When I described the boardgame Terraforming Mars to someone a couple months back (I forget who, sorry), the first thing they asked was “What about atmospheric pressure?” I hadn’t thought of that question, but it seemed like an excellent question after they raised it. Presumably you would need to significantly increase atmospheric pressure to make […]
I didn’t manage to post last week’s planned Strange Horizons Flashback story, and in the past, falling behind has been the beginning of the end for this project; I don’t get the week’s story posted, and then time passes, and eventually I accept that I’m not going to continue the project, and then a year […]
The bad news: I needed to get a smog check this year for my 2005 Prius. The good news: I went and got one a couple of months before my registration renewal was due, back in late March. The bad news: I apparently then forgot to actually pay my registration renewal. The good news: The […]
A month or so ago, a carton of milk in my fridge went bad a couple of days before the sell-by date. A couple weeks later, the same thing happened again, this time with an unopened carton. Around the same time, half of an avocado went moldy in my fridge. That had never happened before, […]
From a 1997 novel: She puts away her notebook. [10 sentences elided here—about half a page. No mention of her notebook anywhere in here.] [Character name] puts away her notebook. [Yes, I understand that it would be possible to construct a rationale for why this made sense or was a clever hint toward something or […]
I’ve been continuing intermittently to work on the puzzles provided in the Turing Tumble book. I think last time I mentioned Turing Tumble, several of y’all said that yours hadn’t arrived yet; have they arrived? Have you been doing the puzzles? I’m getting near the end, but some of the later ones are really hard. […]
A day of interesting-to-me insights and thoughts. But no time/energy to write them up in any detail, so a couple of notes-to-self as reminders (each of these could be a full entry in itself if I had time and if I were more awake): This morning, it suddenly occurred to me while I was driving […]
Here’s the next Strange Horizons Flashback story: “Messengers from the Stars Will Come to Help Us Overcome the Obstacles That Hold Us Back from Achieving Our True Potential,” by Grady Hendrix Voyager Sraosha is part of the Transhuman Project, and all of the Voyagers in the Project are about to Discard their human vessels to […]
The completist in me loves single-volume “complete works of [author]” books. The bargain hunter in me loves anthologies that include dozens of stories and hundreds of pages. The reader in me gets exhausted even looking at books that thick, and goes off to read something else, or play video games. This dynamic has been true […]
I now have author-gender stats for over 80 anthologies that I’ve looked at in the past couple years, from my father’s and my bookshelves, with publication dates ranging from 1951 through about 1990, plus a few outliers outside of that date range. (This post is essentially an update of my post from a couple years […]
I just happened across Huxley’s 1958 Brave New World Revisited; specifically, part V, “Propaganda Under a Dictatorship.” It’s primarily an analysis of how Hitler influenced the masses. I’m dubious about some aspects of what Huxley says, but there are some elements that I thought were interesting in light of modern politics. One doesn’t have to […]
I posted some thoughts about playing Pandemic in a Facebook comment thread a year ago; when I came across that just now, I figured it was worth pulling those thoughts out into a post of their own. It’s possible for Pandemic to become essentially a solo game, with one experienced and/or pushy player telling everyone […]