2440 – Fallout (TV Series 2024 -)

timespace coodinates: The series depicts the aftermath of the Great War of 2077, an apocalyptic nuclear exchange in an alternate history of Earth where advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retrofuturistic society and a subsequent resource war. Many survivors took refuge in fallout bunkers known as Vaults. More than 200 years later in 2296, a young woman named Lucy leaves behind her home in Vault 33 to venture out into the dangerously unforgiving wasteland of a devastated Los Angeles to look for her father, who had been kidnapped. Along the way, she meets a Brotherhood of Steel squire and a ghoul bounty hunter, each has their own mysterious pasts and agendas to settle.

Fallout is an American post-apocalyptic drama television series created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the role-playing video game franchise created by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky  the series stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, and Walton Goggins. (wiki)

imdb   //   rt

2374 – Bruton / Library playlist

If you want a total nostalgia cosmic ride here is one of the best playlists with 230 entries on YT. It is one of the best archival finds – with lots of goodies from Bruton Music was founded in 1977 by Robin Phillips in the UK specializing in producing soundtracks for TV gameshows, movies, animations (such as La Planete Sauvage), TV series, and documentaries from the 70s and 80s. Alessandro Alessandroni, Amedeo Tomasi, Nino Nardini, Armando Trovajoli and lots of other crazy Italians. There is also Thierry Durbet, Georges Rodi, Alain Goraguer, and many other unduly forgotten French synth and keyboard wizards. Expect Italo-disco greats and relaxation music providers such as Geoff Bastow, James Asher or Paul Keogh.

THX to WAKA X or digging up this gem.

LISTEN HERE to the full playlist.

2234 – Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism (podcast 2023)

Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism

“Amelia, Djamil, Christian, and Rudy join for a discussion on the history of Soviet Cybernetics and the use of computers for socialist planning. We discuss the origins of Cybernetics, its role as a reform movement in the sciences, and why cybernetics became attractive to the Soviet academy in the 50s, before moving to the biographies and projects of Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushkov. We reflect on the failures of OGAS, and what could have been done better, as well as its positive legacy and finish by discussing the ways in which cybernetics was kept alive until the collapse of the USSR and the remaining possibilities for computerized planning.”

References:
B. Peters – How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
L. Graham –Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union
S. Gerontovich –InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
S. Gerontovich – From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
O. V. Kitova & V. A. Kitov – Anatoly Kitov and Victor Glushkov: Pioneers of Russian Digital Economy and Informatics
V. Pikhorovich –Glushkov and His Ideas: Cybernetics of the Future
Y. Revich –The Story of How the USSR Did Not Need the Pioneer of Cybernetics
D. West –Cybernetics for the command economy: Foregrounding entropy in late Soviet planning 

I will not comment on this since it speaks for itself – it is one of the most interesting and stimulating discussions I have listened to lately. It touches on a variety of topics from a variety of perspectives without closing down this huge discussion. Instead of basically labeling it as failed or as just empty words (from Cyberspeak to Newspeak), it is important to see where cybernetic thinking left traces and how it moved away from its initial lofty goals. Should be listened to together with the podcast on Allende’s Cybersyn experiment. I have been also recently going back over my small collection of cybernetics and system theory book because I considered them to be a missing link in this history.

1975 – Ad Astra Per Aspera – video essay about Romanian SF cinema by Cristian Dragan (2021)

We commissioned Cristian Dragan to make an extended video essay about the patchy history of Romanian science fiction cinema in the frame of the New TEMPOrealities: Xenogeneses of SF in the Scena 9 BRD Bucharest spanning from early examples to various shorts, unfinished or hard to find rarities. It is probably a first of its kind.