The Splogbots finally found the ‘crawl— I got a few dozen link-farm comments (“MsPoOE Your blog is great. Articles is interesting!”) scattered throughout the archives in just a couple of hours. So with great regret, I’ve imposed that Turing test option on potential commenters. Sorry. If anyone can suggest a less onerous way of keeping […]
Remedial Gigerology, Part 2
Category: biology, marineI’m guessing this portrait is already familiar to a lot of you, since I got the link both from a fellow skiffhead and a boardroom mundane, but — speaking as a biologist — this is one of the creepiest, most unsettling creature pics I’ve ever seen. This thing has teeth where a beak should be […]
Behold, the Dawning of a New Literary Movement.
Category: misc, writing newsSquidpunk. My own contribution to this groundbreaking anthology will be called “Tentacles of Vague Unease”.
Excessively Graphic
Category: writing newsI’m in a sodden corner of upstate rural New York at the moment, catching up on statistics and e-mails. You do not want current, believe me. You want flashbacks. Here are a couple more shots from Pure Speculation last week. I won’t say the one on the left is an accurate picture, insofar as my […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Not-So-Young Parasite
Category: writing newsDateline, EDMONTON, near “the chipping yards”. Okay, I’ll admit I wondered what I was doing here at first. The people were nice enough, but everything was games and action figures and Klingon prosthetics; I saw no great fascination with the written sf lit, and it seemed pretty obvious that anyone who showed up to an […]
Faster than the Eye Can See
Category: writing newsThis cat— Chipwalla, by name— is one fast fuzzbot. Yesterday he clawed the contact lens right off my eyeball before I had the chance to blink. No shit. Popped it right out with one blinding swipe of a paw. That’ll teach me to be two minutes late with breakfast. I have to admit I’m impressed. […]
The View From The Left
Category: just putting it out there..., neuro, scienceThis is an ancient review article — about ten years old, judging by the references — but it contains an intriguing insight from split-brain research that I hadn’t encountered before: The right hemisphere remembers stuff with a minimum of elaboration, pretty much as it happens. The left hemisphere makes shit up. Mr. Right just parses […]
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Category: writing newsI just passed a busker on the street playing Thus Sprach Zarathustra on an accordion. (The thing that makes me wonder if it wasn’t a hallucination is, it wasn’t half bad.) I had this strange encounter returning from the plenary session of the 23rd annual meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, which featured myself, […]
You Won’t Get Elected If You Don’t Speak Klingon.
Category: rantSounds stupid, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s pretty much the way we do things in this hemisphere. Here in Ontario, we face the imminent prospect of double-barreled elections: one provincial, one federal. The leader of our provincial Conservative Party recently allowed that his plan to publicly fund religious schools would include taxpayer support of those […]
New Agent. New Sale. Same Old Attitude. And One Unsubtle Highlander Reference.
Category: writing newsGot me a new agent. Howard Morhaim, about whom everyone raves (Jeff Vandermeer told me he’d gladly get into a knife fight for the man— I remain undecided as to whether this implies fierce loyalty, or just a sick desire on Jeff’s part to get into knife fights at the slightest provocation). It was actually […]