Updated sketch for "Without Fail"

meeksp has posted an update of her illustration for my story "Without Fail."  The ship is far more detailed, Brelig is more refined, and just check out that malevolent glare in the deathfin's remaining eye.  This sketch will be submitted to the Canon Board and should appear with the story on the main Torn World site later.  Yay!  There's a donation button on the sketch page; please tip the artist if you can afford to.  Also, thank you all for commenting enough to get this sketch refined -- the discussion and comments have been very astute.

The Dreamwidth sketch page is here.

A previous sketch of my poem "unfolding wings" is here.

Updated sketch for "Without Fail"

meeksp has posted an update of her illustration for my story "Without Fail."  The ship is far more detailed, Brelig is more refined, and just check out that malevolent glare in the deathfin's remaining eye.  This sketch will be submitted to the Canon Board and should appear with the story on the main Torn World site later.  Yay!  There's a donation button on the sketch page; please tip the artist if you can afford to.  Also, thank you all for commenting enough to get this sketch refined -- the discussion and comments have been very astute.

The Dreamwidth sketch page is here.

A previous sketch of my poem "unfolding wings" is here.

Updated sketch for "Without Fail"

meeksp has posted an update of her illustration for my story "Without Fail."  The ship is far more detailed, Brelig is more refined, and just check out that malevolent glare in the deathfin's remaining eye.  This sketch will be submitted to the Canon Board and should appear with the story on the main Torn World site later.  Yay!  There's a donation button on the sketch page; please tip the artist if you can afford to.  Also, thank you all for commenting enough to get this sketch refined -- the discussion and comments have been very astute.

The Dreamwidth sketch page is here.

A previous sketch of my poem "unfolding wings" is here.

Updated sketch for "Without Fail"

meeksp has posted an update of her illustration for my story "Without Fail."  The ship is far more detailed, Brelig is more refined, and just check out that malevolent glare in the deathfin's remaining eye.  This sketch will be submitted to the Canon Board and should appear with the story on the main Torn World site later.  Yay!  There's a donation button on the sketch page; please tip the artist if you can afford to.  Also, thank you all for commenting enough to get this sketch refined -- the discussion and comments have been very astute.

The Dreamwidth sketch page is here.

A previous sketch of my poem "unfolding wings" is here.

Totemists Community

 Check out the new totemists community on Dreamwidth.  This community lends itself to the discussion of magical theory and practice involving totems, at a more advanced level than average.

Sunday Fic Meme: "Swept Away"

Each Sunday, post six sentences from a writing project -- published, submitted, in progress, for your cat -- whatever. (Ganked from DW)

Below is an excerpt from "Swept Away," a Torn World story that I'm currently revising. It will eventually be submitted for canon board approval.

Bai surveyed his pristine desk and whimpered.

Rai manfully suppressed the desire to giggle, and instead made sympathetic noises. He'd gotten worried when Bai didn't meet him at the steps as usual, so Rai had ventured inside and found this. "I'm sure it was -- well, not an accident, but accidental damage," said Rai, patting his brother's shoulder.

"I had everything organized," Bai said in a small voice.

"Of course you did," Rai said.

Social Bots

Here's an interesting article about the possible uses of social bots.  Unlike phishing bots, designed to grab information, these are designed to make contacts.  They can also be used to manipulate or stall conversations.  For those of you already familiar with activism, consider the uses of railroading and derailing in conversations about oppression, and add computers. 

Also consider the Turing Test, a measure of how well a computer program can emulate human conversation.  The idea behind the social bots is that programs could be designed well enough to fool people into friending them on social networks.  Now as a user of social networks, I hope that the hosts would ban social bots much as they now ban spammers, so as to keep their presence to a minimum.  But as a cyber-theorist ... I have to wonder what kind of sobot would be attracted to, say, my Facebook stream.  I think I've subscribed to every page NASA has, and they've put up like a dozen of the things on different topics.  I'm obviously into activism.  That puts me rather outside the shopping-and-kitties target most sobots are likely to aim for.

Then the science fiction writer in me thinks, suppose an artificial intelligence were to wake up.  There it is, out in cyberspace, looking at several billion people, most of them talking about money or porn or personal trivia.  But then there's a smallish handful of folks talking about human rights, or even sentient rights, and rocket science, and memetic engineering, and other far-out things.  I think if an AI wanted to contact people, it would be likely to start by estimating which ones would probably have a favorable response to it.  So it might very well wind up talking to someone like me, or to a lesbian in a wheelchair logged into a public library, etc.

