Tag: Pop Culture

Generation X. (I Resist Adding a More Zeitgeisty Header.)

Yes, this is really about Douglas Coupland’s landmark book. Generation X comprises people born between early 1960s and early 1980s. Thus I am perfectly average Gen X, and I re-read this book once in a while. As for the content I cannot do better than the blurb: Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a…
On Time Travelling: Rigorous Categorization of Science Fiction Movies

Do you remember the scary moment when Ashton Cutcher alias Evan recognizes suddenly that his arms are crippled – and that they have been crippled since many years? This is a scene from The Butterfly Effect: Evan discovers that he is capable of time-travelling to his troubled childhood. He tries to fix the present by…
My Zen-ny Search Terms: Where Engineering Meets Art Meets Physics Meets Geekdom. (And Rodents, Sometimes.)

I am overwhelmed with spam comments such as “You should take part in a contest for one of the greatest blogs on the web!”, and I really appreciate thoughtful quote spam as: Perfectly composed articles, appreciate it for entropy. “He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.” by…
Turning Flattering Chatty Spam into Postmodern Art

As a spam poet you need to avoid the Ground Hog Day Effect: Spam messages are repeating themselves, so how you do your keep your level of originality as an artist? And spam on blogs is (too) polite these days. You could create tons of flattering poems similar to the following: your website is like an encyclopaedia…
The Art of Error Messages

I believe I need a new blog post category – called for example art created from collections of words and phrases spit out by computers. Or is Pop Culture just fine? So far we had spam poetry and search term poetry – but these might not be the only art forms eligible for the new meta-category! A quick primer…
Crowdsourcing of Art: Poetry from Search Terms

Since I had access to the log files of my first hosted web server (in the past millennium) I had been addicted to analyzing my log files – browsing text files with a simple text editor. In particular, search terms submitted to search engines had intrigued me. I know I am not the only one. People (……
Retro-Geek: On the Fascination of Machinery

I have no clue about art or design. I learned recently from The Time Traveler that stuff like this the following has its own genre and sub-culture: It is called Steampunk. I am intrigued – as I was by the illustrations in Stephen Hawking’s book Illustrated Brief History of Time long before I knew this was Steampunk at…
Discovering Your Life Being Cliché

You are browsing the internet in order to test – by anecdotal evidence – if your original ideas are that original or your most creative writing that creative. Within milliseconds you detect that everything has already been told, shared, pictured, thought, sketched. For every clever business idea I had, I found zillions of companies that already had implemented version 3.0 of this idea.…