Culture Stalled?

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.

Bruce Sterling applies a bit of perspective.

From BoingBoing.

Let's Dig a Tunnel to Hell - Together!

I know we're all super busy with, well, all the crap we're busy with - That said, anyone interested in giving this a shot? We could set up a dedicated Terraria server to turn on one night per week (or during a dedicated weekend time-slot), fire up some sort of voice-chat server to go along with it, and jibber-jaber away while digging deep - too deep! I think it might be a nice way to do some gaming together/catch up. Anyone interested?

Urban Planning Post

The pundits are thinking about urban infrastructure this week . . .
and of course "the new urban groundswell" happened because of Rachel from the television show Friends.

Death to the suburbs!

DRIVE through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers. And that’s because the demand for the housing that once supported commercial activity in many exurbs isn’t coming back, either.

Occupy: Pepper Spray Edition

For the archive.

The Revolution Is Being Televised

Watch live streaming video from occupynyc at livestream.com

Occupy: City by City

Police crackdowns.

It feels awkwardly distant and isolated here in Germany from the political winds of 2011.

A Game of Thrones

Have we all read this?

Occupy