Doom is just a name, but when you speak to it to become a healing product, it does.
Above: On this t-shirt, My Neighbor Totoro meets Bioshock and Satsuki becomes a Little Sister standing beside a Big Daddy rather than Totoro. While I have watched Totoro, I hung up my spurs after finishing Super Mario Bros. 3 and haven’t gamed on anything newer than a Super Nintendo system. That being said, never having played Bioshock doesn’t diminish my appreciation of the cleverness of the design.
Guess what? This post was intended as a tab sweep / links roundup. Alas, after Ctrl+PgUp-ping and Ctrl+PgDn-ing through my open browser tabs, I came up emptyhanded.
Fortunately, I do have a recommendation to make. If you have a few spare bucks kicking around but (1.) aren’t a billionaire and (2.) you’ve not yet reached an age at which you can realistically expect to be hanging up your spoon in the very near future (read as: the near future of human civilization is something that concerns you and you’re not so insulated by wealth that you can realistically hope to observe it all unfold from some unassailable, heavily-fortified perch), consider buying a dead-tree copy of Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. Think of it as a soft-spoken polemic penned by a technologist with a conscience or an accessible, forward-looking economics book written by a conscientious non-economist.
It’s really a shame that alt-right meme-slingers have made such extensive use of the notion of the red pill because, otherwise, I wouldn’t have any qualms about using it here to describe the experience of reading Lanier’s book. Anyway, let’s try a different tack. Imagine sitting down with a cup of coffee at an empty table outside of a picturesque cafe on a brisk, breezy autumn morning. When you look up, you find that Gandalf (in full wizard regalia) or just plain Ian McKellen in street clothes (but not McKellen-as-Magneto) has somehow silently crept up and taken the seat opposite yours. He’s been patiently waiting for you to look up from your phone, tablet, or book and his face is wearing a hard-to-pin-down expression, equal parts quizzical and sober-but-not-quite-sad. Once McKellen/Gandalf has your full attention, he clears his throat and asks you, pointedly, You didn’t pay for that coffee with Whuffie, did you?
. Then you blink. And the chair is empty again.
The Wikipedia article about Who Owns the Future? is barely a blurb, so the best way to get an idea of what it’s about is probably to watch at least part of Jaron Lanier speaking about the genesis of the book and the issues which it addresses at Stanford University, as part of that school’s Colloquium on Computer Systems Seminar Series (EE380).
By the by, here’s an interesting Grammarphobia post discussing the etymology of the idiom hang up one’s spurs
. Also, until I’d read that article, I’d never encountered the phrase hang up one’s spoon
, which turns out to be a euphemism for kicking the bucket
.
The title of this post is a quote from a statement made in a post on Facebook by Lethebo Rabalago, aka Prophet (Detective) Lethebo
. Lethebo, a South African preacher, recently garnered his fifteen minutes of fame by enveloping ailing supplicants at his revival meetings in clouds of an aerosol insecticide called Doom, sold by a company called Tiger Brands. Here’s the text of the Facebook post in question:
MZGA added 7 new photos.Like Page November 19 at 5:00pm ยท Mookgopong Night Prayer ##HIGHLIGHTS## With Prophet ( Detective ) Lethebo By my name, you shall drive out demons. By my name, you shall pick up snakes. Anything you touch, recieves favour because of the annointing upon you. Doom is just a name, but when you speak to it to become a healing product, it does. People get healed and delivered through doom. Its not by might nor by power, but by the HolySpirit. We give God the glory!!
More about Lethebo from the BBC: South Africa’s Prophet of Doom
condemned.