Since Perdido Street Station I have cultivated an ever-growing interest in steampunk, which is to say, that particular genre of novels that deal with the themes of the dynamic between magic and technology, usually represented in the typical Victorian “mechanized civilization” and corresponding “magic” elements in society. Steampunk must be dark, gritty, and Gothic. It [...]
Archive for May, 2006
Charles Stross and Other Matters
Posted in Books, Commentary, Politics, School on May 9, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Rumination II
Posted in Commentary, Journeys, Movies on May 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Shanghai was…interesting. It’s changed so much since I last went there, and that was only about a year and a half ago. Many things have remained the same, though. Its beauty; its ugliness, its modernity and parochialism all mixed together like every other city humanity has ever spawned at one time or another. Shanghai has [...]
Postcards from Shanghai
Posted in Journeys, School on May 3, 2006 | 6 Comments »
It was a song that had been playing on my way to the airport on the day of the flight. “…send me picture postcards from LA…” sang Joshua Kadison. Seven days and half a week of rumination and distraction later, I can only present a URL.
Shanghai-Suzhou OEP Pictures
The connexions are clear enough. When we are [...]
Dreams
Posted in Commentary, Fiction on May 12, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Hestia, she was always the Cassandra of the little Playgroup.
The other day, during Practitions of Kinematical Ability, she ran sobbing to the Playcircle and announced to the class, “A Mercedes Benz R350 just came out of the waste paper basket!”
The scene of the crime was unsurprisingly devoid of any such improbability, though. We stood reproachfully [...]
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