textiplication.com

Great satellite resolution in London.

In this shot, Hyde Park, you can see people.  From space!

is, of course, that it doesn’t work on a plane. 

I’m in London for most of the week, for work.  Unfortunately, the adaptor plug I have does not fit any of the three different sizes of outlets in the wall of my room.  I’m mystified, as I’ve used this adaptor in England before.  Has it expanded, or shrunk? Changed shape since the last time I used it? Or are the plugs in this hotel ALL non-standard? Given that they’re all different sizes and shapes.

It’s going to be tough to get through the week on the remaining 1:36 my battery claims to have in it.

Lack of electrons does ease the sting of having left my iPod at home, though.

I owe a hat tip to the blogroll for pointing me at Jason Stoddard, but I can’t remember who cited him when. Jason’s an SF writer who keeps a marketing head in his day office. That head has been doing some eye-opening research that ought to be, um, embarrassing? [excuse me] for a lot of us SF types.

This one, about SF and Second Life:

Go to Second Life. Do a search on “Science Fiction.” Here’s what you’ll find:

21 total results
2 Star Trek tributes
1 comic book store
0 science fiction authors
0 science fiction magazines
0 science fiction conferences

You get the picture. Ain’t much there. Out of 2.5 million edge-of-the-internet kinda people, this is what we got.

Well, uh, for some reason I never thought about that. Here we are in a time when people are actually living the lifestyle forecast in two of the best SF novels ever written (and a lot more besides), and virtually none of them are SF readers. Hmm. Meaning that none of them are there because they read Neuromancer or Snow Crash.

Actually, I can’t imagine Hiro Protagonist reading anything but a technical reference manual, or Case ever reading anything at all (can you read at all when you’re hopped up on octagons? Doesn’t sound easy - if the dents in the table are jumping out at you, what would printed words do? “Don’t worry, we’ll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.”) I could insert something about how SF readers obviously want to read about people doing things that they don’t want to do themselves.

So if, as Stoddard suggests, SF should be trying to move to where these forward-thinkers, these Second-Lifers, will like us and want to be with us as well — where will we be?

Do Second-Lifers even read?

More about this later.

A turn for the surreal…

This was the first con I’d ever been to, and I enjoyed it even more than I’d hoped.  So many people who write so much, so many people who read so much.  So many people who talk so much.  Damn.  Elizabeth Bear can talk me into the ground, and that takes some doing.  My favorite moments:

• Literary beer with Karl Schroeder, a vastly literate and technical autodidact.  In a very brief hour, we discussed ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, color theory, Searle’s Chinese Room, AI, genetic algorithms and evolutionary computing, fantasy writing vs. science fiction writing, L. E. Modesitt, and Charles Stross.  And some other stuff as well, that I’m not sure I remember.  Conversations like that make me eager to read more non-fiction.
• Panel on The Role of the Agent with Michael Kabongo, Eleanor Wood, and Joshua Bilmes.  Great mix of reassurances on the things I’d read in agent blogs online and a few nuggets that I hadn’t already heard.  Not to mention Joshua telling Chris and me the exact first sentence to put into our query letters…
• Realizing that yes, that was Tobias Buckell talking to John Scalzi over there in the lobby.  That person yelling at them from twenty yards away? Elizabeth Bear!
• As Chris sez, Tobias is just the nicest guy. 
• Over literary beer, jointly (as it were) with Elizabeth Bear describing William H. Macy’s nudity in The Cooler as “You can see the package but not the ribbon.”  Elizabeth Bear was the funniest person I met at Boskone. 
• Wen Spencer’s storyboard of one stick figure biting another in the neck. It’s easier than you think, because stick figures are all neck.  
• Realizing how close-knit and friendly the community of fantasy & sf authors is.

By the way, I’m trying to promote the phrase, “I’m biting you in the neck!” as a substitute for the clearly rude “Shut up!”  It’s going to be an uphill battle, but if we all stand together, we can pull it off.

Here.

Bad Chris.  That art stuff will lead to lots of trouble.

Google Reader has changed the way it displays folders and All Items.  If you’ve read everything in a folder, it still shows you items you’ve already read; the read counts decrease, but the folders never empty.  When you add a new feed to a folder, Reader shows X unread items, but lets you keep reading older and older items as long as you keep scrolling down. Older items automagically add themselves to the bottom of the article pane as you scroll down.

Dave Winer calls approaches like this a “River of News.”  One of the thinks I’ve liked about Reader is that it doesn’t feel as naggy as Bloglines.  The difference between the two is subtle, but important:

• In Bloglines, you have the folder display at the left, with unread counts on all your folders with unread items.  You click on a folder with unread items, all of the unread items appear in the frame at the right, and the unread count goes to zero.  If you close the browser at this point, you never see the items that Bloglines thinks you just “read”.  If you want to read something from a folder, you have to read all of the items, or you lose them.
• In Google Reader, you click on the folder at the left and the items appear on the right, but the unread count (and the unread statuses on the individual posts) remain unchanged.  You can read just one item and come back later to read more.  No pressure to read the whole folder at a gulp!  This is actually a pretty big difference under the hood - Google Reader tracks whether you read each post, and Bloglines tracks whether you read each folder. 

Pistol Grip Pump, Rage Against the Machine

Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Robert Johnson

Angel, Won’t You Call Me?,  The Decemberists

Physical World, Kudu

It’s Alright to Die, Ike Reilly Assassination

Mike, Aaron, and Eddie, Haiku D’Etat

It’s Just That Simple, Wilco

Zoloft, Ween

Double Double Dutch, Dope Smugglaz

Bratislava, Beirut

Candy For Everyone, The Late B. P. Helium

Curuncula, Psapp

Zadie Smith writes beautifully and brilliantly on the nature of literary failure.

Maybe it’s a cheer:

Deep trance, ballroom dance, bit err-or!
Bit file, bit bus, Commodore 64!