rezendi

via

thistleingrey, bolding those I've read, italicizing those I vaguely intend to:

(1) except for the last book
(2) incomplete, yes
(3) I have read and kinda liked other Waugh but something about Brideshead always put me off
(4) midway through this I gave up thinking "you know what, fuck books written in nineteenth century England generally," which has served me in good stead for many years and explains some of the other lacunae here
(5) Nobody ever believes me on this one, because of my squirrel book

It's a weird list with much to criticize but these lists always are.

One of the weirder jobs I've had has been, over the last few years, directing an attempt to archive the world's open-source software for the next thousand years or so. (It's ambitious. I know.) Well, while further archiving initiatives are in the planning stage, version 1.0 of that project is finally complete. It included, in no particular order:

agglomerating the work of literally millions of people worldwide, and writing many terabytes of it to a durable physical form
commissioning, shipping, and installing a 3,000-pound steel vault adorned with AI-generated art
negotiating partnerships with elements of the governments of Egypt and Norway
assembling a list of hundreds of books and other data sources that might possibly somehow explain the deeper context of the world and its technologies today to 1,000 years from now
negotiating with publishers for the right to make single microfilm copies of those books, which was much trickier than all the other negotiations combined
a scouting mission featuring sled dogs, polar bear rifles, and a private jet
recruiting an all-star advisory team, including a historian / Hugo nomineee, MacArthur genius grant recipient, prominent linguist, prominent Egyptologist, and cosmologist / security researcher / JPL interplanetary photographer
partnering with / paying / donating to a proud French nonprofit, a hippie California nonprofit, a Norwegian startup, the Long Now Foundation, Microsoft Research, and the Library of Alexandria, among others
bringing all those partners together to speak to a thousand people at a launch event
four 3D-printed domes (the first of which was misprinted)
a tiny glass platter etched with polarized femtosecond lasers for Oxford's Bodleian Library
scripting, commissioning, and appearing in an announcement video
dealing with the tensions between that video shoot team and that of Bloomberg, who were there to shoot a parallel video as part of the Businessweek cover story on the project
dealing with the fact that GitHub's then-CEO's house burned down while we were all on Svalbard (and, darkly hilariously, the Bloomberg video was edited such that it looks like I promptly started making mocking jokes about this.)
writing a guide for the archive's inheritors, possibly centuries from now with no understanding of today, and having that professionally translated into several other languages
doing all this on a budget that would probably surprise you greatly with its smallness

On the one hand, it has been, as you might imagine, an insanely cool thing to work on, and I'm proud of the results. On the other ... it's good to finally have it in the (not-so-proverbial) can.

As usual, click through to get full photo rather than sometimes weirdly cropped version, sorry.

Cobain bridge.

Redwood sky.

Fallen redwood.

Shasta view.

Glorious rust.

All is possible.

Glasgow rain.

Louvring.

Arts & métiers.

Continental breakfast.

King's cross.

Thames racers.

Brighton rock.

Rome dome.

Trevi selfie.

Cartographic perspective.

Sistine ceiling.

Trevi redux.

Shining angel.

Colosseal.

Basilica dome.

Rome domes.

Below the dome.

He is Back!

Spikiest cathedral.

Creepiest statue.

Graphic novel.

Fisheye folly.

Squirrel skull.

Jacob's Ladder.

Abandoned pier.

Papal conclave.

Fearless leader.

Chicago skyline.

Dignified river.

Golden Marin.

Viking ghost.

Beach tribute.

Central coast.

Oakland fire.

Alberta summer.

Rocky valley.

Renegade burn.

Embarcadero night.

Lisbon station.

Lisbon coast.

Marseille monument.

Marseille immeuble.

Marseille bistro.

Marseille records.

Marseille panorama.

Big Ben.

Winter branches.

Florida denizen.

Auto surreal.

Toronto ice.

Coastal relic.

Central park.

Rockefeller tower.

