Oh boy.  I’ve been meaning to write this post for… well months, really.  I just haven’t quite figure out how to do it until now (and we’ll see if I actually have figured it out).  Because, you see, my friend wrote this book and…

… and that’s where most of you will have stopped reading.  "My friend did something" is a bit of a cue to click away, innit?  It’s right up there with "My mommy’s totally my biggest fan" as far as endorsements go.  Because here’s the thing — we pretty much all want the internet to have a little more personalization, but not that personal, not when it comes to reviews.

The unspoken answer to anything, any link or comment, that starts with "my friend made" is: "Well, but if it’s good, then why aren’t I hearing about it from strangers?"

But, well, whatever.  There’s a couple hundred of you that will have been tricked into clicking this link when I post it to twitter in a minute (using the cheat of a URL shortener so you’ll have no idea what you’re in for), and a handful of you will have had little enough to do for the next three minutes that you’ll read through anyway.  Haha, Tuesdays are the perfect time to spring a trap!

So.

My friend wrote this book:

And now, instead of telling you any damned thing about the book (because there’s a plot synopsis on Amazon, and it doesn’t tell you any more than I could), I’m going to tell you who this book was written for.

(Well, technically it was written for the two cats on the dedication page, because Adam’s a friend of mine, but he’s not quite right, if you know what I mean.  But that’s a measure of his sanity, not his writing.)

But more helpfully, the person this book is for looks a little like this:  You remember the Cartoon Express Train.  Adam remembers it, too — it’s in his bio at the end of the book, even — but you, well, you can’t really remember every moment of those years, but you can see the train snaking across the television screen when you think about it, right?  There’s a lot of the 80s that’s like that for you.  It’s not nostalgia, precisely — it’s those moment of faint-yet-clear memories.  Thundercats, ho! The invisible one-up mushroom just before the first jump.  Knowing is half the battle.  Those little dancing mice. The Snorks.  The Chipettes music video for "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."  Cookie Crisp cereal, but oh, what was that cereal with the furry golden guy with the big nose, did that even really exist?  And what the hell were those guys with the hologram stickers and removable glow-in-the-dark "capes" called?

In short, you don’t want the 80s back, you know better than to watch He-Man on hulu.com because it really was just crap, and you can sing the FAME theme song but you’re seriously not sure how you feel about the remake.  But you’ve got shared memories of a lot of REALLY weird shit you saw and read and remember from the 80s, and it’s not the shit you EVER see in those retrospectives, but you swear, you SWEAR it was real…

…You think.

Well, you’re the person Stays Crunchy In Milk was written for, then.  Because it’s not a book about what really happened.  It’s not a book about how crap things were, or how wonderful, or even how things were at all.  It’s a book about what never happened, that just happens to have been written by someone who remembers all those nearly-forgotten moments that you do, too.

And, y’know, it’s $12, so what the hell.

it is the role of the artist to challenge society. no one who lives within the system and makes conventional choices is capable of expanding the box we find ourselves in. that?s why it?s called, ?thinking outside? of it, and to do so, you have to be aware of it first. I believe ?artists? are people born with the dubious skill of acute box-awareness. I say dubious because, if they are anything like me (and I suspect they are, or I am like them), once aware of the confines placed on our existence it becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate them.

there are a lot of assumptions made about what constitutes a successful life. there is, I think, a certain amount of gender-based difference as to the specific expectations on an individual, but the checklist as I understand it runs: stable job, house, car, children, and subsequently future generations. all as expensive as possible. these things equal security, and if yours is like mine, your family says they ?just want you to be happy,? but what they mean is, ?I just want you to be safe, secure, and never take risks with your future.?

the laughable thing, the thing that keeps me from settling happily into the box, surrounded by wood-chips and a little exercise wheel that keeps me running constantly, going nowhere, is an underlying inability to believe that the checklist is actually working out for anybody.

As of right now, my little brother is 21 years old.* I wish oodles of happy natal felicitations to the lad — who can be found right here online. May he have many, many more gleeful, productive years ahead! And even though the occasion veritably cries out for me to tell embarrassing stories about him as a wee nublet of a boy, I will do no such thing.

At this time.

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* He’s … um … rather significantly younger than me, yes.

My day was actually similar to:

G’night.

(I have no credits for the shot. Please add them in comments if you know.)

