Also, virtual reality in the SF sense is a deeply boring idea. Just so you all know, no real people are interested in it.

Would that include the holodeck in the starship "Enterprise" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation"?

if the VR looks like this on the virtual boy. then it sucks, of course

I can see Heidegger there in an ontic understanding of Other entities as a ready-at-hand. Do you mean in another sense? Or the vice versa, taking ready-at-hand entities as dasein?

Did it give gamers an ontic understanding of the ready-at-hand graphics?

I mean in the sense of hammers forming a cyborg assemblage; it's one of those blind jumps from Heidegger to Haraway, but I'm pretty sure it fits. It's one of those retroactive applications of logic; if Haraway talks of the nature of being as reliant upon Techne as co-extensive with the body (politic) then the Dasein of Heidegger's hammers is presumably compatible, and necessary, for the cyborg assemblage.

I'm not so hot on Heidegger mind you, so I shouldn't pay too much attention to what I'm saying.

Ah, I don't much about Haraway so I'll take your word for it.

Haraway's Cyborg manifesto and Lyotard's 'Can a thought go without a body?' (in the Inhuman) are pretty crucial documents, I'd say, and they seem to be undergoing a bit of a resurgence with the Speculative Realist crowd.

I'm not sure if that's a recommendation or not, but anything involving Lyotard is indispensable in my books.

this is cyberpunk right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REfDCPhPQQ4

totally. the shifting floor works to destabilize our frame of reference and suggests a subtle but astute deconstructive analysis of the way we inhabit space. jay kay at times appears to be 'surfing' the floor - no accident as this has become the dominant paradigm for navigating virtual environments. the song's title then can be read both as "almost insanity" and "a form of insanity stemming from an excessive exposure to virtual worlds."

i certainly have met people who suffer from virtual insanity in this sense, many of them here...

cyberpunk always makes me think of the 80s. all that chrome and those long black macs. it's the fictional equivalent of a bang and olufsen advert.

The brilliant movie "Bladerunner" epitomises cyberpunk.

Joseph Cornell!!!!

my favorite passages in any of william gibson's books are those in count zero where he describes the artificial intelligence building little display boxes with pieces of space junk arranged in them...

and the art history student that is trying to track down the boxes... similar story in many ways to pattern recognition, now that i think about it...

^^^hahahah
yes I agree

Cyberpunk sucks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_punk#Overview

That is one of my favorite games of all time.

Has anyone mentioned the Billy Idol CD that came with a floppy disk? Epic.

EDIT: Yes. Yes, someone did.