Download or read book The Retro Future written by John Michael Greer and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Long Descent examines a solution for the troubles of our modern age: technical regression. To most people paying attention to the collision between industrial society and the hard limits of a finite planet, it’s clear that things are going very, very wrong. We no longer have unlimited time and resources to deal with the crises that define our future, and the options are limited to the tools we have on hand right now. This book is about one very powerful option: deliberate technological regression. Technological regression isn’t about “going back”—it’s about using the past as a resource to meet the needs of the present. It starts from the recognition that older technologies generally use fewer resources and cost less than modern equivalents, and it embraces the heresy of technological choice—our ability to choose or refuse the technologies pushed by corporate interests. People are already ditching smartphones and going back to “dumb phones” and land lines and e-book sales are declining while printed books rebound. Clear signs among many that blind faith in progress is faltering and opening up the possibility that the best way forward may well involve going back. A must-read for anyone willing to think the unthinkable and embrace the possibilities of a retro future. Praise for The Retro Future “Whether or not you accept John Michael Greer’s argument that a deindustrialized future is inevitable, you’ll appreciate his call for the freedom to select the best technologies of the past—worthy and sustainable tools, not pernicious prosthetics. Greer’s vision of a “post-progress” world is clear, smart, and ultimately hopeful.” —Richard Polt, professor of philosophy, Xavier University; author, The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century “What might your life be like without an automobile, TV, or a mobile phone? Ask John Michael Greer, who lives that way and recommends it as practice for the soon-to-be-normal. Greer says we are embarked upon the post-progress era. Climate change, loose nukes, and resource exhaustion are among its many challenges. In The Retro Future, Greer looks backward to mark the way forward.” —Albert Bates, author, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide, The Biochar Solution, and The Paris Agreement

Download or read book Future Retro written by Frederic Alan Sharf and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay by Frederic A. Sharf. Text by Richard Arbib.

Download or read book Futuro Retro written by Maria Svarbova and published by Nhp Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the huge success of Swimming Pool, Mária returns with a new collection of her photography in a limited edition book.

Download or read book The Retro Futurism of Cuteness written by Jen Boyle and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to "cute" in the sense of "attractive, pretty, charming" to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around "big" aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a "cult of cute"-positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects-and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness. The Latin acutus, the etymological root of cute, embraces the sharpened, the pointed, the nimble, the discriminating, and the piercing. But as Michael O'Rourke notes, cuteness evokes a proximity that is at once potentially invasive and contaminating and yet softening and transfiguring. Deploying cuteness as a mode of inquiry across time, this volume opens up unexpected lines of inquiry and unusual critical and creative aporias, from Christian asceticism, medieval cycle drama, and Shakespeare to manga, Bollywood, and Second Life. The projects collected here point to a spectrum of aesthetic-affective assemblages related to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class dimensions that exceed or trouble our contemporary perceptions of such registers within object-subject and subject-object entanglements. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle, "Introduction: The Time of the Child"Andrea Denny-Brown, "Torturer-Cute"Elizabeth Howie, "Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire"Claire Maria Chambers, "From Awe to Awww: Cuteness and the Idea of the Holy in Christian Commodity Culture"Justin Mullis, "All The Pretty Little Ponies: Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness"Marlis Schweitzer, "Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty"Mariah Junglan Min, "Embracing the Gremlin: Judas Iscariot and the (Anti-)Cuteness of Despair"Alicia Corts, "Cute, Charming, Dangerous: Child Avatars in Second Life"James M. Cochran, "What's Cute Got to Do with It?: Early Modern Proto-Cuteness in King Lear"Kara Watts, "Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness"Tripthi Pillai, "Cute Lacerations in Doctor Faustus and Omkara"Kelly Lloyd, "Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can't Hide Your Yayoi Kusama-Neurotic Underbelly"

