Leonardo diCaprio as... Nolan Bushnell?!

According to a story I found on www.scifi.com/sfw/news/, Leonardo diCapretty will be playing Nolan Bushy-nell in a movie about the founder of Atari. Here's their news story:

"DiCaprio To Play Atari Founder: Leonardo DiCaprio is attached produce and star in an upcoming biopic based on Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Variety reported. Written by Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman, Atari centers on the life of Bushnell, one of the founding fathers of the video-game industry.Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in 1972 and were instrumental in bringing arcade games, home vidgame consoles and home computers to the masses. Among the company’s contributions were Pong and the Atari 2600.Although Bushnell's life rights had long been pursued by various suitors, Hecker and Craig Sherman persuaded the gaming pioneer that they could do his unique story justice."



Leonardo:


Nolan:











Any questions?

That's no moon...

Remember the room with walls made of televisions in Fahrenheit 451? Well, I think you could make a wall out of this thing:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/sharp-rolls-out-gigantic-108inch-lcd-226761.php

Now to find a 108-inch space somewhere in your home to put this monster. To be frank, I really don't know how I'd deal with having something like this in my home. I feel like I'd wake up one morning to find that it had organized the lesser machines under its iron control, and the living room and kitchen had seceded to form Techopia.

The other question: how the hell do you install it? Does it come with the Russian Olympic weightlifting team to carry it into your house? Will you have to knock a hole in your wall to get it in, or do you just stick it on the floor and built up the walls around it?

If every 10 inches of screen is another 2 feet back of viewing distance, as they told me when I bought my TV, then you'll have to watch this thing from 20 feet away: in other words, you'll be watching from the next room.

Wow. Now that is high-tech.

Hell... it's about time.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080615/ts_afp/lifestylenetherlandstechnologylovesexrobots_080615055138

That news story had two immediate reactions from me. The first was that it's about damn time that we had sexbots. Of course, this story isn't about sexbots: it's about lovebots, something capable of creating a meaningful relationship with its owner. And that's even better. That's something many humans, I'd venture, can't even enjoy with other humans, let alone something with a harddrive. The second reaction was that forty years is much too long. If I expect my robotic body to be ready to receive my brain before my fleshy body rots all around me, technology should advance a lot faster in that forty years. I'll be in my sixties by then, which means I'll either be happily married or have probably spent my life in miserable bachelorhood.

The story does say that we'll have sexbots in five years, but to be frank, judging by the kind of thing we're looking at in our robotic progress when we try to give them realistic expressions, it's not particularly the kind of thing I'd want to get cozy with in front of the fireplace over a nice bottle of the red, red vino.

I'm not saying that I'm holding out my hope for the robotic lover as my only means of ever touching something female-shaped (although sometimes that seems to be a possibility!). No, my friends, it's just that a robot is something that, I believe, is better suited to the disposition of a human than another human is. A human has things like needs and feelings. A human is irrational and asks things that have no good answer, like, 'Does this make me look fat?' The worst: you have to settle with humans. Although I still hope there is such a thing as a perfect match, the One True Love, the cynic in me doubts it and whispers that one day I'll have to choose someone that I know isn't exactly right, and I'll have to grin and bear the things that she does that I don't like, and I'll have to endure her reactions to the things I love that she doesn't. And that, my friends, is something my robotic lover and I will never have to suffer. I could sit on the balcony with my computer, writing away, and she would massage my shoulders or just sit with me, one arm wrapped around my leg like a babe in a fantasy painting, never complaining or thinking of herself.

Damnit, it makes me want to get into computer engineering just to help make it a reality faster.

Cyberpunk Music

As I draw my cyberpunk-inspired pictures or write my cyberpunk novel, I like to listen to music. Unfortunately, I don't have a great number of songs that put me in the right feel to slip into some techno-bar, have a drink, and talk about cybernetic implants with a big Russian named Shadow. Here is the list I have for my cyberpunk playlist in iTunes: any suggestions for what to add? Bonus if the song is available to buy on iTunes. Some aren't quite cyberpunk; feel free to point those out, too.

Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran of the Psychic Wars
Bodies - Drowning Pool
Coma White - Marilyn Manson
Personal Jesus - Marilyn Manson
Angel - Massive Attack
Teardrop - Massive Attack
Freiflug - Megaherz
Adios - Rammstein
Feel So Numb - Rob Zombie
Orchestra - The Servant
Zero - The Smashing Pumpkins
Lithium Flower - Ghost in the Shell SAC Soundtrack
One (Always Hardcore) - Scooter

The Madness!

Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!

Yes, I'm still looking for a good look/feel to my blog. I want it to be something that I can just naturally pick up off the ground, dust off, and say, "Yep, that's my blog right there." So it will continue to change and mutate, probably until it turns into a misshapen mutant just begging to be put out of its misery.

Wow, that conjures a scene. Some horrible, twisted deformity just brought down by the heavy guns of the group of plucky misfits deep in a disused experimental lab. It kicks, uttering a horrible roar of pain, as the leader of the group, his face hidden behind a tactical mask with glowing green goggles, steps forward and raises his high-caliber handgun....

Ahem.

Cyberpunk

Yes, I know what I said. But I just wanted to say that my interest in cyberpunk has been rekindled by drawing a sketch of a pair of cyberpunk characters. Look forward to more. I'm considering linking to it from here, but I'm not sure my crappy-ass sketches are worth the association with this blog. And yes, talking about it is. Because now, in your mind, my artwork looks like something from Christopher Shy.
Suck on that.

Do not be alarmed!

As you may have noticed, this blog's style has changed significantly. I decided that I simply don't have enough to post regularly about cyberpunk, and my thoughts aren't interesting/coherent enough to reach a wide audience just being pulled in pell-mell. Therefore, I have decided to rededicate this blog to literature and my experience both reading and writing it. Up, up, and away!

Your good friend,
Bluefish

PS Yes, I will keep the name. I haven't explained it yet, but it is cyberpunk. I promise. Nevertheless, since cyberpunk remains one of the areas of literature I'm very interested in (it's an extensive list), it will continue to serve me well.

... it deepens like a coastal shelf

It shames me, as the writer of a pseudo-cyberpunk blog, that I bought my computer five years ago and haven't upgraded it physically since. It suits my purpose, though. Although I'm a video gamer, it's been more of a pursuit than a study recently, and there really aren't any new games that I desperately want to play that my computer can't handle--at least, none that aren't also available for my Playstation 3, which cranks out amazing graphics onto my brand-new 40" LCD widescreen HD television, rather than the piddly 17" Dell monitor that my computer is attached to. That was a long sentence saying, "My computer sucks, but my PS3 doesn't." But my computer is fine for what I use it for, and I don't play enough modern video games to warrant buying a new one.

That being said, I can't help but being rather disturbed by my computer's gradual descent into decrepitude. When I first got it, it started up, from power-on to finished loading all the system tray crap, in less than forty seconds (because I timed it). Today, I didn't have the heart to measure it, but I turned it on and ate breakfast, and it was still loading when I got back. It used to be doing the 100 meter in under twelve seconds: nothing astonishing, but respectable. Now, it moves like an old person getting up to take a crap in the middle of the night. If I wanted to wax poetical, I'd say it has qualities akin to something primordial, even pre-Cambrian, just dragging its lumpy, slimy bulk out of some quagmire the world forgot, rearing its misshapen head, and deciding maybe it's best not to come out onto dry land after all.

I can think of three possible reasons for this gradual descent into senility: the build-up of dust, the accrual of pointless applications and bad registry entries, and the slow grinding away of all the moving parts of any machine into fine powder. I feel like I'm watching a loved one slowly slip away to a wasting disease: it still greets me with a smile and tries to play those games we used to love for me, but every day I see it grow a little slower, and the old games come a little harder.

I actually got a bit misty-eyed writing that. I love you, too, computer. I love you, too.