Halfway through this, at present. There’s something about Bruce’s writing that I always seem to forget, between novels: that he really does write the most loathesome, appallingly repellent protagonists in contemporary popular fiction, and somehow gets away with it. There’s no reason why I should be remotely interested in whether or not Vera and Radmila live — hell, I should be rooting for natural disasters to pancake the crazy horrible sows and everyone they know, there is literally not one decent person to be seen in this book so far — but yet I’m still reading. That takes some skill.

• Sacramento and Its Riverside Tent City – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com
  "A tent city is burgeoning in Sacramento, Calif., prompting local officials to consider whether such an encampment should be made permanent, with plumbing and all."
  (tags:pol gmf )

Friday night LA time, the COILHOUSE coven ceases to take orders for their luvly t-shirts. Place your order now. Bought #2 of the magazine yet?

For men. For women.

Bruce "I made kids cry at SXSWi" Sterling:

I know this sounds opaque, but I heard British novelist M John Harrison yesterday describing how the construction of identity is changing because "culture," the factors that acculturate people, have been smeared all over the planet by the Internet. And he sees this is as a challenge for novelists because literature is a description of how people are; it’s about structures of meaning and feeling. And the structure of literary language needs to respond to, or even *lead,* new structures of meaning and feeling.

Simon Crubellier:

I’m an idiot (slaps forehead)

Opensourced Second Life as Augmented Reality overlay. Whack that shit on a pair of lenses.

Prim buildings on wasteground. Jet cars weaving around real cars on real roads. Giant robots peering around the corner of the street.

Build your avatar and load it onto a wearable AR beacon. Let people watch your avatar rez over your realself.

May turn this into a real thought at the weekend. Or not.

(yes am aware SL is D-E-D dead because it is apparently unscalable and doesn’t work most of the time that’s why I stopped writing about it so it’s just an example/marker but still )

* Adam Greenfield interviewed. Handy quote:

I would go so far as to say that there will be no area or domain of urban activity that is not somehow disassembled and recomposed as a digital, networked, interactive process over the next few years. Objects, buildings and spaces will be reconceived as network resources; cars, subways and bicycles will be reimagined as on-demand mobility services; human communities are already well on the way to becoming self-conscious “social networks.”

* People are nice to me when I post photos from Katie West:

* Marc Weidenbaum on what you might call social remixing. I mean, if you weren’t sick of the word "social" being stuck on the front of everything since 2006. Catch the previous couple of posts, too.

* Paul Pope for GQ — I’m seeing a bit of Herge in this, for some reason:

* Xeni’s back from Benin:

* Matt Jones: Permafutures. And, seriously, grab the last four or five of Matt’s entries, his brain is pretty much lodged in "overdrive" lately.

…a complex and multi-layered tale of New York copyright and trademark lawyers, a
conspiracy against them from an unknown powerful source and a history of how the
comic industry has dealt with its creators. And just the occasional snatch of
Yiddish….

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m told it’s very good, it’s written by a friend of mine and it’s out in comics stores from today: WATCHMENSCH.

"I laughed out loud at Watchmensch. Several times, in fact — and the climactic scene is more awesome than any squid!" – Dave Gibbons

(for larger)

• sidewaysthroughsound.com
  I fucking love this show. Free downloads of every edition. Drone/psych/post/alt/etc.
  (tags:radio music mp3 )
• Abandoned Places – abandoned place… behind my own wardrobe
  "So I unscrewed it and found a hidden room, complete with little beds, drawers and wardobes. I would say it was for little children – perhaps illegitimate children… it looked like it hadn't been disturbed for a very long time. There was some newspapers from the 50s…"
  (tags:weird history )

From the starving carcasses of Gillen & McKelvie:

• Sci Fi Channel switching to Syfy – Entertainment News, TV News, Media – Variety
  in which I am quoted for truth
  (tags:tv quote )

Canada’s science minister refuses to answer whether or not he believes in evolution on the grounds that asking questions about his religion is inappropriate.

From their 20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (After Watchmen):

Fell, Volume 1: Feral City
Written by Warren Ellis; Art by Ben Templesmith

Fans of the parts of TV’s Homicide that played like a hardboiled No Exit will dig this book. Eight mordantly funny short stories about Richard Fell, a misanthropic police detective keeping what passes for the peace in a bleak and bad-mojo-ridden municipality called Snowtown. It’s full of tense close-quarters showdowns in dimly lit spaces and illustrated in a gloomily gorgeous color palette that runs from toxic-sunset violet to busted-nose red.

1) Two of my Polish readers have just pointed out that, in Polish, "syfy" has a meaning somewhere between zits, filthy and scum. Oops.

2) This came up elsewhere, but: "sci-fi" is a term coined by fanboy no.1, the late Forrest Ackerman, a wordplay-happy man who also came up with linguist joys like "imagi-movie" and "futuristicostume." The term "sf" for science fiction/speculative fiction was coined by author Robert Heinlein some eight years earlier.