Month: April 2023
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indigestible lumps of technical explanation in the guise of purported dialogue
That invigorating yet frustrating thing where someone smarter than you with a bigger audience makes a fairly neat version of an argument you’ve been trying to peddle for a decade or more. Henry ‘Crooked Timber’ Farrell has been reading Cory Doctorow’s latest, and uses it as a foil for talking about what most sf types…
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our sweaty, bumbling, warm humanity
Irina Dumitrescu: Lately I look at the way people around me accept technology without question and worry that I’m becoming a reactionary. I don’t want to be that person — the one who grumbles about cell phones in children’s hands and social media and the polished bilge of ChatGPT substituting for the writing people make,…
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16APR23 / accessions
Seem to have done fairly well on the buy-fewer-books goal; more than two months since my last purchase. (This may be closely related to my being way behind on my reading rate compared to this time last year.) But I was passing the Science Fiction Bookstore with L____ yesterday and, well… I think she enabled…
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freebird / against professional accomplishment
Been pretty quiet here of late, as I’ve been grinding away at the last cluster of academic commitments on my desk, trying to get free of the backlog so I can leave the building without the waiter chasing after me with the bill, so to speak. Along the way, there have been a number of…