Urban Honking

KmikeyM has a long history of original research. For example, in the domain of food: consider the Fractal Pizza of 2006, the 2007 experimentation with a Taco Burger, or the strangely successful pie shake tests of 2008. Or, on a more serious note, consider the first gathering of the Urban Honking Think Tank, which discussed […]

We live in an age where truth is, if not stranger than fiction, then at least equally strange. Sometimes pop-science books illustrate this point with particular well-researched glee and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is suc…

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that writing The Word for World is Forest was “like taking dictation from a boss with ulcers.” Eager to play around with the ideas of pioneering sleep researcher Dr. William C. Dement, she intended to make a story about the functions of dreaming-sleep. Instead, however, “the boss wanted to talk […]

A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an “unconference,” basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the “future of th…

Occasionally, I pick up a book without knowing a thing about it — because it looks interesting, because I’ve heard about the author, or because it’s a handsome edition. After my Id-devastating experience with Semiotext(e) SF, I was eager for anything by Rudy Rucker, the only one of the book’s editors I’d never heard of, […]

I made this funny little video with Bryan Boyce a couple weeks ago and since then it’s been making some rounds on the internet.  James Mercer plays the “stunt-mouth.”  (no members of Hall and Oates or Broken Bells were harmed in the making of this video)

Dawn of society: happened once, then Repeated. Bombs, Limbs, Obscurity, Oh, nuclear Destruction! Gone are Marin, San Francisco, Berkeley… One by one, the people along this Newly Emptied coast Yoke together to survive. Of course, they are all Radioactive. Haplessly, they Organize themselves. Watching out for outsiders. Wives, TV salesmen, children, physicists, teachers, dogs, murderers, […]

OK, this isn’t explicitly a science-fiction book. Aaaand I promised myself I wouldn’t make many diversions along my path through the Space Canon, but I can’t help that we live in an age where truth is, if not stranger than fiction, then at least equally strange. Sometimes pop-science books illustrate this point with particular well-researched […]

I mentioned earlier that I’ve been working on matching camera movements from After Effects in the physical world. Since that earlier post, my experiments ran into a bit of trouble: I found that it was extraordinarily difficult to get a physical model to line up proportionally to one constructed in 3D within After Effects. In […]

Frederik Pohl is a lesser Grand Master. Lifelong nerd, proto-fanboy, editor of old-timey pulp rags, union president, he is one of those eminently readable, largely innocuous fiction writers who has slogged his way into the canon via sheer persistence. I love Pohl, who has a beautiful imagination and a craftsman’s sense of story, but he […]