Site Updates

Being short on actual content, this week I bring you an announcement of some long-postponed site updates. I updated:

The About page, with some almost personal information
The Gallery page, with some important credits and a note for artists who happen to find their art used here in a way they don’t approve of
The Fanfiction page, with content ratings
Such stories that have the MA rating, with content descriptors/warnings.

In other news, I managed to crawl out of the quagmire, I’m playing Mass Effect: Andromeda again, and Story by R. McKee is an excellent read.

Image: The Bubble Nebula, by Russell Croman

Here, where the world is quiet;
         Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
         In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
         A sleepy world of streams.

Four Ways to Back Up Your Manuscript

Lately I’ve been following more and more full-time authors on Twitter and several of them mentioned the dubious practice of emailing themselves the current version of their manuscript, as backup. And sure, it works. The same way an open fire in your backyard works as a source of heat for regular daily cooking when you’ve got a perfectly functional stove in the kitchen.

How Much SETI Has Been Done?

The completeness of the search for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and other technosignatures to date is roughly equivalent to having searched a small swimming pool for evidence of fish in all of Earth’s oceans.

How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-dimensional Cosmic Haystack
Jason T. Wright, Shubham Kanodia, and Emily Lubar
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 156, Number 6

Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

Mrs. Dalloway

by V. Woolf

What an odd book! With no plot whatsoever, the narrative flows from one point of view to another, sometimes smoothly and sometimes making nearly unintelligible jumps. Almost every character that’s mentioned, no matter how thin their connection to the titular Mrs. Dalloway, her friends and family, gets to to ‘speak their mind’. I struggled to find connections. At times I struggled to tell what the hell was going on. But despite the oddity, I mostly enjoyed reading it. The writing is unorthodox, occasionally poetic, and I was struck by its beauty more than a few times. So here I’ll save some highlights:

Continue reading Mrs. Dalloway

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Two dismally absurd persons… were posted at the front door; and in one of them I recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar for running a young couple into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in consequence of intoxication rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse clasped round the neck with both hands.

Category: Other