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

This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter to the left than to right. His ears are too big. And while the eyes below his frown shine with their own [...]

Ninety percent of the world’s charismatic megafauna is gone. Hormone disrupters are turning the fish off Lakeshore into hermaphrodites, if the tumors don’t get them first. The Arctic is heading for ice-free status by 2030, the Wilkins Ice Shelf is a measly six kilometers away from disintegration, air pollution in this miserable dick-ass excuse [...]

Me, that is. Isn’t it always?
From: a few excerpts from the recent Locus interview have gone online. It’s not the whole thing, but it’s a taste.
About: Puppy Buckets (whose name still makes me think of wood-chippers) likes Maelstrom. Maybe not as much as they liked Starfish, but then, a lot of [...]

This punch-happy little dude has been all over the net for the past week or so: easily the world’s coolest crustacean even before then, insofar as how many lifeforms of any stripe can bash their furious little claws through the water so fast (accelerating at over 10,000G!) that the resulting cavitation bubbles heat up to [...]

After endless harangues from various online sites telling me I couldn’t view their fucking galleries until I installed the latest version of Flash, I overcame my usual aversion to so-called “upgrades” (MediaPlayer 11, anyone?) and complied.
Now the Vampire Domestication talk (here, and here) is broken in Firefox (both 2 and Beta), Netscape, and Opera: [...]

Sometimes, in defiance of entropy, little knots of complexity form in the universe and awaken. I have always found it deeply unjust that such knots, sooner or later, always stop. Each is unique, each cognizant, and if I were running things, the moment matter developed enough complexity to look around and start asking questions, [...]

Anyone who rattles off phrases like “the fetid litterbox of his deranged and hostile cats” with such effortless abandon can wax my balls any time. Even if they got the whole bathrobe thing completely wrong.

I’ve just spent the weekend hanging out with a hundred assorted artists, scientists, activists, activist/scientists, scientist/artists, authors, game developers, journalists, journalist/scientists, scientist/authors, jactarviscidevthors, two Mars-rover robots with genetic programming, and a solar-powered car (which as far as I could tell, could only go downhill). Most of those interactions were fairly diffuse — there’s a [...]

The penguin chick bursts from the shellHis fetal bed has served him wellBut now, the newborn child will restWithin his windswept, treetop nest.
Oh penguin child, oh fledgling fairStay snuggled in your jungle lairAnd when your mother comes to restYou’ll suckle at her feathered breast.
Heed not the snarl, fear not the roarThe beasties on the forest [...]

This month’s New Scientist carries an opinion piece by Rita Carter, author of the imminent Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality. She’s not the first to argue that multiple personalities may be adaptive (the whole backbone of the eighties’ MPD fad was that they served to protect the primary persona from the stress [...]