Archive for public interface

Anteaters, Mushrooms, and the Inherent Goodness of Humanity

So the last few days have been both hectic and enlightening, as well as closing a kind of thematic circle about the fuckupedness of the Human Race. It started with Friday night’s appearance of Cory Doctorow and China Miéville on the stage of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, where they were interviewed by Mark Askwith; […]

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When Mirror Neurons Go Bad.

A brief, totally context-free excerpt from “Hive Minds and Mind Hives”, the talk I’ll be presenting this Sunday at the SpecFic Colloquium. I’m told that as of several days ago only four tickets remained unsold, so anyone who hasn’t already signed up is probably SOL: Mirror neurons think outside the skull by definition. They’re a […]

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A Goddamned Happy Ending.

I haven’t been opinionating much these days because I’ve been opinionating too much: on the malleability of public opinion (for Nowa Fantastyka), on whether science fiction should be a happy place (for the CBC), on the use of science fiction as a Trojan horse for interdisciplinary communication between the sciences (for the University of Bergen). […]

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Chugging from a Human Heart: a Scandinavian Interlude.

Turns out I have too much to do, and too many images to share; so I’m going to stretch what was originally intended to be a two-parter into a trilogy.  Call it the Jackson Maneuver. There were lectures in Bergen. There was a con in Uppsala.  But in between, there was a flight across the […]

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A Land Where Even the Vomit Is Courteous

So, Phase 1 complete. The talks seemed to go over pretty well (and ten minutes afterwards, in deepest Norway, Caitlin was talking in Spanish to a Peruvian grad student about his own writing, because that is just the kind of thing the BUG does). We had beers with an author of a recent paper in […]

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Black Metal, Deep Vents, Unicorns.

Dateline Pearson International Airport: if you’re the kind of person who reads the fine print on blog sidebars, you might know that a week from now Caitlin and I are going to be in Upsalla for Kontrast; I’m looking forward to it, and the BUG will doubtless also be looking forward to it once our […]

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Pimppourri

A bit of place-holding pimpage, which is all I have time for while I beaver away on things I cannot talk about. On behalf of folks doing things they can talk about..   Do It Yourself Moviemaking One of them is Jim Munro, Maestro of the Microbudget, who originally made a name for himself by […]

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Bullets and Binary

I’m in the middle of one of those extended island writing retreats I’ve mentioned in the past: they didn’t stick me in the women’s washroom this time, but they did stick us in a room with a binary shower. Turn it left, you freeze: turn it right, you scald. Turn the tap in between those […]

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The Least Unlucky Bastard.

That was my choice of title when The Daily (“a first-of-its-kind daily national news publication built exclusively as an application for tablets and other emerging digital platforms”—who knew?) asked me to dig up FleshFest ’11 for another kick at the can — the difference being that I’d get paid for it this time around. Aimee […]

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I For One Would Like to Welcome Our New Small-Press Overlords…

Haven’t had much to say recently. I’ve been head-down against an imminent deadline while trying not to dwell on catastrophic medical scenarios grown suddenly personal (a family member, within a hairsbreadth of death for the past couple of weeks: the situation remains dire, but has at least stabilized for the moment). Topped it all off […]

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