constant clever shout-outs to daleks and tasps and Dyson spheres and computronium, and the story is more or less inaccessible if you can't follow the references. I, to my utter surprise, could. My academic and creative background maps onto the themes the book discusses almost perfectly, but I honestly wonder how many other people could fully appreciate it. (I can only think of two, and both are double-majoring in philosophy and computer science. One of them is an industrial DJ who seems determined to become a Replicant, and the other knits hats based on cellular automata. I don't know how I keep meeting these people, but that's beside the point.)
Anyway, the book, if you wish to read it, is for free online under a Creative Commons license. It's about a technophobic Welsh potter getting called for technological jury duty in a post-Singularity world. Check it out.
Still Wriso-ing, or attempting to, at any rate. I've done a bunch of worldbuilding and plotting for the Catalyst 'verse and am in the midst of reworking a short story about the consequences of futuristic iPods. I'm on a pretty hard transhumanist kick after playing some Deus Ex (or more accurately having a friend of mine at the controls while I made the decisions) and reading The Rapture of the Nerds, a book with an intensely specific target demographic which I was surprised to find myself in.
Unless you know a great deal about the Singularity, Objectivism, classic SF, theoretical physics, and the culture of Southern Baptist megachurches, you're not gonna get a lot out of The Rapture of the Nerds. There are constant clever shout-outs to daleks and tasps and Dyson spheres and computronium, and the story is more or less inaccessible if you can't follow the references. I, to my utter surprise, could. My academic and creative background maps onto the themes the book discusses almost perfectly, but I honestly wonder how many other people could fully appreciate it. (I can only think of two, and both are double-majoring in philosophy and computer science. One of them is an industrial DJ who seems determined to become a Replicant, and the other knits hats based on cellular automata. I don't know how I keep meeting these people, but that's beside the point.)
Anyway, the book, if you wish to read it, is for free online under a Creative Commons license. It's about a technophobic Welsh potter getting called for technological jury duty in a post-Singularity world. Check it out.