Back in late 2000, a man calling himself John Titor, claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036, began appearing in chat-rooms and on-line forums, presenting the world with a litany of the terrible things to come—which certainly seems to violate the popular understanding about causality but sometimes the timeline and canon is disdained for lesser things. Though we are living in a sort of post-skeptical world where most agree that perpetuating future-fraud would be quickly smacked down and the internet is not a hiding-place, I still feel a little cheated for not knowing about this fantastically fun and possibly didactic anecdote. Though Titor’s stop in the year 2000 was just a detour, an authorized-delay, after accomplishing his main mission of retrieving a piece of legacy hardware from a quarter of a century earlier, which was reportedly had the needed fix to inoculate computer systems of his time against a fatal programming bug that had ravaged the contemporary technological landscape, he did make a nostalgic appearance online to entertain questions and issue some dire warnings—one being that one ought to avoid eating beef since, owing to the decades’ long incubation period, mad-cow disease would not present in the human population until Titor’s day and age.
Another, more timely announcement—which most have seemed dismissibly distant back then but probably inversely interesting since the internet was new and fresh and we were innocent and curious about what it might mean to have the world shrink through the sharing of ideas and experiences rather than finding that that shrinkage can also lead to things like compartmentalization and ennui that there’s less unique about us than we’d like to admit (Titor, if there’s even an internet for humans in the future, could have been prescient about that too I suppose)—was that there would be an atomic exchange between the US and Russia in the year 2015 that would be known as World War III. These pronouncements are quite different than the predictions of Nostradamus, not vague by design but maybe a little evasive, and not just because they claim the authority of experience but also in that if anything does not unfold as Titor said (like the civil wars that were to occur in 2006 and 2012 that was to split the United States up into five separate countries), it still cannot be refuted as wrong, since his time-travel affected the future, as planned. The engagement ended abruptly after four months, and though there has not, I think, been a continual following—bits and pieces of this strange story resurface now and again and spark a resurgence that’s not only in the dismantling and maybe the desire to find resolution, since those interrupted mysteries are the ones that haunt.
Tuesday 10 February 2015
hindsight bias or temporal paradox
neunundneunzig
platitudnal
Monday 9 February 2015
worth one-thousand
The Daily Beast has a very interesting profile of awarding-winning photographer Alec Soth and his team who are taking an epic road-trips and documenting Americana, sharing his dispatches with all and sundry that really draws in the reader, as the artist’s eye does.
desk-job
Via the nonpareil Neat-o-Rama, comes the next phase of office furniture engineered to make one jump out of his or her chair, a surfboard like foot rest that requires one to constantly readjust one’s weight and make small shifts in one’s posture to remain upright.
It’s a clever idea and I bet it would be much more fun to rock and keep one’s balance rather than just standing still or going through a litany of sitting, standing and kneeling like one’s at Mass—but sometimes this idea of healthy ergonomics makes me want to jump out of my skin sometimes. I would imagine that the goal of all of these subtle and not so subtle changes to the work environment is to eventually allow us to redeem the virtues of being able to rest one’s feet and work in a setting not buffeted by distraction and walking the high-wire. The office is a venue for combating our general laziness and inactivity because we’re rather captives for what someone has deemed our own good, never mind that being seated—or even lying in bed is probably more conducive to creativity and productivity and fitness ought not to start or end at work. Besides, I think the layout of the office, even as a sandbox for collaboration, is changing too quickly for any of these sedentary iniquities to really take root.
Sunday 8 February 2015
link roundup: five-by-five
major arcana: weird numerical connection, coincidence between the calendar and playing-cards
tyranny of the bells: can you match these electronic beeps to their gadgets?
larp oder knutepunkt
Though this event reported in Spiegel (DE) is not the first instance of live-action role play—in some ways Renaissance Fairs, Civil War re-enactments and Comic Conventions can be considered games in the same genre and a few epically sophisticated ones are cited in the article, but this four day challenge that was held on board a battleship turned into a marine museum, transformed into an elaborate gaming environment in Wilhelmshaven probably really surprised its creators for its depth and wrenching emotion. Project Exodus, loosely based around the arc-of-story of Battlestar Galactica—with humans on the run from cyborgs intent on wiping them out, was immersive and elicited a lot of bathos, well-up from unexpected places, due to the game’s “play-to-lose” nature. The scripted plot had leadership killed off at crucial moments and the crew had to manage to carry on. The organisers of the game hope to eventually bring this experience to the classroom—to schools and universities, since it might prove more effective in teaching lessons about conflict and what it means to be a refugee better than a lecture.
