In love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future.
Hi again. Been a while. It would have been even longer, except I recently received an email telling me I really should announce my appearance on the latest installment of “Tales From The Bridge”. In my defense, I didn’t know it was out yet; I’ve done four podcasts just this month and a few more […]
“I try to be scientifically accurate. That’s my whole shtick.”—Andy Weir “You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”—Inigo Montoya “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”—Stanislaw Lem, Solaris Lers of Spoi. You Have Been Warned. As the credits rolled at the end of “Project Hail […]
A minor fiblet for something I’m allowed to talk about. Just to prove that I’m still alive. More substantive posts, hopefully, to follow. Lest she backslide into complacency—lest, after so many cycles spent alone, she start to forget that she isn’t―Aki watches those last few moments Viktor recorded before Abaddon vanished into Eriophora’s broken depths. […]
Lers of Spoi. You have been warned. Just a quickie for the moment, because I’m busy missing my deadline for handing in Gremlin. (I would have made it, if not for the fact that I miscalculated how long it would take someone to fall down a 37-km Higgs conduit where the gravity goes from 0.25G […]
Lore from an old VR game that never got made, Probably because of its utter lack of resonance with anything anyone might be experiencing out here in the Real World…. Finn Oshanek did not watch his mother die. This isn’t that kind of origin story. Finn watched his mother diminish. He watched her deprecate, step […]
If you’ve been coming here for a while―seven, eight years ago―you may remember how this story started: with a homeless man on our porch, sheltering from a rainstorm; with his cat, Blueberry Panda. I blogged about it here, and here; Caitlin wrote with (as usual) far greater eloquence over on TVO, and was interviewed by […]
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016[1]—“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed […]
…Being an interview by Ollie Barder that just went live over at Forbes (or slightly less live over at Archive, if you’ve used up your monthly allocation of free articles). Ollie was originally drawn in because he’s Mr. Mecha and was intrigued by Secret Level’s “Armored Core” short―a big chunk of the piece goes behind […]
Do you like my story “The Things”? Do you more than like it? Do you adore it with a burning passion that puts the so-called “fandom” of all those other Things posers to shame? Do you wanna prove you do, no matter how much it costs? Then mammal, does Angel Bomb have a deal for […]
Analyze the claim that the Catholic church meets the definition of a terrorist organization under Canadian federal law. To analyze whether the Catholic Church meets the definition of a terrorist organization under Canadian federal law, it is necessary to examine the legal criteria for terrorism as outlined in Canada’s Criminal Code and related legislation. Legal […]
Volbert/Ghiordanescu, Watts Hi. Yeah, I know. Last person you wanted to see alive. If it’s any consolation, I might not be by now. Maybe I’m dead, maybe payback arrived and you just slept through it. Doesn’t matter. Put your hatred aside for a moment. You want to hear this. We’ve picked up a—a hitchhiker. Says […]
The illo for “All the Songs”―assembled by me, actually, using elements courtesy of Liam Andrew and Dai Mar Tamarack. Not too long ago—back before Covid took me out for the holidays— I attended the BUG’s latest fiction launch, sharing drinks with a horde of her fans and students from all walks of life. One such […]
I have been wracked by COVID over the last ten days. If I’m not hot enough to set paper aflame, I’m wet enough to single-handedly power a water slide. Throughout the night, every 25 minutes on the dot, I shed my own body mass in sweat like some kind of human hagfish. I take desperate […]
The Core enters the pilot. Ventilators boot up, hydraulics whisper reassurance, control surfaces flicker to life. Straps and webbing cinch tight, securing him to the command chair. Haptic controllers flex around his fingers; awakening subsystems chirp in readiness. The headrest jack snaps into his cervical socket. It’s as though he’s been holding his breath for […]
Which is what we called “Asset Management” behind the scenes, while I was writing it. Of course, back then I didn’t know I was writing it for Keanu fucking Reeves. Apparently they mentioned my name on some ComicCon panel about a month ago, which effectively lifted the embargo (“Brag #2” was as far as I […]
“In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader who openly disclosed his plans with great clarity. The Germans elected me… ordinary people who chose to elect an extraordinary man, and entrust the fate of the country to him. “What do you want to do, Sawatzki? Ban elections?” —Adolph Hitler, “Er Ist […]
A Blast from the Past: Arpanet. Internet. The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had. Cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of […]
Preamble: OK, I lied. Said last time that this time was gonna be about science, and no more of this fluffy promo bullshit. And I meant well. But this time, the fluffy promo is about me. And it’s cool. And more to the point, I don’t have to spend hours doing research on things I […]
I know, I know. Two pimpage posts in a row. Not my usual shtick, and I assure you not any kind of new normal; the stars just aligned that way this time around. For what it’s worth, next time I expect to be talking about Darwinian evolution in digital ecosystems, complete with a tortured retcon […]
(As usual, click on any of the following images to embiggen. Although I really shouldn’t have to be telling anyone that.) You might have seen a dude by the name of Dimitry SkoLzki hanging around the gallery hereabouts. He did these distinctive black-and-white sketches—they have an almost almost wood-cut vibe—inspired by characters and events in […]