Tag: creating

Making stuff: up, real, and nicely.

When The Troll Sweats, Bottle It

IN THE STARS MY DESTINATION, Alfred Bester imagines a world peopled (in part) by a cast-off group of future savages who chant scientific formulae during their religious rituals. “Quant Suff!” they chant, in abbreviated imitation of “sufficient quantity.” “Quant Suff!”…

The Color Of Metaphor

WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT (in addition to these words) is, according to thecolorof.com‘s rendering engine (still in beta!), the color of “metaphor.” (The color of “metaphorager” is, alas, invisible to normal eyes.) The website evidently layers keyworded images into…

Pithyism #888

INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ART’S ROLE in shaping cultures and individuals have to recognize the difference between censorship (an external restraint based on fear and loathing) and self-control (an internal restraint arising from the artist’s desire to communicate).

NextWave SF: “Retropunk”

FIRST CAME CYBERPUNK. THEN STEAMPUNK. And by 2021, … RETROPUNK. Shiny robots. Gleaming atom-powered spaceships. Martian canal races. Alien arcologies in the jungles of Venus. Male pronouns. All the glory of a big exploitable universe sans angst or post-apocalypse modernism.…

Dorothy Parker Nailed It

(From the should-be-better-known blog Letters of Note, here’s a desperate telegram dispatched by a wall-stuck author to her (apparently, or at least in Ms. Parker’s mind) neck-breathing editor. Between this and the previous post my own writer’s block should be…