I don’t much like reading books about time travel. Mostly it just makes me dizzy, I don’t deal well with paradoxes. There are a few exceptions, like Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp and Time and Again by Jack Finney. John Varley’s Millennium is another that has taken up permanent occupancy on my…
Read more One of the best robot characters ever created in SF
[Featured image: Termessos, Turkey–Dana Stabenow, 2011] Looking forward to seeing this one. (h/t SueB) I don’t know how often I’ve recommended something to someone and when they reported back got some version of what he writes about here. Read all you want to about where you’re going but know yourself well enough to follow your…
Dana sez–I’m not what you could call a political animal. Mostly I just want those guys to take my taxes and fix the roads and then leave me the hell alone. I always vote, sure, but that’s as much to honor my parents as it is to do my duty as a citizen. This election…
The Classic Age’s equivalent of the Grand Tour with a young Gordianus the Finder, in company with his teacher, Antipater, the dead epic poet. Yes, really. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the statue of Zeus at Olympia; the Colossus of Rhodes, alas fallen and in pieces but nevertheless awe-inspiring; the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (a…
Read more “What is the achievement of a mere poet, compared to that of an Olympic victor?”
“Everybody was quiet, as if I knew what to do.” HCR for the history, in bite-sized pieces. “We are America.” Fun! Although what does it say about me that I didn’t recognize any of them until the Porg? (h/t Laughing Squid) This year’s iPhone Photography Award winners. As always, WOW. See them all here. (h/t…
The Royal Sunset lilies are lacking their usual lush splendor, but at least they bloomed. There was a cow with two calfs this year who simply delighted in tromping all over the rock garden and taste testing everything in reach. All three of the Thunderhead sedum in the Duchess’s garden came back. And the Songbird…
Saw this coming, as did everyone else, including, if you had asked it, ChatGPT. The motion and brief ask the court to rule that defendants OpenAI and Microsoft infringed on the authors’ copyrights by pirating their works, copying them to train their AI, and trading the books between them as currency, and to reject the…
I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the mental image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, to the point that I started growing my own potatoes, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me…
Read more I can handle bad news, but not with every mouthful.
