Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Friday, February 27, 2009

The New Crop


Regular readers of this page may remember my 2/16 post "Hot Sauce!" in which I boasted of making hot sauce from our home-grown chiles, and also linked to a posting on the web of my hot sauce-inspired short story set in a habitat in cislunar space. We have a lot more chiles in the...


Science Friday: Solar Power Tower/ Looking back at Robinson's MARS


1) Today's Science Friday on NPR will feature this super-cool thing: a solar power plant will be created in the California desert by setting up thousands of small mirrors which will aim sunlight at a "power tower" which will in turn generate steam to run the plant. It is estimated...


Wednesday, February 25, 2009

ANATHEM/ Slush pile


1) Pat lent me his fresh new copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem today. I'm pretty excited about it after reading the dust-jacket notes, so I am passing over to him my as-yet-unread copy of The Power and putting off The Forever War until after I'm done with Anathem....


Monday, February 23, 2009

TIN


Sometimes I get titles for new stories stuck in my head, often based on my mis-hearing of something in conversation or on the radio.  If I could actually write more stories to match all my titles, I could have written by now several anthologies worth of stuff.  In Oklahoma,...


Sunday, February 22, 2009

#2 UPDATE


It appears that the PDF version of M-Brane #2 will be ready for release on 3/1, half a month earlier than originally planned. I’m not sure if I can get the print edition release date in synch with that yet, so I am still going to say 3/15 for that one and get the details up on how to buy it and what it costs for those who want it as soon as I can. Going forward, I would like to have the release dates of the issues be on the first of the month in...


HUNG OVER or SICK?


Last night, Jeff and I actually left the house and went to a public place for a beer or two for the first time since we moved to OKC. While this was fun for a while, the downside of it was that I had to work this morning and I was suffering what I assumed to be a wicked hangover. We have in recent weeks drastically curtailed our alcohol consumption for budgetary reasons (I also ought to keep losing some weight, and am generally able to do it pretty...


Friday, February 20, 2009

NANOTECH ETCH-A-SKETCH


I might be getting in the habit of having Friday on the M-Brane--like on NPR--be "Science Friday."  The cool thing I heard about today on the NPR show was how the Etch-a-Sketch toy inspired a stroke of genius in the realm of making nano-scale transistors, possibly eventually...


Thursday, February 19, 2009

Twitter


Oh, I've added Twitter to my ways of communicating. I don't quite have the hang of it yet, but I'm seeing some possible usefulness for it.  So I'm not really a member of the true Twitterati yet, but over on the left down there somewhere is a box that posts my updates and lets you start following me if you want. There's not much with me to follow yet, thou...


Coming up on the READING LIST...


When I finally finish Terminal Cafe (probably while at work sometime this week--I'm heading into a five-day/60-hour slog starting tomorrow), I think my next two selections will be a couple of well-known classics that I have somehow never managed to catch over the years. One...


Wednesday, February 18, 2009

PARTIAL SITE REMODEL


In an effort to clean up this page a little bit, I have added a sort of second site that links back and forth between here and there, mostly just to hold some of the static stuff that doesn’t change much, like the writers’ guidelines and the subscription info and some other stuff. It’s a temporary measure until I either get a new template or set up a “real” full-blown website for M-Brane, but it should clean things up a bit, or at least make it so...


Tuesday, February 17, 2009

M-BRANE writers' links updated


I added some more writers' site links to that section (down on the left, below the archive). If you are a writer who has sold a story to M-Brane and provided me with a web address in your contract, you should be there. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. Or if you have site, but didn't tell me about it in the first place, but would like to now, then that's cool too.&nb...


PKD's ex-wife finishes "his" novel


This strike me as super-weird, and you ought to look at it if you are a Philip K. Dick fan. I saw it first on Locus, but went to the original source on the Self-Publishing Review site (click...). Evidently Tessa Dick, PKD's last wife has completed/written herself The Owl in Daylight,...


Monday, February 16, 2009

HOT SAUCE!


Jeff and I had a lot of fun this last Saturday by finally turning at least some of our frozen hot chile crop from last season into some hot sauce.  We still have a LOT of peppers in the freezer, but we made three kinds of sauce: 1) a Tabasco-style vinegary sauce, 2) a green...


APEX MAGAZINE


The excellent dark sf/horror sf magazine Apex, which went from being a print digest to an online magazine, is now also available in PDF form and can be ordered for $2.o0 on their website. Editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore kindly let me have a look at the PDF version of their February...


Sunday, February 15, 2009

Baen's BEST OF book


Recently I found at the library the first volume of the Best of Jim Baen's Universe, collecting stories from the online zine from 2006. The stories therein range from so-so to spectacular. I particularly liked Gregory Benford's fascinating (if utterly science-professor-dorky) "Bow...


Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Kindle Project/ Planet Norway


1) I've received some good advice on how to get M-Brane formatted for display on the Kindle. Unfortunately, all the PDF-to-Kindle methods are kinda shaky when there's much formatting involved. I got a somewhat readable result by using an iPhone/Mac app called Stanza.  It was still too messed up to actually use it, though it was much better than what I got just by running it through Amazon's converter. If I had liked the way it displayed...


Friday, February 13, 2009

More Moon/ Darwin


1) This awesome photo comes from Japan's Kaguya space probe which is in orbit of the moon. This was also one of the subjects on today's installment of Science Friday.  I don't have much to say about it, other than that I think it is super-cool. I would, however, recommend going...


Wednesday, February 11, 2009

KINDLE 2


Amazon has unveiled its new version of the Kindle e-reader device. I don't have a Kindle and haven't even ever seen one in person yet, but it really sounds like its catching on with at least some segment of the reading public. I have been investigating making the M-Brane zine available...


PRINT EDITION


I know this will be frustrating to a handful of you, but I am still unable to offer a real subscription option for the print version of M-Brane. For at least the first couple of months, I will be offering something on a month-by-month basis.  I have completed already a first, very small run of issue #1.  The handful of people who made arrangements to receive those copies will receive them in a couple days.  As for the remaining copies,...


TWISTER!


Jeff and I were touched today to receive a few notes from the M-Brane world checking in on us after yesterday's tornado in the OKC area. As it happens, we're fine and weren't really too near the twister's path. We live in the northwest quadrant but in the southern- and easternmost...


Monday, February 9, 2009

ANNOUNCING ISSUE #2 CONTENTS


Though the issue isn't due out for a while yet (officially on 3/15, but it may be moved up to 3/1), I thought I would, just for fun, announce its expected contents and get the writers' names on the internet in another post, and generally keep the M-Brane fire stoked:David McGillveray:...


Saturday, February 7, 2009

More on MOON TERRAFORMING


1. Yeah, I'm still on about this (see yesterday's post).  According to a NASA question/answer site about astrobiology, lunar terraforming is considered unlikely because its low gravity wouldn't be adequate to hold onto a useful atmosphere. I don't know about that, though. I wonder if NASA is giving up too easily (I guess if their optimistic estimate of having a new spacecraft to replace the shuttle--which has, admittedly, become the 1980 Buick...


Friday, February 6, 2009

CONTAMINATING MARS, TERRAFORMING LUNA


Today on Science Friday, NASA researcher Chris McKay talked about how Terran bacteria have certainly made their way to Mars aboard the various landers that humans have sent there. Such bacteria could possibly survive in a dormant state inside this machinery--in areas shielded from...


Thursday, February 5, 2009

Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest


If you are a writer who is into near-future space sf and like to enter contests check out the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, with a deadline of April 1. Grand prize is publication of the story in Jim Baen's Universe (paid, too, at their regular rate) and a package of other prizes including a cool rocket ship trophy. I think it would be super cool if a bunch of writers who have or will have stories in M-Brane would enter this contest,...


Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Market listings, types of submissions, etc.


After railing against zine editorial guidelines (in a comment post on someone else's blog) for things like not replying on rejections, no simultaneous submissions, etc., I decided I'd better double-check my own market listings for M-Brane SF and make sure I am not sending out the wrong signals.  As it happened, my listing on Duotrope did incorrectly indicate that I'm a no-go on simul- and multi-subs.  As it turns out, I couldn't care...


Only half a million dollars? Well, eff that!


I am again going to break my self-imposed rule about keeping tiresome real-world crap off of the M-Brane, but this really turns my crank: President Obama spoke truth to Wall Street and issued these new rules for the worst of the money-wasting, tax-dollar-sucking, economy-wrecking, bail-out-wanting firms requiring that, if they are going to come to Washington, hat in hand, looking for more money, then they will have to be transparent about how they...


Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Print tedium/ Gaylactic Spectrum Awards/ Agony Column


1. I'm going to back away a bit from my recent speculations about starting to sell the print M-Brane #1 "any day now" and just say that it will go up for sale on 2/15 like I originally planned months ago and say no more about it until then. The POD printer has found yet another freaking format issue with it, so I am still not able to see the proof yet.  It makes me wish I had gone with another company that I had originally considered but...


Sunday, February 1, 2009

Frederik Pohl's blog/ Updike/ Magazine schedule


1. I was fascinated to discover the relatively newly-started blog by sf great Frederik Pohl.  How to put this delicately...I wasn't sure until I saw it that Pohl was even still alive.  I didn't have any reason to think otherwise, but I'll it say it wouldn't have surprised...


 

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