❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
trying on a metaphor
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap
macklin celebrini has autism
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Xuebing Du
roma★
★
gracie abrams
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𓃗
The Stonewall Inn
cherry valley forever
d e v o n
occasionally subtle
One Nice Bug Per Day
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
seen from Netherlands
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seen from Netherlands
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@gibsonian
Revealed: what’s inside Bibendum. From Le Rire, 1908. Compare this to the “crinoline monster” we posted previously. See our surprising revelation about the origin of the Michelin Man.
Shiver in wonderment: Weblog ◆ Books ◆ Videos ◆ Music ◆ Etsy
The stuff of Cayce Pollard's worst nightmares.
Inchmale’s Cabinet
Victorian English literature is filled with angst about what chaos lies behind proper and unassuming exteriors. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow says Brussels always reminds him of a “whited sepulchre,” a biblical reference to hypocrisy by which things “appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”
William Gibson’s London puts a psychedelic twist on this notion, with all manner of sinister weirdness lying in wait behind plain facades. This is most true in Cabinet, the hotel and private club that serves as home base for our heroes in Zero History.
Cabinet is “(h)alf the vertical mass of an eighteenth-century townhouse, one whose facade reminded her of the face of someone starting to fall asleep on the subway,” with the interior decor “ragingly, batshit insane.”
In Hollis Henry’s room:
The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling.
Descriptions of Cabinet are classic examples of Gibson’s rewarding prose, descriptions you can tear apart and hold in your bare hands to look at the pieces one at a time. The club is a smaller version his world, full of puzzling things that get more puzzling the closer you look at them.
Since Zero History first published, people have wondered whether Cabinet is real, as places in Gibson’s fiction sometimes are, and this one even described with close to an address, in Portman Square.
Readers suspected an odd club close to thereabouts in London, and Gibson confirmed in a Twitter exchange that it’s “obliquely” based on Home House Private Members Club (all photos except the last two are from Home House).
Home House is described in the membership materials as “London’s most exclusive private members’ club, fusing 18th century splendor with 21st century style.” Before you get too worked up, it’s not quite as bonkers as Cabinet, but it is extremely ornate and each room is uniquely designed, including multiple bars, restaurants, lounges, and private rooms.
The club is more expansive than Cabinet, too, encompassing three units, Nos. 19, 20, and 21 Portman Square. The building originates in 1773, when Elizabeth, countess of Home, commissioned famed neoclassical architect James Wyatt, who was later fired and replaced by rival Robert Adam. It’s considered one of the greatest surviving townhouses of Adam’s with its grand reception rooms and stunning central staircase spanning the height of the building.
Over the years it was owned by various royals, and was home to an institute of art for about 60 years. After being vacant for most of the 90s, a group of investors bought and restored it to its current state.
The restaurants and drawing rooms have their own old world charm, but the bars are stunning and kind of alien. You’ve got “The Vaults,” the late-night party rooms with animal prints and warm lighting. The House Bar has a bizarre, freestanding bar that looks like molten metal.
One phenomenon you see in Gibson’s fiction is he’ll get a grasp on something weird, and before long it sort of mutates and fragments. It’s that eventual, even distribution of the future. I feel like this has happened to the fever dream figment of Cabinet, with the rise of short-term, personal rentals. Consider these airbnbs, for example.
In the past five to ten years, the oddity of Cabinet has splintered into thousands of small, private clubs, in which the right online fund transfer can land you access to the inside of a castle, a clock tower, a water tower, a tree house in the redwoods, a funhouse of mirrors in Pittsburgh. There’s a cabinet of curiosities on every block.
An interview that is an embarrassment of riches.
On "authenticity":
“Authenticity” doesn’t mean much to me. I just want “good”, in the sense of well-designed, well-constructed, long-lasting garments. My interest in military clothing stems from that. It’s not about macho, playing soldiers, anything militaristic. It’s the functionality, the design-solutions, the durability. Likewise workwear.
On the heritage/workwear movement:
The difference between, say, Engineered Garments and, for instance, Iron Heart, is that Engineered Garments is nostalgic, while Iron Heart is atemporal.
On the Needles "upcycling" of military gear:
I don’t think they have any grasp of source code at all. Their combination MA-1/M-65 field jacket actually negates the functionality of the M-65’s lower pockets. You can’t fucking put your hands in them. Freaks me out.
On the current in-vogue nature of military wear:
It will become not the thing, and then it will again belong to the people who totally get it, until it becomes the thing again. I think Caleb Crye’s combat pants, for Crye Precision, will be around after the wars they were built for are forgotten, but it’s too soon to wear them now without being taken for a mall-ninja.
On fashion conspicuousness:
There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure. I don’t have that as a concern, but there’s something appealingly “low-drag” about gray man theory: reduced friction with one’s environment.
