Sometimes you end up taking the summer off...

And sometimes those summer months last a lot longer than you think...

Table of contents

• Summer Season
• From the blog: Cybernetic Machines
• New to Dr Implausible's Bookshelf
• From the blog: Internet Observations
• Multi-melting: System Shock 2, KGLTW, Tron: Ares
• Recently on the blog
• Recently on the podcast
  • E0049 Spirit of the AI-dio

So I took a bit of a break, and honestly, it helped. 

The break wasn't idle: there were festivals and roadtrips, movies and campouts, music and BBQ, and a few other breaks beside.  Sometimes these involved getting outside the range of the signal (see "Beyond Where the Robots Go", below). A necessary change of pace.

But we kept thinking, and writing where we could, and this newsletter inclludes a collection of the material that made it to the blog during the last few months.

Obviously, AI and its implications has still been on my mind, and if there was a theme for the collection of articles, perhaps this was it.  I'll introduce them in turn. Hope you enjoy.

What started as a way to describe the complexity of AI tools via analogy to other similar systems that we currently use ended up turning into a collection of articles that used madlibs to explore a generic process of complex systems.

Sometimes written in the moment, I hope the train of thought flows through.

Similar understandings of technology may already exist; we can explore those connections in the future as they arise.

Also AI related, though less about the technology and more about how we are talking about it and dealing with it on a social level, and how groups are developing ideology and identities based on how they understand it.

There was a fair amount of media encountered and / or experienced over the summer months, and I don't want to delay the newsletter any further trying to recount it all, here were a couple recent standouts.

System Shock 2 Remaster

In the late 1990s video gaming was undergoing a real paradigm shift, and this was most apparent in the FPS genre. The trifecta of post-Doom FPSs that moved the genre forward includes Half Life (1998), Deus Ex (1999?), and System Shock 2 (2000). They brought innovations to the genre that are still with us today: branching missions, novel environments, game story embedded in the environment as you play through. Weapon upgrades, skill upgrades, and multiple paths to success.

I played a lot of these three back when they came out, and I was happy to finally see SS2 make the light of day in the remastered version. It plays smoothly, and the high res textures are nice...

While both HL and Deus Ex had a few sequels, SS2 didn't, though it was (spiritually) followed by the Bioshock series, which most modern gamers may be more familiar with.  They haven't had the chance to experience the horror of the decrepit spaceship in the original release.  25 years later there's still something to hearing that synthesized voice call you "insect" that reverberates and shakes you to your core.  Still a great game, worth tracking down.

We'll carry on with regular encounters as they happen, and if possible I'll link back to a summer retrospective on the blog's main page.

The summer months also saw a bit of a break from podcasting, but with the fall we're back with some new episodes.  Here's what's been released since the last newsletter issue.

Some episodes are already recorded and due to be released shortly.  We'll share those with you soon.

There's also some ongoing series on the blog, which we'll bring up on the newsletter once they're done. Stay tuned, more to come!

But what about the Adaptive issue we talked about last back in June?  That's still on it's way, emerging out of the jungle next to you in a few short weeks.