Blasphemous Geometries

Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins

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Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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“The Antiques Roadshow” – For an entire generation of people who grew up [in the UK – Ed.] in the 1980s, those three little words herald a wave of unease and bitterness.  Like a Renaissance magus, they conjure forth memories of Sunday evenings dominated by the looming return of school and the perversity of one’s parents’ taste in television.  You see, younglings… prior to the internet, cable TV and the explosion of cheap consumer electronics, most young British people were trapped not only in a four channel world, but in a world where only one TV channel was ever really accessible to them : the one that their parents wanted to watch.  Continue reading Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins →

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What will publishing look like a decade from now?

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Via a whole bunch of sources comes this piece by former publisher Richard Nash at Galleycat – an eight-point bullet list of the changes he expects to see in the publishing industry over the next ten years. [image by adactio]

There’s nothing in there that you’ll not have heard from various prophets of hegemonic disruption, but to have a former publisher repeating it on a site which is very much a core industry organ (at least in the online sphere) suggests a certain degree of grudging acceptance of the changes coming down the pike. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

6. In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

7. In 2020 some people will still look back on recent decades as a Golden Age, just as some now look back on the 1950’s as a Golden Age, notwithstanding that the Age was golden largely for white men in tweed jackets who got to edit and review one another and congratulate one another for permitting a few women and the occasional Black man into the club.

I believe the appropriate phrase is “zing”.

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Protective workwear supplied: cleaning the Burj Dubai

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File under science fictional employment opportunities: the Burj Dubai (that ludicrously huge tower in Dubai which we’ve mentioned here before) is finally open for business (if there’s any business left, natch), which means they need to keep the thing clean for tourists and visiting dignitaries – quite a challenge when you’re talking about a building that clocks in at over 800m in height. [image courtesy Wikipedia]

There are 23,000 glass panels on that thing, most of which will be cleaned by BMUs (robot Building Maintenance Units), but some of the uppermost sections just can’t be reached without using old-fashioned meatworkers with ropes and harnesses… and to protect them from the harsh sun up there, the workers wear a get-up much like a spacesuit, complete with a backpack full of electrolytic “sports beverage” to keep them hydrated.

Certainly not a job for anyone with phobias of heights. Or claustrophobia, for that matter… [via @Ballardian]

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Cheer up, emo writer – maybe positive sf really could make you more positive.

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Well, it turns out my mother may have been right after all* – listening to music with positive messages in the lyrics encourages consideration and empathetic behaviour in teenagers, according to research at the University of Sussex here in the UK. Apparently, people who listen Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” are more likely to help pick up some knocked-over pencils than those who’ve listened to a neutral or negative tune. [image by Vagamundos]

(I’ve obviously been emotionally mutilated by a lifetime of listening to hirsute and/or black-clad people torturing guitars… if presented with a bunch of pencils in the presence of Michael Jackson songs, my first instinct would be to jam one up each nostril and headbutt the nearest desk until I achieved release.)

But this throws an interesting light on Jetse de Vries’ call for optimistic science fiction – if the same psychology pertains to the written word as it does to music, perhaps science fiction readers (and writers) really would be more positive in their outlook if there were more stories written in such a mode.

[ * – This sentence is purely included for stylistic effect; as should be completely obvious, my mother was always right about everything. ]

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