While I usually pretend to keep abreast of what books are coming out, this one was a surprise purchase, oh, about ten seconds after entering our local Barnes and Noble late last week: “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett. For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to [...]
Every now and then the Internet reveals something amazing about us and the rainbow of cultures we represent on this planet… Kazumi just now called me over to her computer to look at the video below, and – wow! – that is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a very long [...]
Bruce Sterling posted a rather rough wakeup call about the state of current literature and publishing at his beyond the beyond blog – Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature. The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away [...]
Last year I had picked up the first US translation of one of Arimasa Osawa’s books – Shinjuku Shark, and just recently I’ve found a new translation in his series around a cop in Tokyo in our local Japanese bookstore. The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of [...]
Last weekend we had a chance to see the Japanese movie “Departures” as a preview of its official release in the US during the San Francisco International Film Festival. Departures won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and it must have been a close call as best film all around. Where to begin? [...]
Japanese restaurants traditionally display artificial menu items in their shop windows, and every visitor to Japan has been dazzled by the amazing quality and realism of the plastic models for every conceivable food item that can be found in restaurant windows. Sooner or later it dawns on the visitor that there must be a massive [...]
We saw Coraline this week and I have to say I throughly enjoyed it. The film is done in stop-motion and for the first few minutes it seems to be very obvious, almost as if the filmmakers attempted to point out the fact that this is not another mass-produced CGI film of the kind we’ve [...]
Whenever I think I have too many too complicated projects I find something like this on the web… here is the Toaster Project. Thomas Thwaites is attempting to build a toaster from scratch, starting with iron ore, crude oil and other raw materials. It’s an interesting project, based on some very interesting and deep thoughts [...]
Jason Scott over at ASCII has a rather hearty rant about the Cloud we are supposed to put all our data in. And he is absolutely right. In fact, it couldn’t be said better! Over the last few years we’ve all been trained to entrust a large number of companies and organizations with a lot [...]
While googling up another arcane feature of the Atari ST system hardware I stumbled over this: The Flight Simulator History page. It offers a very comprehensive history of all versions of FS and background about its creators, and then in addition pre-built emulator packages so you can go and check out what Flight Simulator looked [...]