Courtesy of TNG, a collection of reimagined covers for the Atari 2600 [note to young'uns: cover images themselves are original, with only new titles added]. Surprisingly I can only immediately identify Defenders and Yars’ Revenge. Look for the passing references to both Harry Potter and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Combining today’s themes of hoax and time travel, Google Australia has launched the gDay(tm) feature - “search tomorrow’s web, today!” - powered by MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapoloation). The modification to the PageRank algorithm is naturally called SageRank.
The methodology (”mashup of…recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast”) bears some similarity to Asimov’s psychohistory. Their FAQ also touches on some interesting questions about second-order prediction: if everyone has access to tomorrow’s (90% likely) scores, Lotto numbers, share prices, etc. what does that do to established markets? And could you read, say, of your impending demise and act to prevent it, creating an epistemological paradox?
And to make the most of the limited range, can you combine gDay with Gmail’s Custom Time to send gleaned details further back in time (all the way back to 4/1/2004 per their FAQ)?
This flash-short fiction by Desmond Warzel is a brilliant mix of Ballard-esque ‘invisible literature’ in the style of a message forum, the juxtaposition of wikian impermanence with reality, historical Eurocentrism, flamewars, moderator pedantry, and time travel tropes - “everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.” Paradoxes figure predominantly, including a reverse ontology projection (”if we kill Hitler then time travel won’t be invented”) and an oblligatory Grandfather Paradox. This must also be a singular exception to Godwin’s Law.
Abyss & Apex : Fourth Quarter 2007: Wikihistory
I have a particular weakness for futurist pseudohistory (fiction written as future historical document, such as The Dune Encyclopedia - not to be confused with the related cryptohistory, sensationalist dogma masquerading as fact such as Holocaust denial) and this prompted fond memories of reading The Complete Time Traveler.
The expression of April Fools’ Day has taken on extra dimensions with the proliferation of the web hoax, and has developed far enough to generate a pronounced backlash (if there’s one thing the Internet does better than anything else, it’s backlash.) (more…)
