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District 9 will shake you to your core. In fact, it may lead to a core breach, causing you to undergo emergency core ejection through your tear ducts. Possibly your throat if you have a weak stomach. I warn you-- some scenes will be hard to watch, if movies are sometimes hard for you to watch ( Read more... )

After listening to the Obama inauguration speech, I rewatched Star Trek: Insurrection and noticed a serendipitous resonance of themes ( Read more... )

There are two ways in which the high quality of writing has become a problem for readers ( Read more... )

Here's a photo taken at yesterday's Kerrytown Book Fair in Ann Arbor by SF/Fantasy author Tobias Buckell:

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In the comments to Scalzi's blog entry about the Hugo award victory of "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says he wants to have my children. This is the most... interesting compliment I've ever received.

Thanks, pnh! Regrettably, you may not bear my offspring, nor can you. But I'll settle instead if you will consent to letting ( Read more... )

Reason #217 to read Eliezer Yudkowski's website.

"I am Eliezer of Borg. You have the option of being assimilated."

Q. Is resistance futile?
A. We are happy to help you with all forms of futile resistance. We regret that, to ensure the safety of others, non-futile resistance is not possible at this time.

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When we had Chris DiBona from Google as Penguicon's Guest of Honor, I hoped to have a panel about Google in science fiction. For instance, there is a piece of Flash animation science fiction about Google's next ten years. "Turing's Cathedral" is a non-fiction essay by George Dyson about his visit to the Googleplex, and it gets very science ( Read more... )

Every time I go to a convention, there is usually an anime room. Sitting in there watching the otaku enjoy subtitled animation from Japan, I am impressed by how powerfully this medium spreads a foreign language through other cultures. I think back to the anime conventions I've visited and consider the classes on Japanese that they teach there! An ( Read more... )

I hadn't previously heard of a few of the speakers at Stanford's Singularity Summit, but I know every single one of the following eight names, and it's the most exciting lineup of Guests of Honor ever. It's interesting to finally find out from their photos what some of them look like ( Read more... )