Planning a trip to Europe very early next month. Lisbon, Marseille, London, and Brighton, here I come, I think, various covid concerns permitting. Will also be back in Toronto too for a bit.
(But I'm pretty sure covid concerns will permit, things seem semi-stable in all those theres, and even here; California has the lowest covid rate of all 50 states right now, and a pleasingly high vaccination rates, especially locally -- 90+% of those eligible are vaccinated in every Bay Area county.)
Collecting rejections from publishers for le latest book. Some seem totally reasonable, like the ones which call it "too crazy for me," or the most recent, who liked the start but not "once the story shifted into the supernatural and sci-fi realms. The story started to feel so all-encompassing." That is a correct assessment, and hey, if that's not for them, that's not for them. But more are from editors who clearly didn't read more than maybe a few dozen pages and tapped out before the weirdnesses hit. It seems the initial outreach to mainstream / literary / crossover publishers has officially not worked out, though in fairness it seemingly did come pretty close with a few imprints, including big names indeed. But this was always very much a speculative fiction novel to me.
Interesting things may be happening at both of my day jobs, about which I cannot yet speak.
Interesting things may also be happening on my sometime-journalist-slash-columnist front. I may have found another platform at which to write on a regular basis, this time about climate tech, for a ... well, you don't know the the publication, since it doesn't really exist yet, but you do know the driving force behind it, as they're one of the most famous people on the entire planet. He teased deliberately vaguely.
We shall see, we shall see.

Minor bullet-point update:

I spent a week in Toronto last month and am about to fly to Canada again tomorrow, for a few days in Edmonton supporting my mother-in-law after surgery, followed by a few planned blissful introvert days in Vancouver. (I've been to Vancouver a fair amount but never solo for more than a day or two, I don't think. I intend to eat extremely good sushi and other Asian food, run the Stanley Park Seawall, and rent a car for a day to drive the Sea to Sky Highway.)
My day jobs, where I cosplay as a C-level exec of an 80-person company and a sometime director at a 2,000-person company, are going fine, and it's interesting running a medium-sized business and navigating inside a large business, but not nearly as interesting as, say, a year or two ago when we were building Bookshop.org and readying the unveiling of the 1,000-year open-source archive stored in a vault beneath an Arctic mountain, respectively. So it goes, sometimes?
I'd like to find a (perhaps side) project I care about, perhaps something related to my alarm-bell sense that the climate emergency we find ourselves living in is a whole lot more imminent than I appreciated even a couple of years ago, maybe in my tech/media overlap sweet spot, but that's ... tricky at best. I am playing around with something which apparently entirely unrelated, but I see subtle connections. We'll see.
Le book is out with various publishers, most of whom are maintaining a surly silence. I did get an eventual rejection from the publisher who was maybe possibly interested in it if it was cut by a full third. My agent was upset. I was (silently) not. It's a big sprawling epic of a book, that's its nature, and while I can certainly see it sprawling, say, 15% less, a third would have gutted it into something I would have regretted and resented. Rereading DUNE, and discovering DUNE's origin story (rejected by 20 publishers, eventually picked up by one best known for publishing automobile manuals) has left me feeling quite oddly calmly confident about it, actually; not that I predict DUNE's monumental fate for it, of course, or that the publishing industry is at all comparable these days ... but it takes time for weird books to find their place in the world.
I was asked to write a magazine piece for The Walrus but research is not going well, in that I thought I had a lot of relevant contacts, but none of them have panned out, and between that, travel, and illness, very little progress has been made.
Oh, yeah, illness; I was sick for a month. It sucked, but it wasn't terrible. It wasn't covid - tested twice, and dissimilar symptoms anyway. Serious fatigue, dizziness and lightheadedness, stark loss of appetite, and night sweats were the primary symptoms. I got two sets of blood/urine tests, two weeks apart, as my PCP tried to figure out what it was, and each set had a subset of mildly concerning abnormalities ... but there was no overlap at all between the two sets' abnormalities. It was extremely circadian, too, I improved dramatically around nightfall each day, the running joke was that I was suffering from low-grade vampirism. Some kind of infection, I suppose? Anyway it's behind me now, I'm working out daily again, running roughly the same distance/speed that I was, eating/drinking normally (I lost 5 pounds in a month, which is admittedly only 2.25% of my body mass, but still), and not waking up in puddles of sweat. Corporeality: while there is much to be said for it, certain and increasing aspects of it seem to be overrated.

