Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • some kind of code for consumerism at its most insidious

    I’ve got a little girl who’s seven, and she lives in a world that’s all potentially magic. Within her imagination, the possibility of supernatural things sits alongside school and real things. There’s no distinction. At the same time she’s kind of assaulted by magic. What she watches on TV, the magic there is some kind…

  • midsommaren

    Endings, beginnings. The pivot of the solstice. Where next but onward?

  • the course of the heart

    It’s not news that if you successfully follow your heart, people who thirty years ago advised against it will reappear quietly but persistently at the edges of your career. Back then, all they wanted you to do was what someone else did. Thirty years later, all they want you to do is what you were…

  • satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort

    In 1928, the poet Paul Valéry had a vision of the future: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement…

  • dynamic entropy / epistemological bunkering

    Yesterday’s XKCD is funny, but (for me at least) funny in a grimly ironic way that Munroe may not have intended. In it, he points out that major figures in early cybernetics (von Neumann, Claude Shannon) and/or computer science (Richard Bellman) carefully named their research fields in ways intended to make the criticism of said…