Monday various

I can remember stumbling across his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” in my high school library, reading it and not really understanding it, but finding it mind blowing nonetheless. To me, that particular brand of hazy understanding feels like the correct way to think about a lot of things – fractals, electron clouds, cats in boxes waiting to be poisoned – the natural world is really too complicated and beautiful for any of us to fully understand, and that’s OK. That’s in fact what makes it so beautiful.

We’re looking for short (30 second to 2 minutes) videos that say what you think about Canadian speculative fiction. These should be interview-style videos in the vein of Speaker’s Corner and can be recorded as simply as with a web camera. Prior interviews or footage can be submitted provided that you have permission to do so. We will host these individually on a YouTube channel (sunburstaward), but will also edit them in order to create a series of short videos to promote awareness of the fundraising campaign. A longer video will be shown at the opening remarks to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

But mostly I sat down and said, I’m not going to write a boring story. And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. Don’t dick around too much in the weeds of, oh, gee, this character’s deep interiority or anything like that. Get it done and make this character do some stuff and make stuff explode. That seems to work pretty well. [via]