Charles Ardai is nerd royalty by any reasonable standard. He founded Juno in the 1990s. He’s married to Naomi Novik. Hasn’t he done enough?
Apparently not. Charles now runs a press called Hard Case Crime, which publishes old-school pulp fiction. Mostly crime stuff, duh. But it has come to Charles’s attention that the two-fisted …
Cool iPhone app of the day: Simplify Music 2.0. Download it to your iPhone ($2.99—worth it!) and then go to Simplify Media‘s website, register and download the software for Mac, PC or Linux. Now you can stream all your tunes to your iPhone, wherever you are. Doesn’t matter if you’re on Wifi, 3G or pokey old Edge: it works.
I just …
Annoyed by March Madness? Baffled by Fantasy Football? Hate sports of all kinds? Then here’s a fun pastime for you and your ilk: a Summer Movie Box Office Fantasy Draft! But hurry – you don’t have much time!
The game is about using your Box Office predicting skills to select which summer movies will earn the most money. Then, …
For years one of the fundamental questions facing any tech reporter was about cyberwarfare. Did it in fact exist? Was anybody actually cyberwarfighting? Other than disaffected Chinese teenagers? Or did we just sort of want them to, because it would be cool?
When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of
…
I was excited to see Moon. Moody, cerebral thriller set on hyper-realistic one-man lunar base. Starring Sam Rockwell, apparently all by himself. It’s Cast Away meets Solaris! Except maybe good!
My excitement was slightly tempered when I found out that the director, Duncan Jones, is David Bowie’s son, because presumably if you’re David …
I have a think-piece in the magazine this week in which I think thoughts about Star Trek. Kind of a mental shake-down in preparation for the reboot. Fun fact: this marks the very first time Ro Laren’s name has appeared in Time magazine.
In the piece I invoke the TNG episode “Cause and Effect,” which is my all-time favorite Star Trek …
Some notes from a newbie Twitterer:
1. It is fun to twitter @ other people, but it’s only fun for you and the person you’re twittering @. To all third parties, it is boring
2. It adds one more link to the chain of things I do to avoid working (checking work e-mail, checking blog comments, checking home e-mail, checking …
There’s an interesting interview over at Wired with Neil Gaiman talking about his current run writing Batman. Apparently DC decided to kill Batman, wait awhile, then reboot the whole franchise. Much as they did with Superman in the 1980’s. Back then, they had Alan Moore do the honors. The result was “Whatever Happened to the Man of …
Just in case you’re curious, I’ll do it for you. Here are the places where I said (or strongly implied) that I would never Twitter ever: here, here, here, here, here and here.
Sometimes your job makes you do things you didn’t think you’d have to do. I said I didn’t like Twitter. I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.
Hypotwit. …
It is the shame of contemporary medicine that people can still get strep throat. I feel like it should have been stamped out already. Like polio. Perhaps my children will live in such a world. I was born too early.
Because I had strep all weekend, and I also had a huge repetitive-labor task to perform, I watched a lot of movies, …
I’m sorry, I just think the Potter Puppet Pals are important. In this episode: “Millions of little monsters have spawned on Ron’s already filthy scalp.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI4NvFzeC8o&hl=en&fs=1]
J.G. Ballard died on Sunday in London, aged 78.
I’m a little surprised when I think about how much J.G. Ballard I’ve actually read. Like most people my first contact with him was through the movie of Empire of the Sun, which starred — trivia moment — a 13-year-old Christian Bale. Eating grubs. It was a truly, truly great …
