Outstanding professional writing obligations nearing completion...

...meaning this space will soon host some fictional sketches.  I hope.

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Tycho: ambient music for those who are succeeding in our contemporary economy?

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Cover art for new Tycho LP "Epoch" There's a moment roughly 30 seconds into " Montana ," the second track on Tycho's breakout 2014 album Awake , when you realize that the people who created this music can't possibly have experienced any adversity in their lives. For nearly 6 minutes, its mannerist, echo-ey guitar noodling melds with hazy synths and just noticeable bass over competent live drumming. It sounds great, the type of warm, organic electronic music that makes you feel as though the world is a place of unsullied wonder filled with promise and opportunity and absolutely lacking in the structural hurtles that have come to define our political moment. The euphoria it inspires is the pleasant, genteel kind bi-coastal types get from legal marijuana, a euphoria from which you can quickly sober up before heading back to your six-figure tech job, not the Rimbaudian sensorium-fucking kind which, though you might survive it, you will not come out of it who...
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Coffee shop weekend

Now that DC is becoming a proper coffee shop town, it is developing a solid corps of eccentric coffee shop knockabouts. In Arlingon, these marginally employed, gregarious people divide their time among several coffee shops and diners. They frequently start up conversations with strangers, and because I'm very nearly one of them (especially this past week as I've spent more time out due to my beloved being out of town), they invariably strike up a conversation with me. Tonight at the coffee shop, a man I've seen many times on the Arlington scene started talking to me about the weather and then proceeded to talk about a website he was building. The service? A database containing the STD history of subscribers so that whenever a subscriber is pressed by a potential partner to prove his STD status, he can simply pull out a smartphone and put his money where his libido is. It really sounds like a great idea...oh, except for the multitude of privacy concerns, lack of health syste...
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An upward redistribution of certain undesirable futures

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Natural filters applied Like all supplicants of literary cyberpunk, I’ve devoted a decent amount of armchair time to parsing the oft-quoted William Gibson-attributed maxim, “The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Despite having some serious attribution issues, it is a favorite of technology optimists and a mainstay of douchebag keynotes for all sorts of industry conferences. It is generally interpreted as some version of the following -- that human progress realized in “the future” is generally technology-enabled and that those on the lower socio-economic rungs have less access to the technologies (the Internet, ubiquitous computing, etc.) with which “the future” manifests. A footnote would point out that, yes, many technologies have been distributed down the socio-economic ladder as they have become cheaper to manufacture at scale. There are other futures, though, largely outside of the experience of the global upper and middle classes. From Bhopa...
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