Some stories are just that: stories. Simple. One dimensional. Easily digestible entertainment.
Some stories are much, much more than that. Some are complex conductive elements comprised of dozens of vibrant, glowing fibers, woven together specifically to guide us into the psychedelic cyberpunk future that might be.
Chad Deal’s Ketcel is the latter.
Continue reading “Review: Ketcel”
“The International Refugee Society has twenty-six cybernetically enhanced ‘Letters,’ and for the right price, they’ll eliminate anyone.”
Agent G: Infiltrator by C. T. Phipps is a science fiction espionage thriller with underlying themes of cyberpunk trans-humanism. The book description reminds me of the Hitman franchise, but initially Agent G comes across as more of a cyborg James Bond than an Agent 47. For example, G states that he gets paid exorbitant amounts of money for his work, yet during his first mission his assistant and fancy gadgets seem to do much of the heavy lifting.
Not being a huge Bond fan, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this definitely isn’t a 007 clone. While there are plenty of Machiavellian machinations going on within the Society and lots of fancy technology at play, the meat of the story is thoroughly original, and quite a bit deeper than expected.
Continue reading “Review: Agent G – Infiltrator”On Tuesday, March 16th, the news broke that Facebook plans to launch a platform for writers to publish content and earn income through monetization tools such as subscriptions. Here’s how Engadget summed up Facebook’s initial offering:
“It’s reportedly a free-to-use system that will tie in with Pages, letting you publish live videos, Stories and other material that goes beyond articles and newsletters. You can create Groups and check stats on your work, too. And yes, there will eventually be ways to earn money from your writing, such as subscriptions and ‘possibly other forms’ of income. Facebook is paying the test group to help get the tools started, according to the tipsters.”
J. Fingas/Engadget
Apparently the offering is meant to be an addition to Facebook’s Journalism Project. As such, it appears to be aimed at journalists and writers of short fiction/non-fiction rather than book publishers. There’s also a good possibility that this project is an attempt to draw users away from rivals like Substack, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
As an author, blogger, and longtime Facebook user, I have some thoughts about the potential of Facebook Publishing.
Continue reading “Facebook: Publishing Platform?”I often joked that the Other Job was eating my life, and that’s why my presence as an author was slowly fading. I did an undeniably poor job of keeping up with friends, staying active in writing groups, and staying on top of schedules for my blog and Patreon– not to mention actually writing books.
But in a very real sense, the Other Job consumed my life. I lost touch with most of my local friends outside of work (although I made new friends at work.) After I got out and started to try to reconnect, I learned that several of the people I knew had died. Others are gone, moved to parts unknown.
Worse yet, for me, the other job consumed my ability to write and be creative. It happened so gradually that I didn’t even feel it happening, and what I did notice was easy to attribute to stress and lack of sleep. As in, “I’m just tired, I’m sure this’ll be easier after I get some sleep.” Or “I’m just stressed out– I’m sure I’ll be back to normal when I’m not.”
So it came as a shock that, once I left the other job, things didn’t go back to normal. I wasn’t the same person, and I still couldn’t plot complicated stories or focus well enough to write. And that was absolutely horrifying.
Continue reading “The Aftermath of the Other Job”I left the Other Job nearly three months ago. At the time I had immediate plans to write a blog post as a sort of wrap up to the saga of corruption, disaster, and misery that I’ve been chronicling for the last couple of years. I thought it’d be cathartic. I thought I’d know exactly what I wanted to say.
I didn’t wind up writing that post because I felt like it was all stuff I’d said before, and at the time the last thing I wanted was to extensively revisit that hellscape of disappointment and failure.
In the ensuing months it began to become apparent that going back to what I was doing before the Other Job would be significantly more difficult than just walking away. I had reoccurring nightmares. I had trouble sleeping. I seem to have lost a lot of my creativity, and almost all of my ability to plot stories. Which is, to say the least, absolutely horrifying.
Continue reading “The End of the Other Job: Escape & Loss”
Bi-curious Stepford Wives + femme Fight Club
In a small town where all the women are AI, a corrupt policewoman picks a fight with a drug-cooking housewife, igniting a provocative rivalry that could wind up killing all the men.
I stumbled across Alpha Bots on Twitter, and it immediately caught my eye. Interesting author: check. Eye-catching cover: check. Intriguing description: check. I picked up a copy, and I’m really glad I did. Here’s why.
