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This Giant Superintelligent Triassic Squid article raises some interesting possibilities.
I don't think that the new scientific work out there on the unexpectedly high intelligence of squid has been sufficiently exploited by genre authors.
Personally, I hope this big guy is still lurking down there in the deeps somewhere. Forget Cloverfield, I want this guy to show up on some waterfront some day.
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Monday, October 10, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
The Literature of Deflation
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The New York Times has a frightening little piece up outlining the likely consequences of a Greek departure from the Euro - an event that, to me at least, seems extraordinarily likely.
If Europe truly ends up this bad - if people are fleeing Portugal and Italy with suitcases full of Euros, hoping to hell that Germany doesn't go up in flames too - I have to imagine America's current fascination with apocalypse porn will end pretty quickly. (Sorry, fellow zombie authors.) How fun can that kind of fantasy be, when the reality starts to hit you in the face?
If socialist realism in literature makes a comeback, I for one am going to be really pissed.
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The New York Times has a frightening little piece up outlining the likely consequences of a Greek departure from the Euro - an event that, to me at least, seems extraordinarily likely.
If Europe truly ends up this bad - if people are fleeing Portugal and Italy with suitcases full of Euros, hoping to hell that Germany doesn't go up in flames too - I have to imagine America's current fascination with apocalypse porn will end pretty quickly. (Sorry, fellow zombie authors.) How fun can that kind of fantasy be, when the reality starts to hit you in the face?
If socialist realism in literature makes a comeback, I for one am going to be really pissed.
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Thursday, October 6, 2011
A Quick Thought on Steve Jobs
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I won't try to cover all the big-picture stuff about the legacy of Steve Jobs, because the entire commentariat is trying to do that right now.
I just want to stop and thank the guy for one thing:
Fonts.
They say that Jobs was personally responsible for insisting that the early Mac word processing programs had to include multiple font choices - an innovation that Microsoft rapidly copied.
That one decision was critical in giving birth to desktop publishing.
In a very real sense, a lot of the "creative" side of the computer revolution is descended in one way or another from desktop publishing. That was the moment when computers stopped being an appliance or a computational tool and became a canvas, too.
Thanks, Steve.
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I won't try to cover all the big-picture stuff about the legacy of Steve Jobs, because the entire commentariat is trying to do that right now.
I just want to stop and thank the guy for one thing:
Fonts.
They say that Jobs was personally responsible for insisting that the early Mac word processing programs had to include multiple font choices - an innovation that Microsoft rapidly copied.
That one decision was critical in giving birth to desktop publishing.
In a very real sense, a lot of the "creative" side of the computer revolution is descended in one way or another from desktop publishing. That was the moment when computers stopped being an appliance or a computational tool and became a canvas, too.
Thanks, Steve.
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Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Back to the Blog Thing - Work in Progress
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After a lengthy layoff during which my time was dominated by non-writing projects, I'm back at work on a new series.
I'll be posting updates to this space as I proceed - and I'll also be doing some more standard blogging here as well.
What's the new series about? Well, the short answer is that it revolves around this map:
More to follow.
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After a lengthy layoff during which my time was dominated by non-writing projects, I'm back at work on a new series.
I'll be posting updates to this space as I proceed - and I'll also be doing some more standard blogging here as well.
What's the new series about? Well, the short answer is that it revolves around this map:
More to follow.
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