arcade fire on snl

Listening to Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” is just about as religious an experience as it gets.

“Keep The Car Running” sounds kinda like Springsteen, methinks. S’like the Boss is making a comeback.

update:

Here they are in a pretty funny skit – longer lunches!

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Reads: Newton’s Wake

I seem to be obsessing with all things Singularity of late, but Ken MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake has a less optimistic take of it, calling it the Hard Rapture, where billions are uploaded without their will, eventually leading to a great war between the humans and the AIs. In the book however, this has happened in the future-past, and Newton’s Wake is really about the descendants of the post-apoclayptic survivors encountering their centuries-old forebears who fled the Rapture in another part of the galaxy.

Having crammed Cold War ideology, posthuman slavery, as well as penning not a few folk songs and operas, there’s really too much going on in this book for me to cover, but suffice to say, it was quite a trip. I’ve read a few of his novels before, but there’s so many ideas going on in this one that it’s really quite a headrush. MacLeod’s probably the first person to come up with the idea of using temporal causality as a dogfight tactic, which is pretty damn cool in my book.

Newton’s Wake
(ISBN No: 1841492248) Check NLB Catalogue for item availability.

Reads: Dog Days

Dog Days is pretty funny in the beginning when it reads kinda like Douglas Coupland-lite with its loser coder hero, recently dumped by the hot girl from marketing and stuck in a huge software company grinding code for what is quickly becoming vapourware. Then the book pretty much veers off into some mob-cheating scam that seems a little incongruous with the beginning. It was the ending that really took the cake though, totally tacked on and dripping with so much schmaltz I was cringing as I read it.

The book apparently started life as an award-winning short story – it probably should’ve stayed that way.

Dog Days
(ISBN No: 978-0684840000) Check NLB Catalogue for item availability.

bill vs steve

Freaking hilarious. Its a sign of Apple’s increasing dominance that Steve gets to use the red lightsaber now, innit?

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

This mind-blowing clip is the most elegant, even most moving explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve heard yet. Its been popping up all over the blogosphere and getting fanboy receptions, but I wonder if it’s as impactful to a non-geek, or if it even makes sense?

I really hope it does, cos I hate getting all excited over this stuff and only having Grace and my brother to geek out with.

Update:
Here’s the transcript, courtesy of Bud.