NGL it was pretty great to actually go somewhere and do something. The empty-ish nonstop Emirates flights weren't too bad either. (On the flight back, in particular, I had an entire row of economy class to myself, so I just lay down on the middle 4 seats and slept for ten of the 16 hours.)

All the below shots are weirdly auto-cropped so click through to see them in all their proverbial glory.

Departure vista.

First late night walk. (Between jet lag, Ramadan, and the blistering midday heat, my traditional travel walking of ~8-10 miles a day was mostly in the pleasant dead of night.)

Met this Uzbeki guy doing bagwork at 2AM at this open gym/park near the Marina. We chatted about boxing for a while.

The Marina is mostly more like this. (High-end retail brands compositioned out on either side.)

Well, the above is more formally The Walk. The actual marina part of the Marina is more like this.

I was awake at dawn most nights and it was really pretty great. Dawn is a frontier.

Especially the dawn dips in the Persian Gulf. Excuse the shirtless selfie but I think it conveys the flavor of the moment. That wheel on the new artificial peninsula behind me is some 700 feet high, and isn't quite open yet.

Accidentally stumbled across this very pleasant beachfront patio bar in the company of a couple hundred expats, Manchester United, and those ridiculously gargantuan thousand-foot towers gazing down on us all.

I visited an Atlantis-themed aquarium in the Atlantis Resort. The aquarium itself was fine, but to my surprise the faux-Antlantean mise-en-scene was the star. (Also to my surprise: I ate at the Gordon Ramsay onsite and it was excellent. Admittedly fish & chips, but I'm something of an aficionado, and this was some of the best I've ever had.)

Atlantis was on The Palm. You're probably familiar with the idea of The Palm. It's... a bit much. Here's a pretty good scale model of The Palm, found at the base station of the Palm Monorail.

The Marina again, and probably my single most Islamic-cyberpunk shot of the week.

If anybody asks, I was framed.

Here in this ultramodern town Dubai Creek is still traversed by abras, wooden boats with diesel engines and benches on which passengers ride for about 25c. The town is 85% expat, most of whom are from the Indian subcontinent.

Downtown, not to be confused with the Marina. (Note Burj Khalifa.)

View from 122nd floor of aforementioned Burj Khalifa. (There are 163 floors but I'm told the view actually starts to degrade once you start getting too high. Tip: the observation deck is on the 123rd floor. Don't go to it. Book a morning coffee at At.mosphere in the Armani Hotel, as I did, literally one floor below. The minimum spend is less than the price of the observation deck, and there's no waiting around in lines or picking up your ticket, and you get a fancy cappuccino.)

The dramatic atrium of the Burj al-Arab (the famous sail-shaped hotel off the coast.) No, I did not stay here, rooms start at $700/night and go up in a hurry, even during covid. I just had a meal there, for less than you might expect.

It was a very nice meal. That's a burrata-and-tomato salad which also featured watermelon and pomegranate seeds, both of which were inspired additions, and a negroni, and the infinity pool beyond, and the Gulf beyond that. Plus my DNA Lounge mask for goth-punk street cred. I still have goth-punk street cred, right? Right?

Thus endeth this litany of semiconspicuous consumption. Which on the one hand I feel a bit guilty about, but on the other, it will be good for the world to start getting back to its normal interconnected self, and that includes spending money on travel and tourism ... and this kind of travel, from one highly vaccinated nation to another, is most of what we're going to see for the foreseeable, I expect.

I was totally going to post Dubai pictures, but then realized I had a backlog from Bay explorations. The code I use to share from Google Photos does a weird cropping thing, sorry:

Hayward, ish.

There's a tale here.

Western shore.

Cruz coast.

Horror show?

Splashed color.

North bay.

Doggie diner.

Golden gate.

Light emitting palms.

Surf's up.

Do I keep coming back here? Have I been here before?

You have to be smug after acquiring a new Tesla. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.

Emeryville does not approve of the metric system.

