Slackpathy - noun - The phenomenon where conversations in a Slack channel are carried out using roughly 50% emoji or reaction gifs and 50% written natural language.  The term derives from the hypothesized phenomenon of telepaths sending entire thought-complexes to each other rather than streams of speech.

Generally speaking, I dislike loud and busy parties.  I find that my senses become overloaded in a very short period of time - all the voices, all the background sounds, all the random noise, the echoes from hard surfaces... it's very unpleasant.  After a short period of time in such an environment, my vision is all but useless.  The fog, the mist, the random colors.. on top of that, my tactile sense goes nuts.  Being rubbed down with wet and dry sponges, fans blowing on the front and back of my head at full blast, my legs vibrating backwards and forwards …

This was the last part of the imaging procedure that I remember before deciding that I should probably take a nap. I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, and let's be honest, being stuffed into the core of a superconducting magnet for a couple of hours gets boring after a while. I can only entertain myself so much... I can best characterize this part of the imaging procedure as "Shit got real."

Something cranked up deep inside the core of the machine and my vision went red, and then it started to bleed in and out. At …

I drew this depiction of what phase B of the MRI I had done in October of 2014 looked like. The sounds seemed to come from four places around me - two just above my head and two somewhere around my shoulders, or maybe my abdomen. I'm not sure because the sounds from the multiple points resonated weirdly inside my head and made some of my dental implants feel like they were buzzing (at the time that wasn't possible because they were all resin composite, but work with me here). The sounds made these weird, watery waves that made an almost …

Late in 2014 I had cause to undergo magnetic resonance imaging of my head as a diagnostic procedure. If you've never had one before, this procedure can involve a head x-ray (to make sure you don't have any ferrous material in tender places that might get ripped out by a very powerful magnetic field). It definitely does involve an hour or two laying on your back on a backboard with snug straps holding you in place (because if you move it'll mess up the imaging data) while you're stuffed into a relatively small tube in the core of the MRI …

Song: Showtime: Imp Strife Mix by Malcolm Brown, George Buzinkai, and Curt Blakeslee

Album: Homestuck Volumes 1-4

Book: Overthrowing the Old Gods by Don Webb

License: CC BY-NC-SA v3.0

As you may or may not have guessed I'm a fan of science fiction (I'd have to be to take the name of a certain time traveling alien as my own) as well as an afficionado of H.P. Lovecraft's C'thul'hu Mythos. Maybe I'm in dire need of calling the crew together for another tabletop RPG night or maybe I've been under a little too much stess recently but lately I've been on a Laundry Files bender. If you've never heard of Charles Stross he's an excellent author who writes this particular series, in which a halpless hacker named Bob …

It’s long been a trope of science fiction where one of the characters has the capacity for superhuman access to data in realtime, usually through prosthetic eyes that incorporate heads-up displays that make geospatial coordinates and targeting information available without the distraction of having to look down at a monitor of some kind. In point of fact, this isn’t anything particularly new. Fighter jets like the FA-18 have long had transparent monitors positioned directly in the pilot’s field of vision that incorporate much of the information of the instruments on the panel. Players of first-person shooters like …

If you've watched television for any length of time, chances are you've seen the classic FAA blips-on-a-screen representations of air traffic over the United States. A student at UCLA has taken this to the next level by generating high-res 3d movies of air traffic over the country. They're all in QuickTime format, so you'll have to have the appropriate CODECs or players installed. The animations are an interesting diversion, if nothing else. There is a version where each kind of flight is colour-coded, a 3D dome projection (nice work on that, incidentally), and even one where an amorphous blob is …