Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • framtiden ser ljus ut

    There’s no escape from dumb-ass hot takes about The Fewtch, even in DuoLingo: On the bright side, I’m on a 225-day streak, and apparently I’ve learned 2,000 words… which makes it all the more embarrassing that I still stumble over unexpected sentences in real-world transactions as simple as buying a coffee. Ah, well. Practice, practice,…

  • Thirst, fear, faith : Butler (1993), Parable of the Sower

    Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is another canonical work of sf / dystopia / climate fiction which I’d never got round to reading. It was interesting to go through it with the LUCSUS Masters students, because they picked out things I might not have noticed, or would otherwise have passed over as a given…

  • the worst has been averted, at least temporarily

    Steven Shaviro on KSR’s new joint: [Kim Stanley] Robinson is juggling many threads, but he has no interest in combining them all into a tightly organized narrative. This is in part, at least, because the world we live in doesn’t work that way. It is unimaginably complex, and it is at least potentially open. The…

  • rough guidance: some reflections on the making of travel guides to places that don’t (yet) exist

    Somehow I haven’t really talked much about the Rough Planet Guide to Notterdam here at VCTB; I think that’s partly due to an anxiety about “crossing the streams”, getting my day-job stuff tangled up in what is very much a scratch-pad-pub-booth-talking-to-myself sort of website these days, but also to some extent the same anxiety that…

  • collecting for the collective

    Got yer weak signals right here, guv: Called B-Wa(h)renhaus (an untranslatable pun meaning both department store and “conserving house”), the store covers over 7,000 square feet and sells used and upcycled clothing, furniture, phones and other electronics. In an attempt to reach beyond the usual people who already patronize secondhand shops, the store’s location is also significant: It’s…