live birth

There is a reader board on the way to my work that changes every week. This week, it reads:

If fish is brain food you better eat a whale!

If I were the type to leave passive aggressive notes, I would probably take the time to stop and let these people know that not only is their understanding of basic grammar pretty shaky, eating whale isn't really going to help anything, because whales aren't fish.

genre fiction

Quirky, solitary, code-obsessed narrator finds herself in a wholly constructed artificial world, one where individuality seems increasingly impossible and relationships are all suspicious. It's hard to know what's real and what's created, ideated, an experiment being performed by the overarching corporation or an act of systemic sabotage being perpetuated by someone working from within that very system.

Themes include: computers, games, video games, game theory, cryptography, cryptanalysis, networks, branding, marketing, advertising, identity, subversion, falsehood.

If this is cyberpunk, though, and I think it is (the Neuromancer reference sealed it for me), it's vegan cyberpunk, homeopathic, back-to-the-land cyberpunk. The artificial world isn't a virtual one, and the mysterious coded messages arrive on paper. That isn't to say it's a throwback to another time; the absence of technology doesn't preclude the discussion or consideration of technology. I'm not sure that description sounds very appealing, but PopCo itself is really interesting for such a fast, light read. I have more to say about this, but blogs are not academic papers. Right?

one song

A white wall, two sky-blue figures, and some interesting (if oddly-laid out) copy: We are one song. The figures were holding hands, and the letters skittered across the side of the building, with strange spacing and lots of emptiness between them. Clearly, it was an ad for something, but it wasn't clear what it was for. I puzzled over it, then gradually let it fade into the scenery. When you drive by something every morning, it loses its mystery pretty quickly.

Then it changed. More figures appeared, along with a logo and more letters that filled in some of those large white spaces. We are connected and strong. Another week went by, and when I looked up this morning, the sentence had filled out even more: We are all connected and millions strong.

It's an ad for a local hospital (and yes, the colors should give away which one), and I like it. It's simple and clever, and it takes advantage of the way we tend to ignore the static highway-side scenery while we commute. That said, the sentiment seems more appropriate for arguing against privatized health care than for it; we need a more inclusive system so that this ad's message can ring true, so that we can all be connected and strong, so that healthcare is no longer a luxury limited to the lucky few.