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Reading Gibson is something that drew me into computers when I was younger.

I wonder how many people saw that low budget '90s documentary Cyberpunk?

There's an amusing interview with Gibson, in which he describes writing Neuromancer on a typewriter, back when he had a vision of computers being these amazing, almost magical devices.

Shortly afterwards, he bought an Apple to write on. However, he took it back to the store because it made this weird grinding noise. That was the disk drive... working perfectly. :)

Gibson explained that he had a vision of disk drives as being some kind of spinning crystal mechanism. Certainly not a noisy, grinding electromagnet.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss :)

fexter
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Ashintaro: trance from Tokyo in 2043AD

While a cool example, this sort of thing has been going for a while. I bought a jacket two years ago that had a left breast pocket sized for a discman.

It has an internal conduit of material for running headphones up into the hood, and the hood has mesh material so you can hear your audio. The right breast pocket is a removable CD pouch with plastic sleeves.

Still, as many other people are going to point out, there must be a few dangers in people snowboarding without the ability to hear anything. And once they listen to some crazy music they'll probably be even more dangerous in their fearlessness :)

But can Mozilla get the same exposure that AOL will give Netscape?

That might be the more practical question.

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Salon readers, check out this cool band

fexter (original story submitter) here...

It's only fair to note that the article concludes that it was cool for Yoda to do this, after all:

But, boy, were they wrong: The scene has played like gangbusters, and Yoda is by far the most popular character in the new film (as a recent EW.com poll confirms). He even became the star of the ads, which dropped romantic-lead costars Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen for him.

But I think this points out the bigger flaw with the movie: that a mentor character becomes, with ease, more popular than the supposed heroes.

I think the writing and direction were the root cause of this.

This article:

http://nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/sto ri es/20020525/299070.html

was really spot on. All about the missing rogue character.

Lucas talks all about Joseph Campbell's mythology structure, which focuses on the hero's journey. But somehow, in the last two movies, Lucas has managed to avoid giving us any heroes we could enjoy watching.

Sure, he has given us a couple characters who we at least like, but that doesn't mean they're heroes who we root for all the way along, and who we grow *with*. The most recent two movies are more of a series of events than heroes' journeys.

fexter, ashintaro.com

Good site, eh?

This new site is good!

Clean, minimal design, plain tables (no bitmapped layout), clear arrangement of content, standard HTML, no plug-ins, fast-loading and resizes to any browser size.

And it's full of trance music imported from Tokyo in the future, which makes it extra good. :)