Archive for public interface

When Worlds Collide. (And Crash. And Burn.)

You may remember me telling you about my recent travels to Tel Aviv and Berlin: the concept of Utopia figuring into both events, even though dystopia was more front-and-center at least in my own case. You may also remember, a bit further back, campfire tales of my journey to Bulgaria. I made new and wondrous […]

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The Perfect Gift for Someone You Don’t Like Very Much.

  How time flies. Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor is on the verge of release— Nov 12 according to official schedules, but if past experience is anything to go on it could be on bookstore shelves before then. (It could be on bookstore shelves now for all I know. Assuming there are any […]

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Transitioning to Apocalypse

  Meghan Murphy, a radical feminist in the classic Second-Wave mold (that’s TERF to you kids), gave a talk to a packed house at the Toronto Public Library last night. She got a standing ovation inside and hundreds of shouting protesters outside. I’m giving a talk tomorrow at a different TPL branch, to a smaller […]

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Seeding Utopia. Like, Today.

Hey, Torontonians: There’s this local thing I’m a part of: “The Multiversity Collective” (which might not strike some of you as the coolest name on the block, until you learn that we narrowly avoided being called “Multiversity Our Strength”). Remember that “Toronto 2033” book that came out from Spacing a while back? That was the […]

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Late Notice, Long Distance

I’ve been head down lately: writing a story to accompany an upcoming art installation on Hypersonic Glide Vehicles, gearing up for a class talk at York University, and— weighing most heavily— preparing for a symposium/workshop over in Hungary, under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Köszeg (iASK for short). The title of the […]

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The Gong Show.

Dateline — MidAtlantic. The BUG and I are crossing the ocean in an airbus that’s been painted a lurid mix of purple and pink— call it pinple— whose in-flight menus are refreshingly honest and whose vomit bags are volumetrically calibrated from “pan flute music” to “our competitor’s prices”. The uniforms of the flight attendants are […]

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Time Dilation in Tel Aviv.

None of the following events should have happened, by rights. I should never have even made it to Tel Aviv, but for some vestige of Baptist Guilt. Why, I’ve Got Friends I Haven’t Even Used Yet I currently have nearly 250 unanswered emails in my In-Box. Some are links and bulletins concerning cool bits of […]

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Images, Opera, Israel.

  A bit of a break from the doom’n’gloom; instead of rubbing your noses in real-world apocalypsi, I’ll rub them in my fictional ones instead. Those at least have the advantage of cool cover art.    Air Quotes in Israel First off, though, let me pull a 180 and announce something downright literally Utopian: to […]

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The Lviv International Book Forum: Huge Hearts, Tiny Bods.

The first thing that occurs to me when I arrive— well, the second thing, after wondering about all the little plumes of smoke rising from the surrounding countryside (which nobody in Lviv seems to know anything about)— is Hey, this place really reminds me of Poland. Lviv actually used to be part of Poland, back […]

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…Aaaand We’re Back.

You may  have noticed some breakage here at rifters.com over the past week or so: little black diamonds where punctuation should be, graphics failing to load, broken fonts and formats on some of the Blindopraxia pages.  I think the whole site may have vanished briefly, although I can’t be sure. Basically, the conjunction of some […]

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