A year ago today, two days after returning from my last business trip to NYC, I commenced three weeks of dry coughing, a few days of which featured a fever. (I also tested seronegative two months later, but 1 in 4 who were covid-infected test negative on subsequent antibody tests, so who knows.) Apparently I'm marking my personal pandemic anniversary by planning travel again. This is a very positive sign: I'd avoided doing so last year because it seemed empty with no plausible schedule, but given the growing body of data indicating that covid vaccinations reduce not just infection but transmission by a whopping 90%, I now expect to be flying over oceans again as soon as sometime this summer.

So then. Where shall I go? S. and I are planning a week in Tokyo, which is a) just across the (very large) pond, b) all but untouched by the pandemic, and c) will either be opening up this summer or cancelling the Olympics, and my money's on the former. We and The Epidemiologists are also talking about a collective week in Iceland, where a friend has been living for the last six months and will probably still be. I expect at least one of those to happen this year, and possibly both.

I also want to go on a three-week solo trip. Possible itineraries, assuming places open up:

One week in London and Scotland, visiting family in the former and hiring a car to drive through the Highlands in the latter
One week in Marseille and Rome, visiting a friend in the former and finally visiting the latter (yes, I know, I too can't believe I've never been)
One week in the Middle East, say a 2-night stopover in Doha, four nights in Dubai, and two nights in Muscat? (That would even add a couple of nations to my visited list, although having passed 100 a couple of years ago, I find my latent country-bagging impulse much diminished.)

Possible itineraries sans quarantine requirements, assuming places don't open up, per this handy list:

1 week in Turkey (Istanbul, Cappadocia, maybe the Dardanelles)
1 week in Kenya (Tsavo and Lamu?)
1 week in Ghana (Accra, Kokrobite, Lake Volta)

(Sounds like a weird itinerary I know, but there are nonstop flights.)

I'm not actually deciding on any of these anytime soon, much less booking them, but man, is it ever nice to be thinking about them.

Happy 2021! Hey, it's not 2020, and it's guaranteed to be shorter.

I'm working on a new pet project: a tool to create annotated timelines online. (Largely out of frustration with Twitter threads and other ill-suited stopgap solutions.) I'm putting together a monster timeline for the pandemic, but I think it's actually suited for more focused things, 10-15 stories that provide an overview of how the story about a particular topic evolved.

Arguably the most interesting thing about it is what it does with its data. Instead of just using a database, every timeline's raw data is stored in a GitHub repository. There's also a database, of course, for users and indexing, but instead of the site being just a silo, it's a filter. You can point it to any public repo, and if the data there is in the expected format, it will display the contents. Or, since you can also log in with GitHub and access data with that authorization, timelines can be kept private and shared closely.

I know that probably sounds like irrelevant inside-baseball tech stuff, but it seems to me it's a model for finally, literally, owning your own online data. Imagine if Facebook followed this model. Then all your Facebook data, everything you'd ever posted or commented, would be in a git repository you controlled. Facebook would have a copy too, of course, for efficient processing and indexing; but you wouldn't have to rely on them to access it. Other companies could offer services letting you mine and search your own data, and provide alternative interfaces to it.

...And you could move all your standalone data/posts/images to a Facebook competitor in a matter of minutes. Similarly, you could move your data from GitHub to GitLab or BitBucket on a moment's notice. You never have to "request" or "export" your data. You automatically get the benefit of git's versioning, plus GitHub's API, UI, fork / pull-request / merge collaboration, etc.

It's pretty surprising to me that I can't think of any other sites/services with this "self-hosted data" model. I suppose there are a couple of cryptocurrency attempts to do it for decentralized apps, like Blockstack, but there's zero reason for any cryptocurrency here. For-profit companies are obviously opposed to anything which crumbles the moat that keeps users with them, but even open-source / nonprofit organizations don't seem to do it.

An analogy: there are lots of services like Plaid, Mint, etc., which access your bank accounts on your behalf, via OAuth tokens or just straight-up using your passwords. This is an example of (the secure version of) that, treating your data like your money. GitHub is the data bank, and you choose which services to share data with. You can't stop them from keeping a copy - but you can stop them from not letting you have a copy at all times, so you can cut them off and move to a competitor, or use this data for multiple services at the same time.

