Forwarded from пивной негодяй (bribón de la cerveza) ඞ
“The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
"“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is.” He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”
“Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of “Westworld.” In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the fuck out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”
“I had real trouble coming to that,” Gibson said. “I couldn’t really think about it. I just had to get to the point where I could write it really quickly. Afterward, I looked at it and was just . . . It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself.”
After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t expecting to have to revise the world’s F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy,” he said. “All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-fucked, super-fucked,’ like that. I told myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy shit—if that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.”
Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curious vibe. He is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot of people do this but don’t mention it—I have an experience unique in my life, of going, ‘This is so bad—could this possibly be real?’ ” he said, laughing. “Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of America—that’s pretty fucked. But if we’re looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means shit about global warming over the next decade . . . I don’t know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. “I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real?subId1=xid:fr1576523451116jae
"“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is.” He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”
“Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, executive-produced by the creators of “Westworld.” In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the fuck out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”
“I had real trouble coming to that,” Gibson said. “I couldn’t really think about it. I just had to get to the point where I could write it really quickly. Afterward, I looked at it and was just . . . It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself.”
After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t expecting to have to revise the world’s F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy,” he said. “All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-fucked, super-fucked,’ like that. I told myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy shit—if that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.”
Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curious vibe. He is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot of people do this but don’t mention it—I have an experience unique in my life, of going, ‘This is so bad—could this possibly be real?’ ” he said, laughing. “Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of America—that’s pretty fucked. But if we’re looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means shit about global warming over the next decade . . . I don’t know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. “I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real?subId1=xid:fr1576523451116jae
The New Yorker
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.
Forwarded from barrel roll (Fljúgandi Kettlingur)
Forwarded from Qetzal ad libitum, ad infinitum
Какие-то ребята научились использовать саккады для того, чтобы увеличивать виртуальную доступную облаcть в VR. Человек в виртуальной реальности идет вперед, но на самом деле он ходит кругами по небольшой комнате. При этом система умеет делать так, чтобы не было столкновений с предметами в комнате или другими людьми. .
Как они это делают: в момент временной слепоты они немного подкручивают/двигают всю VR сцену влево или вправо. Мозг не осознает изменения, но замечает их и человек немного сдвигает направление движения — поворачивает. То есть идет кругом, хотя ему кажется, что идет прямо.
Статья (английский) и видео. Впечатляюще.
Как они это делают: в момент временной слепоты они немного подкручивают/двигают всю VR сцену влево или вправо. Мозг не осознает изменения, но замечает их и человек немного сдвигает направление движения — поворачивает. То есть идет кругом, хотя ему кажется, что идет прямо.
Статья (английский) и видео. Впечатляюще.
Numbers Station Omeґа
Соцреклама из Норвегии. Офигенно. (src)
Норвегия все ещё круто. За 2019 в столице ни одной (зарегистрированной?) смерти от дтп. А на пикче эволюция этого значения с 1975 (src)
Для сравнения, в Киеве за 2019 таких случаев 16 (src)
Для сравнения, в Киеве за 2019 таких случаев 16 (src)
Twitter
Anders Hartmann
This makes me happy: Road deaths in Oslo (pop. 673.000) in 2019: Pedestrians: 0 Cyclists: 0 Children: 0 The graph shows the reduction of road deaths since 1975. Article in Norwegian: https://t.co/9Dv2bLZlFT #VisionZero
Все это время в вики, оказывается, скрывалась эта гифка, происходящее на которой всегда приходилось описывать словами
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mug_and_Torus_morph.gif
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mug_and_Torus_morph.gif
Ееее дефкон. Не знал, что по нему даже исследования проводились
https://youtu.be/y6neDk_4XBs
https://youtu.be/y6neDk_4XBs
YouTube
DEFCON scares me and science says it will scare you too
DEFCON is existentially terrifying. How about a nice game of chess?
Studies:
David L. Waddington et al.“Education from inside the bunker: Examining the effect of Defcon, a nuclear warfare simulation game, on nuclear attitudes and critical reflection.” Journal…
Studies:
David L. Waddington et al.“Education from inside the bunker: Examining the effect of Defcon, a nuclear warfare simulation game, on nuclear attitudes and critical reflection.” Journal…