Web/Tech
10.12.20 How Two Spam Emails Cost Me $650 (or) When PicRights Enters Your Life
I just bought something for $650! Three photos, as it turns out. Three digital photos. And I nearly lost out on the opportunity to do so, because the letters about those photos showed up in my spam folder first, and it was only by chance I happened to check and discover that … well, crap.…
Read More6.4.19 Frederic Durbin on how ‘Typewritten Tales’ key readers into post-digital collapse worlds
As a big fan of Frederic S. Durbin‘s work (especially his 2017 novel A Green and Ancient Light), I was delighted to discover he had new work in a new set of anthologies, which he’d co-edited with Richard Polt and Andrew V. McFeaters). Not only that, the angle “keys” in directly to one of Fred’s…
Read More03.24.17 Terrorism in the era of ‘Black Mirror’: ‘It’s like we’re all living in a movie’
For your perspective consideration, please. I interviewed Charlie Brooker, the creator of “Black Mirror,” the anthology series about the dark forces in ourselves and our technology (catch it on Netflix), Thursday afternoon for an article I’m working on about technophobia in TV series. Needless to say, I was delighted: I’m a big fan of what…
Read MoreWhy I will not be killing my treadmill desk
It happened today. I sat down in my elevated desk chair, in front of my elevated desk (probably about four, four and a half feet off the floor) and pulled out my retractable keyboard rest and began working at my computer. And I thought, "Now this is what I wanted." Getting here has taken time.…
Read MoreHow to deal with freeloading publishers: Look to ‘Goodfellas’
When I got started writing for newspapers and magazines, I did it for peanuts. Not literally legumes, but CDs. I was writing reviews for a tiny paper in Boston called The Beat, which was essentially done out of a basement and given away free in stores, and if I got a free CD out of…
Read MoreWhy ‘American Idol’ has nothing to fear from me
Singing has a checkered past with me. I love singing, I love music, but put me in front of people to do it and things haven't always gone so well. (As a kid I was at a summer camp where we were all asked to perform in a pseudo talent show; I thought I could…
Read MoreBlackouts and slippery slopes
Blackout day! Today, several sites around the Internet will be blacking themselves out for 24 hours to bring awareness to SOPA/PIPA, legislation that wants to start the process of muzzling the internet on behalf of corporations. That's a huge generalization, but I've only got a few minutes here. It is funny to think how quickly…
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