There's really no reason that this couldn't be done for all kinds of other data - social media in particular. I wonder if there might be some way to even watermark your own data, so that, if it got out, you could tell which service let it slip. (Using e.g. different lookalike Unicode characters for different services, that sort of thing.) I'd like to imagine self-hosted data will become more common in the decade to come.

They've all been forced into a common visual format and I can't be bothered to fix. Click to see correct versions.

(click to see correct proportions)

(note tiny human silhouettes for scale)

(westernmost point in California)

(smoke from faraway Santa Cruz fires)

(click to see Mount Doom)

(Oakland)

(Oceanside)

(Slab City)

(For all your southland demon summoning needs)

(Click to see very distant hovering helicopter)

(Pismo Beach)

(Toronto)

What the heck, let's randomly do a meme, via

redbird:

1) What is the oldest thing you own?

Good question. I don't tend to keep old things. I do have a bowl full of natural pearls of salt which formed on the shores of Lac Assal in Djibouti: maybe them? Or would they be mere years or decades old? Genuinely unsure. I do have a briefcase, once my father's, which is at least fifty years old. Nothing else leaps immediately to mind tbh.

2) What is the oldest home you've lived in?

Gotta be the month I spent living in New College in Oxford, founded 1379, where the stone steps had been trod on by so many feet they had been worn down to a very noticeable U shape, especially the first flight. I've maybe spent a night or two in older buildings (though really unclear where, if so) but not lived by any reasonable definition.

3) What is the oldest book you've read?

I have, long ago, read the Epic of Gilgamesh (albeit in translation, he joked) so that's gotta be the winner, right?

Oldest physical book ... my father had (IIRC) a fairly early edition of Churchill's History of the Great War, so that might qualify.

4) What is the oldest electronic device that you still use?

Uhhhh, an iPad Mini I picked up way back in the antediluvian days of 2015, I suppose? I'm not very retro when it comes to electronics. I do have some older phones still but never actually use them.

5) What is the oldest work of art/architecture that you've seen?

The step pyramids of Saqqara are probably the clear winner here. I actually spent an hour in one of those pyramids, alone, because I went at a time when there were ~no tourists in Egypt (courtesy of a recent terror attack) and Saqqara wasn't really on the tourism map yet anyway. It was a supremely haunting experience, exploring those dark tunnels, climbing up and down the steep steps and ramps, beneath literal tonnes of pyramidal stone, with only a battered, flickering plastic flashlight to light my way. I think it was this one:

I passed 100,000 words on the new novel tonight. It feels a bit like it's spinning completely out of control as approaches the end of Act IV, which is odd, because I actually have a fairly clear idea of what Act V is and how I want it to end. (Which is a relief; endings are hard.) The problem, I think, is that there are so many twists and revelations that just explaining what the hell is going on, in a somewhat abstract way, is occupying a lot of the available verbiage. I need something a little more concrete and human to anchor the act.

(This is also true of Act III, but I've halfway figured out how I'm going to fix that one already.)

There are two ways to write something good: write a good first draft, or greatly improve a work with each new draft. I've done both. Two of my books, Dark Places and Beasts of New York, were basically published as-is, albeit with additions and cuts respectively. The others were all painful rewrites or rerewrites or rererewrites. The former mode is obviously preferable, but this one was never going to be that ... but I think, even in its current messy state, the spine of the story does not suck.

(And at least I am extremely confident that no one will ever criticize it for lack of ambition.)

Almost all of my novels are partitioned into sections. Beasts in two, Night of Knives in three, the others are all five acts IIRC. I think this is in large part because, mentally, fixing and polishing 20,000 or 30,000 words feels a lot less oppressive and insurmountable than fixing and polishing 100,000 all at once. But also because I think it's easier for readers, to have distinct sections and milestones within a novel. It's asking a lot of someone, especially these days, to read a whole book. Little rewards along the way are helpful. I've long felt that the experience of reading a novel expands will beyond the novel itself; a book is really a conversation between author and reader, and it comes with a preface and a prologue, whether you want it to or not, before they ever even get to the text.

(You can neither prevent this conversation from happening nor control it, which for control freaks like us novelists is a disconcerting thought.)

The best twists are the ones which make the reader realize that actually this is not quite the book they thought it was; and the best partitioning of a book is that which puts section breaks at the right places for the reader to take a breath and digest what they've read so far. These are not necessarily the right places for the author to take a break.

