February 2012
25 posts
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Are we losing the ability to visualise the future?
The human race: born with the singular potential to reach the stars and an primitive willingness to remain stuck in the mud.
I read on the Internet today that NASA was cutting funding to space exploration, again. There has been a slow disinvestment in space exploration for years, an insidious and gradual closing down every source of funding that does not have anything to do with war or the...
FRANK HERBERT: Litany against fear →
Using the words of Frank Herbert’s Benne Gesserit order to raise awareness of the plight of abused women. Most excellent.
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Sunday Winning.
My website overhaul is coming along well. Ajax magic has been added to the shopping cart and product pages; also wrote a Ruby RSS parser to pull my Tumblr posts onto my home page alongside my Twitter stream. In addition to spending time with the family, cleaning the house and managing to put in two solid hours on my short story ‘Wishing Stone’. #winning all round.
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New websites and why I refuse to be the juice in...
I’ve been looking for a way to share the things I love to do: my writing and my photography principally, but even the software I’ve written and have yet to write. I have looked at a number of off the [virtual] shelf products and found them wanting. The vast majority of them are just way too restrictive in the way they want you to work. Each product seems to be trying to funnel,...
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Lean Publishing and not creating a Dorodango
There are ideas and then THERE ARE IDEAS. Clearly, not all ideas are created equal. I have been struggling with the whole self-publish vs traditional publish quandary for a long time now and have been procrastinating, horribly, because it occurs to me that both paradigms are fundamentally flawed and I don’t want to commit just yet to either. Traditional publishing models are something...
“If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will...”
– Jaron Lanier
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Digital Mush & network abstraction.
The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
~ Jaron Lanier. You are not a Gadget
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
The Lean Publishing Manifesto →
The book is dead, the book is not dead; long live the book
“I am a dreamer of dreams, a peddler in the ephemeral, a sower of intangible and...”
– Stuart Forsyth
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Troll Bridge
I have lived next to this bridge as far back as I can remember and my time is nearly up. I have watched people come and go, moving over it and under it as my memory fades and becomes thin and scattered, like fireflies tossed in a summer breeze. Part of me still longs for those green tree-lined banks sloping down into the muddy brown waters; for a time when men still valued such things over their...
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the...”
– Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
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Compile Sync for @scrivenerapp
A brief Twitter exchange with Scott Sigler (@scottsigler) made me think of some of the problems faced by authors using tools like Scrivener toward the end of their revise and compile cycles. Once your drafts reach a certain point they need to be compiled and sent off for checking and editing. Invariably you’re exporting to DOC or RTF and then the edits are made by 3rd parties straight into...
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“practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -...”
– 1984 - George Orwell
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Prometheus →
I can still recall the absolute wonder I experienced the first time I watched Alien and saw the crew of the Nostromo come across the pilot of the derelict space-craft. That immense ancient fossilised creature always bugged me. How could Ridley Scott put something totally bloody amazing like that in a movie for only the briefest of scenes?
Well it seems that in Prometheus some of our...
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“I can relate > “@neilhimself: No. Hell no. GOD no. @LLStories: Do you reread...”
– http://bit.ly/x3bY1h
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A revolution of thought; how AHA moments shape our...
There it is, a moment frozen in time when the rug gets pulled out from beneath your feet and fundamental thought processes are changed irrevocably once and for all.
Aha moment! Wake up world, we are well on course to a dystopian future once only thought to exist as fiction instagr.am/p/HFNxpjQ_jI/— s2rt (@s2rt) February 16, 2012
I am re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 at the moment with...
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Submission to Asimov's
Today I submitted a short story to Asimov’s Magazine that explores the ever-blurring boundaries of what it means to be alive. I come from a medical and technology background so this is a theme which threads its way through almost all of my work. The way we respond to technology says a lot about us from a societal point of view and in the near future, when our narrow organic view of life becomes...