Book of living stories
Earlier this year, author V.E. Schwab delivered the sixth annual J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. With her permission, we are proud to present the text of that lecture; you can also find a complete video of the lecture and the excellent Q&A session that followed here, and also embedded below. I […]
It’s been nearly 10 years since Christopher Nolan’s Inception hit theaters, and the debate over the film’s ending continues to rage on. Did dream thief Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) really make it back home to his children, or was he still dreaming, trapped in a fantasy that was more palatable than living on the run from the law for the rest of his life?
Across the world, urban clusters have — to a greater or lesser extent — social and economic differences. Reflected in space, these imbalances of income and access to education, health, sanitation, and infrastructure generate ruptures more or less visible – although drastically felt.
Although her life ended in 1982, Jane Arden’s history is a fascinating one, almost more so in thanks to the mystery it provokes. This director, writer, actor, and poet worked most of her adult life, yet that work is almost entirely out-of-print and difficult to track down, something that hasn’t particularly changed even as many other avant-garde filmmakers have become more accessible thanks to increased availability provided by the internet and various remastering services and archives.
Short fiction is awesome. No, seriously. I am of the opinion that there are few things in life better than a perfectly executed short story. Creating an expertly paced short story, that makes you care about its characters, understand its world, and be invested in its central conflict—all within the space of 7,500 words—is no […]
Taiwanese feng shui master Chen San-yuan sure likes Pokémon Go. He has nine phones affixed to his bicycle and another two he’s carrying around for catching Pokémon around Taipei.
Chen rocketed to fame after a photo of him appeared on Reddit.
Last month, Youtubers EXP.GG TW (via AsiaOne) interviewed Mr. Chen about his love of Pokémon Go.
When asked why he’s so into the game, he replied that it was a lot of fun. “I can connect with people (and) prevent Alzheimer’s disease,” he added.
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The BBC also recently interviewed Chen, who is now using 11 phones to play the game he heard about from his grandson, plugging his phones into a portable battery. He will catch them all.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
A United States of Japan novel. Germany and Japan won WWII and control the U.S., and a young man has one dream: to become a mecha pilot.
Stinky feet sufferers at their wit’s end can rest easy, because Panasonic has a product that is designed to take the stink out of your kicks in the most high-tech way possible.
The electronics maker has introduced a futuristic new shoe deodorizer, the MS-DS100, which eliminates shoe odor by blasting nano-sized ions into your those smelly sneakers and other assorted footwear.
And with a name straight out of 2001 and a design that’s pure Back to the Future, it’s no wonder the gizmo’s only being offered in Japan beginning September 20.
Today’s television landscape doesn’t relegate storytelling to the actual screen, but offers opportunities to extend the lives of characters through transmedia. While the avenues are open creatively on a number of digital and social platforms, it also offers opportunities for companies to advertise in new places, often blurring the line between an organic extension of […]
It’s no secret that a growing number of Bitcoiners are unhappy with Twitter. A mix of perceived censorship through shadow banning and lack of serious action being taken by the platform to remove the notorious ether giveaway bots have aggravated calls for a decentralized alternative to the existing social media goliath.
Although members of the community had been vocal about this for awhile, it seems that recent moves like the unexplained temporary suspension of BHB Network’s Giacomo Zucco yesterday or the simultaneous purging of Infowars’ Alex Jones’ content by other social media platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Facebook and Apple have finally catalyzed the transition.
Enter Mastodon, the distributed social media platform. Mastodon is both very similar to and very different from Twitter. At a glance, one might be forgiven for mistaking it for TweetDeck. Many of its features have been cloned, including the ability to tweet (or “toot”), retweet (“boost”) and like (“favorite”). Some enhancements have been added in, including more granular privacy controls and up to 500 characters available for microblogging.
Where the platform really shines is in its lack of centralized oversight. Instead of users congregating around a single website, Mastodon is divided into “instances” — smaller communities that set their own rules around content and users (not unlike subreddits). Individuals registered with one Mastodon instance can communicate with users of another and have the ability to switch between a “local timeline” (seeing toots from users in their instance) and a “federated feed” (curating content from other instances).
The exodus from Twitter to Mastodon began with a number of users moving to the most popular instance, mastodon.social (boasting upward of 170,000 users). However, Opendime’s Rodolfo Novak has since gone on to create bitcoinhackers.org, an instance which, according to its “About” page, is dedicated to Bitcoin maximalists with “no scams, no shitcoin, no impersonation, no begging and no illegal content.”
Thus far, it has generated a considerable amount of interest, nearing 800 users at the time of writing and repeatedly ranking in the top 10 most active instances per hour. It remains to be seen whether these numbers will continue to climb. The general sentiment appears to be that Mastodon will be used either in tandem with Twitter (an app for cross-posting across both platforms is currently being propagated) or as a backup network for users that have been banned from it.
Ok so bunch of cool bitcoiners are discovering mastodon together right now on https://t.co/9EJlDOasTX it’s actually pretty fun !
— Francis Pouliot ⚡️ (@francispouliot_) August 9, 2018
This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
There will never be another Harlan Ellison. Insanely talented, incredibly smart, legendarily prickly and difficult, and difficult to get along with if he didn’t like you (or sometimes even if he did), Ellison was one of the rare writers who transcended his own work to became an icon based solely […]
The post 10 Harlan Ellison Short Stories That Changed Sci-Fi appeared first on The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.
