Tim's Bits and Pieces

Just a few interesting links.

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Various notes on the Paris Attacks.

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It was two weeks after we moved into the new house that I first noticed my daughter singing the theme song of a popular cartoon series in our new backyard. "For the Fairies" she said; and I thought it was cute.

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An image meme correcting a popular, but very wrong, "quote" from Marcus Aurelius:

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The palace gardener walked down the central path of the west garden. He was alone among the plants, which was no longer unusual. Visitors to the west garden had become rarer in the past months then any time the gardener could remember of his forty-three years of tending these grounds.

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Matthews watched the ship's thrusters automatically activate in an attempt to slow its entry down while his lifeboat drifted away in the upper atmosphere. It was strange, last week he was struggling to keep her running, but now he found himself praying that her drives would fail because then she would smash into the planet hard enough to kill It. Maybe.

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Those working in Australia's detention centres are now forbidden under threat of jail time from revealing information to anyone about anything they come across while doing their jobs.

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I was recently on holidays for a few weeks, and while I was away I finished off a couple of SF anthologies: The Mammoth Book of Best New SF #23 edited by Gardner Dozois [2009] (confusingly this is the same book as The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection), and Destinies Vol 1 No 2 edited by James Baen [1979]. A couple of months ago I also read L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXIV edited by Algis Budrys [2008]. And I thought a comparison of the three collections might offer some interesting insight into the current SF marketplace.

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