I know Cory Doctorow has loomed large over this blog in its resurrected form, but anyone distributing art and music through platforms like Amazon and Spotify should at least think hard about the analyses of those platforms he and Rebecca Giblin present in CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM. I’m not an Audible member and don’t want to sign… Continue reading Why streaming doesn’t pay
Author: Matt
What are neurophysiologists doing?
I had something else lined up for today, but it’s humbling and fun to be cited (“cited”) 12 years later for a 2010 comment on a methodological issue in cognitive neuroscience that’s apparently still polarizing researchers today. (Marc is a former labmate, of course; no one ever said #networking wasn’t a thing in science, or… Continue reading What are neurophysiologists doing?
This strange, despondent land
The beggar had crept closer as I watched. He pointed at the old man, and said, “Still come from north and south to study here. Someday we are great again.” Then I thought of my own lovely country, whose eclipse–though without genetic damage–lasted twenty-three hundred years. And I gave him money, and told him that, yes, I was certain America would be great again someday, and left him, and returned here.
I have opened the shutters so that I can look across the city to the obelisk and catch the light of the dying sun. Its fields and valleys of fire do not seem more alien to me, or more threatening, than this strange, despondent land. Yet I know that we are all one–the beggar, the old man moving among the machines of a dead age, those machines themselves, the sun, and I.
“Seven American Nights,” Gene Wolfe (1978)
Questionable animal husbandry
We’re not quite twee enough to actually own a bearded dragon, but more than twee enough to send our kids to the kind of school that would ask us to foster one for the summer. With the kids, I lean really hard on the idea that the lizard is a guest and not a toy.… Continue reading Questionable animal husbandry
Grasshopper, but make it steampunk.
Eastern Lubber grasshopper, Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, SC. I had no idea what it was when I first saw it, but I showed my 8-year-old son a picture and he identified it immediately. I assumed he had mistaken something else for the word “lubber” but no, as usual when it comes to R. and animals,… Continue reading Grasshopper, but make it steampunk.
“Witness increases the cost of ignorance.
It increases the cost of sabotage and blamelessness, which might bring people to your side who would enter awareness if the cost had not been made so high, and which raises the ideological overhead of blameless people whose main goal is avoiding the lower costs of repair so they can profit from the higher cost… Continue reading “Witness increases the cost of ignorance.
Accountabilipost
I put myself on a regimen after Labor Day: 60,000 new words of Heatstroke Heartbeat by the end of the year. (Heatstroke Heartbeat is the third installment in a quartet about the illegal underground dragon-racing scene in the city of Yemareir; the first two books, Brimstone Slipstream and Windburn Whiplash are awaiting cover art before… Continue reading Accountabilipost
Strawberry Blonde
Tonight’s writing fuel. Part of a mixed-four pack procured from Capitol Cider House at the DC Farmers’ Market on our way back from Myrtle Beach. It’s hard to find actual dry cider in New Jersey; this is it, and it’s good. “Strawberry Blonde.”
New exoskeleton who dis
Spotted at the Nash County Rest Area in Dortches, North Carolina, USA. I’ve never actually seen a just-emerged cicada before, and the lightness of its coloration makes it hard to tell what kind it is. But the Internet says there’s a thing called a “dog day cicada” that lives in North Carolina, and I’m a… Continue reading New exoskeleton who dis
Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain?
For reasons, I’ve been driving a car without my usual presets or a Bluetooth link, which I guess is a good way to discover radio? I ran into WDVR‘s Wednesday morning show, “Loose Threads,” which I stuck with long enough to hear a vaguely Fleetwood Mac song I don’t remember, a cover of “Girl from… Continue reading Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain?