| Robot Chicken... Pee-drinking... A Delorean Monster Truck... Damn this is cool. |
[Aug. 15th, 2005|03:07 am] |
| [ | Spirits |
| |  nerdy | ] |
| [ | Voices |
| | Rush - Different Strings | ] |
Hmm. Okay, time for another epic, rambling piece of writing regarding something no one much cares about. =]
I got my first issue of Wired a few days ago - a free subscription was included with my NextFest ticket. In fact, two issues arrived at once. The magazines were very enticing; they screamed at me to be read. The first issue had Gorillaz on the cover, and the other one had this intriguing headline: I DRANK PEE FOR NASA.
I don't read magazines. Ever, basically. I got a free subscription to YM a little while back via Neopets, and I used to be subscribed to Nintendo Power, but in the past year I don't think I've read any outside of a waiting room for something or other. A lot of magazines don't hold my attention; a lot of magazines are stupidly expensive; and a lot of magazines are infected with advertisements.
Think about it - People complain about banner ads on the internet (accessing websites which are generally free). However, they gladly pay for a magazine, which will be at least 25% if not closer to 50% full of advertising. I don't get it.
Anyway, on to Wired: I will be enjoying the day that this thing comes to my doorstep for the next 12 months. Heck, I'll probably renew my subscription once it runs out. It's just $10!
So, I crack open the floppy magazine. It's... awesome. Just awesome. There are articles on robots, on Google map hacks, on phone sex, on the fact that "Happy Birthday" is still not public domain yet.
The cover story is a huge section called "Remix Planet". In it, they expand the definition of 'remix' beyond the realm of music - it also applies to fanfiction, casemods, Roy Lichtenstein, and the like. And Robot Chicken. Oh yes.
In the first article, Neil Gaiman interviews the guys behind Gorillaz. Dude! (Don't accuse me of going off topic... >_>;; ...I thought Gaiman was awesome even before I became a comicbooknerd-in-training. I read his novel Neverwhere and my dad had a couple Sandman comics.)
The interview inspires me to go out and get Demon Days just a little bit more...I really should, y'know. (Oh, and I managed to find a remix of Feel Good Inc. that doesn't have the rapping! ^_^ Random-K remix.)
The last segment of the story (after Quentin Taratino, car hybrids, mashups, custom Nikes...) is a really amusing and enlightening timeline, from the Jackalope to Choose-your-own-adventure books to MST3k to Power Rangers to Sealab.
The second issue is more of the same awesomeness. There are little snippets of interesting stories - Wedding rings grown from a spouse's bone cells, the Grokster ruling in layman's terms; and then some longer articles, like the aforementioned test of NASA's urine-to-water purification system; and then one MONSTER article that gave me a lot of food for thought.
It's a retrospective on the past 10 years in terms of the internet. This is, basically, my whole life in an article. I think I'm going to look back on what all happened these years and be astounded, 20 years from now. History is being made, you know?
So it goes through all the big foundings - Netscape, Amazon, Ebay, and the cultural phenomena in the making - Did you know TiVo began in '97? And Netflix began in the same year as Google. And one day children will read about these things in the history books, I think. No one had any idea what was coming.
Included (for the lay-days, obviously) is a full-page photo of Google's founders in a hot tub. Okay...
There's some more interesting articles after that - A guerilla graffiti artist who put one of his images in an art museum, and the museum accepted it and put it on display themselves; blogging soldiers in Iraq - but on the last page was one thing that took up probably way too much of my time. The headline of the section reads "Found: Artifacts fromt the future", and it's a proposed crossword puzzle from 2019. There are clues like Former sky layer (5 letters), Pop. Word Guide (Before Wiktionary) (3 letters), and First vidgame to nab Oscar: ____ 4 (4 letters); but also mundane clues as you'd find in modern-day crosswords, so it doesn't seem so wildly farfetched: Blood, phlegm, or bile (5 letters), Dr. Who's organization (4 letters), Birth a sheep or goat (4 letters - I actually had to look that one up in my dictionary).
I ended up filling in about half the puzzle or a little more. I'm scared to look at the rest of the answers and ruining it for me. I had a lot of fun doing what I had done :P
All in all, Wired is a lot on the same lines as Boingboing is - and it's perfect for me. I love it. It gives me a window to a culture I'd love to become more a part of, with lots of fancy gadgets, lots of programming (and hacking) skills, and lots of amazingly intelligent people who seem to know everything about what's going on in the world but still have time to spend an hour or two at a time looking through funny flash videos. They're all just really cool and popular nerds, as paradoxical as it seems.
Also, as an odd bit of coincidence: the night my Wired issues arrived, I was watching The Daily Show and some guy came on to talk about the Blogging in Iraq story. It's kind of eerie to see flashed on your telivision screen the cover of a magazine you're holding in your hand at the moment.
The mag made a bit of an appearance in the Fantastic Four movie as well - Dad and I both chuckled as it came onscreen.
I'd never heard of Wired before I started regularly reading Boingboing (though since then I've read about it constantly - Xeni had an article in this month's issue in fact). So either those two days were an odd coincidence, or Wired's more popular than I thought and I never noticed it until now.
So I've found myself a good magazine. And you should pick up an issue or something. It's a pleasurable reading experience.
~Joy should sleep, but... nahh. |
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