ksw2 - Slashdot User

Submission + - The New School of Videographers (osnews.com)

Submitted by Provataki on Saturday November 03, 2007 @05:26AM

Provataki writes: This editorial discusses the impending explosion of hobbyist artistic videographers, in the same way that happened with digital photography just a few short years ago. The article claims that it's time camera manufacturers create camcorders equivalent in principle to the cheap DSLRs that we currently enjoy. Some beautiful HD footage, shot by amateurs, is shown too.

Submission + - Spook Country (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by

Eater

on Sunday September 16, 2007 @10:03PM

Eater writes: "This weekend, I finished Bill Gibson's latest book, Spook Country. If you haven't read anything by Gibson lately, you may be surprised to learn he's stopped writing about the future. Plenty of future-stuff happening in the present for him, it would seem. No more Ono Sendai decks, Betaphenethylamine, or Russian EMP gliders. This has all been replaced by Google and Wikipedia, Ativan, and WEP cracking. It came off as a little egregious to me at first, but I suppose that's because I always cringe a little when I see "current" computer references in fiction or movies. However, his presentation was better than most.

At some point after Virtual Light, I think I fell out of love with William Gibson. I still think he's one of the most amazing visionaries of our time, but his delivery doesn't immediately suck me in like it used to. I remember being hooked within ten pages of Virtual Light. Now, it feels like the first third of the novel is devoted to disjointed character development and an endless string of names to remember that don't quite gel into an interesting plot until you're well into the story.

This is something he's very consciously aware of. In an amazing documentary, he confessed that readers often complain his more recent books are nothing like Neuromancer. He says this is because Neuromancer was a very young man's book, written by a young man, and that is a cognitive place he doesn't have access to anymore. Futher, he says this is probably a very good thing for his work. I can sympathize with that point, and he's probably right. To draw a parallel, William S. Burroughs was a different man in the 1950s than he was in the 1980s, and his works reflect that progression. I suppose that all writers must embrace that sort of evolution. That said, I personally prefer Naked Lunch to Cities of The Red Night; as writers mature, I don't suppose it's a given that their readers will mature with a similar progression. This applies equally to Gibson as it did to Burroughs.

Spook Country gains momentum quickly in the final chapters. All men love spy stories, and this is one infused with some unique technical and cultural elements. It seems Gibson is just getting comfortable with this new direction of writing, and I look forward to reading more of it. If he's able to harness his born talent as a technical visionary and apply it to the world we currently live in, his new work will become more captivating than Neuromancer ever was."

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