(But that, thankfully, is a thought I can put aside until I have at least one complete draft.)

Admittedly I haven't been out much, but I have been out on a mini road trip. Don't worry, I was social distancing. "But Jon," you say, you straw person you, "just how much were you social distancing?" Well, let me put it this way:

A Lassen triptych:

Going back further:

I've been having running problems lately. By the end of about 5K I am exhausted. Weirdly, even when I run more often, I do not progress; I'm still winded and dazed by the end of about 5K, sometimes even less. What's going on? I asked myself. Is it age? But no, people run sizable distances well into their seventies. Is it my new size? I've put on both muscle and fat and am 225 lbs nowadays, but it's still a pretty fit 225 lbs, and my legs are fairly strong, so that doesn't make much sense. It it some ... condition?

It is, I think, but not a medical one. A mental one. I have somehow become a negative splitter.

I would never have known if not for Strava. But looking at my last set of 4K or 5K runs, the splits are pretty remarkable, for me. Today I ran 4k/2.5m, was newly cognizant of my tendency for negative splits and kept (I thought) slowing down, and yet at the 3k/1.9m mark, got winded enough that I stopped and walked for a minute before finishing. "Well," I thought to myself, "at least this won't be a negative split, for once." And yet, Strava saith --

Mile 1 Pace 9:16
Mile 2 Pace 9:03
0.48 Pace 9:03

That's right, even with that full minute of walking, I had a negative split. Go back a month to my (really lovely) nighttime 5K, a double loop around the Central Park Reservoir:

Mile 1 Pace 9:27
Mile 2 Pace 8:54
Mile 3 Pace 8:48
0.18 Pace 8:18

I mean, no wonder I finished breathless and dizzy, I haven't been someone who can keep up an 8:18-mile pace for years. Anything faster than 9:00 or so is pretty draining. And yet clearly I keep going well under that (again, today's 9:03 includes a minute of walking.) Let's go back to my previous 5K, and you guessed it:

Mile 1 Pace 9:22
Mile 2 Pace 8:40
Mile 3 Pace 8:25
0.14 8:24

Something in me decides, after the first mile or so, that I'm being pursued by wolves. The remarkable thing is that it's completely unconscious. I'd have no idea if not for Strava. If not for Strava I'd tell you I was slowing down slightly over the course of the run.

The solution is obvious: keep running at about a 9:00-9:15 pace if I want to start aiming for 10K rather than 5K. How? That's a pretty good question. (Constantly checking my phone is super distracting so not really an option for me.) It's bizarre to me, though, albeit relieving, that my new problem with distance running is simply that I just need to slow the hell down.

Happy new decade! Crossposting from Twitter, my list of my favorite pieces (which I wrote) published in the teens, mostly for my own reference, e.g. if I ever decide I want to jump ship to a different column-writing gig and want to assemble a quick portfolio. Mostly TechCrunch columns, but --

first, 2011's BEASTS OF NEW YORK, my odd squirrel fantasy novel. I've written other books that people like, but this one, people love: BoNY at GoodReads.¹

OK, back to TechCrunch. Also in 2011, I went for a wander around East Africa and wrote this reportage piece from Mombasa's fiber landing site, which provided the vast majority of East Africa's Internet connectivity at the time: This Is Where The Magic Happens.

A few years later, in 2014, I wrote about Internet dialects, David Foster Wallace, and a predicted loss of trust in mass media's Clinical Standard Written English, in a piece which I think holds up all too well: Such DFW. Very Owell. So Doge. Wow.

In 2015 I channeled the spirit of Dr. Seuss into my frustrations at constant nag reminders to download apps. Sadly, those reminders have since only multiplied - notifications! newsletters! GDPR! My sentiment remains the same: I Do Not Want Your Stupid App.

Then, in 2016, five years after I started writing about Bitcoin, I wrote a long rant about Why It Matters. I still believe this, though I also believe the cryptocurrency industry has taken a lot of wrong turns since: Why Bitcoin Matters.

