Archive for September, 2011
Transmedia Halo
September 23rd 2011 at 1:50 pm
I recently talked to Jeff VanderMeer about the transmedia awesomeness of Halo at Omnivoracious in an interview, and we also talked about what my favorite reads were in the Halo Universe.
Pop vs Soda
September 23rd 2011 at 9:42 am
As an outsider to the US, sometimes trying to explain how Europeans totally miss the point that the US really is not just one monolithic entity, you could do worse to explain US geo-social-cultural maps than using this map of Pop vs Soda terms by county: Each of those colors, bounded by socio-linguistic conventions, also [...]
Wall Street driving world hunger and regime change?
September 22nd 2011 at 9:30 am
Allowing food commodities to be traded is a double-edged sword. We get this chart from The Atlantic that shows how trading food futures is effecting food prices. On the flip side, the effect of food prices has been shown to be causal, linked to an increased chance of riots and the overthrow of regimes: Literally, [...]
That Easter Island collapse thing
September 21st 2011 at 3:42 pm
Turns out the ecological collapse of Easter Island? Not so much. More like a ‘caught disease from Europeans, collapsed from dying all over, rebounded, caught more disease, were enslaved and land was forcibly turned over to sheep farming and allowed to graze everything’ sort of collapse. Not shocking. I always read these things about ‘water [...]
New Short Story in: TRSF
September 21st 2011 at 12:43 pm
Technology Review, a tech magazine published by MIT, blew my socks off not too long ago by approaching me and asking me for a short, short story about energy. I called it Lonely Islands and they accepted it for a special issue called TRSF (Technology Review: SF). It’s chockfull of SF by Elizabeth Bear, Ma [...]
Redesigning Software License Agreements
September 21st 2011 at 11:28 am
This is so beautiful. Someone should hire this guy. He abstracted the entire iTunes license agreement into a compact, human-readable and understandable document.
Some very cool high def videos of where I grew up
September 20th 2011 at 1:56 pm
One of my cousins sent me a link to a variety of videos by a videographer in Grenada. If you’re curious to see where I grew up, there are a bunch of them at FirstGrenada.com. Here are a few selections. The carenage, which for most of my life was ‘the big city.’ I was born [...]
Announcing The Apocalypse Ocean Kickstarter Project
September 19th 2011 at 3:01 pm
I’ve been talking to interviewers and friends about how badly I’ve wanted to do a Kickstarter Project for almost a year now, ever since Tu Publishing used it to launch their first line of books. But my schedule hasn’t had room in it for a novel… until now. I’m often asked, when will there be [...]
Techsplaining
September 19th 2011 at 2:36 pm
I’m going to start a new term: Techsplaining. It’s like mansplaining, but with technology. When people assume that because your opinion about tech isn’t right because you don’t *understand* the details of the tech and start filling you in… when you know them probably better than the person on the other end because you’re a) [...]
A dose of techno-optimism
September 15th 2011 at 7:38 pm
Just finished sitting in the audience at the Michigan Theater listening to Mark Stevenson and Cory Doctorow spin theories and narrative about the future. It was an interesting couple hours, and afterwards I chatted briefly with Mark Stevenson thanks to Cory introducing me (he’s always been very nice to me, ever since I was a [...]
