General – Page 10 – Wetmachine

P.J. Harvey is cool.

sweetjain April 2, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

P.J. Harvey is cool.

Wetmachine Wants Music

Gary March 30, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General Exception, My Thoughts Exactly

Hi, it’s Gary, the guy who maintains the drunken machinery[1] here at Wetmachine.

John has asked me to install a Soundblox MP3 player on Wetmachine for your listening pleasure (don’t panic, it won’t start playing automatically, and it’s a lot better than those cheesy MIDI tunes of yesteryear).

But we need music to play!

We interrupt this program

John March 24, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

For a brief commercial announcement.

My employer, Laszlo Systems, makes some cool XML-based technology for so-called rich internet applications that run in Flash players. For those of you who don’t have a current degree in marketing buzzspeak, I’ll explain that that means you use Laszlo’s stuff to write nifty interactive web apps that don’t require page refreshes, and that the language in which you write them doesn’t suck. See the little blogging widget to the right for a micro-example.

As of yesterday Laszlo has greatly liberalized its free-for-developers and free-for-noncomercial-use policies. If you do any web development you really should go get the download. It’s cool, and it’s free.

Steve Talbott: Technopoly's eloquent critic

John March 20, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I often describe myself as a technoparanoaic, or a technoskeptic, or a neoluddite, or whatever. I’ve used an excerpt from the Unabomber Manifesto as epigrams to my books, and I’ve called my Acts of the Apostles “Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us in convenient thriller format, with fewer pictures and more sex and car chases.” But although I might use a Kaczynski quotation in order to be provacative, and although I obsess on dystopian visions of the future, I really don’t have a consistent point of view.

To read somebody who does have a consistent point of view, see Netfuture:Technology and Human Responsibility, the occasional newsletter put out by Steve Talbott.

I don’t always agree with everything Steve says (although I usually agree with most of it), and once in a while his writing style gets a little floral for my taste. But he is a wise man and a thoughtful writer. I highly recommend him.

Orson Emergent: Subvocal speech

John March 19, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I realize what a boon this will be for people who have lost their ability to speak.

However, all I can think about is how the thought police are going to love it.

There's still hope — robots fail in the desert

John March 14, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Ever since watching the opening sequence of the first Terminator movie in 1984, in which autonomous battlebots relentlessly and remorselessly hunt down a pesky band of cockroach-like humans who refuse to be eradicated from what’s left of the Earth, the mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration have been racing to beat the movie’s date of 2029 for the ultimate man-machine showdown.

Perpaps starting to panic a little–with only 24 years to go, no credible unstoppable AI-driven land-based deathmachines on the horizon and a whole world to destroy–the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) challenged itself to “think outside the box(sm)” and so opened up the competitionto universities, entrepeneurs and even people who have no known connection to Haliblurton, Lockheed or Raytheon.

ORSON, the Overmind

John March 9, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Watch it grow.

(ORSON –Obedient Remote Servo-Organic Network. Read “Acts of the Apostles” for chilling details of its origin, true nature and ring-of-power-like destiny!!!)

1985 — a novel a-borning

John March 7, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I’ve started work on a new novel (or novella — we’ll see how lont it turns out to be. . .). It’s set in the year 1985 in a setting that seems to be some kind of hybrid of the USA, the New Kent of my “Cheap Complex Devices”, and Orwell’s 1984. Its subject, I guess, is the prison-industrial-military-entertainment complex, but I’m trying to focus (of course) more on the story than on any big themes or messages.

Nightmare

John March 1, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

My nightmare started out last night with an image of a woman sitting by the grave of her recently deceased husband. She was one of those people who don’t (can’t, won’t, etc) understand that dead people are dead, and so go to gravesides and talk to their dear departed ones.

She was describing to me her husband’s attitude about this and that, as if he were still alive. She was happy and playful, teasing him as if he were there. She made some remark about his hair. And then he was there, lying in an open casket. His head was towards me and his feet towards her. He had a big pompadour of gorgeous hair (I’m practiacally bald, so figure that fact into any analysis).

I did not recognize either the husband or the wife..

And then his casket disappeared, and he was lying on a bed of ice, like a fish in a fishmarket. And then we were in a room of similar wives, all sitting by their dead husbands cooling on beds of ice. And then my dream got weird.

Wetmachine so far

John February 16, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Half a year (or so) ago I decided to get serious about livening up my Wetmachine website. Wetmachine had been around since October 1999, but I had only updated it a few times. I wanted to transform it into a site that people would come back to. A blog of some kind was clearly in order.

Knowing that it would be a drag, not to mention probably impossible, to singlehandedly make Wetmachine sufficiently compelling to warrant return visits, I invited some friends to play along. About three months ago we made the switch to blog format. Read on for some brief musings on the experiment so far.