What the hell I’m doing here?

Greetings, unkempt masses. I’m Marc and this is supposed to be a presentation or introduction, but there’s not really anything interesting to tell about my sorry self, so I won’t bore you with it.

I will tell you, however, that when Fernando Fonseca (yes, he‘s the one to blame for having my dyslectic prose inflicted upon your eyes, feel free to scorn him), whom I met and with whom I’ve been collaborating on the Google Wave preview (awesome stuff, try it out if you can get your hands on an invitation) offered me the opportunity to participate in this Guest Editor business (ostensively for being, literally, ‘a bitter and paranoid person’), I was worried, after taking a good look at the site, that I might not have what it takes.

I mean, you may have noticed that this site seems essentially music oriented, while my musical culture is, to say the least, quite shameful. OK, I might be able to reach more than 400.000 points at the music challenge facebook game, but that’s basically out of pattern matching (which I’d like to think I’m relatively good at) and recognition of cultural/genre clues (I have a certain interest in memes/pop culture, much like people tend to be interested in particularly gruesome murders or accidents).

From a musical standpoint, the most I could feel comfortable writing about would be some new or weird instruments or techniques (not excluding 1.500.000V Tesla coils) i’d find about while scavenging the net for clues on how much longer we’ll have to wait for the machines to rise, take over, and fix things (not much, IBM is already at the ‘we were aiming for a rat brain but got something more complex than a cat’s cortex and we don’t understand how it works, but we’re going to build a larger one anyway’ stage, at this rate they’ll be sending sociopathic AIs to Jupiter less than two or three decades behind schedule), but the most I’d be able to say about those things is ‘Hey, look what this guys are using to make neat sounds! Sounds good, doesn’t it? You can find more info about them here, here or here.’, which I feared might not be enough…

Now, if I could rant about anything I felt like, I’d probably feel comfortable (should I turn out to be able to write in a remotely publishable quality, which is unlikely) using some of the following themes without too much ridicule..:

Prospective

- Emergent social technologies – Wave – AR – brain/computer interface – open source – …

- New social trends – CC – transnationalism – kiva and similar – ‘one day you came home with a piercing, will your son come home one day with a prostetic arm? – …

- Futurism

- Technological trends – recent/near future technologies – 3d – oled – prosthetics – gene therapy – SENS

- TED

- Transhumanism

- Singularity

Curiosities

- Robots – walking robots – jumping robots – juggling robots – flying robots – military robots – flesh-eating robots – …

- Technological novelties

- Already mentioned weird/new musical instruments and techniques

- Weird new memes

‘Why things are fucked up almost beyond all hope’, or ‘Stupidity’, or ‘Things that make me angry’

- Negationism (i.e. VIH negationism, vaccine negationism, global warming negationism…)

- creationism

- 2012

- Organic crap - ecoilogism

- Copyright corporations (and other sociopathic corporations)

- lobbies – eu comission

- Crazy gestalt (i.e., media panics: terrorism, pedophiles, flu of the week)

General cultural stuff

- SciFi – Fantasy

- Comics – Webcomics

- Movies I like – Movies I don’t like – …

What you should be worried about, though, is that when I told that to Fernando, he replied, literally: ‘This will be your first post. Nothing more to add.‘, which seems a bit lazy to me, but since I am considerably lazy, and I’m relatively proficient at copying and pasting, well, here it is, and that’s all you get for my first post.

If you want more (or if you don’t), please feel free to write comments, declarations of unconditional love, suggestions about what you would like me to rant about, death threats, or whatever you feel like on the handy comments section down there, which I promise I will read with interest so I can blatantly disregard them and pontificate about whatever I very well please til Fernando kicks my fat ass in the general direction of away.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Marc.