velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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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…
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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…
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out of the valley
Day four, and it feels like I’ve turned the corner on this virus: I tend to measure such things by the point at which I actually feel like it’s worth wearing more than PJs and a dressing gown, and after a passable (though not great) night of sleep, I’m dressed properly. (Or, given my benchmarks…
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repeating falsehoods like incantations
From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud: An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”