The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Unleash The Wild Hunt!

    No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?   And if you haven't got the…

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  • Hollywood Insider Gossip!

    According to my Hollywood sources the actual title for Star Wars Episode IX will not be The Rise of Skywalker, but rather Everything Rian Johnson Told You Was A Damned Lie A Film by J. J. Abrams    

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  • Be Careful What You Wish For

    It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then. Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of…

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  • A Cinematic Contradiction

    Recently I was watching a video bemoaning the current state of Hollywood. I won't bother linking it — you've seen it before, or read it in print. Hollywood has no creativity left, it's all remakes and adaptations of older stuff. You know the drill. I don't really disagree. I do think that we forget how…

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  • Disaster Excuses

    One common thread running through science fiction, almost since the beginning, is a concept I call "Disaster Excuses." A Disaster Excuse is some awful event used to justify what would otherwise be an unlikely technological project, journey, or social change. For a long time the standard Disaster Excuse was nuclear war. From 1945 up to…

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  • SEE THIS MOVIE

    The new Apollo 11 documentary is amazing. There's footage I've never seen, and I've probably watched every space documentary made in the past forty years. Skip this week's crop of comic book heroes and see a film about real ones. 

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  • The Philosophical Alphabet Inside Us

    Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . specifically to Restoration-era England, when a group of intellectually curious men began to meet at Gresham College to watch scientific experiments and discuss matters like how gravity works and whether blood circulates. At first they were informally known as the "Invisible College" (not…

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.…

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The Worldbuilding Index