Topic suggested by Tod Detre Many fiction writers assume they’ll be a good dungeon master. “That adventure we just played had such a simple plot! An old man sends us into an abandoned labyrinth for a lost gem? Where’s the twist? I can do muuuch better.” I was one such Read more
Reading an article on Neil Gaiman, one thing that really struck me was how many women ended up being victimized also as free labor: nannies only paid when it was worthwhile to bribe them to sign an NDA. The article led me to watch Amanda Palmer’s TED talk “The Art Read more
I was fixing this professor’s computer, and we got along great. I was one of only two Unix support personnel at the university and he was a Unix user. He was also from Turkey and made me Turkish Coffee every time I came to his office, so I put that Read more
In the book, “The Battle-Fields of 1866,” there is an essay by Edward Dicey about Heligoland, a small German archipelago in the North Sea near Denmark. In the essay, Dicey records the oldest known version of a now-famous adage: What the inhabitants do during the winter is a subject too Read more
Call me a Luddite: I’m fed up with predictive large language models. I’m exhausted with it. I gave the stuff the good old college try. I looked at what it could do, how to program it. I started way before it was a Big Deal. Like many people today, back Read more
I despise hand-selling my books. The whole reason I’m not a self-published author is I want someone else to do that. The shame is painful. The embarrassment. I feel exactly how I used to feel when my mom would ask strangers for money. So it was something of a surprise Read more
An annual accounting of my writing for the year. I had a novella come out this year, some short stories, and a game!