Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 37

Why the Israeli military is going green

Another notable military force is committed to going green. Those fucking hippies are everywhere:

“The addition of these solar panels is far from the IDF’s first step towards an environmentally friendly military.

During the past several years, the Israel Air force has been transforming its entire energy infrastructure into alternative fuels, with an emphasis on solar power.

‘Two years ago, it was hard to convince commanders that the IAF needed to become more environmentally friendly. Now they do...

New Lego movie early reviews have me excited

I cannot wait for this movie:

“More importantly, given the film’s flip approach, it means that no one is being so protective of the way that, say, Batman (Will Arnett) or the ‘Star Wars’ characters are presented that a team of lawyers was allowed to swoop in and spoil the fun. Instead, everything is subject to the director’s silly-making sensibility, especially the plot itself, which may as well have been borrowed from every other brink-of-disaster epic. So, while Emmet and his minifigure frie...

Texas and high speed rail

Wouldn’t shock me if high speed rail in the US has to happen in a primarily red area in order to get past the culture war pawn status it has become…

“The Texas Transportation Commission is expected to vote Thursday at its monthly meeting on the creation of a high-speed rail commission focused on the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Separately, TxDOT is holding a series of public meetings around Texas and Oklahoma, starting this week, to hear comments on a study looking at the feasibility of high-speed r...

Workshops galore!

John Scalzi brags about students of his at workshops who have gone on to do well, while reminding us that the Clarion workshops and Viable Paradise workshops are taking applications:

“Can’t tell you how cool it is when someone you taught goes on and publishes. I taught three years at VP and a year at Clarion, and each of those classes were filled with writers who were smart as hell and genuinely fine wordsmiths. Several have gone on to publish — and I’m absolutely delighted each time it happen...

Another sign of the death of the middle class?

Corporate America is already pivoting to serve higher and lower class America on the assumption that middle America is squeezing out:

“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.

If there is any doubt, the speed at which...

Reginald Stratton audiobook novellas can now be purchased individually

My series of linked novellas from Metatropolis, all featuring the character Reginald Stratton, can be downloaded individually from Audible:

This separates them out from the awesome Metatropolis anthologies. But if you wanted a way to listen to them all in one batch, this would be the way to do it.

Dumas: no, he wasn’t white

Now that the BBC has put a black musketeer in a recent series, a whole lot of people are shown as being utterly unaware that Dumas was not white:

“We like to imagine that in the past (in general, a blanket past) in any region of the world where there was a big white population(Canada, the US, England) there couldn’t possibly have been POCs. If they were, they wouldn’t have been ‘cool’ ones, anyway. They’d amount to servants, the kind of people we don’t want to know about because it’s BORING.”

(...

NASA private space cuts don’t leave a lot of room for error

Yikes:

“NASA’s big-ticket missions have been spared the Congressional ax. The Orion crew vehicle gets $1.2 billion, the Space Launch System (SLS) gets $1.9 billion. Together, these are supposed to get humans to Mars or an asteroid, or both.

But there’s some who are not quite so happy: the private space companies vying to get astronauts to orbit by 2017, including Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada. The White House request for $821 million to support the commercial crew program was trimmed to $6...

Progress report: day 31

I’ve been deep into the copy edits of Hurricane Fever. I’m 60% of the way through.

Now I have to pause to get some eBook design wrapped up (one of my freelance gigs).

I’m lucky in that my Laptop Laidback desk is allowing me to get a lot of work done while lying down. Copy editing is this constant slog of looking at your work with a critical eye. Such a critical eye that by the end of this, I’m usually at a point where I’m sick of my own words.

40% more to go.

Elder Scrolls body armor fail

I was watching this 13 minute full cinematic trailer for the upcoming Elder Scrolls game. And there is this moment, most of the way through, when the woman in armor that leaves boobs and and back exposed gets hit with an arrow.

Reader, I laughed out loud. Because it perfectly illustrates the thing that people keep writing about online (like here at Tor.com). Hey, if you’re a badass warrior and don’t need armor, don’t wear it. But here is this woman wearing this clunky, basically shoulder armor...