Week 37

07.15.02

Man, I had no idea that Philip Jose' Farmer had a website.  Fifty years of unique genius!

http://www.pjfarmer.com/sindex.htm

Look, he's not Proust, okay, but check this out:

The Alley Man,  Down in the Black Gang, A Bowl Bigger than Earth, Sexual Implications of the Charge of the Light Brigade, The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod — (that's the one where Tarzan was written by William Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I'm just guessing here, but I'd imagine Paul Di Filippo owes that unlikely work a sizeable debt) — Riders of the Purple Wage, Sketches Among the Ruins of my Mind… If it weren't for science fiction, where the hell else would terrific, freaky material like that *ever* see print? And who but Farmer could write it, ever? I bow the knee, Phil! We're not worthy!

07.16.02

These Canadian guys started out wanting to sell "location-based" ads on mobile phones. Then they figured out that they could sell their knowledge about where cellphone users go — to antiterror forces. That's called "geo-profiling." Do you hang out at nuclear waste sites at 3 in the morning? Better turn that cellphone off, Ahmed.

http://www.wirelessadwatch.com/profile/
2001/profilium.shtml

http://www.mobic.com/news/2002/01/
avesair_matches_mobile_marketing.htm

How long before this handy technology service hits the divorce courts? "She's an unfit mother, Judge. My private detective tracked the phone in her purse, and look how she hits those singles bars."

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/government/cjo/press04.html

07.17.02

These guys have the peculiar app of enabling groups of people on the net to meet physically.

http://www.meetup.com

If you got several hundred thousand fans of Tabasco Sauce together via the Internet, maybe you could overpower the "Pepper Fest" and spontaneously sack and loot Avery Island, Louisiana.

http://www.tabasco.com/main.cfm

07.18.02

If you're familiar with the terms retrofuturism, retrophilia, technoplegic and yestertech, then "technostalgia" ought to make perfect sense.

http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/
technostalgia.asp

Soon "Technostalgia" will be redefined as a passionate longing for the lost peace and plenty of the Clinton-Era high-tech Golden Age.

As opposed to a dismal era which produces stuff like Greenhouse-stricken "drunken trees."

http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/
drunkentrees.asp

And the stricken market's  "capitulation bottom."

http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/
capitulationbottom.asp

07.19.02

Some very nice shots of the ancient, tiny, pre-Internet here. Those maps have much of the weird archaic majesty of Mayan glyphs.

http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/
historical.html

Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.