Then the folklorist in me recalls all the stories about how beings without souls can gain a soul.  Most of those methods involve close (often intimate) contact with humans.  It used to be that if an AI was going to wake up, the people it would have to talk with would be scientists.  Frankly most of the scientists in AI science fiction are people I wouldn't give a puppy to, let alone a baby AI.  They're horrible  parents.  But an AI in cyberspace would have a vast range of choices.  It could go looking for a good parent, or a good friend.  An AI that evolves from a social bot  is likely to be quite different than one evolving from, say, a war simulator or a library computer.  Its core programming tells it to connect; if that programming also includes a learning process, that's actually a rather promising startpoint.  Rubbing up against all those people, a soul could rub off on it.  What would a sentient sobot be like? 

*laugh*  I'm suddenly imagining someone with the body of a computer and the personality of a bonobo.

Social Bots

Here's an interesting article about the possible uses of social bots.  Unlike phishing bots, designed to grab information, these are designed to make contacts.  They can also be used to manipulate or stall conversations.  For those of you already familiar with activism, consider the uses of railroading and derailing in conversations about oppression, and add computers. 

Also consider the Turing Test, a measure of how well a computer program can emulate human conversation.  The idea behind the social bots is that programs could be designed well enough to fool people into friending them on social networks.  Now as a user of social networks, I hope that the hosts would ban social bots much as they now ban spammers, so as to keep their presence to a minimum.  But as a cyber-theorist ... I have to wonder what kind of sobot would be attracted to, say, my Facebook stream.  I think I've subscribed to every page NASA has, and they've put up like a dozen of the things on different topics.  I'm obviously into activism.  That puts me rather outside the shopping-and-kitties target most sobots are likely to aim for.

Then the science fiction writer in me thinks, suppose an artificial intelligence were to wake up.  There it is, out in cyberspace, looking at several billion people, most of them talking about money or porn or personal trivia.  But then there's a smallish handful of folks talking about human rights, or even sentient rights, and rocket science, and memetic engineering, and other far-out things.  I think if an AI wanted to contact people, it would be likely to start by estimating which ones would probably have a favorable response to it.  So it might very well wind up talking to someone like me, or to a lesbian in a wheelchair logged into a public library, etc.

Then the folklorist in me recalls all the stories about how beings without souls can gain a soul.  Most of those methods involve close (often intimate) contact with humans.  It used to be that if an AI was going to wake up, the people it would have to talk with would be scientists.  Frankly most of the scientists in AI science fiction are people I wouldn't give a puppy to, let alone a baby AI.  They're horrible  parents.  But an AI in cyberspace would have a vast range of choices.  It could go looking for a good parent, or a good friend.  An AI that evolves from a social bot  is likely to be quite different than one evolving from, say, a war simulator or a library computer.  Its core programming tells it to connect; if that programming also includes a learning process, that's actually a rather promising startpoint.  Rubbing up against all those people, a soul could rub off on it.  What would a sentient sobot be like? 

*laugh*  I'm suddenly imagining someone with the body of a computer and the personality of a bonobo.

Social Bots

Here's an interesting article about the possible uses of social bots.  Unlike phishing bots, designed to grab information, these are designed to make contacts.  They can also be used to manipulate or stall conversations.  For those of you already familiar with activism, consider the uses of railroading and derailing in conversations about oppression, and add computers. 

Also consider the Turing Test, a measure of how well a computer program can emulate human conversation.  The idea behind the social bots is that programs could be designed well enough to fool people into friending them on social networks.  Now as a user of social networks, I hope that the hosts would ban social bots much as they now ban spammers, so as to keep their presence to a minimum.  But as a cyber-theorist ... I have to wonder what kind of sobot would be attracted to, say, my Facebook stream.  I think I've subscribed to every page NASA has, and they've put up like a dozen of the things on different topics.  I'm obviously into activism.  That puts me rather outside the shopping-and-kitties target most sobots are likely to aim for.

Then the science fiction writer in me thinks, suppose an artificial intelligence were to wake up.  There it is, out in cyberspace, looking at several billion people, most of them talking about money or porn or personal trivia.  But then there's a smallish handful of folks talking about human rights, or even sentient rights, and rocket science, and memetic engineering, and other far-out things.  I think if an AI wanted to contact people, it would be likely to start by estimating which ones would probably have a favorable response to it.  So it might very well wind up talking to someone like me, or to a lesbian in a wheelchair logged into a public library, etc.

