Well, they suckered me. After I’d heard so much about the vaunted FX of Nine Inch Nails’ live show, Reznor et al stomped through an opening assortment of Slip and Year Zero tracks against a competent-but-hardly groundbreaking backdrop of coloured spotlights and dry-ice vapor. Four or five songs in, I was resigning myself to merely […]
Revenge of the Butterballs
Category: biotech, DumbspeechA few years back — before he ascended into Heaven with the angels — Cory Doctorow submitted a nifty little story to the Gibralter Point writing workshop (an annual affair for which, come to think of it, I am about to depart this very weekend). I don’t remember the title, but one of the central […]
Loving the Alien
Category: fibletWe sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every few weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the AI tries to pull another fast one; but for now, it seems to be behaving itself. 428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion […]
Got Another One!
Category: neuro, writing newsNature published “Hillcrest v. Velikovsky” last week — and the very next day, this cog-sci dude named Mike Meadon posted an erudite and outraged blog entry on the insanity of the kind of world we live in, that such things could actually happen. Evidently he didn’t realize that the work was fiction (until the famous […]
I Talk Too Little
Category: ink on art, public interfaceSo the folks over at SF Signal approached me to answer their latest Mind Meld question, to wit, “Which science fiction or fantasy novels, past and present, do you consider to be the most controversial? Why?” And I answered, but I composed my answer during a couple of spare moments during Polaris, sitting cross-legged on […]
A guy with a light saber. And his slave girlfriend on a leash.
Category: public interfaceOne guess as to which of those elements I found hotter. Yup, there’s a whole different clientele that shows up at these Polaris things compared to, say, the more literary (those red-staters among us might say “effete”) affairs like Readercon. Out of the ten panels I sat on, only three had a literary focus; the […]
The Smell of Fear
Category: public interfaceSo. A mere four days before Polaris is scheduled to begin, I drop them a line to ask what events I’m scheduled for. Oops, say they, I guess we forgot to tell you. You’re scheduled for ten events. You’re moderating five of them. Guess you’d better start preparing, huh? It gets better. Some of the […]
The voices that control me from inside my head say I shouldn’t kill you yet.
Category: miscSelf-loathing giant squid. Bad-ass fucking fractals. If Randy Newman did the theme for The Passion of the Christ. A furry old lobster and a creepy doll. GLaDOS. An extended dance remix of a contest for the world’s best pants. Tom Cruise. Oh, and your brains. I just had front-table seating at Jonathan Coulton’s first-ever Canadian […]
We Have a Pulse
Category: writing news…but not much more than that. I am not dead, but I am snowed under by a variety of contractual and literary obligations, and if anyone out there really wants to free up enough of my time for more frequent postings here on the ol’ ‘crawl, they’ll show me an easy way to calculate the […]
In Honor of George Carlin
Category: miscJust a few days ago, I got a rather odd piece of e-mail apparently meant for me even though the salutation read “Dear Mr. Kelly”. At least, if it wasn’t meant for me, there’s some other author out there whose writing is “not a fun place to be”, and in which the ocean plays a […]