Sold: Dhuluma No More…

I’m very pleased to say that my tale of climatech, climaterrorism, the global south, and journalism in the mid-21st century, “Dhuluma No More,” has been accepted for publication in Asimov’s SF! That’s my second official pro sale of 2008, and the year’s still very young! It’s also my second sale to Asimov’s! I owe a big thanks to my friends from Clarion West who helped me out with a much earlier draft titled “Ogallalla”… especially Shawn Scarber… from whom I learned a lot when he discussed the original (and triple the current length) draft of this story. Since I can’t …

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Warning off

For those who read my earlier post about how the RSS feed might have to change for this site, please disregard that warning. Because of the nature of the plugin I’ve installed to allow privacy control of my more sensitive posts, changes to the feed will be unnecessary. Yay! However, it would still be a good idea to visit my Contact/RSS subpage and make sure you’re subscribed to my original feeds. (That is, copy-and-paste those feeds, rather than following the link and subscribing to the Feedburner feed that you’re forwarded to. That way, if I ever so stop using Feedburner …

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Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews

So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever. The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …

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Bananagirl Wins the Prize

Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …

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