The UK’s bumper-bank-holiday fortnight is over, and I have access to a stable internet connection once again… which means it’s time to warm over the engines here at Futurismic and get back into the groove of talking about interesting stuff I found on the intertubes. Doing so will involve scaling the Brobdingnagian RSS mountain that lurks in my Reader account, of course; that alarming but cheery “1000+ items!” message suggests that that declaring inbox bankruptcy on all but the last few days is probably the only sensible way to deal with the problem.

And of course, the big story of the last few days is pretty inescapable. So you can read my thoughts about the assassination of Osama bin Laden over at Velcro City Tourist Board, should you wish to. Shorter version: not sad he’s dead, but pretty sickened by the glorying in his death; close with Nietzsche quote about being careful not to become that which you would destroy.

Additional: I somehow managed to squeeze writing a piece on the Arthur C Clarke Award for New Scientist into the mad churn of last week; I dare say those of you with an interest in the Clarke have already heard about it (a long-odds win for Lauren Beukes with Zoo City from the excellent Angry Robot imprint), but a chance to crow about writing for an organ I’ve been reading since I was a teenager was just too good to pass up, y’know? 🙂

Normal programming (for values of “normal” based on a highly localised dataset) will be resumed imminently; thanks for your patience.