On the impact of the internet on fashion and personal style:
Today it’s not uncommon to see men who’ve gone to considerable care and expense to get some very specific look exactly wrong, and I suspect that that’s down to the internet. There are some things that bulletin boards can’t really convey. You have to see it being worn well.
This is basically Part 1 of my Tor.com review of The Peripheral, and it’s the part that’s safe to read if you’re determined to avoid spoilers. I wrote a separate spoiler-rich commentary that will go up later.
Oh, and there’s also an interview coming too.
Welcome new followers! I’m happy you found your way here. Thanks to piraterob for getting us on the radar of @greatdismal himself.
In case you hadn’t figured it out, this is a blog about the real concepts behind the novels of William Gibson. I mostly write about the Bigend Trilogy, but plan to branch out all in good time. I hope you find all this stuff as fascinating as I do.
Relevant to the followers of this tumblr. Go forth and follow.
These super-mirrored Mykita + Maison Martin Margiela sunglasses are a look I’ve been wanting since I read Neuromancer over 20 years ago, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Too bad they cost the proverbial limbs.
From Neuromancer:
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial. “I think you screwed up, Case. I showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.”
* * *
"We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy." [Terzibashjian] seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. "It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror into mirror…. You particularly,” he said to her, “must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.”
Molly bit one of the pastries in half. “It’s my show, Jack,” she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. “I know about you. Stool for the military, right?” Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn’t known she had it.
"Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.
She extended the gun. “Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won’t feel it for months.”
"Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight….”
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass out of here." She put the gun away.
Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job Flynne didn’t know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That’s all there is to it. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.
The Peripheral is currently scheduled for October of this year.
io9 has a video of Gibson reading from this novel from April 2013.
Jason G. Goldman on io9:
Perhaps you've heard that Ukraine had a small battalion of dolphin soldiers, trained to sniff out mines and patrol the border. Since the dolphins were housed at an aquarium in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, they now answer to the Russian Navy.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti is reporting that the dolphin training program, which was originally founded in the 1960s, was actually meant to be disbanded next month. But the Russians have decided to infuse new funds into the program and keep it going.
One source told the news agency that the dolphins are currently outfitted with old, outdated equipment, but that the facility's engineers are working on new instruments to "boost the operational efficiency of the dolphins underwater." The Ukrainian Army lacked the technical expertise to "convert the detection of objects by the dolphins' underwater sonar to a signal on an operator's monitor," but the Russian Army seems to have the know-how.
From "Johnny Mnemonic":
He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.
"What is this place?" I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.
"Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. 'Talk with the War Whale.' All that. Some whale Jones is..."
Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
[...]
Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, sparking across the frame and then fading to black.
We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
"I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?"
"The war," she said. "They all were. Navy did it. How else you get 'em working for you?"
Bless. io9 has learned about William Gibson’s Buzz Ricksons collaboration. In fairness this seems to have been occasioned by a new Buzz coat hitting the market. But this has been going on for quite some time.
William Gibson blog, December 31, 2005:
Recently we have been discussing an entire Pattern Recognition line, which would consist of all of their classic reproductions, but in black. People have been requesting other jackets that the USAF never issued, like a black version of the coyote-snorkel N3-B USAF parka. Ninety percent of their product sells within fifty miles of their Tokyo workrooms, they tell me, and they really aren’t very interested in foreign sales. They are just, well, nuts. Divinely and magnificently nuts.
Long Awaited Lab-Grown Burger Is Unveiled In London
After three months, $330,000 and a high-profile media blitz, the world’s first hamburger grown in a lab made its worldwide debut Monday.
The unveiling of "cultured beef," as the burger is branded, was a production worthy of the Food Network era, complete with chatty host, live-streamed video, hand-picked taste testers, a top London chef and an eager audience (made up mostly of journalists). Rarely has a single food gotten such star treatment.
But this was no ordinary food launch, of course. The burger, which began as just a few stem cells extracted from a cow’s shoulder, represents a technology potentially so disruptive that it has attracted the support of Google co-founder Sergei Brin.
"Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view the world," Brin says in a promotional video released Monday, the same day he was unmasked as the anonymous donor who ponied up money to grow the burger.
Read the rest on NPR’s The Salt blog.
(Photo: iStockPhoto)
Would you try a lab-grown hamburger if you could?
From Neuromancer:
Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.
"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that. You know what this costs?" She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
The Social Uncanny describes the narcissistic void of social technology that reflects us back to ourselves, familiar yet strange. It is the rush we feel at the sight of ourselves in recursion throughout the eternal reflected worlds of social media. Like mirrors facing each other in perfect parallel, each online profile generates a new subset, a new reflection, more distorted than the last, until our faces are shapeless blurs spiralling off into the Nth dimension.
The Social Uncanny is also our disgust at the sight of those multiplying nested images which we are now unable to control or cull. We delete one profile only to find another that has slipped the noose, gone missing in the wild before returning to public life with wildly inappropriate personal information broadcast to the world at the times we never want it to. The return of the repressed: everything you say or do online archived forever, even the ultra embarrassing stuff from your early digital life, stored somewhere where you’ll never get to it even if you wanted to hide it from someone. Backups, caches and archives working silently in the background to ensure you can never hunt down and kill the original (a term now meaningless), never completely eliminate your shame.
