internet
Two Bloggers twig onto the dark side of Utopianism
So Scalzi opines on Atlas Shrugged (which I’m currently reading for the first time, via a 64-hour long audiobook. If you’re curious, the book that filled the Atlas Shrugged slot in my teenage-reader political awakening was the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Yeah, Read more…
writing
The Frugal Writer
A piece of writing advice I rarely hear, but one that seems appropriate to our digital age, is to never throw any of your work away. Everything you write, finished or unfinished, even the trunk novel that will never see Read more…
politics
The next person who says Obama does civil liberties better than Bush deserves a boot to the head
Make that a boot stomping on a human face — forever. I actually had someone try and pull that on me in a debate, more or less in the sense “BUSH HAZ WORST RECORD ON CIVIL LIBERTIEZ EVAR.” This was Read more…
internet
Unrelated Computer Things to Worry About
Among other things, Google decides there are no Bisexuals. Computer virus attacks an Iranian nuclear power plant, along with a hefty chunk of the Iranian energy sector. Trash day at Google? The Feds want to wiretap your Facebook account. UPDATE: Read more…
internet
Elizabeth Moon and the Category Problem of Extremist Islam
Elizabeth Moon upset a lot of people over the week and a half by posting about citizenship, the 9/11 attacks, and the proposed Cordoba cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero. As she said about building the cultural center, Read more…
internet
And now for an episode of “what he said.”
Over at Mighty God-King we have a critique of the new series, The Event. Now, I haven’t seen the show, and from what I’ve been reading about it, I don’t have any desire to, but MGK’s post brings up some Read more…
asshat
Myth and Asshats
So rarely does the universe provide such an enlightening conflation of shallow facile consensus political wisdom, along with elitist literary snobbery as we have in this column by Maureen Dowd. Dowd has gotten the memo, that Christine O’Donnell is the Read more…
internet
Things to screw with your futurism
Two unrelated things that I came across recently that should have some serious implications to anyone writing near-future SF. The first post is actually kind of obvious, in fact it touches on one of the central themes of the singularity. Read more…