The online home of aspiring fantasy & scifi author Martin Stellinga
Writing a great story starts with thinking up great characters. This sounds easier than it is. Two tools that can help are the positive and negative trait thesauruses.
Continue reading “The negative/positive trait thesaurus”
Avengers: Endgame is out, eleven years after the first Iron Man movie kicked off the Marvel cinematic universe. Forming the capstone to a twenty-two movie story arc is a pretty tall order. Let’s see how it fared.
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Above is a picture of a deep sea fish called the Mariana snailfish. This fish lives at 8 kilometers deep, or roughly 5 miles, and is transparent. It got me thinking about science fiction.
Continue reading “The curious case of the see-through fish”
In my career as a software developer, I’ve seen a lot of television and novels mangle the depiction of hackers. Today, let’s go blow apart some of those erroneous depictions.
Continue reading “5 common mistakes about hacking in stories”
This week, the first photograph of a black hole was released. Although, technically, it’s a visualization of a whole load of data, not an actual photo. The difference isn’t that important. You can see the result above. It looks a bit like a blurry donut. So what’s up with this?
Continue reading “Black holes”