Archive for ink on art

Underdog Overdrive

First, a PSA: In keeping with my apparent ongoing role as The Guy Who Keeps Getting Asked to Talk About Subjects In Which He Has No Expertise (and for those of you who didn’t see the Facebook post), The Atlantic solicited from me a piece on Conscious AI a few months back. The field is […]

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A Glut in the Galleries.

It’s been a busy couple of years, too busy to squeeze in the usual Gallery Update back at the start of last year. But the fan art and the book covers and the bodily mutilations have continued even as my coverage of them lapsed—and by the time you look in on the backlog you’ve got […]

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Skin Deep: the Empty, Pernicious Beauty of “The Creator”

“We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” —Stanislaw Lem Lers of Spoi. You Have Been Warned. Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first: this movie is absolutely beautiful to behold. The cinematography is first rate; the vehicle designs are perfect. The vistas of robots in rice paddies—corny as that may sound—are […]

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Red Team Blues

A number of years ago, while I was just beginning to figure out this whole Writing thing, I tried to classify what I saw as “successful authors”. You may know the usual names I trot out in interviews, those I cite as inspiration in developing my own voice—Delany, Silverberg, Brunner Brunner Brunner—and I won’t belabor […]

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The Only Question You Need to Ask ChatGPT.

No, it’s nothing to do with “Alberta brewery’s first AI-designed beer“. Although I’m not ruling out the possibility that maybe it should be. Regular visitors already know my overall perspective on this whole Chatbot/AGI thing. Recent events, while entertaining, haven’t changed my opinion all that much. (Although it’s nice to see an uptick of people […]

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The Apex of Tinseltown.

Turns out I have an IMDB page. I didn’t realize that myself until recently. It is very short— as befitting someone with no real presence in the industry—and yet also padded. A guest appearance on a Guelph-based podcast doesn’t really strike me as a cinematic credit, for one thing. And while I did get a […]

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Stanley Kubrick, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Neill DeGrasse Tyson walk into the Mines of Moria…

…and turn this… …into this… and and and and and …and I gotta say, I was skeptical that they could surpass the steampunk menagerie of Nantes’ Les Machines de l’île—but the Frawnsh seem to be absolute fucking masters at this sort of thing. The still photos don’t really do justice even to the scale of […]

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The Aspirational Zombie.

Long-time readers of the ‘crawl might remember that I’ve never had much patience for the AI’s Just Wanna Live trope. I put my bootprint on it in my very first novel— “Expert defense witnesses, including a smart gel online from Rutgers, testified that neuron cultures lack the primitive midbrain structures necessary to experience pain, fear, […]

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Parts of People.

“My life has been 107 hours long,” says Ms. Casey, Wellness Counselor at Lumon Industries, moments after learning she won’t be making it to 108. “Of all that time, my favorite was the eight hours I spent in Macrodata Refinement. You could say those were my Good Old Days.” Of course, Ms. Casey—or whatever her […]

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Russian Liaisons, Polish Hellicorns, Alien Kickstarters, and Contraband Readings.

But before we get to any of that: The Revenge of the Attack Helicopters. The 2020 Hugo finalists have been announced. If you scroll down the to the “Best Novelette” category, you’ll see an entry that you may find both familiar and not: “Helicopter Story”, by Isabel Fall. Familiar because Fall and her story were […]

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