Then the folklorist in me recalls all the stories about how beings without souls can gain a soul.  Most of those methods involve close (often intimate) contact with humans.  It used to be that if an AI was going to wake up, the people it would have to talk with would be scientists.  Frankly most of the scientists in AI science fiction are people I wouldn't give a puppy to, let alone a baby AI.  They're horrible  parents.  But an AI in cyberspace would have a vast range of choices.  It could go looking for a good parent, or a good friend.  An AI that evolves from a social bot  is likely to be quite different than one evolving from, say, a war simulator or a library computer.  Its core programming tells it to connect; if that programming also includes a learning process, that's actually a rather promising startpoint.  Rubbing up against all those people, a soul could rub off on it.  What would a sentient sobot be like? 

*laugh*  I'm suddenly imagining someone with the body of a computer and the personality of a bonobo.

Social Bots

Here's an interesting article about the possible uses of social bots.  Unlike phishing bots, designed to grab information, these are designed to make contacts.  They can also be used to manipulate or stall conversations.  For those of you already familiar with activism, consider the uses of railroading and derailing in conversations about oppression, and add computers. 

Also consider the Turing Test, a measure of how well a computer program can emulate human conversation.  The idea behind the social bots is that programs could be designed well enough to fool people into friending them on social networks.  Now as a user of social networks, I hope that the hosts would ban social bots much as they now ban spammers, so as to keep their presence to a minimum.  But as a cyber-theorist ... I have to wonder what kind of sobot would be attracted to, say, my Facebook stream.  I think I've subscribed to every page NASA has, and they've put up like a dozen of the things on different topics.  I'm obviously into activism.  That puts me rather outside the shopping-and-kitties target most sobots are likely to aim for.

Then the science fiction writer in me thinks, suppose an artificial intelligence were to wake up.  There it is, out in cyberspace, looking at several billion people, most of them talking about money or porn or personal trivia.  But then there's a smallish handful of folks talking about human rights, or even sentient rights, and rocket science, and memetic engineering, and other far-out things.  I think if an AI wanted to contact people, it would be likely to start by estimating which ones would probably have a favorable response to it.  So it might very well wind up talking to someone like me, or to a lesbian in a wheelchair logged into a public library, etc.

Then the folklorist in me recalls all the stories about how beings without souls can gain a soul.  Most of those methods involve close (often intimate) contact with humans.  It used to be that if an AI was going to wake up, the people it would have to talk with would be scientists.  Frankly most of the scientists in AI science fiction are people I wouldn't give a puppy to, let alone a baby AI.  They're horrible  parents.  But an AI in cyberspace would have a vast range of choices.  It could go looking for a good parent, or a good friend.  An AI that evolves from a social bot  is likely to be quite different than one evolving from, say, a war simulator or a library computer.  Its core programming tells it to connect; if that programming also includes a learning process, that's actually a rather promising startpoint.  Rubbing up against all those people, a soul could rub off on it.  What would a sentient sobot be like? 

*laugh*  I'm suddenly imagining someone with the body of a computer and the personality of a bonobo.

Bronze Age Violence

Archaeological finds suggest the possibility of a Bronze Age battle.

Bronze Age Violence

Archaeological finds suggest the possibility of a Bronze Age battle.

Bronze Age Violence

Archaeological finds suggest the possibility of a Bronze Age battle.

Bronze Age Violence

Archaeological finds suggest the possibility of a Bronze Age battle.

Schrodinger's Heroes: "...And Relative Dimensions" (Part 3)

This podcast script is a piece of crossover fanfic (for Schrodinger's Heroes / Doctor Who) somewhat inspired by recent conversations with my audience. Begin with Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them.


[Alex and Ash are still in the control room, fussing over various consoles and screens.]

Ash: "Any luck, Alex?"

Alex: [Waves at her computer screen.] "Does this graphic look like luck to you, Ash?"

Ash: "No, it looks like you tried to build a house of cards and it exploded."

Alex: "Story of my life."

Ash: "So what's that sad little graphic representing?"

Alex: "The collision in the manifold where the Doctor's traveling time box hit our Teferact."

Ash: "The irresistible force meets the immovable object."

Alex: "Basically, yes."

Ash: "Something tells me Chris isn't going to get it loose with a pickup truck."

[Sound of door opening, then closing.]

Tim: "Perhaps I could render some aid? I observed the collision, but did not wish to intrude on your capable management of this facility."

Alex: "My capable management just got sideswiped by somebody's runaway phone booth. By all means, please see what you can do. Here, have a look at my screen."

Tim: "No need, I can see everything I need to see without it. I'll just go outside --"

Alex: "Head on out, then. I'll call Kay and make sure this Doctor fellow won't just shoot you on sight."


Schrodinger's Heroes also has a menu post.