Because now it’s 2025, and he fucking did it. The Xenotext is live and glowing in Deinococcus radiodurans: iterating away inside that immortal microbial bad-ass that feeds on stainless steel, that resides inside the core of reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl, that does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. Christian Bök did not give up. Christian Bök did not fail. Christian Bök is going to outlive civilization, outlive most of the biosphere itself.
Xenotext
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Security? Politics? Life?
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rational Astrologies and Security
In 2003, [Bruce] Schneier coined the term security theater to describe security measures that provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it.
[…]
There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman, the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not.
via Cory Doctorow
so you will remember
Saturday, December 7, 2024
This Strange Moment
A message to you from the fleeting present.
For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
interplanetary neurosurgery
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn
The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn.
[…]
These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of Neurosurgery.
the fascination index
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Bois also criticizes the whole practice of pigeonholing voters into two established categories, of forcing people to have to reduce themselves, essentialize their political views. He criticizes the aforementioned political compass charts. It is reminiscent of Edouard Glissant’s idea of the ‘right to opacity.’
Bois destroys and humiliates this essentialization, this hijacking of human complexity in spectacular fashion. At first, he plots all the ‘normal’ and mainstream politicians according to their views on the political compass chart. Then, he introduces us to some of the Reform Party politicians. They fit onto it, but their views are so bizarre, that he introduces a third scale, a z-axis, the ‘fascination index,’ to plot them correctly.
The sun goes down alone
Sunday, November 3, 2024
A Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac: Don Henley’s ‘The Boys Of Summer’ at 40
Instead of the counterculture being a metaphor for lost love in ‘The Boys Of Summer’, therefore, the lost love is a metaphor for the counterculture.
Cormac McCarthy on language and the subconscious
Monday, July 8, 2024
The Kekulé Problem: where did language come from?
Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
