Babylon

Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long' than you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.

"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They don't make much of a difference between states, you know?" Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?" Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.

"Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. "Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing." He held out the trodes. Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
"Try it," Case said. He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out.
"What did you see, man?" "Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him back the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.

-Willam Gibson, Neuromancer 




Web 2.0, what hast thou wrought?

Several times over the course of the past two years or so, I've had hackers inject PHP code into my website to dish out Generic Viagra links. It was messy, but easy enough to fix, and yet I still get lockout notices a couple times a week due to hackers all over the globe trying to pry their way back in. I suppose it's only a matter of time before they succeed and I'll be back to combing line-by-line, like Obama with pork-laden legislation (I kid), through my carefully crafted code picking out their malicious crap. In the meantime, they've contended themselves with spoofing my e-mail address to send me spam from 'myself', thus bypassing the anti-spam filters. Why bother? If I wanted to fill her nights with pleasure, I'd just get her the DVD box-set of Gilmore Girls and a cheesecake. Sheesh.

And speaking of my Inbox:

It’s been a while since we’ve seen you at Ricochet. Because of that, we wanted to let you know about some of the changes you may not have noticed. We’re now publishing a free morning newsletter, The Daily Shot, which is unlike any other political update you’ll read online...

Say no more.


Puddles 'o fun

Infamous Luddite Technophobe that I am, I still find this newfangled 3D printer to be pretty cool. Of special coolness is the making of dental prosthetics, since I'm scheduled for the fitting of a crown and an inlay shortly. I blame PopTarts. And Bush.
Now, as pleasant as that is likely to be, I'm sure I'd prefer to have a miniaturized version of said device that I could strap to my jaw and click "Print".

Judgement


Sure, this could all be mere coincidence, but, man, that's one whole heck of a lot of coincidence.
Just saying.
If you only want to see how you should plan for the rest of 2015, skip ahead to around 1:10:00
or thereabouts, but it's the preceding build-up that gives weight to his presentation.

Strange Times.