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Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!
As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all. Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got…
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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…
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Arkad’s World Review From Booklist
One of the most anxious times for a writer is just before the book hits the stores, at the moment when the first reviews appear. You may like what you've written, your editor may like it, your wife and the people in your writing workshop may like it . . . but none of that…
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Look What Arrived!
Christmas came about a week early this year! Look what arrived: freshly-printed copies of Arkad's World! If these volumes have reached my house, there's at least a sporting chance copies are getting to Amazon's warehouses or your local bookstore. Get your copy now! I honestly believe this is the best thing I've written. Getting it…
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Post-Thanksgiving Food Bragging Post
This year we had two and a half guests for Thanksgiving1and so decided to really pull out all the stops for an epic meal. The menu: Hors d'Oeuvres Pickled Herring in Sour Cream Oyster Patties Cremant de Bourgogne Viandes Roast Stuffed Breast of Turkey Sous-Vide Breast Turkey en Mole Juliénas Beaujolais Legumes Oyster Stuffing Tamales Roasted Brussels Sprouts Roasted…
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Watch the Skies!
If you do, and you're in the Southern Hemisphere looking at the constellation Norma, you might see a supernova, accompanied by a gamma-ray burst. Any day now . . . which of course means any day in the next few thousand years. Astronomical events take place over long time scales, except when they don't.
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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.
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Things I Want Other People to Write
I've never written fan fiction. When I was young, it felt like cheating or plagiarism to write a story set in someone else's fictional setting, or using their characters. (This was before the whole concept of "shared worlds" or "expanded universes" arose, and all works actually had a single identifiable creator.) And when I was…
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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. …
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Random Encounters: The Ruined Arcology
It seemed like Utopia: a city in a single building — high-tech, secure, and "sustainable." Shopping, entertainment, health clubs, offices, and services all in one gleaming structure. When the giant multinational company built it, the planners envisioned a hundred-story "company town" filled with fifty thousand workers and executives. They'd get coddled and cared for in…
The Cambias Digression
Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.
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