Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • bold as (nostalgic) love: Gwyneth Jones and hauntology

    A Metafilter thread on the new St Ettienne album (haven’t heard it yet) gave up this comment: It’s interesting to see the 90s End Of History era displace the Swinging 60s as a lost golden age just out of clear memory. @metafilter https://www.metafilter.com/192220/Ive-been-trying-to-tell-you#8132163 I’m sharing this here due to its synchronicity with a point I…

  • Longtermism is merely a more acceptable mask for transhumanism

    This longread by Phil Torres at Current Affairs on the Longtermism/x-risk/Effective-Altruism mob does a pretty good job of setting out the issues with what might be the ultimate in moral philosophies, namely a moral philosophy whose adherents have convinced themselves that it is not at all a moral philosophy, but rather the end-game of the…

  • accuracy only happens by mistake

    Aiming to reboot the blog-as-commonplace-book practice, here—a habit which hasn’t so much fallen away as become blocked, in that I keep storing up things to clip in my inbox, but never actually, y’know, clipping them. (Which is a little like continuing to buy cigarettes but not smoking them? Though if I put it that way,…

  • Solargoth

    I keep telling myself I shouldn’t pass public comment on solarpunk, firstly because I haven’t done the reading and legwork, and secondly because I know a few people who really have done the reading and legwork (hi, Jay!), and as a good, responsible academic (cough, cough) I know better than to traipse across someone else’s…

  • subjective and iterative magratheanism / the whys and wherefores of worldbuilding

    It’s always nice to get an insight into the creative process from an expert, and this short bit on worldbuilding by Paul McAuley is exactly that. Worldbuilding as a concept is having a bit of a moment, or so it feels, having jumped out of genre fiction theory and metastasised more widely, following in the…