I’m on my way to Vancouver for a week (no, I can’t tell you why just yet — hopefully soon). And I gotta say, looking at the weather forecast I am not happy. I lived in Vancouver for over a decade, and among its many pleasures was the torrent of cherry blossoms and the t-shirt […]
In Space, No One Can Hear You Scar the Patterns.
Category: ink on art, miscI was going start this off by claiming that I don’t often pimp those in my own social circle — to try and convey the sense that I’m Mr. Objective and totally averse to conflicts of interest, I guess — but when I thought about that for about two seconds I realized it was bullshit. […]
Odd Man Out: The Starship Sofa Online Workshop
Category: public interfaceStarship Sofa (the phenomenal, out-of-nowhere, Hugo-award-winning brainchild of Tony Smith) is hosting an on-line event on March 31. It’s being promoted as “a workshop for aspiring science fiction writers”, and at least two of the speakers bear this out: Ann Vandermeer will be talking about “Unlocking Your Creativity”, and Nancy Kress will describe techniques for […]
Break Fast.
Category: Dumbspeech, fibletSengupta threw a video feed onto the wall: Rowdy voices, flashing lights, a mag-lev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to some drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Impromptu footage of a campus bar; the student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure […]
The Life Sausage
Category: eulogyA while back I was trying to explain “quality of life” to my stepdaughters— why sometimes it’s okay to die young, why sometimes a long life can be the most terrible of fates. I invented a simple graphic to help make the point. Imagine time along the x-axis: quality-of-life along the y, but as a […]
Banana’s Dead.
Category: miscThree hours ago he was purring on my pillow. Now he’s in a box. I’ll probably never know what happened in between, except that it must have been agony. I have to go dig a hole. More later.
The Constraints of Time, The Limits of Reason
Category: rant, scilitics, sociobiologyAs a postscript to my previous entry — and as a case study to the current one — I spent a little while over this weekend doodling the outlines of a fake nature documentary riffing off the old “Hinterland: Who’s Who” vignettes that used to run on CBC. Mine was called “Internet: Who’s Who”. […]
In Vicarious Defense of R. Scott Bakker
Category: UncategorizedFor a while, a few years back, I thought I might have an evil twin. I kept running into people at cons who’d met him: Man, he coulda been your clone, they’d say. He’s tall and gangly and kinda sardonic — smaller in the nose, maybe — he’s writing this book about the neurological impossibility […]
Pursuant to Last Post’s Comment Thread about Machine Suffering…
Category: AI/robotics, interviews… as chance would have it, here’s an excerpt from a list of interview questions I’m currently working through from ActuSF in France: You raise the question of artificial intelligence, with the “intelligent frosts”, and quote in appendix both the works of Masuo Aizawa and Charles Thorpe on neuronal networks. Do you believe that in […]
Black & White
Category: legal, sciliticsA couple of minor announcements before we get started: First, a quick shout-out for the benefit of the SciFi subReddit admins: Yes, I am both who I claim to be and who this circuitos dude claims I am (even though I don’t Twit); and yes, if there’s sufficient interest I’d be happy to do a […]