Blog » In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of Penguin Random House. Ballantine...
Blog » I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth is a terrible clock. I love leap seconds. I love the unsolvable...
Blog » At work we recently started experimenting with generative AI for assistance with programming. We have a new Visual Studio Code plugin which we can ask questions in English, and it spits back code. It was a really interesting piece of, well, mandatory training. I've formed some opinions. The main thing I dislike about AI coding assistance...
Blog » Mirror's Edge came out for the PlayStation 3 in 2008 and it is literally the only PlayStation 3 game I own. I bought the console in 2011 because it was a top-of-the-line Blu-ray player and I guess Mirror's Edge was the only game for the console I had any interest in playing. I wrote a belated post-mortem of the game in 2012 and concluded...
Blog » Control is a 2019 third-person action shooter developed by Remedy Entertainment. The game takes inspiration from a variety of sources, but its most prominent and notable influence is the SCP project, which is very important to me, for obvious reasons. (I don't like to call it the "SCP wiki" these days... I think this gives people the false...
Blog » Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about. "Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist. It might exist at some point in the future, but that just seems pretty improbable to me. As I understand it, right now, to "accurately" simulate the behaviour of just a handful of neurons requires a...
Blog » So I think I've mentioned a few of times that the next thing I want to publish is a book of short stories. Due to [gestures at the world] all of this, and some other things, progress on this has been extremely slow over the course of 2021. Currently I am hung up on selecting content. At present, the book will definitely contain: "Valuable...
Blog » So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eventually, and in the meantime we want to make absolutely sure...
Blog » So, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing has been offering on-demand paperback printing services for some time... but it appears that an on-demand hardcover printing service is now in beta. And I was invited into that beta. And so, there are now hardcover editions of all of my books! Click through to each book's dedicated page for purchase...
Blog » It suddenly occurs to me that not everybody who follows Things Of Interest also follows me on Twitter, or even follows follows my dedicated book announcements account. That being the case, you may not be aware that there are now paperback editions of my books! Click through to each book's dedicated page for purchase links: There Is No...
Blog » Conditions for the ultimate Deus Ex run are: Do not carry or use inventory items. In particular: No weapons. No augmentations. No lockpicks or multitools. No skills upgrades. In particular: No hacking. Never use a door code or a computer login without acquiring it legitimately. Spend no money. ...
Blog » A while back during a training session at work, our instructor pitched us a hypothetical question: Your data centre is on fire, and all your application code is on one drive, and all your tests are on the other drive, and you can only rescue one. What do you do? Save the application code. Save the tests. More recently, out of curiosity, I...
Blog » It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinion about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Code from your perspective, only mine. That said, the major...
Blog » As a first draft there are a variety of fairly simple, fixable problems with this movie and a few major core problems which we're going to have to discuss at greater length. You're an experienced writer at this stage, so you know what the editorial red pen is like, so let's just get right into it. We'll cover the simple stuff first. * D-O...
Blog » cripes does anybody remember Google People— qntm (@qntm) 21 August 2019 it existed for like fifteen minutes between Orkut but before Google+, and had the wildest features like your profile image had to be smiling. "No, wider," it would say. Sometimes it would just accept a frowning image and modify it to be smiling— qntm (@qntm) 21 August...
Blog » A picture is worth a thousand words, so let's start like this: [draws a big circle] This is the fictional universe which you created. It should have solid fundamentals and internal consistency. You should be able to answer most sensible questions about it. [draws a much smaller circle inside it] Your story will only cover this bit. * By...
Blog » First, go and watch The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. J. J. Abrams has this storytelling device which he uses, which he calls a "mystery box". Me just telling you those two words, and then pausing for a little while as you think about all of the works of J. J. Abrams you've ever seen, might be enough for you to work out what a "mystery...
Blog » I program computers and I also write. There is more than one way to program, but there are a few good practices in programming which have analogous good practices in writing. Here is how you write like a programmer. The following is not necessarily advice. First, write with purpose. Do not write just because. Don't write because you love...
Blog » Teleportation is when a physical object travels from one place to another without passing through the intervening space. Teleportation is, at least to a first-order approximation, fictitious. However, when it does appear in fiction, it frequently has some kind of logical underpinning, and it becomes interesting to break down those various...
Fine Structure extras, appendices, feedback » Fine Structure is noted for its highly nonlinear, not to say garbled, presentation. As part of work on an end-to-end rewrite of the story, I assembled a chronological listing of the chapters, which you may find makes more sense. Read from top to bottom. Unbelievable scenes On Digital Extremities...
Blog » For every mathematical statement S, exactly one of the following two claims is true: 1. S can be proven 2. S cannot be proven Every statement S has a negation which is also a statement: ~S So, furthermore, for every statement S exactly one of the following two claims is also true: A. ~S can be proven B. ~S cannot be proven (To put it...
Blog » Be privileged. Be lucky. Be rich. Be powerful. Be good-looking. Be intelligent, smart and wise, but more importantly educated-- suggested fields of undergraduate study are biology, anthropology and politics. Contrary to popular suggestions, I do not advise you to drop out. Network. Be charismatic. Meet people. Know people. Remember names....
Blog » Not the films. Their titles. In a world where the production process for the biggest new films is essentially live-streamed in its entirety, the title is what comes first, and comes under harsh analysis before anything else, even the earliest teasers. With this in mind, I intend to rank the Bond films' titles according to how good they are...
Blog » then: Whose is the unicorn dream? Deckard is an original creation. None of his memories are his own, they were given to him. Someone, some human, must have had the unicorn dream before he did, and then it was implanted in replicant Deckard. Who? * "It doesn't make any difference [...], it's completely hypothetical." If Deckard's a...
Blog » I bought Braid on the promise of lavish visuals and neat puzzles with temporal mechanics, and on this basis I was rewarded. I found some frustration with the controls, which I eventually traced to dodgy keyboard drivers - the game wouldn't register the up or down arrows while I was holding Shift, making it impossible to rewind at high...
Blog » Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there. It's probably best not to call right now. After...
Blog » This turned out to be a long one. Back To The Future is one of two films, along with Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which forms the bedrock of what most people of my generation understand about time travel. Back To The Future is so iconic that its model of time travel forms a kind of universal canon. Even people who've not seen it seem...
Blog » "Don't worry, it'll all make sense. I'm a professional." It's about time I wrote this up. I have a lot of non-time travel-related praise for both of these films, but I'm going to try to stay on topic. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is the first film in the unexpectedly successful, and still one hundred percent canonical, if sadly...
Blog » While writing Ra I listened to the following tracks pretty much incessantly. There were more in the list but I've cut it down to about one track per artist, and also randomised it. James Shimoji - Red Line Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms Nine Inch Nails - And All That Could Have Been Mansun - Railings Idlewild - Modern Way Of Letting Go...
Blog » Now including all of season 7B. This may be the final significant update of the Futurama timeline. It's been an emotional day for me. Notes The Futurama universe is assumed to be exactly identical to ours except where the show explicitly diverges from reality. Several episodes' dates are formed based on projections which may prove...
Blog » Magic spells This is background information about how magic spells work in Ra. This is information that I've been keeping up to date since the story began, but now it can be released publically. This article contains one serious spoiler for anybody who hasn't finished reading chapter 18, Deeper Magic, and mild spoilers beyond that point....