![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.ĭebt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history-as well as how it has defined human history. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. The classic work on debt, now is a special tenth anniversary edition with a new introduction by Thomas PikettyĮvery economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() If Arrival does nothing outside of introduce more people to Ted Chiang, it will still. ![]() Field linguist Jessica Coon, who consulted on the. Buy the book, read the story and enjoy the movie and story as two different things. Following this triumph, his stories have won him numerous other awards, making him one of the most honoured writers in contemporary SF. The 2016 movie Arrival, an adaptation of Ted Chiangs novella Story of Your Life, captured the imaginations of science fiction fans worldwide. In 1990 he won the Nebula Award for his first published story, "Tower of Babylon". Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives outside Seattle, Washington. Chiang's rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. With his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose. Includes 'Story of Your Life' the basis for the major motion picture Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner, and directed by Denis Villeneuve. STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS: TED CHIANG ![]() ![]() Though Mai’s three adult daughters, Priscilla, Thuy, and Thao, are successful in their careers ( one of them is John Cho’s dermatologist!), the same can’t be said for their love life. She’s divorced, and after an explosive disagreement a decade ago, she’s estranged from her younger sisters, Minh Pham (the middle and the mediator) and Khuyen Lam (the youngest who swears she just runs humble coffee shops and nail salons, not Little Saigon’s underground). Oanh’s current descendant Mai Nguyen knows this curse well. It started with their ancestor Oanh who dared to leave her marriage for true love-so a fearsome Vietnamese witch cursed Oanh and her descendants so that they would never find love or happiness, and the Duong women would give birth to daughters, never sons. ![]() Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. ![]() ![]() I recently saw a great Russian film, "Дурак" - Durak, meaning "The fool". As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system.ĭazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell’s Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I've discussed in my previous blog posts about RWA Nationals ( here and here) that there are always unexpected surprises that occur at the conference so this year, I came prepared. It was large, clean, the staff and service were impeccable and there were so many chairs and places to meet friends and colleagues.Ĭhapter Two - the Introduction of the Heroine The city is walkable, has tons of attractions and restaurants and our hotel, the Marriott Marquis Marina was an outstanding place for a conference. San Diego was better than I expected it would be - the sun, breeze, coastal temperature put everyone (okay, me) in a happy mood. ![]() Also, like the first two, it defied my expectations. This was my third RWA National Conference to attend and, like the first two, it did not disappoint. That is a man in white boxer briefs, standing on a San Diego bar with motorcycle gloves and a helmet covering his, um, steering column. ![]() ![]() ![]() my first playthrough was clean, but after that, idk maybe something happened like soft-lock. there is another topic in the forums about mouse but that person was a Linux user, i dont use Linux but still I got that problem. there must be alternatives if that object is not in the bookcases or sth.Ģ) another problem, mouse and keyboard controls (shortcuts) arent working properly. ![]() actually it is a good thing so we can play different routes in every turn, but. I had to abandon that save and I completely started new game bc of this. because there was no key under the rug (or anywhere else) so i couldn't open the cabinets. I know the game randomized the location of the hammer parts, but in my 2 playthroughs, i literally couldn't get head of the hammer. but sadly i have some problems and i have to mention them to you.ġ) the first problem that I got is, randomization. <3 firstly thx for the great idea of making a game based on "The Dreams in the Witch House" story <3 I honestly admired the survival elements and time managament system in a point and click game. ![]() ![]() Maybe then he would have stopped himself from becoming so smug about Spenser's success, so cavalier about serving up limp plots for his new novels. Maybe then Parker, just like Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon, would have had an epiphany about the randomness of life. And, besides, Parker was wearing a big white T-shirt that read: "I Love Spenser."Īs the years have passed and the Spenser series has grown weaker, I've sometimes wondered if literature would have been better served if my friend, instead of skidding away from Parker, had just tapped him, oh so gently, with the car's fender. He looked just like his book jacket photos. ![]() At the time, my friend was still an avid Spenser fan, so he realized that the man he'd almost flattened was Robert B. My friend cursed and hit the brakes, but the man kept strolling across the street, smiling to himself, as though he hadn't seen or heard anything. He'd just approached an intersection where the light was green, and he was about to chug on through, when, suddenly, a burly man stepped in front of the car. Eight years ago, a friend of mine was driving his car through downtown Boston. ![]() Parker doesn't know - about a brush he once had with mortality. THIS IS a true story - one that even Robert B. ![]() ![]() ![]() The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext's new Foreign Agents Series. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period Production for the industrial era and Simulation, controlled by the code. The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort. ) theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of (. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, is in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. ![]() ![]() ![]() “I grew up reading books like Salem’s Lot and watching films like The Lost Boys and Near Dark. They were the scary things that were trying to eat the good people,” Kristoff explains during a wide-ranging conversation with Den of Geek. “When I was a kid, vampires were the monsters under the bed. In this story, the first in a new epic fantasy trilogy, vampires are 100% terrifying again, vicious monsters who kill violently and indiscriminately, and whose powers mean that few humans are capable of standing against them for long. Published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have sparked a particular vein of horror story that continues to this day (looking at you, American Horror Story: Double Feature), but Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, changed how audiences relate to bloodsuckers forever and plenty of contemporary vampire tales have continued to cast the creatures as broody, desirous, long-suffering anti-heroes burdened by the weight of immortality.īut don’t expect bestselling Australian author Jay Kristoff’s new book, Empire of the Vampire, to follow this modern trend. ![]() ![]() ![]() (The earliest references to blood-drinking creatures date back to ancient Mesopotamia, believe it or not.) But the way we relate to these creatures has shifted throughout the centuries, as legends, folklore, and popular culture have adapted to the needs and fears specific to respective societies. As a species, humans have more or less always been obsessed with vampires. ![]() ![]() Even speculative design and social design play their part in fueling the economic system. Our current economic system could not exist without the number systems, coins, banknotes, documents, advertisements, interfaces, typefaces and information graphics that graphic designers have helped to create. ![]() On design’s complicity in systems of oppression: critique and exit strategies from the author of The Politics of Design "Will certainly change how you think about, and possibly practice, design."-Steven Heller ![]() "At once a retelling of design history, an updated analysis of the field, and a crash course in political economy, Pater’s book draws on key insights and debates of the moment to give one of the first full-length accounts of the relationship between graphic design and capitalism."-Chris Westscott, Eye on Design CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It by Ruben Pater / ISBN 9789492095817 / small 552-page paperback published by Valiz ![]() |