"There is no paradox, as the Little Pale Book tells us: It's going back, kills your grandma."
Don Mark Baldridge
@donmarkmaker.bsky.social
Author / SFWA / CODEX Writers / Unsyndicate donmarkbaldridge.com
Errors and paradigm shifts both begin with anomalies
My interview with qntm, author of There is no Antimemetics Division, in the pages of The Fabulist: fabulistmagazine.com/if-memes-cou...
qntm's Big Ideas Want to Eat You | The Fabulist Magazine
qntm, author of THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION, on dangerous ideas you can't remember, literally killer memes, and why being part of a powerful culture won't save you.
fabulistmagazine.com
For an actual apocalypse (and how we might avoid it) see my new blog post, beginning: "What we call empty space is not entirely empty." www.donmarkbaldridge.com
Don Mark Writes
donmarkbaldridge.com
millennially ancient earthworks of the amazon, imaged by lidar www.scientificamerican.com/article/hund...
Hundreds of never-before-seen ancient ‘earthworks’ discovered in the Amazon
Many of these structures date to around C.E. 100–300, during the time of the Aquiry civilization, and may have been used for ceremonial purposes
scientificamerican.com
It's modern magic that's "primitive", not the other way around. In ancient times magic was sophisticated, layered and pervasive. We're the ones knocking rocks together.
You ask me, writers shoulda been exploring, seeking their own unique voices —like everyone always says they should but so few do— this while time! www.wired.com/story/more-t...
More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chat bots.
wired.com
I so love this hairdresser scholar. How did the romans achieve their ornate quaffs? They had them SEWN IN PLACE, we now know. vimeo.com/121478365/93...
Janet Stephens Documentary - Roman Hair
This is "Janet Stephens Documentary - Roman Hair" by Rutgers Filmmaking on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.
vimeo.com
"And after the end? Well, hunker down; it’s a long wait. But what’s that to me? Am I not contiguous with eternity?"
The floors were polished hardwood. The walls were pure white. "White as alkaloid crystals," Wiggs Dannyboy was to say. "White as yeti dung, white as the Sabbath, white as God's own belly. Floral patterns, they're for your doomed. Your immortalist wall is a white one." —Jitterbug Perfume
"Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system." —Stewart Brand, 1980
"Typography is the architecture of a spiritual public square." -- Paul Renner
The skin of an orange has a quality like plastic. Tomato skins, that weird membrane between the shell and the boiled egg. You can make plastic from milk (casein). And, turns out, lab conditions make us much more likely to detect "microplastics" where there are none. news.umich.edu/nitrile-and-...
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny pollutants, according to a University of Michigan study.
news.umich.edu
Le Guin's Earthsea is more SciFi than fantasy, in that it posits that the cosmos is essentially founded on language.
"Where the myth claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena, SF first posits them as problems and then explores where they lead; it sees the mythical static identity as an illusion, usually as fraud, at best only as a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies."
Yeah, existence remains bizarre no matter how accustomed we may get to it through habit. Just being alive, and knowing it, is the weirdest imaginable condition.
Indeed, it would be best for my purposses if the reader never saw that I was saying anything of the kind, but just began to see the cosmos differently, as an entity, possessing a certain strangeness. To have, in effect, an alien encounter with the universe.
For makers (particularly those with any experience the sound studio) I can't suggest a more effective oracle than the Eno/Schmidt Oblique Strategies: stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique....
Oblique Strategies
Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies card set reimplemented as a dynamic web page.
stoney.sb.org
AMOC Time www.the-independent.com/life-style/c... Oh yeah: apocalypse. Right.
We’re in a heatwave, so why is a ‘cold blob’ in the Atlantic causing so much concern?
A large expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean has been bucking the global warming trend and is alarming scientists, who warn the collapse of an ocean current system could be catastrophic for the planet ...
the-independent.com
Crowds run to see some burning building while one man walks slowly away. ------ This is the shortest mystery story I've written to date. Got a shorter one?
"That is a very lonely man [...] whose journey is always the long way round." — Nova Swing, M. John Harrison
She was like a hologram; if you looked, every part of her would prove to contain the whole you didn’t understand. — Move Swing, M. John Harison
"Sometimes, when I’m really stuck, I write with a pen in a notebook." —Cory Doctorow
"Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur" —Cory Doctorow
According to new research, ChatGPT may consume 1.13 × 10⁻³ kWh per query, or about what a 100 watt light bulb uses in 41 seconds. arxiv.org/html/2604.00...
The Energy Footprint of LLM-Based Environmental Analysis: LLMs and Domain Products
arxiv.org
Every coin flip cleaves the present from the past
"It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity." —The Machinne Stops