It was a mix of Greek folk music, with ancient Greek theatre, under the thrashing of electric guitars. The music is made for the stage and the play is made for the music. You can’t have one without the other, but unfortunately, the show has only limited nights in Athens, so you’ll have to make do with just the digital download. Listen with the app below and get the album.
pliskinfemto on bandcamp: Truly God-tier metal with emotional and epic guitar riffs like you’ve never heard before. Never expected anyone to blend hellenic folk with black metal so well. Aherusia keep getting better with each album they release and have already earned their place next to the top metal bands of Greece. Favorite track: Ocean.
Or if you prefer Youtube:
Aherusia’s third album is an ambitious and profound concept based on the Promethean myth. A definite bold step forward for the band, who streamlines their sound while maintaining its core characteristics.
If you’ve noticed, I’m running quite a few of these articles under the category “Mythographers we Love.” There are a lot of people doing new things, reimagining mythology all the time, presenting new mythographies. So I’ll do my best to share some of them with you.
Recorded live in the studio, Prometheus sounds extremely lively and pulsating. Its lyrics written in common Hellenistic script lend the verses an authentic aura of antiquity. Accept this gift of fire.
The novel Slow Up has a lot of things going on. While knowing these is not a necessity in enjoying the story, a deep background in the possible technologies and techniques involved will make it a much better read.
10. Rapid Serial Visual Representation
Can you read it?
It’s a speed-reading trick where text is parced into single point. Some speed readers like it, others do not.
9. Most of the IT Scenes Are Inspired by my Own Job at Wind Telecommunications HQ
Most of the tickets came in at a frantic pace, just like in the novel.
The scenes have nothing to do with real persons and situations. But the feeling of an uphill battle, that Sisyphean task of fixing hundreds of computers every day is there in Galene’s job.
8. For More on Nootropics, Check Out Reddit
Nootropics are real and have measurable effects. If you want to try them out, consult an expert. There is a lot of info online, but don’t push yourself too hard. Again, consult a doctor, not the marketing brochure.
Nothing is like the movie Limitless of course, that was a magic pill with insane powers. Real nootropics help you focus, help with creativity, memory.
7. Polyphasic Sleep is Real But You Should Take it Slow
Going directly at Uberman will most probably make you a zombieman.
We’ve all heard about geniuses who simply skipped sleep like Leonardo Da Vinci. That is not actually possible, of course, they only took short naps, powernaps as they call them now, to help their brain recharge.
My opinion is that getting good sleep is more important that gaining a few drowsy hours. I’ve seen that sleep deprivation cuts down on creative thinking. And there are serious medical risks involved.
The logical next step in athletic events is to have augmented races. Some augmentations actually give an advantage over other athletes, like in swimming. Especially with world-powers sending out troops at stupid wars and having young veterans come back disabled all the time, the day where augmentations are common-place is today.
The Cybathlon is not quite an Olympic-level event yet. But it showcases what can be done, and it won’t be long before augmented athletes can compete side-by-side with regular ones, like Pistorius did in the Summer Olympics of 2012. Yes, we know what he did afterwards, that’s not the point.
You can watch the scene mentioned by Gregoris in the novel, where the winner shows unprecedented evgenis amilla (fair game spirit) and swaps out his number with Oscar’s so he can be the winner:
5. Humans With Amplified Intelligence Could Be More Powerful Than AI
Frankly, a merge of mind and machine where a trained user can hook up and amplify his intelligence for short amounts of time is what we consider most plausible.
Another archetype of this is the Mentat from Dune. Human Computers that crave information and can help with decisions.
Wacky hair is a must
From David Lynch’s Dune, we got the Mentat Mantra (It’s not from the Frank Herbert novels but fits so well it got adopted instantly):
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It looks adorable. The real-live version, not so much.
External wombs are being researched and seem to work just fine. There are many real medical conditions where external wombs would be suitable. Of course, that opens up a can of worms, since humans could be raised from prime genetic material without people knowing. It’s almost like a dystopian sci-fi story.
Slow Up is Available to Read Now
Limitless meets Black Mirror in this novel that pushes the limits of a couple’s minds.
