Eight years ago today, I relaunched a personal website not really seen since the previous millennium. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if it’s a little bit good or a little bit bad and in what proportion. But eight years does appear to be the Bronze Anniversary or, if you’re indecently British, the Salt Anniversary?!? I’m guessing that latter one dates back to the Danelaw. As with previous versions of this blogiversary post, I’ll…
Going from fabled fictional cities last week to real cities this week, I went further in Afar and found this list of 11 lost cities now found that you can visit. I’m pretty sure there’s more than a few that you want to add to your bucket lists. Mind you, I still want to go see the Gruffalo.
Longtime visitors will note that I do post about Tolkien from time to time, even if I’m not the prime Tolkien fanatic in the family. I couldn’t even tell you who the first lord of Dol Amroth was, which I’m pretty sure is the level of detail one needs to be a Colbert-level Tokien fanatic. If I were, I would surely know the specific countries and landmarks Tolkien thought of in our world which he…
I continue to talk to people online and offline about machine learning and the current zeal for AI doing creative work and one of the writers, Chuck Wendig, who I linked to last month (and who, unsurprisingly, does not find AI-authored writing as a wave of the future to be surfed). One of his posts from last week drills down to one of the reasons I find the AI creativity craze so annoying: the fact…
Hey, if you think that’s a startling headline, the original title of the article by Cory Doctorow in Wired is not-safe-for-work. But it does touch on something you may have suspected or outright observed about social media sites and their lifecycle of desperately needing content and eventually not being that useful, but obnoxiously necessary. It may motivate you to think rather unsociable thoughts. In any case, I found it interesting and in line with many…
On Monday, I had another discussion with folks online about machine learning being employed for creative tasks and the inevitable “it’s inevitable” angle people who stand to benefit from that automation like to promote. One of the things I brought up is that people can not want technology to be implemented in a certain way and not be anti-technology, which reminded me of the term “Luddite,” commonly used these days to describe someone who is…
Hey, it’s not just future TV I’m interested in, I find all sorts of creative industries of interest. In this case, one of the “big five” publishers, HarperCollins, recently reached a tentative agreement with its union. So right about now, you might be asking: Well, to learn more, you can check out: It’ll be interesting to see what changes this has on the other publishers in the “Big Five.”
Common refrains I hear from sci-fi fans are both “I want the aliens to be more alien” (often when referring to certain film or TV aliens) and “You have to check this out: the aliens were really alien” (often when referring to certain books). The latter sentiment makes sense, because when you start considering how evolution might have taken place on other words, the bilaterally symmetrical humanoids that dominate much of cinematic science fiction seem…
After contributing a horror short story to an anthology last Fall, I’ve been researching what the current markets are like and came across this piece by longtime writer (and longtime writer of the business of writing) Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Now, referencing the Stanford Marshmallow Experiments might make this interesting alone, but the real reward is staying with the piece as she goes through plenty of historical numbers of what writers have been paid and, well,…
Look, I wasn’t looking for this. You weren’t looking for this. But the Internet finds ways of creating things we weren’t looking for. So enjoy one of the classics of sci-fi (2001) cited occasionally by some for why they don’t like sci-fi mashed up with another one of the classics of sci-fi (Star Wars) cited continually by too many as something that “ahktshually, isn’t science fiction.”