Month: February 2009

It has come

After more than 18 months of contemplation, I have finally broken down and tracked down a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus for myself. The cover surprised me a bit–I was expecting something in dark colours, more like an old school leatherbound Bible, not something that looks like this: The insides, though, are exactly what I was expecting, except that the… Read more →

Aside

Despite making a pretty decent living these days, some things still regularly flash me back to my less-well-off upbringing and set me off on a class warrior rant. One of these is conspicuous consumption in the form of ridiculously expensive items which have no intrinsic worth, but are made pricey for no purpose other than to display wealth ostentatiously. Like diamond-studded memory sticks. (Christ, if you’re going to consume conspicuously, buy something that is expensive for a reason, not just made expensive as a way to show off your score, he said with a straight face.)

The Child Of A Full Eclipse

I was not previously aware that Guy Gavriel Kay had “made his mark” as a poet before becoming a novelist. I can perhaps be excused for this, since my awareness of Kay started when I read his first novel (at age 11 or 12). To me, therefore, he’s a novelist, and one that I tend to automatically buy when he… Read more →

Reality Shock

It’s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with “Wow, that’s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago”. In addition to this being common, I’ve also noticed that X is decreasing. Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two: Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it’s a very low… Read more →

The Black Cab Sessions

Once again, along comes one of these things where my immediate reaction is “I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this already.” I’m talking this time about The Black Cab Sessions: musicians record a single track, in a single take, in the back of a black cab, and the results are then webcast to the world. As they put it… Read more →

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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.