[New Humanist Magazine:] You said you’d like to live in The Culture, but isn’t it the messy struggle, in which scarcity, crime and bad things are inevitable, that makes life worthwhile? [Iain Banks:] No. via /r/printSF
Category Archives: cool stuff
makes me feel hopeful
Sunday, August 9, 2026
From Alpha to Omega The Classless Society in Motion More on Stafford Beer
an eternal moment
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty [Western] civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what […]
Games
Friday, January 30, 2026
According to [Johann] Huizinga [in Homo Ludens], games have certain common features. First, they are clearly bounded in time and space, and thereby framed off from ordinary life. There is a field, a board, a starting pistol, a finish line. Within that time/space, certain people are designated as players. There are also rules, which define […]
Eigenvalue knows the score
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Thomas Pynchon Is Angry […] one detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions. via Reddit i read Gravity’s Rainbow last year. Pynchon’s relevance is so profound as to be deafening. i have V and Lot 49 on the shelves, i […]
Why do people listen to this shit?
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
The Hatred of Podcasting Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while […]
Xenotext
Saturday, June 14, 2025
It Awaits Your Experiments. 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 […]
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 […]
