Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Varna was the sword and I was the shield.

We fell, screaming, through a hole ripped in space, through a hole ripped through a billion years of history. It was a fall that lasted us forever, a fall that lasted an instant.

But it was a fall.

Call us angels, avatars of The Final Mind. Part of the end of all things, sent to bring that end closer. By force - if necessary.

Two asteroid-sized intelligences, full of nano-factories and cornucopia machines, full of the products of the end of time. We were ready to make our mark on yesterday, and shape it into a new tomorrow.

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The Vulgate Worlds sat in the cometary halo of a dying star: a red giant, guttering away its hydrogen in a final doomed attempt to stay alight. In a million years it would collapse and fade, just big enough to become a white dwarf. Until then, a posthuman clade or two would fill its empty spaces, diving armoured comets into the thin star stuff to steal the secrets of the ages.

Stein Gunarsson was from Kohlwahr. Once a back up world, now an expanding node in the wide open spaces of the superbrights, its ships sped across the stars, grazing lightspeed and exploring the myriad faces of humanity. Stein was one of the explorers, a transmitter in his skull beaming all his sensations to his ship, and then back across the stars to his real body, a cluster of chilled smart matter out on the edge of the Kohlwahr system.

Prices for proofs of Susannah Clarke's excellent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell go through the roof on eBay...

So should I sell my copy?

...and the sea is so inviting: shades of blue, fading into the horizon, speckled silver in the sunlight. There's a statue standing on the cliff edge, by the fort, looking down at the sea. A seagull flies past, white fading to black as it banks shadow under its wings.

It's a beautiful view.

... a tug is towing an ICBM submarine through the straits of Dover.

Big and ugly, it's a scary thing to see in the flesh.

Taken from inside the office, and through the haze, here's a picture of this afternoon's boomer...

marypcb has revealed that there is such a thing as Black Books slash.

Just when I thought the world couldn't get any wierder.

I think I shall write about designing SharePoint web parts in .NET until it goes away...

Both marypcb and feorag have had a go at enhancing the submarine image I posted earlier, while trying to persuade me to start using PhotoShop...

Here's marypcb's impressionistic purple version: