Brad Simkulet's Blog, page 7
October 9, 2017
October 8, 2017
gamefreaksnz:
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sb.ii
–You don’t have to just wish he was dead. It would be
so easy to make it happen.
–What? Who?
–Shh. Just think of it, of how easy it would be. You
can do it while he is asleep.
–No. No. That wouldn’t work.
–The light sleeping?
–Yeah, he’d know I was there as soon as I reached the
bedroom door.
–Find a way to drug him. Put him to sleep. You could
get something that would do the trick from M—. His cousin would be able to
tell you where he is, to put you in contact.
–It’s too dangerous. What if they found out that I
put something in his drink?
–You’d be killing him in his sleep. There are going
to be bigger issues than whether or not you spiked a drink, right.
–Right. Yeah. Stupid.
–So you don’t want to get caught is what you’re
saying. You want him dead but you don’t want to pay the price.
–I … no! Of course not.
–Hire M—. Have him come in some Saturday morning
when he’s here alone. A home invasion.
–No way. M— would do it, but there is no way he
would keep his mouth shut if they figured out it was him, and they would
totally figure out it was him. Seriously, though, who are you?
–You know who I am.
–What?
–You know. An accident then. You want an accident.
What sort of accident? Let me help you here. There has to be a way to make this
work.
–How can it be an accident? A ladder or something.
–Get him to take you camping. That’s where you can
make an accident happen.
–What? How?
–He’s not a strong swimmer. Not like you. We get him
on the water, and we have an accident.
–Holy shit. That … that could work.
–Think of how much better everything would be without
him. This could make all the difference.
October 7, 2017
Annalee Newitz's Autonomous: a robosexual romp through an unequal future where biotech patent-enforcement is the only law
Annalee Newitz’s debut novel Autonomous is everything you’d hope for from the co-founder of IO9, a much-respected science communicator with a longstanding sideline in weird sex and gender issues: a robosexual romp through a class war dystopia where biotech patent-enforcement is the only real law remaining, where indentured humans resent the conscious, enslaved robots for making forced labor socially acceptable, and where hackerspaces become biohackerspaces, home to reverse-engineered, open source pharma and GMOs that might just save the future.
Newitz’s tale combines the gonzo, corporatized future of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash with the weird sex of Charlie Stross’s Saturn’s Children; throws in an action hero that’s a biohacker version of Bruce Sterling’s Leggy Starlitz, and then saturates it with decades of deep involvement with free software hackers, pop culture, and the leading edge of human sexuality.
Jack is a pirate: she putters around the ocean in her submarine, camouflaged by fragments of melted polar ice-cap, smuggling the blockbuster pharmaceuticals she reverse-engineers and replicates. Mostly, she’s in the lifesaving drug business, but a woman’s gotta eat, so she gets her operating capital by bootlegging lifestyle drugs, like Zacuity, the latest and greatest from pharma giant Zaxy: a drug that makes working hard orgasmically pleasurable.
But Zacuity has a dirty little secret. Zaxy only distributes it via large corporate employers, who administer it as a perk, under strict supervision – thus disguising the fact that it is powerfully addictive. But this fact is immediately apparent when Jack’s customers start literally working themselves to death.
As if Jack doesn’t have enough problems, she’s also just killed a burglar who broke into her sub, and in so doing, inherited his slave, whom she is determined to set free, if only he’ll leave her sub.
Jack’s piracy threatens to expose Zaxy to civil liability, and this paints a huge target on her back – so she’s pursued by one of the fearsome Intellectual Property Crimes enforcers and his giant killer robot. Lucky for her, the normally deadly efficient assassin is thrown off his game by his all-consuming, secret sexual feelings for his robot sidekick.
Add to this a global movement of freeculture hackers who are determined to free the pharma, a born-free robot that is puzzling through what it means to never be indentured, and the seedy underground of itinerant bioscientists who drift between the domes of the now-temperate northern Canada, the souks of the former Morocco, and the high seas, and you’ve got everything you’d hope for in an Annalee Newitz novel (which is saying a lot).
Autonomous [Annalee Newitz/Tor Books]https://boingboing.net/2017/09/19/annalee-newitzs-autonomous.html
October 4, 2017
humanoidhistory:
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: 1982 space art by Andrei...
60 YEARS AGO TODAY: 1982 space art by Andrei Sokolov, recalling the orbital odyssey of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 satellite, which launched on October 4, 1957.
October 2, 2017
October 1, 2017
katevictoriax:
Boys need to be cuddled more. Put his head in your lap or on your chest. Stroke his...
Boys need to be cuddled more. Put his head in your lap or on your chest. Stroke his hair, scratch his back lightly with your nails, rub his shoulders, kiss him on the top of his head. Anytime, not just when he’s feeling down or trying to fall asleep.