When Galene meets a man who’s only goal in life is to make his mind go faster, she ends up falling for him. But will she manage to keep the relationship going at the top of the glass tower, when in reality she’s too much of a slob and is bogged down with all her unfinished goals, when their age difference becomes too much of a problem, and when his work places them in the sights of an unforgiving huntress?
Do you want to know what’s next for the computer geek Galene? Do you wanna meet Artemis? Then read this bittersweet story in a world where thinking too swiftly can get you killed.
Athens is becoming an important stop in the worldwide fantasy event circuit. This year, we had guest visitor Kate Madison, who’s made an indie series called “Ren – The Girl With the Mark.”
The cosplay competition was extremely fun and very popular. Here are some indicative pics, for the whole gallery from CosplayersGR click here.
And we had the author Ioanna Bourazopoulou, who has been translated in English and won awards for her novel “What Lot’s Wife Saw.” Here’s where you can get copies on Amazon US and UK:
There were plenty of other stuff, mostly in Greek of course. Check out the convention’s English page here and contact them in case you want to take part next year. The visitors gobble up English content like there’s no tomorrow, stuff like Saga comic volumes, memorabilia, Chibi figures and whatever sort of loot you might peddle.
To end this article, here’s Sci-fi author Judith Blish getting eaten by a zombie. Um, guys, maybe we should be taking better care of legendary writers, especially now that Star Trek is cool again? Guys? Anybody left alive?
Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel prize in literature this year, and we’re ecstatic.
Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Why?
Well, the reason is that some people think that genre fiction is somehow less than literary, as if the injection of a fantastical or a technological element somehow lessens the impact of a perfect story.
Ishiguro, like Heinlein before him with Stranger In A Strange Land, has proven that you can talk about love, you can talk about science fiction, you can talk about mortality and make it shine.
What I really like about him is a tidbit of a belief that I have injected into my own stories, this quote below:
Like the saying goes, history is written by the victors. But history is rewritten every day, in every tiny event, in any major revelation. Steve Jobs was said to ignore facts that didn’t match his beliefs.
And people, when they tell themselves that something happened a certain way, they alter reality for themselves. Because it’s impossible to be truly objective, you can only be subjective and hope for the best.
The God Complex Universe is a warped version of events, a splintered timeline branching out from 2009, in which people have told themselves how certain events happened and have affected the future.
And when a powerful billionaire tells himself that something happened a certain way, everybody bends to his will eventually.
As for Kazuo Ishiguro, we can state for certain that he did it by himself, he won the Nobel prize fair and square. No Muses were dispatched.
This group is currently beta. Meaning things are about to change at any time.
So what can you do over there? Well, except talk about the God Complex books, we can discuss articles, favorite mythologies, movies like Wonder Woman and Thor, books like Ilium and Percy Jackson, anything you like. Keep it civil, but light swearing is allowed.
I mean, if someone had written that story in a novel somewhere, they’d have called it far-fetched. And this is real, it’s happening now.
Notice I didn’t say “a black man” on point 5. I said a person. Because that person was killed in front of a woman and a small child, and that just shouldn’t happen. But the dialogue on this is enormous, I don’t want to touch on that.
Yes, this photo is a chapter-break in our history. We have a full-scale dystopia posing as utopia, civil rights violated, technology both liberating and influencing ourselves, our minds, our decisions.
I worked a bit on a couple of news channels, and have a unique perspective on what things mass media want to show or not. I can’t actually write examples, but trust me on this: The media shows what it wants to. But you already knew that, deep down.
Also, with technologies like Live-U (multi carrier video broadcast from a mobile unit through any and all available cellphone companies) and Youtube, and Twitter and every person carrying a computer in his pocket, media has become more instantaneous. If the shot is there, the news channels will want it. A news crew carries top-of-the-line equipment worth easily 60-70 thousand euros, but if a kid on his iPhone got a better shot of the news-story, the news channel will broadcast the latter. Doesn’t matter if it’s shaky, doesn’t matter if it’s grainy, dark, out of focus. It will play, because it is valuable as news.
One day we had some faulty equipment and in our frenzy, we joked about having the weather guy just live-stream through Skype.
Then we got the go ahead, and we just put him through just like that. Fingers crossed and praying the line won’t drop.
