No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

The Splogbots finally found the ‘crawl— I got a few dozen link-farm comments (“MsPoOE Your blog is great. Articles is interesting!”) scattered throughout the archives in just a couple of hours. So with great regret, I’ve imposed that Turing test option on potential commenters. Sorry. If anyone can suggest a less onerous [...]

I’m guessing this portrait is already familiar to a lot of you, since I got the link both from a fellow skiffhead and a boardroom mundane, but — speaking as a biologist — this is one of the creepiest, most unsettling creature pics I’ve ever seen. This thing has teeth where a beak should [...]

Squidpunk. My own contribution to this groundbreaking anthology will be called “Tentacles of Vague Unease”.

I’m in a sodden corner of upstate rural New York at the moment, catching up on statistics and e-mails. You do not want current, believe me. You want flashbacks.
Here are a couple more shots from Pure Speculation last week. I won’t say the one on the left is an accurate picture, [...]

Dateline, EDMONTON, near “the chipping yards”. Okay, I’ll admit I wondered what I was doing here at first. The people were nice enough, but everything was games and action figures and Klingon prosthetics; I saw no great fascination with the written sf lit, and it seemed pretty obvious that anyone who showed [...]

This cat— Chipwalla, by name— is one fast fuzzbot. Yesterday he clawed the contact lens right off my eyeball before I had the chance to blink. No shit. Popped it right out with one blinding swipe of a paw. That’ll teach me to be two minutes late with breakfast.
I have to [...]

This is an ancient review article — about ten years old, judging by the references — but it contains an intriguing insight from split-brain research that I hadn’t encountered before: The right hemisphere remembers stuff with a minimum of elaboration, pretty much as it happens. The left hemisphere makes shit up. Mr. [...]

I just passed a busker on the street playing Thus Sprach Zarathustra on an accordion. (The thing that makes me wonder if it wasn’t a hallucination is, it wasn’t half bad.) I had this strange encounter returning from the plenary session of the 23rd annual meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, which [...]