I wouldn't vote for me
Aug. 2nd, 2007 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllFosca's supports gave the impression of having been booked with the specific aim of making Fosca look like Lordi in comparison. Of the various flavours of tweeness on offer, I missed most of The Parallelograms, and was a bit disappointed with The Besties (Bis if they'd been hit with a Fey Ray. As opposed to Bis being hit with Fay Wray, which could at least make you some money on specialist internet sites). A Smile And A Ribbon, though, were very sweet. They appeared to have a song about Darren Hayman from Hefner; even if they didn't, the fact that I could seriously entertain the notion that they might should give you some idea what sort of thing we're talking about. Adorable, and wry, and soppy in a good way. I approve. Fosca themselves...they seemed to be having a whale of a time, but I felt Kate's absence pretty keenly, and ultimately I don't think this side of Fosca is quite the Fosca I love.
On the way down, a bunch of 'singing' christians at Vauxhall (and would such a loud massed performance have been allowed to persist so long by a non-monotheist group, I wonder?) obliged me to start in on the Sebastian Horsley autobiography while I waited for a bus, simply because it was *obviously* degenerate. A mild annoyance, as I'm deep into my main book of the moment, Accelerando, whose cover is fairly innocuous even if the content is anything but. Put it this way: Warren Ellis is acknowledged for having looked at the early drafts, and now all the near-future infoSF stuff he's been doing lately feels to me like the pumped-up, dumbed-down version of this. The ideas are fizzing off the page, and most of the time I can follow just enough of them to keep up, but only while riding a vertiginous sense of future shock and information burn. Which is, of course, a sign that form and content have been perfectly married, because that's what the book's about - the transition to the future. Although, as Stross has pointed out elsewhere, things are already changing so fast that if you want to write something people can follow and engage with, you have to damp down the novelty rate; even this much chaos is muffled. And even this recent and this smart a book has started looking dated in places; there's pretty much zero chance that the next US president will be more morally conservative than this one, and oil at 80 euros a barrel in the 2020s isn't so shocking when it nudged past $78 this week.
So, given what a linguistic sponge I am, I apologise in advance if I start dropping the jargon of a cyberpunk tosser over the next few weeks, especially since it might be mixed in with Baltimore street speak, because I've started watching the fourth season of The Wire online, which itself would have seemed madly futuristic, what, two years ago?
And Accelerando is also implying a possibility as to why modern economics are the one thing which, no matter how many times I try to wrap my brain around them, I simply don't get. Because whether we're heading for Accelerando's future or just a collapse, they aren't going to be around much longer; so in among its various handy (and occasionally otherwise) amendments, perhaps my head just doesn't feel it can justify allocating that much processing power and memory to an obsolescent discipline?
On the way down, a bunch of 'singing' christians at Vauxhall (and would such a loud massed performance have been allowed to persist so long by a non-monotheist group, I wonder?) obliged me to start in on the Sebastian Horsley autobiography while I waited for a bus, simply because it was *obviously* degenerate. A mild annoyance, as I'm deep into my main book of the moment, Accelerando, whose cover is fairly innocuous even if the content is anything but. Put it this way: Warren Ellis is acknowledged for having looked at the early drafts, and now all the near-future infoSF stuff he's been doing lately feels to me like the pumped-up, dumbed-down version of this. The ideas are fizzing off the page, and most of the time I can follow just enough of them to keep up, but only while riding a vertiginous sense of future shock and information burn. Which is, of course, a sign that form and content have been perfectly married, because that's what the book's about - the transition to the future. Although, as Stross has pointed out elsewhere, things are already changing so fast that if you want to write something people can follow and engage with, you have to damp down the novelty rate; even this much chaos is muffled. And even this recent and this smart a book has started looking dated in places; there's pretty much zero chance that the next US president will be more morally conservative than this one, and oil at 80 euros a barrel in the 2020s isn't so shocking when it nudged past $78 this week.
So, given what a linguistic sponge I am, I apologise in advance if I start dropping the jargon of a cyberpunk tosser over the next few weeks, especially since it might be mixed in with Baltimore street speak, because I've started watching the fourth season of The Wire online, which itself would have seemed madly futuristic, what, two years ago?
And Accelerando is also implying a possibility as to why modern economics are the one thing which, no matter how many times I try to wrap my brain around them, I simply don't get. Because whether we're heading for Accelerando's future or just a collapse, they aren't going to be around much longer; so in among its various handy (and occasionally otherwise) amendments, perhaps my head just doesn't feel it can justify allocating that much processing power and memory to an obsolescent discipline?
