Science Fiction Author of the JUMP 225 Trilogy
As part of the research for my next book, MultiReal, I’ve been thinking a lot about mind uploading. Mind uploading is a transhumanist concept wherein you take a human brain and digitize it. We’re not just talking about scanning and mapping here; the goal is to have a fully functioning mind that can exist outside of all this defective muscle, bone, and tissue you cart around with you. Science fiction authors have been kicking the … Read more
Despite last week’s rant about too much web 2.0 hype, I’ve made one discovery recently that’s made my life a lot easier. It’s called coComment. coComment keeps track of all the comments you make on blogs throughout the web so you don’t have to go Googling for them yourself.
I’m starting to get that dot-com bubble burst feeling again. There are too many meta information tools out there with shaky revenue streams.
In case some of you are wondering why your MySpace Friends lists are suddenly exploding, here’s why: I’ve been going crazy with MySpace promotion over the past few weeks. Despite my misgivings about MySpace (which mainly have to do with the site’s design, functionality and usability — not its general purpose), I’m attempting to make practical use of it to promote Infoquake. And so in the last three weeks, my friend count has skyrocketed from … Read more
A few more tidbits, shoutouts, and callouts from the WorldCon festivities in Anaheim: I was really hoping Tobias Buckell would turn out to be an asshole, considering that he’s smart, talented, funny, and successful. But alas, my hopes were thwarted, and he happens to be a great guy. I proved conclusively that I am The World’s Worst Pool Player™ while chatting up Sean Williams, Garth Nix, Madeleine Robins, and two other people whose names were … Read more
Technology isn’t always about giving us more freedom to do things we couldn’t do before. Sometimes technology can help precisely by taking away our freedoms. Small, inconvenient, and irritating freedoms. For instance: speed limits.
Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan” is nothing less than the extension of Franz Kafka’s vision to its chilling nadir. It’s Franz Kafka narrated by a stuffy British professor in tweed who’s long ago retreated into the bitter chambers of his imagination and shut the doors, tight.
Some more of my (remarkably obvious) observations about the French.
I love snooping at other people’s libraries. Whenever I’m at someone’s house, you’ll usually find me with my head tilted to one side reading book jacket spines within the first ten minutes of walking in the door. I’ve been known to walk through IKEA paying much more attention to the books on the shelves than to the shelves themselves. So imagine my excitement when I discovered LibraryThing. LibraryThing is basically a connected online database of … Read more
I’ve recently discovered something else the Mozilla Firefox browser can do that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can’t: Firefox can accept documents using the “application/xhtml+xml” header. This just might change the world.