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You probably have to be Jewish to appreciate the full and bitter irony of this sentence: Nearly 11 months into a devastating war, a serious new challenge has emerged in Gaza: polio. Growing up, there were two uncontested heroes in the Jewish-American pantheon: Sandy Koufax and Jonas Salk. If you were really in the know, you’d add a third: Albert Sabin. Salk invented the polio vaccine, Sabin invented the oral …

She said, I don’t think I can do this anymore. I love you but I can’t do this. I said, But if you love me, why can’t you try? She said, It’s over. I said, I know we aren’t perfect, but who is? She said, It’s over. I said it’s over. I said nothing. But later I thought about what I should have said. I should have said, But we …

(for an Italian publication, 2009) The Eyes -- "When the Night Falls" The Beatles -- "Strawberry Fields Forever" John's Children -- "A Midsummer Night's Scene" We The People -- "You Burn Me Up and Down" The Byrds -- "Everybody's Been Burned" Pink Floyd -- "Paintbox" The Doors - "The Soft Parade" Love -- "You Set The Scene" The Stooges - "Ann" Scott Walker -- "Boy Child" Miles Davis -- "Bitches …

I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs in strawberry?” saga). If I had the inclination to double …

Recently I took a trip down memory lane and explored my logo design archives from the ‘90s. I’ve been designing logos since then—almost 30 years ago, before the internet was even a thing. In this article, I’ve gathered some of those early logo designs, along with background information from the client projects I’ve worked on over the past three decades. Finding inspiration was perhaps more challenging then, but there was …

Today the postman surprised me with a card-backed envelope which contained a true ‘blast from the past’. The message came from a kind lady in Riegate, Surrey and contained a publicity leaflet of an advertisement in The Essex Countryside magazine from 1991. Sarah Ballingal wrote “My mother used to live in Walton-on-the-Naze and we have come across this article amongst my late sister’s belongings.” I remember the leaflet well and …

When it comes to interim stages of game dev, I am a bit of a packrat. I have paper maps from when I was doing Ultima Online, and UI sketches for Star Wars Galaxies… of course, for my current thing, Stars Reach, I have a whole pile of images and videos going back to the very earliest days of the project. I mention this because we just posted up a …

I covered Showtime’s marvelous film noir series, Fallen Angels, in my second volume. This anthology show delivered six episodes in the summer of 1993, followed by another nine in the autumn of 1995. Each playlet was adapted from a story by a famed noir author, and was blessed with a phenomenal attention to detail appropriate to post-World War II Los Angeles: a heavily stylized depiction of the city populated by …

I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper and a pencil and I feel unbelievably organised and flexible, day-to-day. It’s because it’s simple. …

1. The more science fiction and fantasy you read the easier it is to guess where any given premise will go. When a book upends your predictions you feel like you’ve got something special. Doris Piserchia—like Margaret St. Clair, another neglected SF writer—has a talent for dodging the predictable narrative. Take the first Piserchia novel I read, I, Zombie (originally published under the name Curt Selby). A company uses remote-controlled …

This time-lapse drone video following the climbing route up Mount Everest does more to make clear the sheer scale of Everest, and in greater detail, than the eponymous 1998 documentary I first saw in an IMAX theatre—which wasn’t exactly a slouch. This video, however, uses a commercially available drone that starts at around C$2,750 (and it’s no coincidence that it was posted by the drone manufacturer, because oh lord does …

Why do governments go after companies and executives of services of more weakly encrypted tools? It’s very hard, this early, to pierce through what’s going on with the French authorities’ arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram — but that doesn’t stop people from having pet theories. Was it retaliation from the US and the FBI for not backdooring Telegram? Was it a favor to Durov so he could …

Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest, c. 1465–1470 This post annotates a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we—the weirdos of internet-making and online life—have …

It isn’t, as the Celestron website one-sidedly states on its page about observing Pluto, a “fun holiday to celebrate.” What today is is the anniversary of a terrible day for science and knowledge, a day in which a very political vote was taken, which has done tremendous harm to science education and communication over the last 18 years.“It” is the 18th anniversary of the highly controversial vote by four percent …

Reflecting on my reading over the past year, I have found that I have been drawn to a considerable amount of historical fiction, most of which takes the lives of marginalised women as a starting point. Here are my top recommendations in this genre – as usual, in no particular order. The Maiden by Kate Foster In June I did a literary walking tour of Edinburgh (I know, a book …