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Showing posts from May, 2007

calling librarians and web-heads

From the advance readings of Cory Doctorow 's upcoming book, Little Brother , it promises to be an important and timely book While I love reading Cory's work, I prefer to read it digitally on my PDA. But I'd like to get as many paper-versions (dead-tree, FTL ) into the hands of impressionable young readers as possible. Ideally this would help Cory set up a service on the page to enable library donations. It seems like this would be easy enough to pull off, if there is a publicly available list of libraries, and then a connection to a web-enabled bookstore that would execute the order. As a book is ordered for a particular library, it could be removed from the list. However, I don't know if such a list exists, and I've got no programming ability at all. So I have two questions: Is this the best way to execute this plan, or are there ways to improve it? Does anybody want to help with it? Please respond in Comments, or mail me directly through the address in my blogger...

anda’s game

Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com ~ Sam Kieth cover for Anda’s Game comic My favorite short story by Cory Doctorow, and one of my favorite short stories ever, is Anda’s Game . A comic book adaptation is planned, along with several other of his stories. Mine is on order already through Atlantis Fantasyworld in Santa Cruz, California! As with Cory’s other works, it is available for free, online. There is also a fantastic reading of the work available through his podcast, and at the story’s official page, here .

hoopy sidebar addition

I'm abandoning Bloglines, an online Feed Aggregator where I followed my RSS/Subscription feeds. Though I prefer NetNewsWire Lite, there was no guarantee that I'd be following RSS feeds while in front of my Mac. Bloglines, being a web-based service, allowed me to check from any computer, but had trouble updating many feeds, couldn't find feeds, and stoped paying attention to some without further explanation. Even so, being able to have something that was mostly consistent across any computer I use is pretty great. Now I'm using Google Reader , which is also web-based, works across all my computers, and is so far a simpler, more elegant UI to browse through. It also provides a widget for sidebar integration in my blog (Look! Over there!), allowing me to simply and easily propagate articles that are interesting into this blog's sidebar. There's no editing, publishing, or massaging of the data (and no easy way for me to add a Comment on it). On the other hand, it...

“...and they lived happily ever after.”

Boing Boing: Fair(y) Use Tale: AMAZING video cuts up Disney to explain copyright A Fair(y) Use Tale cuts together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, lifting individual words and short phrases to spell out an articulate, funny, and thoroughly educational lesson on how copyright works. This is the most subversive and hilarious use of Disney material I've ever seen -- and there's even a really smart chapter about why Faden used Disney material to make his film. This should be required viewing in every K-12 classroom in the country .

on the movie of the book

Myself, I'll be willing to entertain the idea that Neuromancer is really "headed for the big screen" when I'm watching it being shot As the old saying goes, I'll believe it when I see it. I *do* believe, though, that Peter Weir will not be going forward with Pattern Recognition. That is one utterly solid little factoid of film news, alas. I no longer get very wrought up over the liminals, myself, except to be annoyed by people who seem to assume that feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis. — William Gibson , from “I’ve Forgotten More Neuromancer Film Deals Than You've Ever Heard Of” ( boingboing )

wii rss

In case you want to read large amounts of text on your TV screen, the already slick as hell Google Reader has a Nintendo Wii-specific interface . ( 4 Color Rebellion )

differences in culture: online personas, Japan vs. US

The hiddenness of the online Japanese face: In Asian societies, says Peng (who worked at University of Beijing before coming to California), ’self-identity is more socially-diffused across important others rather than strictly bounded with the individual... We might crudely characterize the slogan of collectivism as “my in-group is important” while an interdependent self might be described as “my in-group is who I am.” Imomus, Click opera

arg

Can you imagine a world without oil? It's likely to happen at some point, but what if it happened tomorrow? What would you do? That's the question central to the ARG, World Without Oil : WORLD WITHOUT OIL is an alternate reality event, a serious game for the public good. It invites everyone to help simulate a global oil shock. People participate by contributing original online stories, created as though the oil shock were really happening. The game's masters rank the participants (“players”) according to their contributions to our realistic portrayal of the oil shock. The game also places value on player-created communities, collaborative stories, and collective efforts. Each contribution helps the game arrive at a larger truth. No team of experts knows better than a given individual what effect an oil shock would have upon that individual's life, or what action he or she will take to cope. Personal reactions to our simulated oil shock, placed in context with many other...

10 miles per Alpo™ can

Dog Powered Scooter

super win now

LOLTrek ooot Live Granades Edit: Didn't realize that this site was blocking outside links to their images. It’s The Trouble with Tribbles episode of Star Trek TOS, as rendered in I Can Has Cheezeburger / Meme Cat style dialog.

New Baby Deep One

New Baby Deep One , originally uploaded by Bugmaker . From the "Creatures" set. Lovecraftian goodness you can hold in your hand!