So who can tell me what the Deathfall is? Has anyone in the class ever heard of that before? ... Yes, um, Bladeflake? Yes? ... Well, sure, that's one way to put it. It *is* a sort of "crazy blizzard", I suppose.

You see, when you are all grown up and you have done all the grown-up things you were meant to do in your life, and you begin to hear the icy groan in your limbs - the creak and crack that happens as your crystalline bones weaken with age - then you will gather your strength one last time, along with all the other Ice Lords of your age, to make the trek over the mountains, across the plain, all the way around the world to invade and besiege the fiery tropical realm of the Fire Princesses.

Yes, of course it's very hot there! Blistering! The Princesses live in eternal daylight, the sun forever above them, their homes built right into the thousands of sputtering, shaking volcanoes that smolder in the bright, scorching light. And the Princesses themselves run red-hot with the boiling fluid that runs through their veins.

Yes, Stormhammer. It does sound like a dangerous place and yes, in fact, it can kill you. It *will* kill you. It *does* kill you. The Deathfall is the last thing you do in your life: You invade their land and you slake your desire on any and every Princess you can. Their flesh will burn your eyes and splinter your skin but your icy seed can survive - and it will. You will leave it in as many of their boiling wombs as you can before your body can take no more, and you melt.

That's right. You will melt. All that is you will eventually fail to hold and you will break into pieces and vanish as steam off the body of your final conquest. That is how we Ice Lords die. And that is how we make new life.

Yes, babies. This is where babies come from. The seed's stony case will melt and fertilize and the Princesses will bear new children. Those who are girls will be, of course, Fire Princesses, to be raised under the bright and scorching sun. Those who are boys will be Ice Lords, to be raised here in the comforting embrace of night.

How? Well, of course the newborns cannot travel all the way back around the world on their own, and they cannot survive long among the volcanoes. So they must be brought to us. Each year, at the Birthspring, the oldest among the Princesses - the ones who have done all the grown-up things they were meant to do in their lives, who no longer feel the heat of their own blood, whose skins have begun to crack from the smoke - gather their strength one last time to trek across the plain and over the mountains, all the way around the world before the last of their life-spark expires... to bring us our sons.

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For consideration: ...it's like MARCH OF THE PENGUINS meets a Ralph Bakshi cartoon...

a visit to Doctor Beef?s Storm Troopin? set on flickr is always a worthwhile activity.

For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.

My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.

Inflection Points

View more presentations from Jamais Cascio.

By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.

The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.

• Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) on Atemporality | transmediale
  "If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session is being introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality."
  (tags:video )

Jack Bauer saves the day... with AOL 3.0

unhappyhipsters brings me a special kind of joy.

unhappyhipsters:

At the art opening, he?d been convinced the blank canvas symbolized endless possibilities. Back at home, it was just one more reminder of his own desperation.

(Photo: Raimund Koch; Dwell, April 2009)

true story.

bigworldsmallvictories:

Sentimentality follows preservation.

A

Good morning! Fancy A Fierce Pancake for breakfast?

HOW MUCH IS THE FISH? HOW MUCH IS THE CHIPS?! (Lara! Thank you!)

Egads, how could I have forgotten about these freakwads? I once loved their one-and-only studio album, A Fierce Pancake with the same passion reserved for exceptional goofballs like Primus, Billy Nayer Show, Mr Bungle, Idiot Flesh, Violent Femmes, Fishbone, and Adam the the Ants. But it’s been a long, long time since I last listened…

Is it just me, or does Mick Lynch look uncannily like Siege (yanno, if Siege were crossed with Ed Grimley and a lemur)?

Formed in London in 1983, Stump were a legendary Anglo-Irish indie/experimental/rock group inspired by Captain Beefheart. The lineup was Kev Hopper on bass, Rob McKahey on drums, Chris Salmon on guitar, and Mick Lynch on vocals. They toured a lot in the mid 80s on a couple of brilliant, bizarre EPs, and their energetic live shows quickly earned them a cult following. Then they got signed to a major label, apparently squabbled constantly during the production of AFP and broke up soon afterward, a quarter of a million pounds in debt to their record company, and never to be heard from again.*

The entire album is cracked fucking genius. It’s also very difficult to track down anymore. Beg, borrow, steal a copy if you can.

Read the rest of Better Than Coffee: A Fierce Pancake

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Post tags: Better than coffee, Crackpot Visionary, Dance, Geekdom, Music, Punk, Silly-looking types