Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 31

Elon Musk: We Need Universal Income Because Robots Will Steal All the Jobs

Spacentrepreneur Elon Musk thinks we’ll eventually need a basic universal income because of “automation.”“People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,” he told CNBC. “Certainly more leisure time. And then we gotta figure how we integrate with a world and future with a vast AI.” – Eve Peyser, GIZMODO

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Second Thoughts

 

When the time comes to take action, there’s no time to think, just act. Don’t react, that implies delay and even a second can be fatal, for you, not them. When the time came, instinct kicked in and he lashed out, with the pencil, pierced a jugular, no second thoughts.

Jonathan Pie’s Idiots’ Guide to US Politics

I don’t know how familiar people in America are with spoof news reporter, Jonathan Pie but they should really watch this.

 

Jonathan Pie

Facebook is harming democracy, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to do something about it

This story by Timothy B. Lee for Vox I consider a sister piece to the one I posted before from the New York Times about how journalism needs to get its act together after an orgy of fake news.

A generation ago, newspapers and television news programs had a lot of influence over what people read and watched. Stories that made it on the front page got a lot of attention, while most people never heard about stories that mainstream media outlets chose to ignore.

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Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News

Two nights ago my phone started beeping and ringing bells so I had a glance, the way you do, and it was telling me there was a big revelation about Huma Abedin, Clinton’s aide and how she’d turned snitch and sold the Democratic candidate out. The ‘story’ was being carried by YouTube and the ‘news’ supplier, it turned out, was one of the alt-right channels that could turn a rumour into bible gospel. I wasn’t surprised. It’s become commonplace these days and that’s frightening.read more

The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election

On the day you go to the polls, I urge my American friends to cast their eyes over this article by Ben Fountain from The Guardian newspaper. Anyone who can begin an article with a quote from David Bowie and, in the same article, quote Sam Cooke as well, gets my vote.read more

Irksome

They could live with the orange glow face, the too twee hand gestures, the appalling diction even the intolerable and arrogant illiteracy. It’s a cliche of oppobrium visited on a long since marginalised section of the community, for centuries. It’s not cultural appropriation, witches complain, Trump’s triumphal bigotry is irksome.

When you’re busy, write

It’s fascinating to read what writers do when they’re writing. Some write an outline, get up early and stick to a daily word count quota. Others turn off their cell phones and hide away until they finish. Maya Angelou rented a hotel room, by the month, where she kept a dictionary, a thesaurus and a bible as well as a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles. One of my favourite writers, Khaled Housseni doesn’t outline, hates first drafts and believes real writing occurs in the rewrite. Jodi Picoult doesn’t believe in writer’s block but says the time we spend writing must be treated as precious since ‘you can always edit a bad page but you can’t edit a blank page.’

Three months ago I responded to a Wednesday writing challenge with what became the first of a ten part science fiction series I called Starman : Life on TrappistOne. Having always been a science fiction fan since as long as I can remember, I found it oddly liberating and stimulating to write science fiction. It never occurred to me before. Apart from anything else, you can free yourself from the encroaching tentacles of ‘cultural appropriation’ from the start.

Since then, I’ve continued to blog but restricting my blogging to flash fiction and 50 word responses to the Daily Post Prompt. It’s like a stretching exercise for the writing muscles every day. The rest of my blogging has involved choosing tasty web articles, on subjects dear to my heart and intellect, to reblog.

There’s been the occasional short story too, to keep things interesting and varied. One of those articles I reblogged, for example, about how Charles Dickens chose names for his characters, prompted me to write a Dickensian style trilogy that ran to more than 7,000 words, called The Rise & Fall of Donald Trumpet Esq.

But what has really kept my oven hot and the dough rising in these past three months is that science fiction story that began as a response to a weekly writer’s challenge and then became a 10 part, episodic science fiction series, because now it has become a novel, or at least, a novel in the making.

So far, I’ve written more than 25,000 words and, in the nature of these novels on the web, I could end there and then began writing part 2 until I’ve a series that can be sold as a box set or a Netflix drama.

But I’m getting carried away. This began as an article about what writers do when they’re writing and all I can say is, keep busy. Unfortunately, I’m not a routine person and I hate making lists. Some days I start as soon as I wake up and the earlier, the better. Hemingway made a habit of getting up at dawn when it’s quiet and you’re undisturbed but particularly, when it’s cold. He got warm by writing.

Some people don’t like music or reading. I find myself listening to music all the time. I make country music playlists, wear earphones and play it loud. Last week I got ‘You Want It Darker?, Leonard Cohen‘s new album and I can’t stop listening to it. Reading? I’ve just finished a 1,000 page epic by Spanish writer, Ildefonso Falcones, ‘The Hand of Fatima’. I’ve also read three books by fellow bloggers, Tanya Cliff’s Tales from the Valdaren, Caillen James’ Forgotten: Andones, Amber Wake: Gabriel Falling by P.S. Bartlett and Ronovan Hester, The House Across the Street by Celerina Avellano and Lucy Brazier’s PorterGirl : First Lady of the Keys.

And those are the books I’ve read. Lined up in my inbox are Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize winning, The Sellout, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings and the latest in Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series, Rather Be the Devil.

In the past week I’ve seen two plays, ‘Donegal‘, a new musical by acclaimed Irish playwright, Frank McGuinness and The Kings of Kilburn High Road by Irish playwright, Jimmy Murphy. I can’t stop watching films and am currently switching between two Netflix series that could not be further apart, The Crown and The Expanse.

So, let me offer this in mitigation for my tenuous presence in the blogosphere, a presence I cannot forego and indeed, find I need but must struggle to find the time. Because I’m busy. That’s why I’m writing.

Relish

 

It’s one thing to take satisfaction out of a job well done, no matter how distasteful, gross or inhuman it or its execution might sometimes be. No, the people he had no time for were those who wanted to take pictures or souvenirs. It’s wrong to do it with relish.

The Benjamin Franklin Method: How to (Actually) Learn to Write

Benjamin Franklin may be the most prolific man in all of American history.

In his NYT bestselling Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson writes of Franklin—

“[He was] the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.”

Franklin’s literal rags to riches story is jam-packed with insights on writing and a better life.

Born into poverty with 16 siblings, Franklin dropped out of school at age 10. How did Benjamin Franklin go from primary school dropout to the most accomplished American in all of history?

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