Category: Miscellaneous
-
Art Forms of the Future
Despite the portentious title (or pretentious, your choice), this is actually just a link to a video. Here are some musicians performing in zero-gee, courtesy of a plane flying parabolic arcs. I call this art of the future because I suspect in a few years' time we'll see something like this filmed in orbit.
-
Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective
Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.
-
Boskone 2019
This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in. Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves.…
-
Class, Status, and SF Continued
The movie science fiction boom of the 1980s pumped a lot of money into the field. SF and fantasy authors began to get six-figure advances for novels, and sometimes cracked the New York Times bestseller list. Money and status usually go together (but not always, as we shall see in a moment), so you didn't hear…
-
Class, Status, and SF
I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in…
-
Firewood Observations
With the recent cold snap in New England I've been burning a lot of firewood. For several years now I've been cutting and splitting my own wood (it's cheaper than joining a health club for exercise), and I've learned quite a bit about firewood. Birch burns like plutonium, beetles will eat all the pine before…
-
Tales of the Time Patrol: The Wild Bunch
We recently re-watched Sam Peckinpah's famous gritty Western The Wild Bunch. This time around I realized something: at least one of the titular Bunch is a secret agent of the Time Patrol. The moment of revelation comes when the gang arrive at the headquarters of the corrupt Mexican warlord General Mapache and see the General's…
-
Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .
. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.
-
Most Infuriating Thing I’ve Seen Today
I drove past a hair-styling parlor with a fancy custom neon sign showing a pair of scissors and the name of the place: "A Notch Above." Huh? It should be "A Cut Above." Hair parlors all have lame-ass pun names — Mane Event, Short Cuts, Shear Magic, Curl Up and Dye, Cutting Edge, Hair Today, etc. …
-
Time to Clean House
Academics worried about "anti-intellectualism" in modern society need to realize that the modern system of research universities and scholarly journals needs some serious housecleaning. Read this article to see why. Until scholars can muster the courage to stop encouraging and defending fashionable nonsense, the rot will continue.
The Cambias Digression 