I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'