What is the purpose of blogging? Should you get into it? In short: (1) it is better than social media and (2) one of the best ways for us to cultivate the Internet for future generations.
Author: Richard Rabil, Jr.
By day I work as a technical writer. I write essays and fiction in my spare time.
What I’m Up To: February 25, 2019
From the day I started this blog, I haven't committed to a strict blogging cadence. Until I do that (and I really should), if I don't have any well-formed thoughts to publish, I'll settle instead for giving a brief update on what I'm reading and working on.
Stars Beyond Our Reach
Traveling to the nearest star would require a generation ship. Can such a thing be done? As sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson explains with alacrity and precision, no, it can't.
Facebook Was Foreshadowed in 1909 (and a Score of Other Things You Didn’t Know about Science Fiction)
Why is 'Frankenstein' considered the mother of the genre? How did we go from seeing so many utopian stories to dystopian ones? Where did the word "robot" come from? Will SF ever be recognized as "true" literature?
My Article from STC Intercom: A Cost-Free Method of Archiving Wiki Pages in Confluence
Of all the boring subjects in the world, page archiving has got to be the most boring one of all. But for organizations whose content starts getting out of control, it's a critical problem to solve. Here's how my team tackled it in a low-cost way.
(Not Quite) Getting Over Cyber Punk
In a Slate op-ed published earlier this week, author Lee Konstantinou argues that "something is broken in our science fiction" and that we need to move beyond the cyber punk aesthetic. Perhaps, but there's one particular insight of cyber punk we should never abandon, which is that technology doesn't just serve us, it changes us---and not always for the better.
Narcissus on Social Media
Social media taps into our common need to feel connected. But it also adds something unique: a metrics-driven design that can easily turn us inward rather than outward.
