Blog

I’ve been reading Robin Sloan’s video game development diary with much interest. Partly because his joy of creation that shines through – and the world desperately needs more of that in these COVID-19 times. But also partly because he’s using machine learning to generate descriptions of castles for his video game. A bit of background:… Read more Adventures in machine-generated text: short-burst creativity, and why classical CS has it wrong

A friend of mine recently posted this article, rather boldly titled “How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained“. It was either read that or watch that man eat a $120,000 banana, and any attack on intellectuals seemed slightly less depressing than wondering how the hell a banana is worth $120,000. The… Read more On the destruction of metanarratives: the map is not the territory, but . . .

In which a Twitter argument forced me to think about my evolving personal definitions of science fiction.

In which I read the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a writer and talk about the things I’ve learned, from handling themes to the tradeoffs of branching storylines to shaved knuckles in the hole.