May 29, 2018
Though discovered nearly four years ago, an asteroid in orbit near Jupiter ( BZ509, or just “bee-zee” for short) is now said to be originally from outside our solar system. The aliens are here (have been here…). Continue Reading
May 20, 2018
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
In his house at R’yleh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming…
…because of course his ancestral DNA was brought to Earth aboard an asteroid, as part of an ancient bombardment that seeded life…
Well, maybe not. It’s a controversial idea only in the sense that octopi are not aliens and no DNA can possibly have survived an asteroid bombardment hundreds of millions (or even billions) of years ago.
Still, asteroids seeding the universe is a fun idea for fiction writers. Which is the germ of my novel in progress…
https://qz.com/1281064/a-controversial-study-has-a-new-spin-on-the-otherworldliness-of-the-octopus/
April 28, 2018
About ten days ago, I started a countdown on my Facebook “wall.”
Some of my “friends” asked if I was going to send something into space.
When I “commented” that I was leaving Facebook as of May 1st, they begged me not to.
The system will police itself, they argued. User complaints and the #deletefacebook movement/backlash would force Zuckerberg & Co. to change their policies.
Hardly. Instead, they’re doubling down.
In fact, Facebook has been terrified for years that its users would eventually find out that it’s nothing more than an online marketing tool for greedy companies – and that Facebook has sold them out.
It took me a while, but finally I decided enough was enough.
I’m leaving Facebook. Here are a few reasons why I hope you will, as well.
April 22, 2018
On a lark, I signed up for a “BrandYourself” account a few weeks ago.
I’d read about it via a Quartz link and was curious. I’ve been living outside the US Culture Bubble for about two decades now, so I’ve largely missed the “OMG my employer is checking my SNS posts” terror that (apparently) has been sweeping the nation.
My first BrandYourself warning: You have 738 Risk Factors!
OMG. What were they? Was I really putting myself at risk? Continue Reading
April 2, 2018
My friend, you died on Easter morning.
We all knew it would happen sometime soon. But still it seemed sudden.
My grandfather also died during Easter weekend, many years ago. Good Friday, in fact. I was 10. We had to have the wake and funeral right away. The Church said they wouldn’t allow him to be buried on Easter Sunday.
My mother told us that Grandpa went straight to Heaven, because he died on Good Friday. That we would one day see him again.
Terry, you died on April 1st. But it was no Fool’s. It was Easter. You were sleeping, and did not wake. Continue Reading
March 25, 2018
It’s been a few days now since the “big reveal” that a social science researcher sold information from 50,000,000 Facebook users to a third party company (which used said info for various campaign purposes, but that’s another topic for another blog….).
Somehow, we all managed to be surprised by this. What about our right to privacy? How dare our personal information be used without our permission!
How did we all get so naïve about technology and its control over us?
March 17, 2018
This past Monday, city workers came to cut down a cherry tree near our house. It had been there for years.
We found out later that a neighbor had complained that leaves falling in her backyard were a nuisance to clean. The fact that local children (and adults alike) treasured the cherry blossoms each spring seemed to escape her.
And cherry blossom viewing season is just around the corner. What a shame. A waste.
More’s the shame, I only have two pictures of the tree in full bloom.
Fleeting moments, lost in time and memory.
My children wrote a heartfelt letter to the tree, and I taped it as best I could to the stump:
“To the Cherry Tree,
For always showing your cherry blossoms to us until now, thank you.
We miss you, but we’ll never forget that this stump is the stump of a cherry tree.
If this stump ever grows, we want to see cherry blossoms again.”
Stories are made by fools like me…
March 10, 2018
It’s been six weeks since I decided to take a break from Facebook. Back in mid-January I took a screenshot to show students how to figure out which apps they used the most (Line, by far, in case you’re wondering, followed by YouTube… not surprisingly, since my students are all Japanese).
It was a little shocking to see that I was spending over 8 hours a week on FB on my iPhone. My train commute is about an hour and a half each way, and I go to campus four days a week. So basically I spent 2/3 of my train time looking at FB posts.
Yuck. What a waste of reading time. Continue Reading
February 16, 2018
Yes, yet another award for my science fiction novella, Adam’s Stepsons! This time, in the category of “E-book Science Fiction.”
The official rollout of the 2017 New Apple Awards hasn’t yet started (they announce winners in each category slowly over several weeks), but I felt I should announce it here anyway.
Competing against full-length science fiction novels, that’s not too bad!
I guess I really do need to write more. And more. And MORE.
February 11, 2018
So much for my New Year’s resolution of writing more regularly on my blog.
I can blame “writer’s block,” which is sometimes just a convenient excuse for general laziness and sometimes stems from a genuine fear of being entirely uncreative and uninnovative.
(My software program tells me that uninnovative is not a real word. Well, now it is. So there.) Continue Reading
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