Trope-a-Day: Used Future - General

April 2025

avatar The Author

Comments migrated from WordPress:

jrdougan <jdougan@acm.org> on 2016-01-28 23:42:11 wrote:

Which video games?

“The metaphorical appearance of the actuality may best be compared to the perfect streets and shiny happy people seen mostly in architect’s impressions and Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets.”

Like http://dapperday.com/inspiration-and-the-art then?

Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-01-29 15:25:47 wrote:

Yeah, that seems about right.

(Disneyland is a good comparison in some other ways, with specific reference to the aggressive manicuring of the Disney parks with everything cleaned and polished to within an inch of its life. God may see each sparrow fall, but he’s got nothin’ on The Mouse tracking Dirt. Or possibly Singapore as William Gibson described it in “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, without the stultifying conformity but with the neo-Gernsbackian smily-faced polish in full play.

Of course, it’s not a bunch of hard-working maintenance workers in costume doing the job there . It’s just one more piece of the automated ubiquitous infrastructure, seeing all and knowing all in the interest of ensuring that if a pet poops anywhere inside a city, a little robot - probably something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JUCMlDNbGQ - will dash out from the nearest robot hotel, clean up the mess within seconds, polish the pavement to its wonted perfection, and bill the responsible sophont three millis for municipal poop-robo service.)

January 27

avatar The Author

Saw this meme today:

“We don’t build things to ‘weather’.”