21 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
Future Troubadour
The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated – it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieti...16 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Directionality in Zero-G
Phrases like “things are looking up” and “look at the upside” once
meant something like “consider the good in the situation,” but
they went through an ironic shift in the solar system’s early spacecolonial
culture, mutating in the microgravity of early tin-can
stations to mean a variety of practically sarcastic sentiments, typically
something like “be careful” or “let’s be realistic.” The joke
(that is, that there is no “upside”) wore off in a hurry, but use it
wit...Many of the phrases we use on Earth make no sense in space.