I’m holding off — for the moment — on commenting about last week’s inaugural SFContario, which had much to commend it but which also contained one big gnarly injustice that might just overshadow all those good elements. Not entirely comfortable with the fact that the concomm is stonestalling1 on even addressing that issue, for reasons which I […]
You’re All Just Lucky I Don’t Have a Kodak Carousel
Category: ink on art, On the Road, public interfaceMan, what a trip. You know any table where China Mieville sits at one elbow and Scott Westerfeld at the other is gonna give rise to some interesting dinnertime conversation. That kind of mix-and-match happened pretty much every night in Nantes: We bonded with China over a mutual love of cephalopods; with Brandon and Emily […]
Fast Forward
Category: On the Road, public interfaceThey have an entire wall of prog-rock albums here, replete with listening stations. They have a dealer’s room which puts a lot of real bookstores to shame. They have cool sculptures and a shitload of guest authors in whose shadow I pale; I have drunk and snarfed at length in the company of China Miéville, […]
Beasts with Broken Backs
Category: On the Road, public interface, writing newsThis posting consists of a wadge of a accumulated items, unceremoniously horked onto the ‘crawl with no common thematic underpinnings beyond the fact that it’s all part of the backlog. I have met the major honking deadline which resulted in all these weeks of radio silence (and I’m told I’ll even be able to talk […]
Postcard from Purgatory
Category: public interface, writing newsDear Subject_Name_Here: No, I’m not back. Yes, I’m still working my ass off. No, I still can’t talk about it. Yes, when I can talk about it you will doubtless be disappointed, because it’ll be pretty anticlimatic (in the dramatic sense, not the global-warming-denier sense). But I’m going to come up and gulp a breath […]
A Breath of (Extrasolar) Air
Category: astronomy/cosmology, scienceYeah, I know, I’m supposed to be face-down in work. And I am, I am. But this is just too cool to let pass without pointing it out: a team out of Santa Cruz and Carnegie have tagged a potentially habitable planet around Gliese 581. And they did it with a good old-fashioned ground-based telescope. […]
Worth the Price
Category: On the Road, public interfaceIf wifi were water, this place would be Arrakis. Free bandwidth is an alien concept in Australia. A minute of internet is treasured more than the rarest jewel (or at least, it costs as much). Notwithstanding which, this country rocks. I could go on about the fact that the neurotoxins that developed in this place […]
Okay, I lied.
Category: public interfaceThis is the last post before oblivion, and I make it only to repeat and highlight old news, buried in past Comment Streams, that the “Offensive Squid” forum does in fact exist now, right over here, and is just dying for pithy posts on anything from the neurology of mantis shrimps to the recurring philosophical […]
Parsec. Pictures. Pause.
Category: misc, public interface, writing newsOne last miscellaneous grab-bag before oblivion, folks: Parsec: As in, the award. This is old news (it was announced late last month, I think), but “The Things” — or rather, Kate Baker’s wondrous, melancholy performance of “The Things” — has been nominated for the Parsec Award under “Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form)”. Kate squeed […]
Cheeks
Category: fibletDear Neville, I hope our Lord is keeping you safe in these most trying of times. I have tried to contact you through more conventional means but the network has been down for some time in Manhattan and now my batteries have died. I have resorted to the old-fashioned methods our ancient brethren used, in […]