Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • efficiency (slight return)

    Decent piece here at the Atlantic on not just plastic, but the necessity of plastics—by which I mean less their necessity to us, “the consumer” (though they have indeed become profoundly necessary, due to their embeddedness in so many of our day-to-day practices), than to their manufacturers, as a way of getting rid of by-products…

  • organ donation

    Trying to get back into a proper working groove this morning, as there is (long-past-deadline) writing to be done; thus trying to purge myself of a deeply cursed earworm. (Bowling for Soup, thanks for asking. No idea how that fucker got in there.) Stoner-space-doom it is, then—more particularly, Lowrider’s “Ode to Ganymede”, from 2020’s excellent…

  • a world where flesh and machine are in tension: re-reconsidering cyberpunk

    Found myself nodding appreciatively at this re-reassessment of cyberpunk by Lincoln Michel: Everyone has their own definitions of genres, but to me the essence of cyberpunk is not tied to the 1980s visual trappings that have defined it in video games and film. Cyberpunk isn’t merely neon signs or street toughs with high-tech leather jackets…

  • a form of therapy against the sleep of reason

    How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have?…Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. Umberto Eco Via Big Other, a timely…

  • epistemic humility vs. “the engineer’s disease”

    This post is prompted in part by a post by Cennydd Bowles, in which he riff on Nathan Ballantyne’s notion of epistemic trespass. Reading it reminded me of a term I’ve seen frequently, most often on MetaFilter, where it has been part of the lexiconic furniture for some time. An ask-the-hive-mind entry on that site…