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My friend Kris Kramer is running a website that highlights indie fiction over at The 4th Realm. The site was originally set up to feature serial shared-world stories that he and some friends are working on, but the group is now soliciting other works of fiction to appear on the site. My story “Authenticity” was [...]

Listen my children and you shall hear What my grandfather thought of Paul Revere I read somewhere long ago that the problem with a liar is not that he can’t be believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. It’s a wonderful insight, and I suspect something similar can be said of historians, who make [...]

My Dad and I got into an interesting debate while nursing cold beverages on the deck of his place in Canada,  during the annual “cram everyone into one house and see how long we last” multi-family retreat. We always have some good discussions during these gatherings. But my Dad and I aren’t that often on [...]

Somewhere along the line, between devouring everything Tolkien wrote nine times, and putting down the eighth volume of The Wheel of Time in disgust, I lost my appetite for fantasy. There was a time when I would have departed for Middle Earth in a heartbeat, if you had shown me the door. I used to [...]

“Have you seen that thing?” “What thing?” “That thing that does that thing it does.” “Oh, that thing. No, sorry.” ~ thing; noun; from Old English thing, assembly; akin to Old High German ding, thing, assembly; Gothic theihs, time. ~ I’m not known for brevity. Whether speaking or writing I tend to use a lot [...]

Ok, I admit I have been in the middle of a really unproductive cycle for the last couple of weeks. I’m not talking about work. I’m talking about the other 50% of my life, or more specifically the 50% of that 50% that is available for liesure, and which for some strange reason I can’t [...]

Given the title and what I often write about here, you might think this post is about either losing one’s way, or becoming hopelessly mired in the documentation for some arcane class library. It’s about neither of those things, nor is it concerned with any other variation on the theme of not knowing where you are. [...]

It was with some degree of sadness that I closed the cover of Patrick O’Brian’s “Blue at the Mizzen” last evening. The act marked the end of my second trip through the twenty-volume series since I first had “Master and Commander” recommended to me by my brother ten years ago or more. I enjoyed this journey every [...]

I struck out three times at the library this week. One was a Ben Bova novel about two brothers on opposite sides of the stem cell/cloning/immortality issue. It started pretty well, but then kept switching between first person protagonists in the first three chapters. I like the first person perspective, but I guess I don’t [...]

If you have any interest in intelligent algorithms Ari Schulman has an article worth reading in the Winter 2009 volume of The new Atlantis. I am not particularly fascinated with what some think of as Artificial Intelligence; I can’t stand the term, to be frank, and hold the acronym in no higher esteem. But I [...]