Yesterday I had a chance to try out two of the "better" head-mounted displays, the Avegant Glypth, and the Moverio BT-300, and I'm disappointed to say that neither is quite ready to be a desktop replacement.

I write smut. As you can see from my office, I often write in public, and as public transportation has gotten much more reliable, it has ( Read more... )

Bill McKibben's homage to analog over digital, Pause! We Can Go Back!, makes an assertion about how everyone's using Moleskin notebooks these days rather than their on-line organizers, and that the miracle of them is that they "concentrate, rather than dissipate ( Read more... )

Re-reading Sam Brinson's Are We Destined To Fall In Love With Androids?, and my response to it, I noticed a pattern between the stories to which I linked, the ones in which I showed how much the "literature of the future" (which is, in fact, really about the present, and ways to address the present) has addressed the question of "human / cyborg ( Read more... )

In the real world, we remember the past as a straight line. No matter how many events were possible, only one set of events brought us to where we are right now. It is the future which is hazy: we haven't been to the future, so all we have are possibilities ( Read more... )

Omaha and the kid and I went out to see Zootopia. No spoilers for the movie; let's just say that it's a rather astonishing piece of animated art which tells a story, has a plot, has a theme, has a meaning, and manages not to be preachy at all about it. It opens with a friggin' children's pageant (which is just about the preachiest thing you can ( Read more... )

In my long-running erotic space opera, The Journal Entries, there’s been an almost as long-running thread around sexbots. With few exceptions, the sexbot stories have always been about second-hand robots; ones whose previous owners for one reason or another have died or abandoned the robot, leaving her (it’s almost always a “her” robot) to figure ( Read more... )

The challenge of the day is to write The First Thing You Saw On The Internet, in which Lauren Modery writes about falling deeply in love with X-Files Fanfic. To be fair to her readers, Lauren points out that X-Files fanfic wasn't really the first thing she saw; the first thing she saw was Alta Vista's home page, but things get awkward and sticky ( Read more... )

So, there's this vaguely science-fictional short going around the Interwebs, entitled The Leviathan.

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

The Leviathan -- Teaser from Ruairi Robinson on Vimeo.
Truly, the CGI is epic. Other reviews are mixed; lots of people are very impressed with the quality of the rendering, although there's always that one snob who has to find something to ( Read more... )

I'm at the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association (PNWA) annual Conference, and I'm having the worst feelings of conflict and anxiety I've felt in a very long time.

I have often felt that the first duty of a writer was to write, and nothing else. And while I've seen a few people here writing, it feels like there's an awful lot more hustling going ( Read more... )

It occurred to me the other day that of the three Disney films I've seen recently, only Wreck-It Ralph really follows the beat sheet, the much maligned guide to writing movies that came out about ten years ago. In Wreck-it Ralph there's the opening scene that sets tone, the debate (which really is a debate!), the theme stated, the catalyst, the ( Read more... )