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The DIY FOSS Cyborg https://dustycloud.org/blog/the-diy-foss-cyborg/
Yes, I met a DIY FOSS Cyborg who lives in Emacs and Guix full-time. And YOU TOO can live such a life, if you dare!
@me
Iirc when I interviewed @sacha about her experience doing this, she said basically people look at you funny when you're like this whereas an idea is that if you had a screenreader you could use that subtly instead of the displays and pass as a non-cyborg in groups of humans. It's definitely cool.
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log
) @mdhughes @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber
Note the sartorial elegance in this 1980 photo of Steve Mann, "The Father of Wearable Computing":
http://wearcam.org/steve5.jpg
https://wearcam.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)
P.S. His related 2001 book "Intelligent Image Processing" was innovative; seminal; excellent.
http://wearcam.org/textbook.htm
He also wrote the 2001 "Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer" but I never read it.
P.S. I'm puzzled why the above jpg isn't showing up inline without clicking it.
@screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber
Mind you, I liked Snowcrash a lot, but it is not a very serious book. It began life as a background theme for a video game, according to the author, and when that fell through, he fleshed it out as a whole book.
It's therefore not too surprising that it has many silly aspects. But it's fun.
His later books get much more serious.
@dougmerritt @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber that being said, it’s a much more serious book than, say, Ready Player One
@flyingsaceur @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber
True!
For some reason serious-minded people seem to object to Snowcrash more, though.
@dougmerritt @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber I remember Stephenson getting Serious when he went all in on Thomas Pynchon, Cryptonomicon was Gravity’s Rainbow as the Baroque Cycle was to Mason & Dixon, I guess. I don’t think much about The Diamond Age
@flyingsaceur @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber
Yeah, something like that.
I liked his later books, but they got harder to read -- and much, much longer.
@dougmerritt @screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber Me too, I got stuck in The Confusion and then the last I saw of him was that failed sword fight game kickstarter
@flyingsaceur @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber I flunked out reading Quicksilver, ignored the rest of that series. And SevenEves was appallingly stupid in each of three sections (physics, biology, sociology, & languages don't work like that).
But until then, The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Interface had a *LOT* of valuable insights to the nightmare 21st C we've ended up in.
@mdhughes @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber Snow Crash is sine qua non, but it earned its place for me alone by showing exactly what was wrong with Ready Player One: the heroes were an eccentric billionaire, a consumer, and DRM
@flyingsaceur @dougmerritt @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber I like Ready Player One (book) for the same reasons as Snow Crash: Horrific plausible future, and VR and disengaging from the world is not going to save us. Turns out spending your entire life in a hotsuit in your apartment, grinding cash, is the worst possible way to live. Tho in the end of course Wade does win everything, and gets to unplug.
@mdhughes @flyingsaceur @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber
> Wade does win everything
Including the love interest. So it was a completely happy ending. :)
@mdhughes @flyingsaceur @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber
De gustibus non est disputandum.
But I grew up reading comic books, fantasy, and science fiction, before I learned physics, biology, sociology, and linguistics, so that vastly increased my tolerance for authors misunderstanding academic subjects.
And almost everyone gets these things wrong whether they know it or not, and the very few who actually do understand them often put their understanding on a shelf while they write, so that it doesn't interfere with their storytelling.
David Brin for example said about his books that going faster than light violates physics, so he made a point of inventing *many* fantastical faster-than-c technologies for his books.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" or some such.
@dougmerritt @mdhughes @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber that’s why I pretty much only read PKD and reread Dune every ten years: it isn’t really that kind of science
@flyingsaceur @dougmerritt @screwtape @mdhughes @me @cwebber
Diamond Age is actually my fave. I love the whole steampunky edge to it
I think it has to do with reference points: Snow Crash flies close enough to greatness that it feels worthwhile to critique it by those rubrics. As if precisely identifying its flaws could lead to plausible "fixes"
RP1 from the outset is obviously not built for stringent analysis and criticism - it's pulp, you're meant to just take it as it is
@pleaseclap @dougmerritt the thing that makes all the difference, that makes it sing to me, is that the cyberspace of Snow Crash is something that Hiro built and got away from him, and now he’s living with some agency in this giant glorious mess that sprang from his ideas. Oasis, though, is this dry puzzle-box with parental controls anti-cheat and even the company that owns it has to play by the rules.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS
EXCEPT ROBLOX
ATTEMPT NO HACKING THERE