MeFi Projects

When you think of dodgeball, do you remember being pummeled with 8.5" kickballs as a child or recall the 2004 cult classic movie? Many adults including myself have rediscovered dodgeball as a fun way to get exercise and make friends through local recreational leagues. Discovering and tracking nearby leagues and drop-in events is tedious and typically done through word-of-mouth (since web search results are incomplete and outdated). This motivated me to start a website to help players (initially just those living in the San Francisco Bay Area, California) to reliably find dodgeball happening near them. [more inside]
posted by mdean on Feb 19, 2024 - 0 comments

Invisible Sun, the third book in my Empire Games trilogy, is published on September 28th, 2021. [more inside]
posted by cstross on Sep 26, 2021 - 2 comments

Avoidance Procedures is a short comic about persevering in the face of the immensity and eternity of everything. It's also the 60th (and last) episode in the lo-fi sci-fi comic series Places In Space, an episodic journey across the universe and back again spread out across two different 30 episode series (previously on projects). [more inside]
posted by dng on Aug 2, 2021 - 0 comments

Dead Lies Dreaming is published tomorrow (October the 27th) by Tor.com Publishing! It's my first novel in over two years, and it's the start of a new trilogy set in the same universe as the Laundry Files: you don't need to have read the other series first. As for what it's about, pick any or all of: eccentric artistically-inclined supervillains, queer found families, disgruntled ex-cops, sinister private equity billionaires, Transnistrian mafia "loss adjusters", and the long-lost concordance to the One True Necronomicon ...
posted by cstross on Oct 26, 2020 - 2 comments

In 2018, I completed work on Chronin, a queer historical SF duology and my debut as a solo graphic novelist. It follows Mirai Yoshida, a college student in an elite program which uses time travel for research, who finds herself trapped in 1860s Japan as civil war is brewing. The complete arc is 730 pages. Today, Volume 1 is out in the world. [more inside]
posted by Narrative Priorities on Feb 18, 2019 - 2 comments

An Escape is a short illustrated dystopian fiction story, told obliquely through a series of 15 interconnected (mostly) single-page vignettes.
posted by dng on Oct 5, 2018 - 0 comments

Destination: Mars is a 180-page graphic novel, that tells a tale of exploration, love and strangeness on an odd and incomprehensible world. Three people (and a cat) set out on a journey to Mars, only to discover that the world there is stranger and more dangerous than they could ever have known. [more inside]
posted by dng on Aug 6, 2018 - 5 comments

A short SF story I’ve been trying to sell since 2015 that suddenly has relevance thanks to the Vice story about face swap pornography so I decided to self publish it to Medium. Celebrity! Copyright! Intellectual property! Puns!
posted by The Whelk on Jan 26, 2018 - 1 comment

An old prototype SF game about mysteries, weird aliens, and managing your crew. [more inside]
posted by Zarkonnen on Sep 12, 2017 - 3 comments

I wrote about the 2007 flop 'The Invasion' for Vice's Does It Actually Suck? And read it as a newly relevant parable about fascism from outer space.
posted by The Whelk on May 15, 2017 - 1 comment

After three invitation-only anthologies organized by founding editor Paul Starr, in 2015 The Sockdolager made three key changes: an additional editor (Alison Wilgus), open submissions, and a quarterly release schedule. As of December 15th, with Issue #4, we've completed our first year! [more inside]
posted by Narrative Priorities on Dec 16, 2015 - 1 comment

My story, A Thousand Solomons, is up on the Baltimore Science Fiction Society website, as a winner of their Amateur Writing Contest. The contest is held every year, there are cash prizes, the winner's work is published online (for a year), and the winner has the opportunity to read their work at Balticon.
posted by newdaddy on Nov 22, 2015 - 2 comments

Today's the launch date for The Annihilation Score, boot six in the Laundry Files. It's my big fat superhero novel. (The US launch date is Tuesday 7th, but it's available today in the UK, NZ, Australia, and the EU, from Orbit.)
posted by cstross on Jul 2, 2015 - 13 comments

A bunch of ideas I've had tumbling around in my head for some time about science fiction, fear, isolation, and death, have finally gelled into an article looking at all of SF through the lens of Margaret Atwood's "Survival."
posted by 256 on May 21, 2013 - 1 comment

My debut novel (well, long novella, actually) has been published by Champagne Books! It's a time travel SF romance called A QUESTION OF TIME. It's about an SF author who finds herself transported to her high school days in the late 1980s, where she realizes she has a chance to save a favorite teacher from death. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik on Dec 19, 2012 - 4 comments

Ken Cosgrove, everyone's favorite Accounts man on Mad Men, has a side career as an author with many pen names. The David Algonquin Wiki imagines a world where Ken's stories have become popular and well-remembered pieces of culture but the man himself is largely a mystery (Although Harlan Ellison is a fan). Wiki is open to anyone, with an attempt being made to write his stories round-robin style.
posted by The Whelk on Apr 20, 2012 - 48 comments

Our research hypothesis is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people that make it part of their daily life. To explore this idea, we use data from approximately 18 million check-ins collected from the location-based social network foursquare, and apply clustering algorithms to discover the different areas of the city. [more inside]
posted by jasonhong on Apr 19, 2012 - 1 comment

AEscifi has released its second annual podcast, this time featuring our favourite science fiction short stories from 2011. As always, everything is free and Creative Commons licensed. [more inside]
posted by 256 on Jan 22, 2012 - 0 comments

Time 2 Travel is a group blog for the fashionably broke time traveler. Get advice from people who've been then - Learn about Safe houses! The best cults on Delos! and maybe contribute some advice or reviews of your own. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk on Dec 5, 2011 - 20 comments

A web app to tell you how broken your favorite San Francisco MTA route is. Right now it's pretty simple, just pulling data from the NextMuni API when it's asked for a specific route, but I plan to revamp it this weekend to have it do periodic polling on each line so I can display stats on the front page. Other improvements in the works: get published schedules so the app will only show lines currently running, adjust the headway thresholds based on scheduled headway, collect stats for each line to rank the most broken lines in the system... got anything else I should do with this?
posted by spitefulcrow on Apr 5, 2011 - 1 comment