Archive for public interface

An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar…

Last month it was the Atlantic, where I pretended to know something about AI. This month it’s the MIT Reader, and the subject is The Imminent Collapse of Civilization. Honestly, I had no idea I was such an expert on so many things. This time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. […]

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Promos and PSAs

. I’ve been dropping hints about a couple of upcoming forays overseas; a few of you in the comments have taken the bait. So now, for those who haven’t noticed the new entries over on the sidebar, I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be a guest at Bulgacon later this month, over in (you guessed […]

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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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Tub Thump Dump.

It’s not that there aren’t a bunch of things to talk about. I want to review a certain anime series that combines unremarkable animation with some of the sharpest TV writing I’ve ever encountered on the subject of personality uploads. I want to share my perspective on the tech bros and futurists and “prototypers” who […]

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Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge.

Turns out I’ve made a fair number of podcast/interview appearances over the past year or so, across a bunch of jurisdictions all the way from Russia to the Free Republic of Guelph. Never really pimped them because A) I was raised by Baptists, B) I generally cringe when people thump their own tubs too loud, […]

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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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Strahan et al‘s Year’s-Best-SF Reddit.

This is not a real blog post; just a PSA for those of you wise enough to avoid Facebook. Jonathan Strahan (one of the genre’s premiere anthologists, not that you need to be told) is hosting an AMA over on Reddit to pimp his latest Year’s Best anthology; it’s running pretty much all day, it’s […]

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Art, Interviews, and Second Life.

For some reason, my travel plans have been severely curtailed over the past few months. I have, however, been all over the place online: interviewed by Julie Nováková as one of the contributors to her Strangest of All anthology (fair warning, the video on my end is Chunky Pixel Soup); doing the inaugural AMA at […]

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PSA. AMA.

I was holding off on this until I could slip it in at the top of a more substantial, imminent follow-up to last month’s Plague Journal entry. But plagues will be with us for the foreseeable future, I still haven’t been able to look away from the headlights long enough to distill my notes into […]

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