Today’s opening act is a left-over I forgot to include in that last post: a bit of flesh sculpture I was not allowed to show off in “Pones & Bones” because it would have risked spoiling a yet-to-be-aired episode of “Hannibal”. That episode recently aired, though, so the embargo is lifted. Behold: the hoofed, flayed, […]
Space Invaders.
Category: art on ink, miscSo, a few assorted and domestic pictures with which to see out the week. To your right, as promised a few weeks back, some Rifters-based fan art from “Toa-lagara” over at Deviant Art (and also, now, in the Rifters Gallery, with her permission). Russians do dark art so beautifully.Immediately below, a special edition enhanced appearance […]
Gallo’s Humor.
Category: rantAh Jeez, here we go again. The weird thing is, I completely see where Irene Gallo was coming from. I sympathize. I know what it’s like to see the assholes piling up outside the gate, to roll your eyes and shake your head at the inanities and the outright lies— even though it’s obvious that […]
The 21-Second God.
Category: fibletWe lost fifteen million souls that day. Fifteen million brains sheathed in wraparound full-sensory experience more real than reality: skydiving, bug-hunting, fucking long-lost or imaginary lovers whose fraudulence was belied only by their perfection. Gang-bangs and first-person space battles shared by thousands— each feeding from that trickle of bandwidth keeping them safely partitioned one […]
False Prophecy
Category: blindsight, sentience/cognition(…being another reprint of a months-old Nowa Fantaskya column, because I’m still in Vancouver and haven’t yet had time to do my epic comparison of Fury Road and Kingsman) I’ve been called a prophet now and again. Articles about neuron cultures running robots or power grids generally provoke a comment or two about the “smart […]
By & About
Category: Beyond the Rift, ink on art, neuro, relevant tech, science, writing newsMe, that is. In reference to a couple of essays that have gone live over the past 24 hours. * I haven’t had a lot contact with the good folks over at The Canadian Science Fiction Review— I don’t even know why they call themselves “Æ”, now that I think of it— but over the […]
Aurora Campbell Panoptopus.
Category: art on ink, biology, marine, neuro, writing newsSome of you may have noticed that Echopraxia made it onto the longest short list in SF a few weeks back: the ballot for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. On the plus side (for me), it’s one of those jury-selected deals, so it’s not a popularity contest like the […]
A Mirror.
Category: ink on artSpoiler Warning: pretty much this whole post, if you haven’t yet seen Ex Machina. Then again, even if you haven’t seen Ex Machina, some of you might want to be spoiled. I know I would. So. In the wake of that slurry o’sewage that was Age of Ultron, how does Ex Machina stack up? I […]
AI. eh-eye.
Category: ink on artI had such hopes for this post. I was going to compare the two big AI movies that came out over the past few weeks. I was going to celebrate the ways in which a common theme could be explored through bombast vs. introspection, through Socratic dialog vs. the more wisecracky kind. I wasn’t expecting […]
Colony Creature
Category: fibletI once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus. I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe […]