Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • This could be Rotterdam

    This could be Rotterdam

    An excellent day in Rotterdam yesterday, ending with this appropriately Bladerunner-esque sunset shortly before a screening of Alien, which in turn was tied to the ongoing Science Fiction: a Journey Into the Unknown exhibition at the Kunsthal, which I recommend wholeheartedly. It’s rare to see an exhibition aimed at a general audience on your own…

  • The mainstreaming of worldbuilding

    Looks like some ideation-futures concepts and methodologies are leaking out of the Valley and into the entertainment industry: [The artist formerly known as Grimes] plans to eventually take up the name of the main character in her book series, an elaborate mythology comparable to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. It sounds like the books will…

  • Ballard (1962), The Drowned World

    I thought I’d read this before, many years ago, and perhaps I did – the handful of dog-eared pages in my paperback copy suggest someone read it, though perhaps I acquired it second-hand. Or perhaps I buried my memories of reading it, whether deliberately or unintentionally? That would certainly be a Ballardian response to a…

  • Ziggurat

  • Social media as trench cyberwarfare

    Will Davies at the NYT: Many of the anxieties surrounding “post-truth” and “fake news” are really symptoms of a public sphere that moves too quickly, with too great a volume of information, to the point where we either trust our instincts or latch on to others’. There’s a reason Twitter invites users to “follow” one…