(warning, long)
The war has gone on for so long that we almost cannot remember a time in which we were at peace. We start awake at night at the slightest noise, ready to charge outside shouting with guns drawn, only to find we are hurling our fury at shadows, and there is nothing there. Sometimes we awaken in the morning to find they have silently raided us in the night and left nothing but rubble and torn ground in their wake.
We have greater resources, but they have more numbers, and they are relentless. They have worn us down over the years, our rampaging enemy with the floppy ears and the big, round, soft eyes.
[read more…]
ever coffee tomorrow crossover over.
That was the subject of a spam email I got this morning that crept through all my filters. I find it a very deep thought indeed.
The body of the email, next to the URL of the sex toys site, it said: rake he toast the lifelong.
(nodding sagely) Indeed.
iiyama USA display solutions
Who spends deferment of payment and several-day-long in front of the screen, its and puts value would like to as little as possible straineyes on optimal ergonomic tuning features, for example for the placing height.
…
Although modern LC displays in punkto efficiency keep up meanwhile loosely with simple tube monitors – the CRTs of the Highbrightness® series possesses advantages, which make her the first choice for computer players and Videofreaks.
…
Who enjoys e.g. DVD videos via PC or frequently (the majority of the 3D-Adventures and the 1st-Person-Shooter play in the twilight), without the superiority of the Highbrightness® devices any longer will not want zockt to do to Computergames with dark atmosphere.
This is the writer’s equivalent of bamboo under the fingernails. I do not want zockt to do with it.
(I got it from Geekward Ho.)
I’ve put a new short story called Transmission up on my main web site.
I wrote this story earlier this year after spending time with my cell phone carrier’s tech support line when my phone was behaving strangely. They told me to reboot my phone. Given that I work in high tech this should not have surprised me but the notion of rebooting the phone seemed kind of funny. (This was, of course, before I got my current phone which requires rebooting and debugging and virus scanning and and and….hooray for progress).
I put the story away after Strange Horizons said that funny futuristic tech support stories are way too much of a cliche and they never want to see any more. But then I dug it out again recently and thought well, it isn’t that bad. My cliches are your gain.
I wish I had time to read The New Yorker every week, because I usually discover terrific essays and articles that have appeared in it months and months after the issue has come and gone. Fortunately, TNY is online, so when someone tells me that “you should read that fabulous article that was in the new yorker a few months back about organic sheep’s milk cheesemaking methods in Northern Vermont…” (or whatever) usually I can find it.
Here’s an article from the June 14 and 21st issues of this year, called Blocked, by June Acocella, about the phenomenon of writer’s block (I can’t remember who told me to go find it, I’m sorry if it was you) .
This article is a great read, even if you aren’t a writer (of course I like it for obvious reasons). It not only discusses the strange psychological phenomenon of writer’s block itself, but also delves into the other reasons that writers stop writing: depression, alcoholism, and my own personal favourite: too much success.
It also includes many of the classic stories of writers who, frustratingly, seemed to do so well and then…didn’t: F Scott Fitzgerald is here, who wrote some of the best fiction of the twentieth century and then drank himself to death; Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then nothing else for the rest of her life (so far); and Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex — nine years apart, because he needed some distance and anonymity from the huge success of the first novel to write the second.
Check it out. And if you do find that cheesemaking article, I’d like to know about it.