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
Author: John
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
Persevering in the Spirit of the Opportunity open to us
Call me a pessimist if you will (you will) but when I read stories with headlines like Nasa scientists hail Perseverance rover’s arrival on Mars with stunning images… The rover’s broad mission is to stay on Mars for a couple of years, gather data and harvest samples to be collected and returned to Earth on… Continue reading Persevering in the Spirit of the Opportunity open to us
Novel Gazing Redux
This series of posts by Marissa Lingen about authors of speculative fiction posted at Novel Gazing Redux under the heading of Present Writers is fascinating stuff: [On Lois McMaster Bujold…] One of the things I love about Lois’s work is that she is extremely speculative about relationship, family, and reproduction. You cannot separate out the… Continue reading Novel Gazing Redux
Skyfire
I’m indebted to the Phil and Lisa Ruin the Movies podcast for bringing Skyfire to my attention yesterday. Take a plot that amounts to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom minus the dinosaurs. Throw in a couple of known Western names – director Simon West and actor Jason Isaacs – to help it get some profile in… Continue reading Skyfire
Miss Skippit
Andrew O’Hagan on recently-retired London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, a.k.a. Miss Skippit: Some people are orderly – to the point of disorder, obsessive-compulsively – and other people are disorderly in a productive way. Mary-Kay is in the latter class, good at appointments (hair, board meetings, eye drops) but not so hot on deadlines… Continue reading Miss Skippit