The battle for matter, and
The idea that one has spoken:
A lost-wax method 

The thing about spontaneity is that it often reduces you to the consumption of what’s available, of what’s already on offer. It sentences you to the world of the mass, as penalty for your lack of effort and planning, rather than the craft and care of the bespoke. Especially when dwelling in the world of commerce-governed time, it subjects you to the logic of the leftover, despite the guise of freedom it suggests.

This is quite insightful. We should all be deeply offended at the notion that we should destroy the free exchange of information for the sake of these cartels. They have no inherent right to benefit from monetizing the distribution of media, or from reducing esthetic experience to an act of payable “consumption.”  They have long since lost their legitimacy by giving up on creativity and resorting to legislative manipulation. And this time, they got caught. 

If they are going to squander their time and money on trying to destroy swaths of the economy to protect their interests, rather than innovating in content and in business models, then they deserve to go.

RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise. That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there. How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now? There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they’re serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo. It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we’d prefer to hear about ideas like that. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 20 years is probably predetermined. Winning is more a matter of discovering it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can’t push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it. What’s the most entertaining thing you can build?

– Y Combinator

There are books that I read, like surfaces I skate across. Then others, lightless depths where I am lost, and led out only by the light that they provide. But then, finally, those whose every word and turn inspires ten and more of mine. And those are the books I live for.

Forming an addition or supplement; not integral.

1620    Bacon Instauratio Magna ii. xlviii. 542   They therefore called this [motion] perpetual and proper‥and they called the others adscititious.

1628    W. Prynne Unlovelinesse of Love-lockes 17   It is a very wicked thing, to attire the head, with dead and ascititious Haire.

1783    W. F. Martyn Geogr. Mag. II. 517   The adscititious inhabitants of Terra Firma.

1864    F. Max Müller Lect. Sci. Lang. (1868) 2nd Ser. vi. 261   These initial vowels‥are not radical, but merely adscititious in Greek.

1879    Contemp. Rev. 27 608   In taking on the onus of a ‘religion’, it has burdened itself with a whole cargo of ascititious and alien ideas.

1920    Times 1 Nov. 8   The [wood] fibres are adscititious and can be absorbed; but the [silica] grit they hold is indivisible.

2008    W. D. King Coll. of Nothing i. 32   Crates of chilly hardware—coffee tins of rusty nails and mismatched bolts and nuts‥and adscititious crap.

Etymology:  < post-classical Latin adsciticius , asciticius adopted (15th cent.), adventitious (from c1546 in British sources; < classical Latin adscīt- , past participial stem of adscīscere (also ascīscere ) to admit, to adopt ( < ad- ad- prefix + scīscere to get to know, to ascertain: see sciscitation n.) + -īcius : see -itious suffix1) + -ous suffix.