My story is up! Pete's June interlude

Read my 'flash' story free at Small Wonders Magazine

Three quick updates.

One

My story There are seventeen kinds of smile was just published at Small Wonders. Consider it advice to a newborn android on how to pass as human.

You are bad at hands

https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/there-are-seventeen-kinds-of-smile/

The story was written in a flurry, combining a few separate things from my ideas document. The phrase “Bad at hands” (“AI doesn’t understand the relationship between human faces and human hands”). A headline from the BBC: “There are 19 types of smile but only six are for happiness.” The instruction “If you see ‘I am not a robot’ you should click it. That’s what a human would do.”

I stumbled into the wiki-style hashtag device [see #my story] when I was trying to avoid writing about all seventeen kinds of smile. Hey, I thought, I can just pretend there’s an accompanying infographic and I’m just referring to it. Then, like a good improviser, I saw what I had done and heightened it.

Two

I came home from work the other night to find this guy waiting for me on the fence.

Three

Anyone who has worked with early stage startups will wonder why this made international news…