Continue reading “Review: Alpha Bots”2021 was a rough year, but in November things began looking up. Among other things I finally left the Other Job, a workplace so incredibly, dangerously, dysfunctional that I wouldn’t have believed it could stay in business if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
I spent November and December coping with residual rage from that place and getting back in the practice of writing on a regular basis. It took some time to figure out how to pick up all the pieces– of myself, of my writing, of my connections with friends and fellow writers– and to hit the road again. Now that I’m no longer working 12 to 18 hours a day with a host of urgent problems constantly jostling for attention, I can focus on what’s important.
As much as I’m still struggling with the fallout of leaving the Other Job and trying to get back to where I was before, I feel like 2021 is going to be a good year. Here are some of the things I’m hoping to accomplish.
Not all of us remember what it was like before, but I remember what it was like to be wild.
We slipped through the underbrush, searching for berries and stalking plump grouse. We paused, still has death, waiting for the telltale rustle of our prey. The smells of the forest and the whisper of the wind brought in as much information as our eyes and ears– there is so much humans have forgotten how to feel and smell and hear.
We danced in the moonlight and slept on sunlit rocks. We followed gurgling brooks to their sources and explored wild places that no human had ever seen. We lived every day in the moment, and every moment was joyous and fascinating. I used to dream about those places when I was little.
Now the memory grows more faint; but I still remember. We were the shadows in the thickets, the reason they whisper about predators that haunt dark places. We were the eyes that watched you, the paws that stalked you. If I step away into the forest, I can still feel it: the senses sharpen, the attention focuses, and I am just a filter for the moment. A bundle of fine-tuned senses, bone, muscle, and sinew, driven by instinct.
All the same, when we heard engines, we ran. It was an awful sound: an assault on the ears, an assault on the sacred sound-scape of the forest. I still have nightmares about being hunted, about running from bright searchlights in the misty darkness.
As a child, it took me years to overcome the urge to RUN when a motor started. The sound of an approaching engine filled me with nameless dread. My parents thought I was just afraid of loud noises. Perhaps it was not strange that a child that commented on the footsteps of mice in the attic might have sensitive hearing.
I was called strange a lot as a child. Perhaps it is strange to remember what it was like be wild, to remember what I was before I became human. Although I’ve never met another who remembered (or at least one who would admit to it,) I know I’m not alone. There are so many of you, and so few of us; is it so strange that we are recycled into human bodies when we die?
They say the soul carries an imprint of its past lives. Is it so strange that we remember? That we carry the memory of our past into your present? You who slaughtered us as “lesser creatures,” you’re not so rational or perfect. A fox or wolf or lynx is perfect. It does not kill out of spite, or seek to eradicate an entire species. It just is. It just seeks to survive another day.
You humans, on the other hand… you’re every bit the monsters we thought you were.
What It Was Like To Be Wild © 2020 Leland Lydecker
Recently the Wall Street Journal (not exactly a bastion of the left-leaning press) broke the news that when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of political news, the company’s engineers intentionally designed the system to disproportionately impact left-leaning news outlets.
While assuring Mother Jones editorial director for growth and strategy Ben Dreyfuss that the algorithmic changes were not designed “in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher,” Facebook deliberately and knowingly wrote its algorithms to favor right-leaning pages while suppressing left-leaning ones– and this was done with Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit approval.
Indeed, the Zuckerberg who once claimed he would prefer to leave the politics to others has been doing anything but. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Zuckerberg is now an active political operator. He has dined with President Trump, talks regularly with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, and has pressed lawmakers and officials to scrutinize rivals including TikTok and Apple Inc., people involved in the discussions say.”
The whispers in the docks, fairways, and corridors of KEL Port were darker tonight. Up near general intake, where new arrivals to KEL26 were processed, Port Security officers were clustered in small groups muttering amongst themselves. In the cozy noodle shop on Sub-Level B, the little family of Tau-Ceti immigrants weren’t greeting customers with their usual cheer. And down in the Mog’s cantina, where most of KEL Port went to eat and drink, kindly, straightlaced Loadmaster Teller sat in corner, plastered out of his mind, having an angry argument with an empty chair.
Something was surely amiss, Radco thought, but puzzling out exactly what was proving to be a difficult task. Calamity was like a disease to humans; it might not have struck anywhere near them, but it deeply affected them nonetheless. To remain unaffected by the general air of unease would mark him as an outsider, unnatural and automatically suspect.
Radco shivered at the thought. Humans were notoriously cruel to outsiders.