An experiment

Matt Webb is running an interesting little experiment on his site, aiming to build an awareness that someone else is reading a given page at the same time as you are) and letting readers highlight a portion of the content on that page for other readers who happen to be around at the same moment… Continue reading An experiment

Cold Calls

After watching this week’s instalment of For All Mankind early this morning1 I found myself dipping into the first half dozen episodes of new Apple TV+ show Calls before starting work for the day, then picked up on the final three episodes this evening. I was aware that this show was coming, but had deliberately… Continue reading Cold Calls

Packages

I’m the Package You Impulse-Ordered Three Days Ago and No, I’m Not Going to Make You Feel Any Better: It’s hard being a package. Sometimes we’re out in the cold for a really long time. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in us. Sometimes someone thinks there’s a bomb in us, so 90 people in green… Continue reading Packages

Romulans

Star Trek: Picard season one showrunner Michael Chabon has been sharing Some Notes On Romulans and I am eating this up with a spoon: Traditional Romulan compounds — Romulans live in kinship units — are built at the center of a kind of hedge maze whose outer perimeter is often contrived to look like a “natural” grove of trees,… Continue reading Romulans

Grandmother-Starship FAQ

From Marissa Lingen’s1 So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered: What is happening, seriously, what is even happening? Your grandmother is becoming a starship! She has gone through many phases in her life already — infant, child, teenager, young adult, student, worker, in many cases spouse, parent, retiree. She… Continue reading Grandmother-Starship FAQ

Irresistible

I’m indebted to Tim Bray for the pointer to jwz’s They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo, which I must have read at the time but which I don’t think I posted about here: I’m going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo,… Continue reading Irresistible