C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I present to you a Japanese toy called "The God Jesus." Notice the picture on the package of the boy praying for the girl and this Japanese robot cruelly denies him!

While looking at satellite imagery on Google Maps, I discovered something so big that you don't even notice it at the ground level. Go to maps.google.com, click on southeast Michigan in the map of America, and zoom in on Macomb County. There is a "zoom" control that looks like a ladder on the upper left, under the video game directional pad. You can drag the map to scroll it. OK, now go to I696, viewing right between Hoover and Schoenherr. Magnification should be the second rung from the top of the zoom ladder. The quickest way is to enter in the directions "Hoover Road, Warren, MI" to "Schoenherr Road, Warren, MI", taking care not to mis-spell Schoenherr. In the upper right of the screen you see Map - Satellite New! Click Satellite.

Tell me, what the heck is that path of desolation? I ASK YOU.

Incriminating evidence that some shadowy corporation headquartered a mile south of 696 between Hoover and Schoenner created a Godzilla-like creature and unleashed it on a horrified populace. You can follow it on satellite imagery all the way up to 28 Mile... and then the satellite photos end. The tracks disappear into the foresty deep.

This is my daydream today.
Imagine that we live in a post-scarcity society. We take high-speed planes or subterranean trains that acheive orbital speeds in vacuum-pressurized tunnels to commute transcontinentally to work. Or we telecommute. Our houses float with autonomous utilities and water recycling. We can travel and socialize and be at home, all at the same time. The offline world is becoming more like the internet: physical location is not so demanding anymore.

As a result, some of the social circles in SF/F fandom take over an abandoned Russian children's park. We mow it, clean it, and fix it, similar to the ad-hocracy depicted running Disney World in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. We hold a convention there as our homes temporarily occupy the sky above the park.

My science fiction recommendations list (in progress) just didn't feel complete without the little cartoon panel from Sinfest that I just fan-modded for it.

I'm LMAO. You've got to read this parody article on Locus Online:
http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Features/0401_Stross.html
Charles Stross Attains Posthuman Status
"... Aussie critic and potential "Spiker" himself, Damien Broderick, comments, "I tried to visit [Greg] Egan years ago, and found myself stuck in a timelike infinity loop once I got too close to his nominal address. Only the concerted efforts of Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear were able to free me."

Zompist.com has a humorous set of notes that an artificial intelligence might need in order to pass the Turing Test. For example:
Clever questioners will ask about your feelings. Safe responses: 1. I'm anxious. 2. I'm depressed. 3. I'm hungry. Bad responses: 1. I'm itchy. 2. I'm righteously indignant. 3. Constipation's gone!

I picked up this meme from jeffreyab and rikhei. Take the timeline and fill in the story of your past and your plans for the future.
( Read more... )

Thank you goes out to Penguicon's Roly Poly Tablehammer Shuffleball Pope, Clark Rodeffer, for bringing to my attention this link of a clip from the '70s-'80s children's show Rainbow. It brings to mind Warren Ellis' great comic book Transmetropolitan in which the "Sex Puppets" childrens show is broadcast to the decadent citizens of the future. According to the Rainbow Arch webpage:
This clip was actually broadcast and watched by millions. Almost too ridiculous to believe. These are taken from original Rainbow scripts and there's no way these could have been done by accident. Innuendo all the way.

I bought the autobiographical graphic novel Blankets by Craig Thompson after a discussion on the PCCboard forum. At 592 pages it's the longest graphic novel published in the U.S. I enjoyed it! If anybody wants to borrow it let me know. Pastor Garry (who some of you may know from his comments to this livejournal) is an occasional reader of comic books (and one of the closet Fen in my opinion) so he had read it. Or, skimmed it perhaps. He thought the author was saying "Christianity is bad 'cuz it wouldn't let me sleep with my girlfriend."

I was pleased that it's not at all what the Reverend suggests. The book is not about religion, it's about obsessive infatuation, represented by the blanket of snow that covers the land. This symbolizes the way it seems to the protagonist like the world is all of one piece -- as if it is all about one thing over which he obsesses, like so many teens do. The book chronicles his experiences of growing out of his two main interests, a girl and a religion.

He does not leave his religion because of the bible telling him he can't have sex. On the contrary, that conflict resolves itself with religiosity stronger than ever: at that point you can see how his two obsessions are starting to become one and the same thing in his psychology, as his sex drive seems to him like a sanctified act of worship for god's creation. His break with religion is not sudden and doesn't take place in a crisis of bad events. His relationship with the girl has been long ago resolved by that time. As the snow melts and reveals the world to be composed of many interesting and worthy things that no longer revolve around the girl, he begins to see how she was not as all-important as he had thought. So then he realizes (through visual metaphor, without the book having to state it in words) that the same is true of his religion. People just don't see the flaws in that which they are infatuated with, and they continue not to see it when it's pointed out. But one day the protagonist seems to come to the end of his teenage years and enter a calm, un-infatuated condition. So after this, there only need to be a few pages of critique for his actual doctrines. This part of the story briefly critiquing Christianity is part of the denoument rather than the climax of the book, because to the protagonist, it's no longer important.