• But why can’t Occupiers meet up in a church basement, or check out a room at the public library like everybody else? This sort of meet-up to chat about heady things, to solve all the world’s problems in a comfortably multi-purpose institutional setting, maybe with danishes and bad coffee, is the bread and butter of the authentic pre-electoral democratic process. If building a little model society, a little pocket of utopia, is really the way to go, then why can’t the Occupiers practice participatory democracy on a friendly farmer’s plot and make a documentary about how awesome it is? Their reason why not, I freely speculate, is that none of these options puts the Occupiers’ favorite ideological conception of democracy and citizen participation (or of agency and societal power imbalance) right in folks’ faces in a way they can’t easily avoid.

    […]

    Camping and deliberating and participating democratically together on somebody’s back forty, rather than in peoples’ way, is a less empowering experience. It’s too clearly LARPing.

    —[The Occupy Movement’s Enthusiasm and Contempt for Democracy The Moral Sciences Club Big Think](http://bigthink.com/ideas/41309?page=all)

  • “I liked the perversity of it,” he said. “I liked saying: ‘Anyone can do this. It’s normal.’ I never ride with a helmet either, even when people are telling me I’m an idiot.  Riding a bike should be normal , and you shouldn’t have to wear a funny Styrofoam hat.”

    (via amsterdamize)

  • GIBSON:
    I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didn’t know how to handle transitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didn’t have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.
    INTERVIEWER:
    What was the effect?
    GIBSON:
    A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somewhat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures.

  • MGMT cover of Bauhaus’s “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”

  • There’s a recent report of a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT. Yes, this is an example of something that becomes less explosive as a one-to-one cocrystal with TNT. Although, as the authors point out, if you heat those crystals up the two components separate out, and you’re left with crystals of pure CL-20 soaking in liquid TNT, a situation that will heighten your awareness of the fleeting nature of life.

    —

    Things I Won’t Work With: Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane. In the Pipeline

    For scz.