Happy Friday, folks. Hope those of you in the U.S. had a great Labor day weekend. I didn’t end up doing a whole lot, but managed to get in one more BBQ night, and saw a couple of movies. The Apparition was ‘meh,’ through and through, but The Possession was a pretty solid and gripping possession/exorcism chiller–not really groundbreaking in terms of plot, but well executed.

As far as writing goes, it’s been a bit slow. Well, not really, but instead of foraging ahead to new and exciting word counts, I’ve been revisiting past chapters of my Untitled Mad Science Novel and doing some large-scale revision, to bring events and characters and backstories in line with fixes I’ve come up with for things that weren’t working. Next week I should get to chug on along with new verbiage.

In the meantime, here are some random interesting links and things. (I’ve also got some Fading Light-specific stuff, but I’ll save that for a separate post.)

Here’s an article on some of the new ethical and political issues that are arising and will be arising from coming biotech advances. Biopolitics cuts across current ideological classifications, it turns out, and makes for some strange bedfellows. Interesting to me both on the face of it, and as a source for story ideas.

So, now people are making their own satellites to put into orbit. DIY science rocks.

IO9 reveals all you wanted to know about dinosaur cosplay in the 1930s. Because that was a thing then. Yes.

Driverless cars will be legal in California in a few years. The future, we are in you.

DMCA: An Author’s Best Friend. This links to a guide for writers on how to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get bogus copies of books on pirate sites taken down.

Here’s a car that runs on compressed air. Not really the speed and range I’d need, but cool nonetheless.

Science has determined that gibbons on helium sing like opera stars. I can only imagine what that grant proposal must have read like.

Great SF authors share their biggest writing setbacks – and how they triumphed. This should be of interest to any writer, not just SF writers.

Gary W. Olson is the author of the dark fantasy novel Brutal Light and a contributor to the dark fiction anthology Fading Light. His blog originates here. Photo: 3poD/Bigstock.com.