Bill Ward's blog of all things genre
Recently I had occasion to visit the toy store — a rarity in a life spent avoiding children as much as possible — and was sort of blown away by how different it was than I remembered. The last time I was in a toy store was probably as a pre-teen buying Advanced Dungeons & [...]
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Living in a time of instant gratification and unlimited distraction, it’s hard as hell to get things done without the threat of a beating. Daniel Akst at Reason.com looks at one approach that might be viable for some — precommitment. In particular Akst profiles a website called stickK.com, which lets you publicly proclaim your goals…and [...]
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An entry over at Joe Abercrombie’s blog about his encounter with a neighbor boy who hadn’t even heard of D&D got me reflecting on many of the things Abercrombie himself covers in his post. He and I are about the same age, and belong to a pre-internet, pre-500 cable channels, pre-iPhone generation that entertained ourselves [...]
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Here is an interesting article at the beeb about how lasers can be used as tractor beams … mad scientists and evil space empires just got that much realer! Apparently this would only work over small distances though, but the idea that light can exert a ‘pull’ rather than merely a push is pretty intriguing, [...]
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Here is a news story making the rounds that reminds me a lot of Larry Niven’s ‘The Jigsaw Man‘ and related stories about organleggers and illegal organ trafficking. In China a teenager sold his kidney for around $3,400 dollars to some illegal organ traders, and bought a computer and I-Pad with the proceeds. His mom [...]
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You’ve seen them before, oh yes. Signs, public notices, little pieces of instruction, menus, lavatory doors, slogans . . . all with punctuation that suggests their ultimate origins may be extraterrestrial. “Yes” that’s right, “rampant” misuse of quotation “marks” as if they “possessed” no more “grammatical weight” than the decorative “marginalia” in medieval “text.” It’s [...]
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