Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

A couple of weeks ago, the Globe and Mail had a great piece by Canadian author Douglas Coupland, entitled " A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years " (see previous post). Easily missed on the web version was Coupland's companion piece, " A glossary of new terms for a messed-up future. " A random sampling: Unwitting Permanence -- The notion that by, say, throwing a Coke bottle off a ship's deck and into the bottom of the Marianas Trench, that bottle will remain there, unambiguously, until the sun eats up the planet. Most of the world's landfills display Unwitting Permanence. Time Snack -- Often annoying moments of pseudo-leisure created by computers when they stop to save a file or to search for software updates or, most likely, for no apparent reason. Deselfing -- Willingly diluting one's sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. Frankentime -- What time feels like when you realize th...

I'm in Toronto visiting eldest son for Canadian Thanksgiving. The Globe and Mail had a great piece by Canadian author Douglas Coupland, entitled " A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years. " Some highlights: It's going to get worse The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness Expect less People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves Believe me, you owe it to yourself to read the entire piece . Douglas Coupland has written numerous works of fi...

Today's Dilbert hits a new high for colorful imagery and euphemism: "I'm an admin, you steaming log. The only thing that would inspire me is finding your corpse floating in my worst enemy's drinking water." The man has a gift for words, that's for sure.

Somewhere in Cupertino, a great disturbance in the Force is felt... http://www.padgadget.com/2010/09/30/ipad-runs-windows-95/

It's a sad thing to see stuff you remember as cutting edge now relegated to nostalgia. But better there than forgotten altogether. PCMag.com posted an amusing slideshow / feature entitled 12 Forgotten Online Games a couple of days ago. The kicker was these were all pre-internet "What?" you say. "There was online before the internet?" Indeed. Dial up services and games abounded, not to mention the grandfather of all community access, the BBS. I had, at various times, an AOL account (using the pre-Windows client), Delphi and CompuServe. And tons of BBS accounts. I was never a huge gamer but I recalled several of the games mentioned in the PCMag story, primarily the BBS "door" games; I had an ongoing friendly rivalry with the SYSOP of the Cat's Eye BBS on his Tradewar 2000 game. I also wasted time on LORD (Lord of Red Dragon) and Planets. My eldest son had a demo account (several, really) on The Realm, which he and one of his friends used t...

Oracle is a relentless devourer of technology companies -- especially competitors. One of their more recent victims has been Sun, the floundering purveyor of Java and the sponsor of OpenOffice.org, a popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office. There is apparently little love lost between Oracle and the OpenOffice.org community. No doubt observing the unhappy fate of the OpenSolaris project, the OpenOffice.org folks have jumped ship , taking the project with them and setting up a new umbrella organization: the Document Foundation , and rechristening their application suite LibreOffice . They did publicly ask Oracle to donate the "OpenOffice" name to the fledgling group, but I suspect no one is holding their breath waiting for that to happen. Much is made in some circles about how "evil" Microsoft supposedly is. Compared to Oracle, they're a bunch of freaking panty-waists. Founder Larry Ellison makes no bones about being a bad-ass. To steal a line,...

Who the hell are you calling a Dummy, you son of a bitch? Answer me, before I kick the shit out of you!