Clatter off to sleep.

Kieron Gillen unwittingly provides the slogan for the Tumblr years.  (via)

It’s not a bad one, as accidental slogans go.  (Though I am still sad that “It’s all about control, Luigi” never caught on.  It could have been the new “son i am disappoint.”)  Though it’s interesting to me that Tumblr’s own gif tumblr hasn’t been active in months.  The Storyboard team there got fired recently, replaced by an algorithmic solution to surfacing content that was rolled back the same day because it didn’t work.  Amusingly, it turned out today that the statement about the Storyboard group firing was actually written by one of them.

It’s a very Tumblr thing.  Kieron’s tumbling through the servers now, alive and looping as pure Tumblarity.  Tumblr loves nothing more than a GIF.

I don’t have much of a presence on Tumblr, but I like it there.  I loved the early tumblelogs that Tumblr moved so quickly to emulate, and what they’ve made out of that cheeky sticky-fingeredness is quite remarkable.  Especially given that they seem to have no visible business model beyond convincing investors to give them money.  Which, I guess, is also impressive: until such time as they have to monetise and their actions in that regard impinge on the tastes of a user base sometimes as touchy and rabid as the old LiveJournal crowd. 

I’d like to think that Tumblr will solve their obvious problems before they crash down like asteroids.  I’d also like to think that most users have copies of their most-loved Tumblr posts.  The year of All I Want To Be Is A GIF would be a very sad thing to look back on, if it turned out you’ve died when the servers were switched off.

• Oh God Robert Scoble Is Wearing His Google Glasses in The Shower
  A warning to a generation
  (tags:tech )

I’ve got my head in a weird and fun piece of work today, so please allow me to distract you with the unusual things kept in Brooklyn by our friends at the Invisible Gallery.

The wonderfully creepy soundscapes of the unit called Eye Cross Cross because I am done with trying to get Unicode symbols to display properly.  I have been writing to these sounds today.  G’night.

• Researcher’s Serial Port Scans Find More Than 100,000 Hackable Devices, Including Traffic Lights And Fuel Pumps – Forbes
  "You probably remember serial ports as the ancient nine-pin plugs you once used to hook up your mouse or joystick to your computer in the pre-USB dark ages. But tracking down devices that still use serial port connections isn’t so hard, it seems. In fact, according to H.D. Moore, any hacker can find–and tamper with–more than 100,000 of them over the Internet, including critical systems ranging from traffic lights to fuel pumps to building heating and cooling systems to retail point-of-sale devices."
  (tags:tech security )
• Muzzle Flash — Hidden in Plain Sight — Medium
  Jan Chipchase: "On Friday I was invited into Google Labs New York and given the opportunity to try out Glass. I declined to put on a pair. Here's why."
  (tags:tech )

SUB-MACHINE GUN is the simplest thing in the world.  A collection of screenshots of bad films with bad subtitles.

There’s something about the way interesting comics work, in them: the juxtaposition of image and text in discordant, dissociative ways.  Also they just make me smile.  But I love the strangeness of these little captures, and they way they make me think for a moment.  Also, it turns out your robot will live.

I like a pop song every now and then.  If I’m deciphering the tags right, then Sam Hamilton is calling this “fucked modern pop music.”

• cityofsound: Sketchbook: Colors magazine, Colors #86 "Making the News", and Colors News Machine
  "The physical experience of the magazine—which we feel still has real value on paper—is also quite something. The issue has a magazine within the magazine, via little pockets of editorial tucked under full spreads, as well as windows cut into pages to indicate how news photographs are framed, and the 'Yellow Pages' newspaper tucked in the back." The overt separation of print and digital is something that came up in brief conversation with Dan Hill the other day. Hoping to drill further into it in the near future.
  (tags:magazines )
• Pad & Quill’s Aria for iPad Mini is an exquisite case, worthy of display – The Next Web
  I don't have an iPad Mini, and don't yet have a requirement for one, but I am nonetheless both impressed and amused by this case.
  (tags:cases )
• DailyDot: The greatest movie that never was
  "Imagine a documentary about events you've never heard of—that no one's ever heard of—but that are meticulously chronicled in online sources many people trust implicitly. Imagine the confusion. Imagine the buzz. Imagine the publicity"
  (tags:fake )

This is a Maxpedition Mini EDC Pocket Organiser.  It fits neatly in my coat pocket.  I’ve always been one of those people who just stuffs their coat pockets with the stuff they might need thirty seconds before I head out of the door.  This means, in practise, that I either overstuff said pockets or that I can’t find one thing I need to stick in there.  Obviously, the older and more senile I get, the more this will become one of those idiot problems that wastes more time and mental energy than it should.  I’m going to need that mental energy for things like remembering where I live.  Also, if I’m just shooting into London for something, I like to avoid carrying a bag if I can.  Not least because a bag tempts me to carry more stuff than I need, “just in case.”

