“sex”

Pues si, Cecilia Marquez anda perdida politicamente, y si, es otro caso mas de exhibicionismo perredista gratuito (con el que se las dan de muy “izquierda moderna”¹), pero, vamos, como quejarse?

“¿Dónde trabajas, pinche vieja?” le eructo un anciano, intuyendo sanjuanera a la ex responsable de prensa del PRD en Jalisco.

Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTube^WP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).

The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”

And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.

Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.

Here they are, lest time forgets:

Except for its nasty tendency to crash unexpectedly (great strides have been made, but it still does it once in a while), Azureus is pretty much the BitTorrent Client. My favorite thing about it (and this seems to be a pattern of open source projects) is its extensibility. There’s everything from a Flag plugin (to get a kick out of how international piracy is!) to a Web (HTML+JS+CSS) UI to the program.

But my favorite plugin is far and away 3D View—a dense, beautiful 3d representation of the torrent process (really, just the standard swarm graph writ 3d). Like the 12/60 clock, it comes with no instructions but it doesn’t need them. If you’ve read anything about how torrents work (and you should!), everything will fall into place after some staring. Its pure infosight—real-time infoporn of the best kind¹.

¹ Which reminds me: I heard somewhere today that “there is no such thing as bad porn, there’s only better porn.”

The quiet last line of this paragraph is a pearl of capitalist freedom that could so easily pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted. If Chloë was able to do what she did was only because she wasn’t tied to prude William Morris, one of the largest talent agencies in the world; it was only because there were other agencies more than willing to take her in.
What a wonderful world to live in, isn’t it? One in which puritans can be self-righteous while we enjoy watching a purdy gal blow her ex-boy.

I found this out in the Wild Wild Web and am not able to ascertain the author¹, which is a shame since she’s a genius:

¹ All I know is they probably come from ZatteVrienden but I don’t grok Dutch.

That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,

and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.

And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.

The offhand references, several per paragraph, to mind-bending concepts (animal uploading, the first AIs, reputation markets, stream-of-consciousness blogs, metacortex, algamics, post-scarcity economy, AIneko, Matrioshka brains, computronium, 3D printers…); the reckless pace; the nonpareil geek protagonist, Mannfred Macx, a “venture altruist”; the kinky BDSM sex thread; its undeniable modernity; its staggering density (this is an information-overload short-story; to be read with Google, Slashdot, Answers.com, and Wikipedia handy)... Charlie Stross’s Lobsters is as unique a sci-fi short story as you’re likely to find. It has been almost a year since I read it but in the meantime it has only become more impressive, more unnerving in its increasing overlap with our present. It was the story that made me believe again in a literature that said something about my present, about our impending singularity future. It’s also the first story of Stross’s Accelerando novel, easily one of the best nonfiction books of 2005 (and it’s not like I don’t see its flaws, it’s that his daring more than makes up for them).