Writing - cushtie.com

Category: Writing

  • Hanggliding Over Volcanoes

    About four months ago, I gave one of my old friends a floppy disc, one of those archaic, flimsy ways to transfer data from the last century. He vanished back to the depths of Kent with it, I flew back to Singapore and didn’t hear another word from him for months. That made me sad.

  • Anniversaries and terrible ideas

    We had a day of birthday and anniversary celebrations today. In the morning, a birthday party for a three year old over at East Coast Park. Everyone else there seemed to know each other from the same church, a place in a shopping mall near our old flat in Chinatown, surrounded by Korean barbecue joints […]

  • Yes Dear

    “The whole point of AI –“ “Is being able to ignore your wife without being caught.” “huh?” “Think about it, the Turing test isn’t really designed to see if a computer can pass as a human or not. It’s there to see if you can convincingly feign attention to a conversation.” “That’s not the point” […]

  • BURRITO

    “You’re a burrito” he said. “Is this one of those racist metaphors about food? Because if it is, champ, you win the prize for being unobservant – I’m Chinese American, not Mexican.” “Maybe he thought you were a small Spanish donkey.” “Thanks Nina.” “I’m not being racist” Phelps said. “For once.” “I can’t be racist, […]

  • Coffee and writing

    I settled down and wrote a thousand words of my time-travel/xenophobia story at lunchtime today, while my wife and children slept. This made me feel very productive, but also utterly exhausted, as I missed out on that crucial nap. It’s hard to balance creativity and sleep. I suppose when you’re younger and have less responsibilities […]

  • How to avoid jet lag

    The cure for jet-lag is simple: copious volumes of Vitamin A. No, not retinoic acid. The real stuff, the hard stuff, Vitamin Alcohol.

  • The Heisenberg Infidelity Principle

    I always enjoy hearing about the contrasting mores in different societies. Over lunch today we discussed what is the Japanese concept of cheating in a relationship. (One of my colleagues had been to Tokyo recently, and corroborated what she’d been told by asking three different Japanese people: who am I to argue with such significant […]

  • Living Well Is The Best Revenge (Apart From Plausible Deniability?)

    I discovered Dumbest Tweets today, which was highly amusing, although it can be distracting to have the unmitigated sewer pipe of Twitter curated and fed to you. A few thoughts, a propos of that, Squid Ink, and discussions with colleagues: There’s room for a natural language based service that gives you plausible deniability the next […]

  • How am I not dead?

    Ten years ago, I drove a rented car to the East of England, to a land where there was no "there" there. Flat land, plain in every sense, the only marks on the landscape the stands of trees, constructed by the Forestry Commission rather than grown. Somewhere, hidden in the numb geography was a CentreParcs, […]

  • Sick of returning to vomit

    I’m coming down with a cold, which is a ridiculous thing to happen in a tropical country. I have muscular pains in my legs, my head aches and my voice is deterioating into a whisper. I’ve taken vitamin C, paracetamol and chocolate and still I feel quite, quite grotty.