User Profile

@forestine “How have so many people been lapping up his guy's bad ideas for so many years?”
Hear me out:

His synths were good, though. That, coupled with “I never actually read his ‘futurist’ stuff” is the entirety of my argument. I mean… I never took his futurist stuff seriously but I also did like his synths so I didn’t like… disregard him completely. Thank you for reading enough to inform me that his ‘great ending’ is ‘oops all nanobots but we’re in that cloud’ it’s a no from me.

@griotspeak@soc.mod-12.com yes! i have a friend who did a whole composition degree with Kurzweil synths, and those things are wild. he's also pretty important in the field of assistive tech for disabled people. It seems that his futurism stuff has been a parallel career for him but it really appeals to a certain subset of tech bros. I was first exposed to this from of all things an Our Lady Peace album that used clips of his work. It felt less colonial back in the 90s and with what was excerpted, but still bothered me a bit. But apparently like now he's got a high up position at Google and those people love his ideas. Complicated guy

It's fun to have these all in one book because the way the panels are written, it's like an endless scroll of plot

i preordered this but i'm recovering from surgery so i just keep looking at the fantastic cover while it sits on my coffee table (the title is glossy and embossed on a matte rainbow background)

image description for book jacket as bookwyrm is just putting the title there. A photo of the author, Harriet McBryde Johnson, a thin white woman with brown hair in a tight ponytail, sitting in her wheelchair with a blanket in her lap. She is leaning forward with her hand under her chin and looking directly into the camera with a slight smile. She is sitting outside in front of a tree. The photo is framed in a slightly crooked rectangle and the subtitle is "nearly true tales from a life".

I wanted to recommend some books throughout Disability Pride Month (July) and realized bookwyrm might be the easiest way to do it.

Too Late to Die Young really changed the way I think about disability and disability justice, and especially disabled activism and rage.

From the jacket: "The author isn't sure, but she thinks one of her earliest memories was learning that she will die."

really really really recommend this one.

#DisabilityPrideMonth

@forestine it's literally just book of revelations for people who think they're too smart for evangelical Christianity

So I took a break from the bleakness of Who's Afraid of Gender? for something more fun.

Oh wait, turns out this book is about silicon valley techbros and every chapter makes me madder and madder. Effective altruism, etc.

Yesterday I was sitting at the park and it was a beautiful day. I sat there reading about Ray Kurzweil's vision for humans to colonize the entire universe with nanobots until they kill everything and turn everything into nanobots "and that's when the universe wakes up" and just sat there, horrified. I looked around at all the leaves on the elms, the blades of grass, thinking, all of this would just be gone. But that's okay, you'll still be around, with your brain uploaded to a computer. As if that's really you. Oooof. And Kurzweil doesn't understand the brain. "It's what, a terabyte? How hard can it be?"

The singularity is just an apocalypse fantasy.

And then he says obviously every civilization would end up here so that's why there is no other intelligent life. So everything is ours for the taking.

I hate this so much! How have so many people been lapping up his guy's bad ideas for so many years?

if i don't finish this book it's because I got too enraged. i probably won't write an annoyed rant about every chapter but >_<