(I like Maxpedition bags.  I also have the Maxpedition Jumbo Versipack Shoulder Bag for overnight travel and, for travelling more than one night, the slightly absurdly named Maxpedition Aggressor Attache Tactical Briefcase.  They’re strong, clever and compact bags that take a beating.)

So I have this.  I don’t like the colour, but it was the only one in stock that week.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not like anyone will see it, because it lives in my coat.  For scale, the black Field Notes notebook on the far right is five inches tall.  That’s a Pilot Frixion pen next to it: they’re erasable pens, and are nice to write with.

The shiny thing reflecting my iPhone 4S (which is always at hand) is an Anker Astro2 battery pack, which will charge the phone and everything else in the pack.  At left of that is my Sony mp3 player, which has been running strong since, what, 2009?  I choose mp3 players very carefully.  It’s the NWZX-1060, 32GB.  Monster Turbine earbuds.

The thing with the white blob above the mp3 player is, if you’re my daughter, my “douchebag ear-thing,” otherwise known as a Bose bluetooth earpiece.  Which mostly gets used to listen to spoken-word podcasts while I’m on the move, and to allow me to take long phone calls from my agents while drinking and smoking heavily.  Not that they cause me to drink and smoke heavily.  Often.  (They are the only people who ever phone me.)

Never, ever, ever be without a notebook and something to write with.  Phones are great for lots of things, but nothing beats paper and pen for complex thoughts, notes and sketches.  I wrote an entire issue of PLANETARY in a notebook on a long three-leg train journey once.  The phone is for everything else, and the mp3 player is for when everything else needs to go away.

Faintly ridiculous, all lined up like this, isn’t it?  There’s a tiny little penknife that also goes in there, but it’s, um, currently missing.  (See?)  Thing is, the business of writing doesn’t stop just because I’m travelling.  So this simple little bag stays in my coat.  For me, this is actually streamlined.

• Quietweet – A Simpler Twitter Reader
  "Quietweet is a read-only twitter client, which ignores all tweets containing @s, #s or links."
  (tags:web )
• The new DIY | Dazed Digital
  "How Tumblr and Instagram are fuelling a new generation of online-only streetwear upstarts"
  (tags:fashion brands marketing web net )
• Piezoelectric ‘taxel’ arrays convert motion to electronic signals for tactile imaging
  "The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch"
  (tags:robots )
• Tracking gunfire with a smartphone
  "You are walking down the street with a friend. A shot is fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red arrow pointing in the direction the shot came from."
  (tags:tech crime war phones )
• The problem with predictions: Speaker says peering into future remains an imperfect science
  "New models are emerging from the life sciences that view the world as a living organism rather than a machine. "These models are coupled with a new aesthetic, which finds beauty in the complexity of life rather than the elegance of symmetry,""
  (tags:future )

“Our” being me and the esteemed Mr Cully Hamner.  You can find the original graphic novel in the usual places.

You know Carter Tutti.  Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti.  All I can say about COOLICON right now is that it makes me smile, a lot.

The vinyl’s up for pre-order, for those of you that like such things.

Provided the embed works, this is a talk Bruce just gave in Berlin. Bruce’s talks are always good. He references Anab Jain’s talk, but I don’t think that’s up yet. Anab’s bit at Improving Reality last year was massive. People like Anab and Bruce do some of the best science-fictional thinking around, up on their feet at places like this.

Ah, that’s better.  G’night.

• Scientists detect dark lightning linked to visible lightning
  "Researchers have identified a burst of high-energy radiation known as 'dark lightning" immediately preceding a flash of ordinary lightning. The new finding provides observational evidence that the two phenomena are connected, although the exact nature of the relationship between ordinary bright lightning and the dark variety is still unclear, the scientists said." DARK LIGHTNING
  (tags:sci )
• ‘Quantum internet’: Towards realization of solid-state quantum network
  "Researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands have managed to bring two electrons, three meters from each other, into a quantum- entangled state. This result marks a major step towards realizing a quantum network that can be used to connect future quantum computers and to send information in a completely secure way by means of 'teleportation',
  (tags:comp )
• NASA chief: Visiting an asteroid is all agency can afford
  ""I need money to go to the moon," Bolden said."
  (tags:space pol )