Category: Writing
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it’s not the invisible hand that puts packages on our porches
As someone who tries on the regular to drop critiques of the passive voice and its role in the obfuscation of the infrastructural, it’s very nice to see someone making the same point from a much larger soapbox than my own: Through passive voice and other forms of labor-erasing language, delivery notifications ask us to…
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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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structure & narrative
Turns out that sometimes the old, non-metaphorical form of cut’n’paste is the only way to zoom out from the details of a complex story and see how you might fit it all together and make it work. I like to think I’m leaving this for myself as a sort of warning regarding excessive creative ambition,…
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the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth
Apparently it was Gilles Deleuze’s birthday yesterday, so big thanks for BIG OTHER coughing up a selection of quotes by the man himself, among which this one was the one that I really needed to read today: Creation takes place in bottlenecks…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is…
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simply imagining better things isn’t enough
Team FOAM have started pushing out more of the fragments I sent them a while back. Latest out of the pipe is a bit titled “The unbearable lightness of solarpunk”, which for old hands at VCTB will be recognisably a condensation-rewrite of this post and a few others. The timing is serendipitous, coinciding closely with…