[A Pleasurable Headache]
Some quick updates:
- I continue to suck badly at Chess. But I’m enjoying playing. And then losing.
- Lockdown Haircut 2 is imminent. Reader, I am genuinely excited. This is how bad things are.
- She is now available from comic shops and the ComixTribe store. Words by Ryan K Lindsay, art by Chris Panda and edits by myself. Look at how fantastic it looks:
SHE: At the Tower of All That is Known from @JustChrisPanda & @ryanklindsay is available in comic shops and on the ComixTribe Shop! https://t.co/CiKBDc5jbZ #Scifi #indiecomics pic.twitter.com/hAycSszUvd
— ComixTribe (@ComixTribe) February 15, 2021
- I submitted my first short of the year this week. I think I referred to it here before as Project Sin Eater. Anyway, now the story is called Simmer and it deals with the online ‘rage’ economy and the horror it unleashes. Fingers crossed!
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Links
Novelists are writing for TV more than ever. How it’s changing the industry
This started around the time of The Sopranos and then shows like The Leftovers (based on the book by Tom Perrotta) took this idea and ran with it. I had no idea Walter Mosley was writing for TV now too though.
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20 years of orange cones: The history of VLC
https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source
The story of one of the most popular apps of all time opens with a need. In this case, French uni students wanted/needed to play Duke Nukem 3D on the campus network. Impossible on the ancient network, outside influence was needed. In this case a French broadcaster offered to trial an IP-delivered TV network to the students. The only catch was an app was needed to play back the programmes. The article captures the very best of the open source movement.
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U.S. Navy Has Patents on Tech It Says Will ‘Engineer the Fabric of Reality’
“One of Pais and the Navy’s patents described what the propulsion system and fusion drive would be used for—a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.” According to the patent, the craft could travel land, sea, and outer space at incredible speeds. Other patents invented by Pais and filed by the Navy include a “high temperature superconductor,” a “electromagnetic field generator,” and a “high frequency gravitational wave generator.”
What could possibly go wrong?
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‘I’ve been called Satan’: Dr Rachel Clarke on facing abuse in the Covid crisis
Meanwhile, here on plague island, certain sections of the population continue to fall deeper into the rabbit hole. We are now at the point where NHS staff and doctors are being abused and threatened for merely doing their job. A job that has grown incredibly harder as an already underfunded system tries to deal with the catastrophe that is Covid-19.
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I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opinion/michael-goldhaber-internet.html
Charlie Warzel talks to Michael Goldhaber a former physicist whose many theories about the internet have, depressingly, come to pass.
“Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: “the attention economy.”
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The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
I think most of us feel powerless when thinking about, or even trying to face up to, the climate crisis that is happening around us. This article, from ProPublica, follows Peter Kalmus (a climate scientist) and shows the effects on his psyche and his family life as he tries to warn those closest to him about the looming threat. It is sobering reading.
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‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 1
Great piece at MediaLens on the notion of self-sacrifice in trying times. Part Two is here.
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Pigs Can Game, Scientists Discover
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g4d5/pigs-can-game-scientists-discover
Late addition after I saw it in the Nothing.Here newsletter. You should all go subscribe btw.
Also, don’t eat pigs.
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I am off to eagerly await the delivery of some hair clippers. See you in two!