• Talk time: William Gibson — brief interview on Blogging, Google and the Internet … ‘Q: Is brevity the key to good internet communication? A: It’s hard to say whether it actually is brevity when it involves a hyperlink. If what you’re presenting is a customised node, then the node is the message and you don’t want a lengthy node!’ [Related: Slashdot]
• Back to the 80s — review of Pattern Recognition [Buy: UK | US] … ‘Pattern recognition, as a human phenomenon, becomes something else when it goes too far; it becomes “apophenia… the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things”. One of the disappointments of the novel is that it doesn’t push this far enough as a potential plot device. If there were an insane number of interconnections by the end, as is sometimes the case in thrillers, then the reader would feel more fulfilled.’

‘”…I find myself thinking sometimes that there isn’t anything other than the impact of technology on society – possibly that has been more significant historically than any sort of political thought, in terms of bringing us to where we are now.” Gibson chooses a contemporary example: his friend’s camera-phone. “I get these pictures every once in a while – no explanation – and it’s just so cool, and it’s such an intimate thing. The view down an airport corridor, or something that struck him as funny.” But to every silver lining there is a cloud. “If that becomes very common,” he points out, “that’ll change the texture of life. You’d lose things. Someone telling you about their new girlfriend, for instance, and you don’t meet her for six months, so you have this picture in your head of her, and then you meet her … and that won’t be happening because he’ll have emailed the photograph right away. Apparently small things like that have a huge cumulative effect on how people experience reality.”‘

‘When you talk about movies, there’s always that which bookstores live by; the book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore’s best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It’s hard to describe just how much better the book is. It’s like, “If the movie was an episode of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is ‘Citizen Kane’ with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end.” That’s how much better it is.’

• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 … “I simply can’t let things go. Do you know what I mean?’
• Alias #22 … ‘My Head — it feels Strange! I – I need some air!’
• The Filth #10 … ‘Have you any idea what happens when you cross stupidity, a love of science-fantasy fiction, and blind idealism with humongous amounts of money?‘
• Reload #2 … ‘You think people want to know the American Government’s been run as a criminal enterprise for the last eight years?’
• 100 Bullets #44 … ‘Word on the wire is, you’re a fuckin’ Cop Killer. I’m envious, Dawg, Knowhumsayin?’

‘Q: Did the Rushdie fatwa cause you trepidation when you were writing your book, in which you lampoon Islamic separatists?

Zadie: I wrote White Teeth in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.’

‘The history of warfare is marked by periodic leaps in technology – the triumph of the longbow at Crécy, in 1346; the first decisive use of air power, in World War I; the terrifying destructiveness of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, in 1945. And now this: a dazzling array of technology that signals the arrival of digital warfare. What we saw in Gulf War II was a new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and – above all – a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute. Welcome to the so-called revolution in military affairs…’

‘I’m headed north again, this time with a 97-vehicle convoy whose mission is to deliver missile launchers and set up a Tactical Operations Center just south of the Baghdad suburbs. But there’s a problem; the convoy makes two massive U-turns in search of a side road that leads to a much-needed fuel stop. “We’re lima lima mike foxtrot in Iraq,” says Sergeant Frank Cleveland, who’s riding shotgun in the truck where I’ve hitched a ride. “What does that mean?” I ask from the backseat. “We’re lost like a motherfucker,” he says.’

• Official Big Brother Site … ‘Anouska was more hurt than she was letting on. “Whatever we’ve done in the last hour,” she told Scott, “has irritated someone in some way. “The last hour I’ve been me,” she went on, “Give a s**t! Give-a-s**t! Where’s my wine, Goddamit!” she finished, marching off towards the kitchen.’
• Big Bro 4 — Unofficial site … ‘Todays top headline: the victims enter the house’
• Big Brother’s not-so-dirty dozen — BBC News Report … ‘”Have you seen her bum?”, screamed Davina McCall as Anouska tottered into the house on her heels. And with that, the tone for this year’s Big Brother was set…’
• Diamond Geezer: ‘It’s back. 64 days of meaningless addiction. Excellent.’
• Barbelith on BB4: ‘…Cameron, the happy clappy Bappy that deserves a slappy.’

‘…now that we have the idea in our heads that “intelligence” appears when systems become increasingly complex, we can approach my notion of “living comics.” Think of a STORY. My contention is that a story can be made sufficiently complex that it achieves some measure of self-awareness – in fact I believe this is what’s happening when authors talk about characters “taking control” or when they say “the story just took a turn I wasn’t planning…”. When I was doing The Invisibles, I was definitely aware of the book as a living entity which was interacting with me in many of the ways a human being might but at the time I was thinking of this “aliveness” as a kind of mystical quality not as an emergent property that could reproduced without recourse to the spirit world. I’d like to see if I can deliberately “wake up” a story and let it make its own decisions.’

‘”I’ve got a big bed and no-one to share it with me” [Anouska] says. They then started mentioning “Follow The Van“.

The rest of the girls then start saying “follow the courgette”, “I don’t get it” says Anouska …

Meanwhile in the living room the boys are discussing Star Trek.’