It is highly unlikely that you've missed the events of the last month or so. If you were sufficiently fortunate to have been in a medically induced coma, you missed Donald Trump not only alienating every possible ally the United States still had on this planet but starting a trade war by enacting a tariff policy which appears to have been generated by an LLM which, predictably, fucked up badly.
I apologize in advance for how disjointed this post seems. I've been tinkering with it off and on for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't strictly a linear narrative. The context loops around a bit because it's easier to explain a few things after the fact than it is to arrange them chronologically. I promise, it'll make sense (probably).
Modulo people possibly taking me slightly too seriously I've never been particularly shy about talking about my love of table-top RPGs. Though I started with Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, as I got older I …
blank - noun - Someone who has scrubbed or never created any substantial presence on the Internet. No social media accounts (or deleted ones), no domains registered, no known e-mail addresses, no photographs, no projects of any kind. While an impressive privacy-related feat in the twenty-first century, it is not without its drawbacks.
e.g., "I'm sorry, but we can't hire you, because we can't complete the background check. As far as we know you don't have any kind of background. You're a blank."
Well, Happy New Year, everyone. It's now 2020.ev, we're into the third decade of the twenty-first century.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to do now. Hell, I'm not even sure of what to do with myself this afternoon. I guess grab whatever downtime we can get before going back to work/school/whatever.
There have been quite a few people joking about bringing back the roaring 20's, with all sorts of memetic payloads (some silly, some not). Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the the Invisibles' take on the 1920's make something of a comeback, but what do I …
If you've been around for a while you may remember a certain magazine called Mondo 2000 from the 90's. It was a time when using the prefix cyber- wasn't done in irony and computers were still weird and edgy and nobody actually knew what the hell they were doing. Psychedelic explorers like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna were still alive (though Leary died in '96 and McKenna four years later), raves required you to go on quests to find map points so you could get your wristband to get in, and we all knew - we just knew - that the Net …
High Gibson - noun, genre - Science fiction in the cyberpunk genre that makes no bones about being inspired by William Gibson's classic works. Stylistic influences, tropes, and character archetypes are easily recognized as being inspired by the Sprawl Trilogy and the Burning Chrome short stories. Compare with high fantasy.
From time to time I sit down with my gaming buddies, and we both lament and observe how well reading and playing cyberpunk games has prepared us for life in the twenty-first century. I don't think that many people expected real life to track quite so closely with many a cyberpunk world penned by the masters, from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson to Bruce Sterling. Strangely enough, many of the lifestyle strategies depicted in these stories have helped keep our own lives (and those of our families) stable and, for the most part nice to live as human history has …
One of my bots just received the following message from Google, verified in Google Webmaster Tools:
Notice of removal from Google Search April 3, 2015
Hello,
Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, we are no longer able to show one or more pages from your site in our search results in response to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you.
These pages have not been blocked entirely from our search results, and will continue to appear for queries other …
