Table of Contents | 15 February 2010
"I can guess his goddamn origin: Disaffected rich kid. Fled America and trained with mystical Eastern warriors. Soon became the best—one year at ninja camp is always enough time for a gringo to get better than any native."
Regardless of the shows they watch or the books they read, fannish LiveJournalers tend to be a close-knit and generous group with a reputation for protecting their own. Not even two years after Strikethrough, the LiveJournal fan community united against a problem that affected far more people than the site's user base: the 2009 U.S. recession. And they did it in a most creative way: By auctioning off everything from DVDs, books, and memorabilia to crafts, fanart, and fanfiction to make rent money, pay hospital bills, and save the homes of fans and pros alike from the rash of foreclosures sweeping the United States.
Since computers began to intrude on popular consciousness in the second half of the 20th century, authors have been quick to latch onto their superhuman calculating capacities as a mechanism for narrative advancement, and as a means of justifying near-future speculative fiction. Indeed, the powers of the computer, particularly as a source of alternative and/or augmented reality, have spawned whole subgenres which have risen, fallen, and been reinvented. However, contrary to popular conception, modern computers (and even conceivable future ones) are not without limitations. There are some questions out there that are really too hard to solve, even for a computer.
Sometime last year, I decided to watch some Alfred Hitchcock movies I hadn't seen in a while, and also to fill in a few gaps in my viewing.
Must have suckers on each feeler.
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