Again in 2016 I wrote another long rant, this one an angry one, about the war on math, a.k.a. the targeting of end-to-end encryption by the powers that be, with a brief pause to train my guns on my allies as well. This one too remains all too relevant: This war on math is still bullshit.²

In 2017, near the beginning of the truly surreal cryptocurrency boom that year, amid claims (repeated to this day) that cryptocurrencies' "Netscape moment" was here, I argued they were using entirely the wrong metaphor and narrative: Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet.

Also in 2017, I wrote a tech column in the second person, about anxiety, complexity, interconnectivity, and social media, and I fear this one is going to hold up basically indefinitely, alas: Technology, complexity, anxiety, catastrophe.

Detouring briefly from TC, in 2018 I wrote an appreciation of the late, great Ursula K. Le Guin for the magazine The Walrus back in my homeland. (It's basically Canada's Harper's.) I was terrified of screwing this one up, but looking back, I think I didn't: Ursula Le Guin Taught Me That Everything I Knew About Sci-fi Was Wrong.

Finally, in 2018, I wrote what I think is my best analysis of the tension between personal privacy and public security, by suggesting "public security is essential; privacy is nice-to-have" ... and then explaining why that is entirely wrong: Personal privacy vs. public security.

¹I wrote two other novels during the teens, but they were really weird and experimental and ultimately didn't work. Other people are more upset about this than I am. If it's any consolation, I have recently written and rewritten a 29,000-word first act of a new novel, which is also weird, and is ultimately going to get really weird, but is much less experimental in that it's structured as a thriller with a single traditional narrative thread. Uh, kind of. Anyway I'd be very surprised if I didn't have a draft of this ready for agental submission by the end of 2020.

²As you can see, somewhere in there TC's titular capitalization policies changed.

February lights.

Hills' eyes.

Iconically yours.

Miami A.

Gator city.

Cautionary tale.

Stanford sojourn.

Final party.

Jersey shore.

Monkey see.

Tree door.

Final game.

Fire works.

Ancient enemy.

Desert rose.

Surfing niece.

Oakland heart.

Long sought.

Shasta trail.

Magnum size.

Shrouded Ararat.

Favourite city.

Hyde dawn.

Fjord view.

University town.

Running route.

Ice water.

Arctic mountains.

Coal mine.

Seed vault.

Auroral night.

Satellite shoot.

Private jet.

Curtain call.

Oh, yeah, and I wrote a thing about the event, too.

Elephant seals, Point Reyes.

Maine sunset.

I was in Toronto for like two hours.

Crabbing it up, Fishermans Wharf.

Bay to Breakers, being Bay to Breakers.

From a hallucinatory overnight in Vancouver.

VR can be heroes?

Baywatch, Venice Beach.

Patron saint.

As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.

Up before the market.

So sans guile.

Brooding Zug, aka the Crypto Valley.

I like this Lausanne watchtower selfie more than anyone should.

The billionaire beside me has a pretty nice lawn.

Niece and nephew.

Benched.

Reach for enlightenment.

Brooklyn Bridge by night.

Vegas veterans will note that these fountains are not usually photographed from this vantage.

The UFO twirled and yawed above the thrashing masses.

Neon Museum.

Weird weekend; about sixteen hours later, I found myself about as distant as this from Mark Zuckerberg.

Be still your beating hearts:

California sunset.

A. gets some perspective.

Windy run.

Learning to fly (which is going slower than I'd like, but well.)

Marin tangle.

Hudson hawk.

Sunset gazing.

Where's that confounded bridge?

Space Coast from ghost to ghost.

Moments later, a soldier bellowed at us "No pictures!" Then we went in.

Spectacled selfie.

Hong Kong shutter.

Peninsular lanterns.

Harbour view.

A tiny and fairly representative fragment of Shenzhen's skyline.

One of the many famous electronics markets.

Light-emitting dreamscapes.

Circumjacent!

Shenzhen is not the least crazy place I've ever been.

I mean.

When in doubt, make it spectacular, right?

I don't think this Hong Kong Airport ad is for a horror movie.

Hanoi tiger I.

Hanoi tiger II, at the Temple of Literature. Why doesn't every city have a Temple of Literature? Anyway I went and was not revered as a demigod. What is the point of being an author anyway.