The Rules of Scotch
By popular request, here are the Rules of Scotch, as defined in Down From Ten. According to Carol in the book a good scotch: 1) Must be unpolluted (served neat–no water or ice) 2) It must be...
View ArticleWhat A Week!
So, a little while ago I said that Free Will was on production hiatus while I resolved some personal emergencies. Those emergencies related to a sudden lack-of-house situation I found myself in. Well,...
View ArticleOther People’s Sandboxes
Every time I turn around, I see more shared worlds popping up. What used to be a fairly limited market dominated by media and RPG tie-in novels (Star Trek, Star Wars, Dragonlance, etc.) is going...
View ArticleThe Places Lantham Loves
Clarke Lantham, the hero of my detective series, lives and works around the San Francisco Bay. One of the features of the books that draws frequent comment is how much the Bay itself is a character in...
View ArticleOn Equine Excrement
This post contains language you might not want your boss to read over your shoulder. It’s a comparative taxonomy of two subspecies of four-letter excrement. You have been warned. Not to put too fine a...
View ArticleOn Cats and Dogs
Yesterday, I wound up in a protracted philosophical argument with Gail Carriger about the relative utility and desirability of cats and dogs. While normally such conversations between cat people and...
View ArticleSufficiently Advanced? Thoughts on SETI
If you envision science-fictiony science projects as children that come in generations, then the generation that gave birth to SETI is a pretty impressive generation indeed. The minds behind it are...
View ArticleThe NSA, Snowden, and Why It Matters
This is a very long post containing technical information about how data security works, and how it interacts with a social contract. To read the whole thing, click under the cut. This post has been...
View ArticleTruth, Justice, Debate, and Democracy
I frequently preface and postscript posts where I talk about politics, ethics, religion, philosophy, or other touchy things with the categorical statement “I’m interested in the...
View ArticleReview: The Sex Myth by Brooke Magnanti
I’ve been looking forward to this book since the author first announced it a couple years ago, and was greatly dismayed to find, upon its release, that it was only available in Britain (and, I’m...
View ArticleEthical Autodidacticism
Learning is a skill. It is, in my opninion, the single most important skill a person can acquire. Without it, one is forever constrained by one’s culture and peer group and the narratives that form...
View ArticleSeriously Important Things
In between working on the website and audio for the new SooperSekrit project today, I followed a link to an article that turned out to articulate one of the greatest (and most easily fixable) systemic...
View ArticleThe Next Ten Thousand Hours, Ep 01
This week on the podcast, we unveil The Next Ten Thousand Hours. Popular memetics would have you believe that it takes ten thousand hours to get really good at something–fortunately, there are all...
View ArticleThe Next Ten Thousand Hours, Ep 03
This week on The Next Ten Thousand Hours, we have an update on the Crudrat crowdfunding campaign, and the unexpected consequences of having all your hard work pay off exactly as you hoped–and how to...
View Article2014, Here We Come
Rather than a retrospective on the past year, I thought I’d kick off the new year in its wee hours with a look forward at the wider world. In The Princess Bride, Fezzik the Giant says to Inigo: “I hope...
View ArticleDealing In, Episode 11
Download Subscribe Welcome to the First of the Free Will/Next Ten Thousand Hours Feedback shows! This one is episode eleven of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends...
View ArticleBruce’s Law and the Future of The Arts
Excitement. That’s the first thing that happens when disruption hits an industry. A world of possibility opens up and the future gets brighter than a supernova. At the same time comes the...
View ArticleIn Memorium: Douglas Noel Adams
As it’s the birthday of Douglas Adams, lots of folks are tweeting favorite parts of his writing to one another. I’ve been trying to tweet mine, but the thought is too big for 140 characters, so here’s...
View ArticleA Choir of New Voices
Think of this for a moment: Everything you know--your science, your technology, your popular art and culture, and your politics--are the result of thousands of years of technological failure. That...
View Article2015, And Worlds Now Gone
There Are Some Things You Can't Change It's the New Year again, well, almost. You can't begrudge me a couple of days late (I had to do a bit of research for this one). 2015 is opening up in front of us...
View ArticleOn Facing West
I am finishing up The Auto Motive tonight and tomorrow, and as I write, I face west. Whenever possible, I always write facing West. Facing the sunset. Looking out at the sun dipping behind the ocean,...
View ArticleA Final Service?
The Silent Generation (folks born during the run-up to World War 2) is dying. As a cohort, they were a remarkable bunch. Tom Brokaw calls their parents "The Greatest Generation," but Tom Brokaw can go...
View ArticleIndie Authors: Would This Help You?
After a consult with some other authors this weekend, I've been able to wrap up a multi-year project here, designing a spreadsheet-based system for sales tracking for indie authors and other IP...
View ArticleDogonomics
As will surprise nobody who read either He Ain't Heavy (the most recent Lantham mystery) or Free Will (soon to be retitled: The Vindicators--see tomorrow's blog post for details), I'm kind of a dog...
View ArticleSuperDogonomics
Last time we learned that the price and availability of dog breeds varies a surprising amount between Oregon and San Francisco. A Labrador retriever (or mix thereof) can be had in the bay area for $400...
