Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 35
March 30, 2014
High rise with fairly radical amount of outdoor space
This is fairly fascinating piece of design:
“Looking a little like a giant white pinecone, the design for this new high-rise apartment building in Montpellier, France, uses strategically placed balconies and shades to give residents the maximum outdoor space without blocking views or taking up too much room on the ground.”
(Via This Amazing High-Rise Apartment Building Looks Like A Giant Tree | Co.Exist | ideas + impact.)
March 28, 2014
Holy crap: there’s a giant planet far out beyond where the comets are made… maybe
This is so sense-of-wonder amazing to me. A bunch of researchers found a large object out there beyond Pluto. Which is cool. But after analyzing it they think its orbit hints at something really, really big out there.
Hold on Chewie, that ain’t no moon:
“Intriguingly, Sheppard’s team also found a strange alignment when they looked at the orbits of 2012 VP113, Sedna and 10 other objects that lie closer to the sun. ‘It was a big surprise to us,’ he says.
One explanation for the alignment could be...
Seasteading… or try living on an island
Interesting link via, I think, Paul Graham Raven (half my links are on Pocket, which tags where I saved the link which lets me attribute, but Safari’s Read It Later doesn’t, which means I have to rely on my memory)…
What do you get from living on a natural seastead oops I mean small island? Well, you get a different kind of time – a different set of distractions. Not simplicity, but a reallocation of complexity that suits some people. You get too many things to list here. The one I want to tal...
March 20, 2014
This week I learned the importance of pacing and balance
I’ve been a bit absent on social media and at the blog. And it’s been due to the high amount of work I’ve been attempting of late. Getting the last details of this novel I’m about to write nailed down, freelance work, a large coding project, and more was occupying mental space and time. I’d lost weeks of work due to being drugged when I messed up my back, so I was also frustrated and trying to catch up. Add that to feeling very down about being housebound, and an ugly winter, and I’m just out...
March 10, 2014
The Skiffy and Fanty Show is trying to take their World SF Tour to Worldcon
Shaun Duke is trying to get out and interview more international authors and is looking for help to do it via Go Fund Me:
“What is the World SF Tour?
Throughout 2014, The Skiffy and Fanty Show will focus much of its attention on science fiction and fantasy works from places outside of the United States. This will consist of interviews, movie discussions, the occasional Torture Cinema special, and discussions of World SF w/ locals. It’s a fairly large project, but it’s one I think is worthwhile....
March 5, 2014
My twins will drop everything they’re doing to watch an Oxyclean commercial
Every once in a while, when Emily is going down to start up a load of laundry, the twins (4 years old) will call after her ‘make sure you add some Oxyclean! It takes all the stains out! Just put one scoop in the laundry.’
It’s interesting what they soak up. There are lots of other advertisements that they don’t pay any attention to. Sometimes they’ll mention something that’s pertinent to their four year old interests and say they saw it on TV at their daycare provider’s house. She occasionally...
March 1, 2014
Today The End is Nigh
The End is Night launches today. Features a story of mine called System Reset. Details are here, the book can be found on Amazon here.
“Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm.
But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes w...
February 26, 2014
Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose to be relaunched in trade paperback from Tor starting this December
So here’s something I’ve been sitting on for a long while:
and:
and:
This December, 2014, Crystal Rain will come back out as a trade paperback with an all new look. It will be followed, just a couple months later, by Ragamuffin, and couple months after that, Sly Mongoose.
The original Todd Lockwood covers for the books are awesome. I have them hanging in my office. Getting to see my favorite characters depicted by an artist was awesome. But when we talked about relaunching the series in trade, on...
February 25, 2014
Progress report: taking deep lungfuls of air
I cut back on the blogging while I buried myself into working on the outline for PS-1 (my last update was on 2/6, wow).
The back pain is mostly gone from my spill on 1/22, though some activity still occasionally inflames it. One month, wow. I can sit, stand, work at the computer, and do my daily walk into town to run errands again. I’m still… gun-shy about any ice and take extra wide detours to avoid and get really nervous around it. It’s an oddly purely physiological response. The fall and th...
February 18, 2014
Metatropolis: Greenspace nominated for an Audie
The audio anthology from Audible featuring novellas by me, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Seanan McGuire, Ken Scholes and Karl Schroeder has been nominated for an Audie.
More about Metatropolis: Green Space.
As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the “Internet of things”,...
