This whole writing retreat thing is stranger than I remember it. This is the approach to my bedroom. My bedroom door is the pale green thing with the poster taped across it: For those of you with teensy monitors, here’s a closeup of the sign outside said approach: Yes, you read that right. My bedroom […]
The Con of Wrath.
Category: On the Road, public interfaceI’ve always had ambivalent feelings about Polaris. Formerly “Toronto Trek”, one of the huger local cons, it changed its name a few years back and started featuring sf novelists in an attempt to expand into the literary end of the sf pool. Their media roots have always remained front and center, though. When I appear […]
Holy Shit, These Things Are Real?
Category: miscI go running in the Don Valley. And something did kind of sting my face the other day, as I brushed past a low-hanging branch. Felt like a nettle. A two-meter-high nettle… I thought Genesis was just ripping off Wyndham’s Triffids. I thought it was just standard seventies prog-rock science fiction… (Yes, this is […]
Polaris Schedule
Category: On the Road, public interfaceIf you’ve noticed the new “Coming Attractions” element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the calendar elements, for some reason — some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have […]
CuddleKill: or, Liz Cheney Explained
Category: biochem, neuro, sociobiologyWell, I warned you all. A shower of oxytocin, to fill all you bickering hordes with trust and mutual love. Except, wouldn’t you know it, it’s never quite that simple. You may remember oxytocin by one of its cutesy pseudonyms (“the cuddle hormone”, “the morality molecule”) if not by its technical handle. It’s the hormone […]
Dress Rehearsal
Category: misc, rantA dispatch from a place we haven’t quite got to yet: A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their lives in defense of glassy spires and luxury enclaves— defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight of […]
And So It Begins
Category: miscThey could have held the whole damn G20 summit in Huntsville, like the G8 immediately before it; the infrastructure was already in place, after all. But they didn’t. They decided to stick it in the heart of downtown Toronto, and then build an indoor wading pool with fake plastic trees and wall-sized pictures of the […]
A Query and a Caution
Category: misc, public interface, SquidgateI don’t suppose any of you know anything about this?: I found it in my laptop bag the other day. I have no idea how long it was lurking in there. It might be there yet if my accursed Dell laptop hadn’t finally crapped out beyond any hope of redemption, forcing me to clean out […]
The Feel-Good Spill of the Decade
Category: In praise of biocide, rantDead zones suffocating 20,000 square kilometers of ocean. Endangered wetlands, disappearing at the rate of over 300 Ha/day. Clouds of black viscous poison soiling the coastlines of four states. And then the Deepwater Horizon blew up. What, you thought those apocalyptic descriptions were of the spill? You thought the Gulf of Mexico was some pristine […]
Containing Within It the Seeds of Something that Will Not End Well.
Category: fiblet, UncategorizedStray beams of setting sunlight glint off Azrael’s skin but night has already fallen two thousand meters below. Moving through that advancing darkness, an unidentified vehicle navigates mountainous terrain a good thirty kilometers from the nearest road. Azrael pings orbit for the latest update but the link is down, interference squelching half the spectrum. It […]