View ArticleHyperDognomics
This is the final post in a series about how my recent search for the perfect pup perpetuted an intellectual penetration into the hidden and varied economics of the marketplace for dogs and puppies in...
View ArticleWhen Every Word Hurts
Today is my first day back writing after five days away. A good thing, too. So many amazing stories have been knocking around in my brain after the difficulties last year, that I’m just dying to get...
View ArticleNow I Can Finally Talk Brexit!
I’ve been holding on to this one for a while. The following post contains geopolitics (not party politics), so if that bothers you, feel free to skip out. Me, since I write books rooted in geopolitics?...
View ArticleThe New Old Future
Warning: The following is a longish post, and contains things some people might consider political. It takes no partisan positions. It is a commentary on the underlying conditions upon which politics...
View ArticleMy Super-Secret Decoder Ring Tribute
I have been a fan of Gregg Taylor and his thrilling throng of thespians over at Decoder Ring Theater since before he even had a proper website. Way way back in the dark times of the early aughts, when...
View ArticleBlogging Antithesis–Now Blogging Kabrakan!
Since I last updated this series in June, the slings and arrows of outrageous life events knocked me of my writing horse. Well, not entirely off the writing horse. I’ve written two more books in the...
View ArticleSome Might Call it Infringement
So. copyright infringement has been a a hot topic over the last year, as numerous high-profile and/or much-blogged about cases have been circulating in the news. Whether it’s Star Trek fan films or...
View ArticleWhat Is Zoroastrianism?
I’ll be the first to admit that the most far-flung bit of speculation I indulge in in The Kabrakan Ascendency (aka The Antithesis Progression)is the Persian Empire having Zoroastrianism as its state...
View ArticleBlogging Antithesis/Kabrakan, Day 296
More action-packed days here in the back of beyond! The last few days my attention has been divided between finding ways to get enough exercise amid sporadic (but severe) rainstorms and working to get...
View ArticleTime To Hold Your Nerve
For the last few years (with the exception of one I missed, IIRC), I’ve been writing New Years posts that have explicitly pushed back against the grouchy gloom and pessimism that seems to obtain...
View ArticleBlogging Kabrakan/Antithesis, Day 431-433
Hello and greetings and updates from the road! Growing up in the San Francisco area, I learned to hate humidity. Going to the east coast or the south or the midwest meant growing a set of gills. How...
View ArticleBook 1? Check (Antithesis/Kabrakan Day 475)
One Down. Five to go. And hot damn does it feel good to say that. I must apologize for my delinquency–I utterly failed in my journalistic duty to document the progress of this book over the last month,...
View ArticleStill Dreaming
This morning, I woke up to snow and everything that comes with it: Icy roads, changing plans, deep-bone aches from the cold… and wonder. When you don’t grow up in the stuff, it doesn’t matter how many...
View ArticleThe Era of the Jackpot
Note: This is my annual New Year’s post where I think out loud about the trendlines of history and what the future might hold. It touches on economics, geopolitics, war, and history. If these things...
View ArticleThe World’s Oldest Honorable Profession
My apologies to regular readers who come around here for the creativity and not the politics. Please skip this post if you are not interested in a powerfully worded opinion. Buckets of digital ink have...
View ArticleThe Abyss Stares Back
Every year, I mark the New Year The post The Abyss Stares Back appeared first on .
View ArticleGuides to The Great Unraveling
Those of you who follow my series The Unfolding World (often these are New Year’s Posts) will know that I’ve been talking in big terms about What Comes Next for the US and the world. I’ve said we’d...
View ArticleThe Great Flappening
This is the latest post in my New Year’s Series. While it can be understood on its own, it assumes a certain amount of familiarity with the background material built up over the last few years. You can...
View ArticleSurfing the Ground Beneath Our Feet
This is a preview for a new series will be a Substack exclusive, so click here to sign up now. A fortress once stood upon a stately hill just ahead of an ancient glacier, frozen in its tracks. The ice...
View ArticleOn Dreams and Their Worth
It’s cold outside. This is an important fact in my corner of the universe, as I have spent the bulk of the past two weeks sleeping in a car in the snow because of a dream. The summer I turned fifteen I...
View ArticleAfter the Peak
ArtisticWhispers Productions presents: Open Vistas An anthology series exploring the vast horizons of human possibility, from the great plains to the great galaxies, from the grubby hands to the...
View ArticleIron, Fire, Muck, and Sludge
Who are these people who keep the streets and castles clean? Who builds the weapons and rivet the warships? Who shear the sheep (or the griffins) whose fur makes the clothing of the arctic adventurers?...
View ArticleSwords In Space!
ArtisticWhispers Productions presents Open Vistas An anthology series exploring the vast horizons of human possibility, from the great plains to the great galaxies, from the grubby hands to the...
View ArticleOpen Vistas: Immortality* (Some Assembly Required)
ArtisticWhispers Productions presents Open Vistas An anthology series exploring the vast horizons of human possibility, from the great plains to the great galaxies, from the grubby hands to the...
View ArticleDeep Breath
We were heading over the highest, most treacherous mountain pass in the state. The road hugged steep hillsides on the right, and—at least in the more hospitable stretches—rode the edge of a sixty-foot...
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