You may have noticed that there’s actually a new format and some stuff on this website now. Well - that’s because I upgraded to WordPress and went through the conversion process. I recreated the accounts of anybody who’d posted in the last couple months, but the passwords will need to be reset. Send me an IM or an email if you don’t remember/know if your account still exists or needs to be created.

In the meanwhile, you’ll probably see features show up and style change as I beat this site more into what I want it to be.

-z

I haven’t submitted anything in a really really long time. Two toddlers and back in the work force, I’m really lucky if I get four hours of sleep a night.

In the past, I’ve asked for suggestions on what obnoxious Christmas gifts to give my monkey boy nephews. Now that I am a parent myself, I can give you recommendations for people you hate who have kids. Here are some suggestions to what give their kids - well those with age 5 and under (Evil Bastard - pay attention now - even though your bundle of joy is still pretty much in the blob stage):

I just checked my gmail and found this strange rampling message.
————
Lou to me, Nov 24

Well I am back on American soil now, bloodied but unbowed, barely escaped with my life from the wilds of Europe and bonnie Scotland with many a tale to recount, strange and terrible, glorious and awe-inspiring. All the children of the village, and the adults as well, gather around me wide-eyed in the local pub to hear the tales of my adventures abroad, which grow taller with each telling.

I tried to find a previous story that I’d written about Charles Stross’s Concrete Jungle but I could find it. So if you didn’t see it, that short story is freely available for reading here. I’d describe it as BOFH meets Van Helsing.

Anyways - I was updating my Amazon wish list with books, and remembered how much I liked Concrete Jungle. It took me about 45 minutes to hit the right combination of key words to find it again. When browsing through Amazon, I found that one of his books, Accelerando is freely available for download in PDF format from Amazon.

That’s pretty neat.

From Publishers Weekly
Stross (Singularity Sky) explores humanity’s inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, “Slow Takeoff,” “free enterprise broker” Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade’s transhumans. In “Point of Inflection,” Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can–sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx’s grandson, Sirhan, roister through “Singularity,” in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross’s three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics—breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space.