There’s a bird I hear in the mornings that I think of as a wind-down bird, because it sounds like a mechanical wind-up toy at the end of its stored-up torque, the sound getting lower as its slows to a stop. Two notes, maybe a musical third apart, sliding from low to high, that pairing […]
Read more "For Real, Though"For that one descending eye-lash curve of bridge where the Beaverton-Hillsdale drops down onto Barbur, you can get some serious speed on a bike, coasting down into that first view of Portland, the lane leaning left, but your mind can keep going out over the river, into the sunrise. You have all of this momentum, […]
Read more "Shamanic Moon and Spoken Coasts"I was in the attic-space of a friend of mine, on the Fourth of July, where he had set up a work nest of neatly organized tools, drawers of electrical components. He pointed out, on the opposite wall, an impressive collection of medals won by his marathon-running wife. Both sides of the room were collapsed […]
Read more "Gates and Streams"Let me give away the punchline to a joke from The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), by Ian M. Banks: The Mistake Not…, a culture ship, embattled with a rogue Gzilt colonel hours before the entire civilization “sublimes” into a multi-dimensional (ineffable, but verifiable) beyond, taps for an instant the potentialities of hyperspace in order to teleport […]
Read more "Sun Gate Serials: Yes, And…"The main variable in a javascript file is usually a function: var main = function(){}; with whatever code you want between the braces. What you open, though, you need to close. What you start you need to finish. You link to the script from the main html page, usually somewhere near the end of the […]
Read more "Sun Gate Serials–Continuity Drift"There is a creek-bed running into the river, filled with fossils. Bivalves and plant stems, shells and weird brachiating ferns. “I could make a table,” I told my brother, “where you have pictures of all these, with the estimated age, type, location…” We were sitting by a fireplace, itself made out of fossil-infused limestone. I […]
Read more "Mongol Empires, Mongrel Swarms [3 of 3]"AGENTS OF INSTINCT The Defiant Agents, by Andre Norton (pen name of Alice Mary Norton), is in the public domain. You can download the text version here or the audiobook from this librivox page. In Norton’s novel, written in the 60s, the Russians and Americans are in a war to colonize planets, after Earth was […]
Read more "Mongol Empires, Mongrel Swarms [2 of 3]"The Mongoliad, a trilogy set when the heirs of Genghis Khan are marching down the steppes to Europe, was written by a group of authors. One of them was Neal Stephenson. I heard him mention the project at a book signing in Iowa City: he wanted to write better fight scenes than had been featured […]
Read more "Mongol Empires and Mongrel Swarms [1 of 3]"I nonetheless liked the idea of visible electronics, and I remember dreaming of a world where everything was built to be radically transparent, where you could see through the cosmetic and superficial, all technology giving up its secrets, spilling its source code—cars, washing machines, computers, governments…
Read more "closed phones, open philosophy"In late February I was on the back of a motorbike in the Dominican Republic, at three or so in the morning. A different part of the road, days before, had been washed out by a mudslide. It was an island of motorcycles, the gas for which would be sold at the side of the […]
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Ecological Humanist 