Ronald Brak

Because not everyone can be normal.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

William Gibson's Neuromancer: Cutting My Cheese With Monomolecular Filament

A sentence from the first chapter of the 1984 novel Neuromancer: "His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls." And today in 2014 I can buy 10,000 times that much for $5 at Office Works. This is not to make fun of William Gibson, people didn't even know what gigabytes were back then. After all, the1994 animated show Reboot called their villain Megabyte as that word still seemed impressive back then instead of quaint.

No, I mention this because the past is a different country and the past's musings on possible futures are little better than fever dreams, as are our own musings on the future. Gibson created a world where the earth had giant space colonies and 3 megabytes of RAM was worth doing a black market deal over instead of a flea market deal. Meanwhile we live in a world where we walk around with gigabytes in our pockets and a minimum crew complement on the International Space Station, who are really only there because the governments involved are too embarrassed to pull the plug, and robots do our space exploration for us. Whatever the future may be, the only thing certain is it won't be as we imagine it.

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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Wise Words From A Founding Parent Of That Great Nation


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Monday, December 22, 2014

"Do I have to wrap them around me and pretend they are attacking like in the old days?"


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