Rich Horton had nice things to say about, among a bunch of novellas, novelettes, and short stories that he considered “strong work” from 2010, my story in Shine. (And mentions, in the same breath, Alastair Reynolds‘ story that appeared right beside it, which was a favorite of mine from the anthology.) So yeah, I’m flattered.
Month: March 2011
Fukushima Radiation Detected in Kangwon-do
UPDATE: An English-langauge article on it is up now at Joongang Daily. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, so… don’t panic. (Yet.) But yeah, they’re detecting the first traces of radioactive xenon from Fukushima in Korea. (Source article, in Korean.) It’s been detected in the Eastern province of Kangwon, which is to the west of Seoul and over some mountains — that is, on the coast facing Japan. One claim is that the radiation circulated down into Korea after passing over Siberia/Kamchatka, which sets up a disturbing (to me) bit of evidence that, hope as we might, not everything is blowing eastward and …
The Underbridges of Internetland
Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but laugh at them: The internet has taught us a number of things about human beings: Weirdness is way more well-distributed than we used to admit or believe. Groups of people can achieve pretty incredible things acting in concert, across vast distances, like building and refining the OS I’m using. Unpopular is simply a different value of popular. There are some uncomfortable truths mixed in there, too, though. One of them is the following: Some people are unrepentantly, irredeemably assholes… and the more anonymous they are, the more they allow their nature to show. At …
Subscribing to eMagazines Online from Abroad
You know, I expected this was going to be easier. I mean, why should it be harder to subscribe to the electronic version of a magazine than to the paper version? It ought to be a lot easier, considering that you don’t have postal workers and airplanes and delivery trucks involved in the electronic delivery. This was what I was thinking when I decided to shift from print magazine subscriptions to online ones, anyway. Since I’m considering getting some kind of tablet computer this year, or maybe a used iPad (since the newer generation is out now), it would mean a …
Global: What It Really Means in Korea
In Korea today, one of the great buzzwords is “global”: you hear about “inbound globalization” at educational institutions, you hear about “global marketing,” you hear about “global outreach.” The word “global,” has attained a kind of buzzword status but as one of my students pointed out last semester in a public speaking exam — he gave a speech on the subject — global almost always really means, “Anglo-American.” (Note: by this I mean, English-language of the American subtype. I don’t mean in the sense some Americans seem to mean when they say “Anglo-American”, ie. British American or something.) There’s an …