Download or read book Star Wars written by Greg Rucka and published by Marvel Entertainment. This book was released on 2015-11-18 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book RetroSuburbia written by David Holmgren and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RetroSuburbia is part manual and part manifesto. The book shows how Australian suburbs can be transformed to become productive and resilient in an energy descent future. It focuses on what can be done by an individual at the household level (rather than community or government levels).RetroSuburbia is a source of inspiration, introducing concepts and outlining patterns and practical solutions. It empowers people to make positive changes in their lives. As with David's previous work, it is thought provoking and provocative.If you are already on the path of downshifting and living simply, exploring RetroSuburbia will be a confirmation and celebration that you are on the right track and guide you on the next steps forward. If you are just beginning this journey, it provides a guide to the diversity of options and helps work out priorities for action. For people concerned about making ends meet in more challenging times, RetroSuburbia provides a new lens for creatively sidestepping the obstacles.The book outlines options available to retrofitters in three 'fields' - the Built, Biological and Behavioural - along with speculation on the future and philosophical musings. Throughout the book, examples from David's 'Aussie St' story and real life case studies support and enhance the main content. RetroSuburbia can be read as a whole, cover to cover, or can be dipped into according to your interests.RetroSuburbia is almost 600 pages in full colour with 556 photos and over 100 watercolour illustrations from permaculture illustrator Brenna Quinlan.

Download or read book Knits of Tomorrow written by Sue Culligan and published by Interweave. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate your inner geek with 20 fun and easy projects! The future was once a beckoning landscape where technology would make all things possible. Space travel! Robot maids! Personal jetpacks! Mind-controlling ray guns! With Knits of Tomorrow you can celebrate this ideal world-that-never-was with original and creative projects that will appeal to any techno-geek-or those who knit for them. Knits of Tomorrow features a wide range of projects, all with a technological bent. They are mostly quick and simple-toys, accessories, and home decor items such as rocket-ship desk caddies, circuit-board scarves, and a robot pillow. There are practical projects as well-tablet covers, laptop bags, and iPod cozies. The playful and fun projects are primarily aimed at an audience with a nostalgic taste for sci-fi, video games, and electronic gizmos past and present.

Download or read book Spectrality and Survivance written by Marija Grech and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of the Anthropocene is founded on the premise that traces of human activity on the earth will remain legible in the geological strata for millions of years to come, showing evidence of an anthropogenic ‘signature’ inscribed in the rock by the human species. Spectrality and Survivance shows how embedded in this understanding of the Anthropocene is a speculative and specular gesture that transforms the notion of the future into an anthropocentric reflection of the present, prohibiting any true engagement with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and post-anthropocenic world. In this volume, Marija Grech develops an alternative conceptual paradigm from which to think the Anthropocene beyond any limited notion of human language, human thought, human systems of meaning, or even a human world. Grech considers how the geological trace of the Anthropocene might be said to ‘survive’ outside of the possibility of any human readership, and how the very survival of the human in and beyond the Anthropocene might necessitate such thought.

Download or read book Life Insurance Programs for Veterans and Service Persons written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Subcommittee on Compensation, Pension, Insurance, and Memorial Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Science written by Steve Fuller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God's activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. In "Science", Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. Fuller sympathetically explores what it might mean to live scientifically. Can science give a sense of completeness to one's life? Can it account for the entirety of what it is to be human? And what does our continuing belief in scientific progress say about us as a species? In answering these questions, Fuller ranges widely over the history of science and religion - from Aristotle and the atomists to Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists - and takes a close look at what science is, how its purpose has changed over the years, and what role religion and in more recent years atheism have played in its progression. Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls Protscience' - all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic. Fearless and thought-provoking, Science questions some of our most fundamental beliefs about the nature and role of science, and is a distinct and important contribution to debates about evolution, intelligent design, atheism, humanism, the notion of scientific progress, and the public understanding of science.

Download or read book Dieselpunk written by Graffito Graffito Books and published by Graffito Books. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of alternative futures for the chic art deco 1920s, streamoine moderne and totalitarian 1930s, and the noir 1940s.

