For my friends on the right: the linked satirical article is both really funny and blatantly, unrepentantly partisan. Then again, if you claim suicide in a jail cell is a form of asymmetrical warfare, you’re begging to be made fun of.

All my former compatriots at Tapwave were snatched up by Motorola for a secretive project. Now I know what they were working on: the sure to be a megahit Feng Shui detector.

The Wall Street Journal has published an “aren’t they weird” article about online romance. Why is this news? People start relationships by mail, on the phone, after sharing a bus on the way to work… It would be surprising to me if people didn’t start relationships after playing in an MMORPG, given the higher fidelity for interaction in a “role-playing” environment.

Ian Macdonald ponders a post-Freudian fiction of character in his blog. Some interesting tidbits. “…I’m tired of reading (and writing) Big Bang Buck SF novels, with Huge Plot Conclusions that over-obviously follow Hollywood screenwriting-school three-act-structures. I’m increasingly interested about simply writing about ‘what-is-like-to-be’: what it is like to live in a future world.” That’s definitely the aspect of SF I find most interesting.

If you own any gadgets at all (and if you read Futurismic, I expect you probably do), you’ve probably suffered the ‘black screen of doom’ at least once, when your battery dies on you, leaving you stranded in a hi-tech world with a metaphorical limb missing. The good news is that scientists are looking at new ways to harvest energy for your tools while you’re on the move – using solar power, heat or motion to charge your batteries.