tangentbot

Today I purchased five books in paper format. The books had been used previously by other people and discarded in a discount used book store. If a book has been read, it is considered used. If a photograph has been seen, is it considered used as well? Anyway, contrary to my belief that used media resellers are doing the artist more a disservice than media pirates, I bought them at Half Price Books because my current e-reader is my phone. As soon as I remedy this, I will remedy that, but I digress. Here’s what I got:

Three “Slice Of Life” manga; Marmalade Boy #7, Marmalade Boy #8 and Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days…

… and two “cyberpunk”(I think) novels:  Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling, and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

As many times as I have seen the film Blade Runner , this is my first time reading Do Androids Dream…, the classic it was built on. I am about a chapter into it and I’m surprised at the startling differences between the two stories already.  I am also trying to read more of Bruce Sterling’s stuff because the man can seriously write some cyberpunk.  (He is @bruces on twitter if you wish to follow him).

I will prolly be reviewing these as I finish reading them :3.

Nintendo is advertising Super Monkey Ball for the Wii, on my fruit. Is this honestly a lucrative marketing angle?  Two out of three stickers on my bunch of bananas say yes!

Click on bananas for a close-up, I double-dog dare you.

Also, here is a link to the Chiquita website… apparently there is a contest.

What a fascinating world we live in. What can be more cyberpunk then a corporate marketing tie-in with fruit?

If you know me, you probably know how much I love Twitter. Also, a lot of you read Slashdot, so you probably saw this story about how human-like bots have become. Background for context.

I really like the ideas of artificial intelligence, what exactly constitutes sentience and sapience, and what makes us human. I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex (for the third time) and it digs into those concepts quite a bit with the Tachikomas. Since then, I’ve been seeing stories crop up about mind-reading via MRI scans,  neural interfaces for computers, and tons of other cyberpunkish bits here and there.

This is my favorite one, though. A Japanese blogger’s two closest friends on Twitter turn out to be bots.

Did you read it? Well go read it! It’s so awesome! Although, I must admit, I feel kind of sorry for coconutsfine. I’m hoping he continues to talk to the bots. I’m hoping somebody I follow is really a bot.  Skynet, srsly.

Here’s a cool chatterbot directory, chatbots.org. There’s also tons of info about bots and AI over at Wikipedia.