This Sunday... Castle Anthrax... EXPLODES!!!1!

11AM PST, Sunday Jan. 8th

The adventure... continues! *BOOM!!1!*

My life is Terraria . . .

Terraria is my life.
Over the holidays I discovered single player mode.

Also my brother brought me some books about a big chair and multiple generations of character archetypes jostling to sit in it.
Live the intrigue!

I wonder how I am ever going to find the time to work at my real life crafting stations in 2012.

Madrid Río

Apparently, since I moved they got it right with this massive project. For a while it looked like something on the scale of burying pyramids . . . with really bad traffic jams. I am still not sure massive tunnel projects are the best solution, but this was indeed an unloved part of the city dominated by highway overpasses; and such changes with well thought out public spaces inevitably improves living in such a dense urban environment.

"Just what is it that makes today's Portland so different, so appealing?"

The Deterritorial Support Group

Over several hours they dispense praise for radical designers and propagandists such as Atelier Populaire, Grapus, The Designers Republic and Class War, and have harsh words for almost everyone else, including the Labour left ("2011's real utopians"), the Lib Dems ("trepanning on the brain of social democracy"), Adbusters ("hipsters are the abortion of the vanguard"), and the Trotskyist SWP ("how endearing to base your entire political outlook on a text written in 1921, under very specific conditions"). They seem equally in love with radical theorists such as Gilles Dauve, and lolcat pictures . . .

. . . This all sounds wonderful, of course. But DSG isn't that optimistic about the imminent arrival of a new world – at the very least, it's sure change won't come from the TUC, or from Westminster. "Capital has already smashed organised labour, and now it's going to work on parliamentary democracy: across southern Europe, there's this slipping into a state of exception," Pablo says, reflecting on the recent appointments of "technocrats" to head the governments in Greece and Italy, and concern about a resurgence in fascist parties ("the fash"). "This postwar argument that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand; well maybe that was just a transition period before capitalism reaches its actual zenith, which is ... China?"

Just in Time for Indefinite Domestic Military Detention Without Judicial Review Xmas!

Ho! Ho! Ho! - It's Terraria patch 1.1.1 including snow, more snow, and killer snow things! :-D

11AM PST, Sunday Dec 18th (remember: service guarantees citizenship)

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.