Blog

Bike Around

Posted on by Patrick

Speak­ing as some­one who watched his father slide into demen­tia, this is very inter­est­ing.

To com­bat [mem­o­ry loss, researcher Anne-Chris­tine Hertz] built a pro­to­type called BikeAround, which pairs a sta­tion­ary bike with Google Street View to take demen­tia patients on a vir­tu­al ride down mem­o­ry lane. Patients input a street address of a place that means some­thing to them—a child­hood home[,] for instance—and then use the ped­als and han­dle­bars to “bike around” their old neighborhoods.

Meet the researcher using Google Street View to help demen­tia patients with mem­o­ry loss—via Google.

Some birth-year words

Posted on by Patrick

Thanks to Mer­ri­am-Web­ster’s “Time Trav­el­er” fea­ture, I now know that the fol­low­ing words’ and phras­es’ first record­ed use hap­pened the year I was born:

And dozens of oth­ers, too. How about you?

(Maybe lat­er I’ll indulge in a caipir­in­ha.)

Campfire Week

Posted on by Patrick
File Photo: Laundry

It was gor­geous out this week­end, sim­ply beau­ti­ful. Highs of 29°C Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. So I washed, like, all the laun­dry in my house and hung it on the line to dry on Saturday.

My neigh­bours decid­ed to have them­selves a fire in their back­yard fire pit, about an hour before I brought my laun­dry in.

Long sto­ry short, every shirt I put on now smells like camp­ing. Not that I’m complaining.

14th try’s the charm

Posted on by Patrick

I real­ly like my short sto­ry “The Overnight Shift”. I wrote it last sum­mer, in a week­end, at the start of my 2016 writer’s retreat. It was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten as a con­test entry in the NYC Mid­night flash fic­tion contest.

Since I wrote it, I’ve been try­ing to sell it. It’s right at the 1,000-word mark, mak­ing it what they term flash fic­tion. There are a decent num­ber of pay­ing mar­kets for flash fic­tion, and I was start­ing to think I was going to have to try them all.

Screenshot

That is a screen­shot of my Sub­mis­sion Grinder screen for “The Overnight Shift”. The num­bers in the square brack­ets at the end? That’s [the num­ber of cur­rent open sub­mis­sions for a piece / the num­ber of sub­mis­sions this year / the num­ber of all-time sub­mis­sions]. Those 14 are all the times I’ve sent this piece out into the world. 13 times run­ning, it was reject­ed (twice it made it to the sec­ond round, where it was then pruned).

And final­ly, this week, I sold it. It will appear some­time in Novem­ber in The Arcan­ist, a rel­a­tive­ly new online SF/F ’zine fea­tur­ing flash fiction.

I’ll be sure to post here when it goes live. Trust me, you won’t be able to keep me qui­et about it.