The Social Uncanny infests a new Twitter app, LivesOn. This app, which is really a bot automagically “powered by algorithims”, analyses your online habits and learns your tweeting “voice”. Assign it certain rights and when you die it keeps tweeting for you – as you – forever.
From Neuromancer:
"Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin; all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the other goddam thumb." When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that, Dix?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing."
@GreatDismal vs @AuthenticWmGibs
RT @shadowbottle @authenticwmgibs @greatdismal Is this based off a Gibson Ipsum generator? [I certainly hope so]
— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) November 2, 2012
@greatdismal dork embarrasses himself in front of author, but his tweed Norfolk jacket's fractal check pattern induces a temporary amnesia.
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 2, 2012
From Zero History:
"How about a Twitter account?"
"A what?"
"Sign up for one," she said. "As Gay Dolphin Two, all caps, no spaces. Numeral two. From the laptop in the lobby. As soon as you finish your drink. Make your updates private. I'll ask to follow you. I'll be Gay Dolphin One. Allow me to follow you, refuse anybody else. It'll mostly be porn bots anyway."
"Porn bots? What is it?"
"It's how I talk to my kids. You'll register. That will be how we keep in touch. Let's try to keep you out of trouble."
Milgrim winced.
Hubertus Bigend, Pattern Recognition and Zero History, William Gibson
The smooth and ironic brow of Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates. … He looks as though he’s … been infused with live extract of hot beef. He’s florid, glossy, bright−eyed, very likely bushy−tailed as well…His dark forelock falls across his eyes; he tosses his head to throw it back, entirely too coltish for anyone’s good. (Suggested by Chris from Tumblr)
Welcome!
Hello and welcome to the Gibsonian Institute's newest followers. I'm assuming you got here by way of my piece at Tor.com; thanks, and it's nice to have you aboard.
As you can probably see, activity here is a bit sluggish of late. (Okay, a lot sluggish.) I plan on getting into a more regular posting pattern in the next month or so ("weekly" at least should be attainable, surely?), so hang in there, and I hope you enjoy this collection of stuff.
rocketsandrayguns:
pureaesthetic:
retro: video: cybrpnk: promotional video for the ill fated 1986 neuromancer film adaptation.
What the?
This is a deeply odd little cultural artifact, but the thing that struck me at 1:20 in is Deborah Rosenberg's comment about how "when one reads between the lines, it's a panacea ... you can see [Gibson's] own very personal rainbow." Which is echoed in this excerpt from the Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER: Why did you set the novel in the aftermath of a war?
GIBSON: In 1981, it was pretty much every intelligent person’s assumption that on any given day the world could end horribly and pretty well permanently. There was this vast, all-consuming, taken-for-granted, even boring end-of-the-world anxiety that had been around since I was a little kid. So one of the things I wanted to do with Neuromancer was to write a novel in which the world didn’t end in a nuclear war. In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when multinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can never happen again. There’s deliberately no textual evidence that the United States exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industrial complex that may not have any government controlling it. That was my wanting to get away from the future-is-America thing. The irony, of course, is how the world actually went. If somebody had been able to sit me down in 1981 and say, You know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is looming in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind of backward.
(Also, that's one hell of a jacket Gibson is wearing.)
themagicstarship:
I think that Lucky Magazine might be a little confused on cyberpunk
What the living fuck? I don’t even.
William Gibson, interviewed in the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER: What’s wrong with cyberpunk?
GIBSON: A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
The tale of shipping container TGHU 307703 0 22G1, which showed up at a Genoa port emitting six chest x-rays' worth of radiation per minute. And interesting information about the mysteries of shipping containers in general, and the security around them (or terrifying lack thereof).
So after 10 years and more than $1 billion spent on scanners, radiation detectors, and beefed-up intelligence, most US ports are still scanning containers onshore, after unloading. Unfortunately, the detectors are easily foiled. Lots of harmless things are slightly radioactive—kitty litter, ceramic tiles, even bananas. So most detectors are set to ignore low radiation levels. Basic shielding would be enough to mask all but the strongest sources. “The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems: They won’t find a nuclear bomb, they won’t find highly enriched uranium, and they won’t find a shielded dirty bomb,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and president of the Center for National Policy. “Other than that, they’re great pieces of equipment.”
From Spook Country:
"You said they put it on a truck today," she said.
"Yes."
"And they're taking it into the United States, through Idaho?"
"We think Idaho. The unit inside is still functioning, though, and Bobby is keeping track of that for us. We should be able to anticipate where they're going to cross."
"If we fail to do that," the old man said, "and they enter the country undetected, we do have other options."
"Though we prefer the radiation be detected at the crossing."
