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Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse

Author: Tom Kaczynski

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Published: 2021-08-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1683964314

In this new, expanded edition, the starting point is arbitrary. From there, the city expands in all directions. At once SF, a contemporary demonology, an occult theory, a mutant utopia and an architectural treatise, Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse is a collection of graphic fictions about the contemporary global megalopolis. This groundbreaking collection, originally published in an Eisner-nominated, smaller edition a decade ago, has only proven more prescient and resonant to our contemporary times than ever. For this new edition, Kaczynski created the original stories "Billion Dollar Budget" and "Rediscovery of the Real" and annotations. There's also a new foreword by science fiction writer Christopher Brown (Tropic of Kansas) and an entirely new cover design. Tom Kaczynski's graphic short stories trace a complex space-time trajectory from the smallest corporate cubicle out to farthest fathoms of the multiverse. Occult economics, metaphysical traffic jams, Marxist zombies on Mars, secret architectural societies, designer ghosts from the future, and demographics demons are just a few elements of a new untested future eschatology.

Beta Testing the Apocalypse

Author: Tom Kaczynski

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Published: 2013-01-18

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1606995413

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Kaczynski takes abstract ideas — capitalism, communism, or utopianism --and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy. Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you've read Kaczynski's comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before embarking on a career as a cartoonist. Beta Testing includes 10 short stories, most notably "The New," a brand new story created expressly for this book. It's Kaczynski's longest story to date. "The New" is set in an un-named third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture.

Beta Test

Author: Eric Griffith

Publisher:

Published: 2011-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780983953104

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: "An unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale." Sam Terra is having a bad week. He lost Molly, the woman he secretly loves, when she vanished before his eyes at the exact same time that ten percent of the inhabitants of Earth disappeared. Naturally upset, Sam follows clues about the global vanishing with questionable help from his friends including a misanthropic co-worker and a childhood pal. When Molly reappears in the body of a man during a night of monster-laden devastation, Sam finally learns the truth. Not just about her, but about the planet Earth and the entire cosmos surrounding it. What we consider mundane reality, others consider a game . . . and not a very good one. The whole thing is about to be shut down.

The 2030 Spike

Author: Colin Mason

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1136555110

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The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear; we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe. Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, The 2030 Spike serves as a guidebook for humanity through the treacherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization. This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.

The Secret of Our Success

Author: Joseph Henrich

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0691178437

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How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.

Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas

Author: Jennifer Ogle

Publisher: Ozark Society

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9780912456003

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This attractive, heavily illustrated field guide is the most comprehensive accounting of the woody plants of Arkansas ever published. Features of the guide include: - Species accounts for nearly all the trees, shrubs, and woody vines of the state, including common and scientific names, descriptions, habitats, and distributions, as well as notes on current and potential species of conservation concern, introduced and invasive species, wildlife and human uses, history, and ecology - More than 1,500 color photographs highlighting important characters for identification - County-level distribution maps - Detailed sections on ecoregions and habitats of Arkansas as they relate to the woody flora - Visual key to aid in quickly identifying a plant to genus - Dichotomous keys for the 32 largest genera including the oaks, hickories, and hawthorns - Full glossary of technical terms featuring botanical drawings - Complete index of scientific and common names A field guide designed for outdoor use, Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Arkansas is an encyclopedic resource for identification and appreciation of the state's trees, shrubs, and woody vines. The book will appeal to educators, scientists, conservation professionals, and outdoor enthusiasts. The book's comprehensive listings of plant photographs, drawings, maps, and cross reference keys will support greater understanding and appreciation of the state's plants and the habitats that support them. The book will be a valuable companion for all who appreciate Arkansas flora in rural, urban, and wilderness areas. You will want to have a copy in your backpack as well as on your bookshelf.

Albion's Seed

Author: David Hackett Fischer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991-03-14

Total Pages: 981

ISBN-13: 019974369X

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This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Trans Terra

Author: Tom Kaczynski

Publisher:

Published: 2015-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780984681419

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Trans Terra is a mutant memoir that melds comics, politics, and philosophy into a heady brew exploring work, creativity, emergence of the new, and the possibility of utopia. The author's journey begins in the frigid wastelands of contemporary consumer culture. Like a surreal HMS Beagle, Trans Terra meanders through time and space exploring archipelagos real and imagined. Prominent stops include Soviet Siberia, Communist Poland, Plato's Atlantis, nineteenth-century New York, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Arriving on the polluted shores of collapsing global civilization, Tom K glimpses the faint light of utopia beyond the veil of Apocalypse. Taking cue from Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method, the author unearths improbable connections between thinkers as disparate as Ignatious Donnelly, Alvin Toffler, Rem Koolhaas, Slavoj Zizek, and many others. Translated into several languages, Trans Terra is a comic book manifesto for the post-capitalist-crisis world. Tom Kaczynski (a.k.a. Tom K) is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist, designer, illustrator, writer, teacher, and publisher. His comics have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Mome, Punk Planet, The Drama, and many other publications. Beta Testing the Apocalypse, a collection of his Mome stories, was published by Fantagraphics Books in July 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his partner Nikki and their two black cats.

The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

Author: Henriette W. Havelaar

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-10-25

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 3110884445

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As an accompaniment to the corpus of the Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS), Adolf von Harnack created the monograph series Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (TU) in 1882, which from that time on served as an "archive for the ... editions of older Christian writers".

Indistinguishable from Magic

Author: David A. McIntee

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-03-29

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1451606281

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The most talented Starfleet engineers of two generations unite to solve a two-hundred-year-old technological mystery that turns out to be only the beginning of a wider quest. With the support of Guinan and Nog, as well as the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger, Geordi La Forge and Montgomery Scott soon find themselves drawn into a larger, deadlier, and far more personal adventure. Helped by old friends and hindered by old enemies, their investigation will come to threaten everything they hold dear. Seeking out the new, and going where no one has gonebefore, Geordi, Scotty, and Guinan find that their pasts are very much of the present, and must determine whether any sufficiently advanced technology is really indistinguishable from magic.