Download or read book Food Preferences and Taste written by Helen M. Macbeth and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international team of contributors present cross-disciplinary perspectives on food preferences and tastes, showing the common themes of these fundamentals of human existence. A comprehensive introduction outlines the themes and the links between them.

Download or read book Music and Manipulation written by Steven Brown and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at many levels and in many contexts. This volume is the first to address the social ramifications of music’s behaviorally manipulative effects, its morally questionable uses and control mechanisms, and its economic and artistic regulation through commercialization, thus highlighting not only music’s diverse uses at the social level but also the ever-fragile relationship between aesthetics and morality.

Download or read book The Steampunk User s Manual written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive guide to Steampunk creations of all kinds offers inspiration and practical tips for bringing your own retro-futuristic visions to life. Whether you’re a newbie to the world of Steampunk, or a long-time enthusiast of airships, goggles, and mad scientists, The Steampunk User’s Manual is essential reading. The popular subgenre of science fiction has grown into a cultural movement; one that invites fans to let their imaginations go wild. In this volume, Jeff VanderMeer—the renowned expert in all things Steampunk—presents a practical and inspirational guidance for finding your own path into this realm. Including sections on art, fashion, architecture, crafts, music, performance, and storytelling, The Steampunk User's Manual provides a conceptual how-to guide on everything from the utterly doable to the completely over-the-top.

Download or read book Pop When the World Falls Apart written by Eric Weisbard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized around the idea of crisis and adversity, be it personal, social, or categorical, the contributors to Pop When the World Falls Apart showcase the range of ways that pop music studies has responded to the social, political, and cultural shifts that are reshaping the world today.

Download or read book The Retro Future written by John Michael Greer and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most people paying attention to the collision between industrial society and the hard limits of a finite planet, it's clear that things are going very, very wrong. We no longer have unlimited time and resources to deal with the crises that define our future, and the options are limited to the tools we have on hand right now. This book is about one very powerful option: deliberate technological regression. Technological regression isn't about 'going back,' it's about using the past as a resource to meet the needs of the present. It starts from the recognition that older technologies generally use fewer resources and cost less than modern equivalents, and it embraces the heresy of technological choice, our ability to choose or refuse the technologies pushed by corporate interests. People are already ditching smartphones in favor of 'dumb phones' and land lines and eBook sales are declining, while printed books rebound. Clear signs among many that blind faith in progress is faltering and opening up the possibility that the best way forward may well involve going back. A must-read for anyone willing to think the unthinkable and embrace the possibilities of a retro future. John Michael Greer, one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited blog The Archdruid Report. He has authored more than forty books including The Long Descent and Dark Age America. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.

Download or read book Playing with Something That Runs written by Mark J. Butler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 PMIG Outstanding Publication Award from the Society of Music Theory The DJs and laptop performers of electronic dance music use preexistent elements such as vinyl records and digital samples to create fluid, dynamic performances. These performances are also largely improvised, evolving in response to the demands of a particular situation through interaction with a dancing audience. Within performance, musicians make numerous spontaneous decisions about variables such as which sounds they will play, when they will play them, and how they will be combined with other sounds. Yet the elements that constitute these improvisations are also fixed in certain fundamental ways: performances are fashioned from patterns or tracks recorded beforehand, and in the case of DJ sets, these elements are also physical objects (vinyl records). In Playing with Something That Runs, author Mark J. Butler explores these improvised performances, revealing the ways in which musicians utilize seemingly invariable prerecorded elements to create novel improvisations. Based on extensive interviews with musicians in their studios, as well as in-depth studies of particular mediums of performance, including both DJ and laptop sets, Butler illustrates the ways in which technologies, both material and musical, are used in performance and improvisation in order to make these transformations possible. An illuminating look at the world of popular electronic-music performance, Playing with Something that Runs is an indispensable resource for electronic dance musicians and fans as well as scholars and students of popular music.