Del.icio.us links for March 4th through March 10th:
- The Millions: What About Genre, What About Horror? – “Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago[...]” Now this is how you write an opinion column.
Tags: writing genre horror literature rant essay - ‘Clean City’: São Paulo Scrubbed of Outdoor Ads – In September of 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising – even pamphlets. It’s all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city itself the focal point rather than colorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
Tags: advertising architecture urbanenvironments - Jason Sanford: I promised myself I wouldn’t rant, but then… – Great rant (about Norman Spinrad’s ignorance of non-Anglo SF writers) that mentions plenty of interesting authors to check out.
Tags: writing sciencefiction reading books - Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards – To whit, games that can show as much or as little as the creators wish, with no apparent concern as to the hardware they’re running on. It’s done by using points instead of polygons, it runs purely in software, and it can even do its thing on a mobile phone. It sounds amazing. It sounds crazy. Maybe it is – grud only knows we’ve seen plenty of wondrous-sounding technology promises fail to arrive over the years, but let’s hope this one can pull it off. The rough concept behind it is that the game is only ever rendering the pixels you can see at any one time, rather than trying to muster the whole shebang on a constant basis.
Tags: gaming engines technology design computing - Racism is linked to Religious dogmatism – Religious people can be racist, and that’s not news. But are they more likely to be racist than non-religious people? A new study now confirms this hypothesis.
Tags: racism religion studies prejudice dogmatism - Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem – From the very beginning of the game, you’re faced with choices that will shape your Shepard’s personality and the way other characters in the game react to you. But the ones that stood out to me were ones that reverberated with political and racial allegory.
Tags: race gaming masseffect - Colonics on MySpace Music – Dan / Ash / Trudy!
Tags: band music - iwrestledabearonce on MySpace Music – Crazy rad hipster grindcore
Tags: band music - Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future – I don’t know how to predict the future, and I never will. But I do know how not to predict it: don’t stick to your boss’s comfort zone by predicting that doing exactly what you’re doing now is exactly the right thing to do forever.
Tags: futurism prediction technology society design imagination sciencefiction - Blood Red Shoes: From DIY to ‘Professional’ / In Depth // Drowned In Sound – We picked Steve’s brain to discover what he’s learnt over the past few years, shifting from the do-everything-yourself punk scene to the corporate-sponsored festival arenas. Here’s the piece, with advice for any bands who might follow this path, entitled: TEN THINGS I HAVE LEARNED: From a DIY band to a “professional musician” by Steve Ansell.
Tags: music diy musicindustry