It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve posted anything music related, so I offer up a contrast of sorts. Here’s Cabaret Volataire‘s brilliant Nag Nag Nag from their 1980 Live at the YMCA album. Simple distorted guitars, bristling synthesizer electronics, this was early – but still danceable – industrial music no doubt inspired by the Cold War […]
Author: karlschmieder
Biofabricate: Scientists + Artists Transform Materials, Manufacturing
This week, a group of artists, designers, and scientists will gather in New York City for the second annual Biofabricate conference. They’ll be discussing the use of biological organisms to create new materials and transform manufacturing. You might think a conference like this would attract only scientists, but surprisingly it is the often artists and designers in […]
Book Review: Ready Player One
It’s 2044, the world’s a dystopian mess and people escape to, learn, live and work in a virtual world called OASIS (the followup to William Gibson’s cyberspace and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse). At the start of the book, videogame designer James Halliday, the ultimate 1980s geek, leaves his vast fortune to the person who can find […]
Your Founder Is Crazy, Isn’t He? (Part 1)
At the beginning of the week, the Founder swore he’d have me back on payroll by the end of the month. It’d been six weeks since any of us had been paid. “What about the options?” I asked. “I’ll take care of those by the end of the week,” he answered. It was the same […]
The Pool at 4 A.M.
My father’s pool is, was, and always will be –– all skaters agree –– absurd. The pale blue surface is very hard, durable, very fast, and sentient. The coping is a great grindable bullnose. The shape is a perfect kidney, just under nine-feet deep. To ride the pool from one lip to the other across […]
Why I Write (Or How I Started Writing)
“Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11 year old that could see that potential.” – C.R. Stecyk My first stories were skateboarding stories inspired by C. R. Stecyk‘s Skateboarder Magazine articles, his fabrication and chronicling of the Dogtown’s Z-boys’ […]
20. How To Clone A Dragon 2 | Can We Bioengineer Dragons?
[For Part 1 of this series on How to Clone* a Dragon, click here.] # In the first of her two part post on How to Bioengineer a Dragon, Keira Havens, of Revolution Bioengineering, argues that there should be a compelling reason to modify a living organism to create a dragon. She points out that “it is unlikely […]
Why I Keep A Journal
I’ve been keeping a journal for more than 25 years. I should say “mostly keeping a journal” because there have been periods of time where I haven’t written in a journal regularly – though probably, I was writing just not in a journal. At the pace of one page per day, that’d come to 9,132 pages […]
Book Review: The Dog Stars
I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction though I’ve read more than a lifetime’s worth and I get why it is popular: We live in a world of uncertainty and great post-apocalyptic stories give us the hope that we can survive the worse of times. Peter Heller’s brilliant The Dog Stars gives us the story of loss, survival, and […]
Regret? Is It Even Worth It? | Observation
Is it productive to regret the hours, days, months, even years you spent stressed out of your mind? The days you were worried about world events that you had no influence on? That you could never even hope to influence? The days when you were anxious over your career’s trajectory? Nervous about your finances and the […]