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I came back home and everything was ... kind'a different. From the building's atrium to the living room: the furnishings belonged to the past, most from a past I remembered. Nobody seemed to be aware of what was going on but I had an ace up my sleeve. The modern man shall not be found umprepaired and shall not be bewildered by the visit of an unwanted temporal distortion. It will not drive him mad, it will not expose him to public laughter - as long as he's got enough charge in the battery.
Homo Technologicus is equipped with an extraordinary set of sensors, for the first time in the history of his kind.
He will record everything, thoroughly, will take pictures from each angle, will record sounds, notes. Everything will be memorized until you'll find the decency of leaving this plane of existence, towards some other order to insult, some other soul to push into chaos. Not me, not this time, you indeterministic abortion of the sacred structure, this time I'll have proof...
Galvanized by the readiness of my countermeasure I would furiously take shoots the old postal boxes I couldn't reach as a kid and the marks left by the pictures taken off before painting the walls, the dial phone and that odd piece of furniture that has never ever belonged to our home, maybe it was some relative's ... no, maybe I'm wrong ... actually I don't even know what it is.
A step back for a last view, to the impossible house i hated before giving it astonishment, to the house that shouldn't had been, alike for an anomaly rather than an hallucinated image of an adrift mind.
A sigh of relief while I fetch my data - as there's still some charge - for a last pride review. At a sudden something bites me at the guts... photos are all blurred, out of focus! damn touchscreen didn't activate at the right moment, how many times did I shoot my own sleeve? too few shots... I had to save charge... and where are my notes? nowhere? A read error, damn memory cards... nothing has retained!
I have no proof, they will never believe me, nobody will believe me...
a couple of days has passed and nothing important happened, nothing linking to the anomaly anyway. Maybe I can purchase a backup battery or a more powerful one. Next time I'll be ready.
the end
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A little guide for sci-fi movies from the later years, avoided (kind of) by mainstreem distribution, that every sci-fi-aholic must not miss to live a happy life.
Talent flows copiously in young Duncan Jone's blood veins, son of such an artist. His growing success will lead him to compromise but in the mean time his work is quite admirable. I suggest his two movies Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011). A hard-core fanbase (part of which is the excentric Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory) hasn’t gone over the cancellation of Firefly in 2002. At least it had a “finale”: Serenity, directed by Joss Whedon in 2005, is for sure one of the best sci-fi movies of the 2000s. So much for the quality… Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009) ) is claustrophobic, tense and cerebral… and with a worthy ending. The man from Earth (Richard Schenkman, 2007)... I don't know if it was ever shown in theatres... you could call it conceptual science fiction: no special effects, no hi-tech scenery, the movie isi all about a long dialog between a bunch of guys trying to disprove their friend's odd theory - his name is John Oldman (nomen omen).
You can't claim to have a comprehensive quadrimensional vision without having seen (and understood!) Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). Indipendent flick, produced with little money but held by a very original idea, it revolves around time travels. Story development is so complicated you may have to consult a schematic of the intricate timelines unwinding in the film: there's one here.
To honor well made crossovers with comedy we point out: Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999) (which was unknown to me until a provisional report from mr. G.) irresistable parody of the well known Star Trek universe, fiction-wise and fandomwise ;-) and the witty Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006) that addresses the (serious) problem of cultural and intellectual impoverishment in a insane comic way.
A science fiction pretext is the backdrop for the dramatic and hyper-romantic events of Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) and Never let me go (Mark Romanek, 2010). Both acts manage to gracely intertwine heavy ethical questions with real and human feelings.
Last on the list is Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, 2006) because I can't remember if I've seen it or not. they say it's good.
Let's end, for completeness, with a warning: not every barely known movie is automatically great... if during your search for forgotten gems you stumble upon one of the following titles: The Day The Earth Stood Still (Scott Derrickson, 2008), Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), The Last Mimzy (Robert Shaye, 2007)...
engage the warp nacelles!
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The player is incredibly small.
I always knew it: tech you find on the shelves will always drag behind the most advanced levels. But I just bought what I believed was the top notch walkman [1] available: only just wider than a cassette tape, servos and auto-reverse function, graphic equalizer, digital FM radio…. And now I'm watching this fiddler that weights just about over 10 grams and I can hold in my palm…
The player has a jack on one side (it came with a 3 cm long cable that should serve as a connector for an auxiliary component named PC, but I can't recognize the connector… USB[2]??)
I plugged the headphones and pressed the button (there's only that one: starts and stops reproduction, alternatively) and… by Jove! Sound quality is astonishing, no hissing or back noise, virtually equal to compact disc standards - and here's where the mystery gets thicker: although I never heard the tracks stored in the player (incredibly capacious! I measured nearly five hours of music stretched over 6 complete albums[3]) I could swear to know the artists. maybe unreleased music?
Without the aid of the user-manual I would have never been able to master what follows, and my sincere applause goes to the designers for really thinking "out of the box" here. The player can "feel" the position it's in: when tilted upwards, downwards or horizontally; depending on the orientation, the button engages the volume or fast-forwards the tracks, but that's not all: somehow it recognizes when it's shaken with a certain vigor and how many shakes it receives: the number of these movements corresponds to the activation of particular functions.
Monitoring is performed via pre-recorded voice messages that provide - through the headphones - detailed descriptions on the mode you're in. Thanks to this ingenious system it is possible to control all functions with a single button.
Aimed at a dynamic youth, the Samsung Tic Toc has potential for becoming the ideal future gadget of every teen-ager on the planet.
I can't imagine boys - headphones on - shaking a small plastic cube and the Tic Toc can't be, at the current state, nothing else than a prototype of some sort... but if it's of any indication about the direction future portable audio has taken, this branch of consumer electronics is likely to become tremendously interesting.
slovo, july 1993
[1] Aiwa HS-T55.
[2] The USB standard evolved through different versions after its official release in 1995.
[3] actually, with 2GB of flash memory, the Tic-Toc could hold even more.
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slovo (proudly) presents:
a little tune conceived with the aid of sleeplessness.
a) v1.0 means that further revisions would be needed but I can't take it anymore.
b) contains free samples, self-produced samples and samples used without permission.
c) it's easy to say "the other".
d) maybe one more and that will be it ...
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slovo (proudly) presents:
a divertisment ended up in a pastisse but:
a) I respect electronic music producers a bit more.
b) the final result is less pretty than the idea that originated it.
c) up the power of love as well as peace&love.
d) it's not over here... for the loving joy of kids and grown ups...
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