Entries from April 2008 ↓

In November of 2000 I gleefully believed I’d coined the word ‘Automagically‘ to describe how I felt about the mechanism behind The Psychic Book Project (now a horribly un-updated project) which included some of my first experiences with web programming. From the Gumball Poetry log:

November, 2000: Gumball Poetry saw several exciting new unveilings this month. Number one, the mechanism that runs The Psychic Book Project was completely overhauled due to Madame Lola’s (our in-house psychic) departure for Antarctica. As such, book divinations are now done automagically by Madame Lola’s robotic dog, Pietro. You’ll just have to head on over there to get the full scoop.

I now see that Automagical  was used as early as 1987. The definition, via Wikipedia:

Automatic, but with an apparent element of stage magic. Commonly used in computer and other technology fields, referring to complex technical processes hidden from the view of users or operators. Includes a connotation of specialness and often implies pride on the part of the process creator (especially when the person using the word is the process creator). Sometimes, also used in sarcastic way, ironically implying an impossible process.

I love this word. It still very much describes how I feel about programming. It’s magical. You create a black box and inside of it roil and boil all these spells you’ve fashioned. Feed it some input and, voila! Your water is turned into wine, your toad into a prince.

I want my web apps to impart a sense of automagicality, and my writing to revive a sense of wonder and magic in the reader. But more than that, this is what I want life to feel like all the time, which, thankfully, it mostly does. Any time I get to feeling like it’s a pile of drudgery I have to remind myself  of pretty much any bit of nature - Elephant painting, elephant intelligence  - to realize how effking automagical it all is. Who needs religion when this much magic is here already?

This article: ET Likely Doesn’t Exist, Finds Math Model made me feel sad today. And lonely, I suppose. But it also reminds me how automagical it is that I even exist.

April 18th! Happy International Eyewear day!

Here’s our contribution.

Let’s see your eyewear!

Small Beer Press launched John Kessel’s short story collection: The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories today, just in time to battle your tax angst. The cover is awesome - I love the artwork - and it’s reversible, with a faux financial self-help cover inside.

Also, as noted on  Boing Boing it’s been released as a free download.

Floor map of Book Expo America 2008. See that green dot? That’s Small Beer Press on May 30th, #2120. Corner lot, yo.

It looks like the cross section of the death star or maybe the preferred cuts of a piggy bank.

Here it is, traversing deep space, the giant small press battlestar. Going where all booksellers are going simultaneously.

At any rate, these people have been tasked with doing something there, probably involving powdered ice cream or eating tea with chopsticks in microgravity.

Today I joined my cousin Tye Parzybok on Amazon.  Tye’s book is Weather Extremes of the West and it’s awesome. (Update: Couch seems to be going in and out of search results. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. Here’s a direct link)

“A rare and deadly twister rips through parts of Oregon and Washington. Haboobs strip paint off cars in Arizona. A dramatic two-hour temperature gyration from 4 degrees Fahrenheit to 54 degrees Fahrenheit and then back to 4 deg breaks plate-glass windows in Spearfish, South Dakota. Most of the wildness of the western frontier may have gone the way of the buffalo, but weather, as meteorologist Tye Parzybok illustrates in Weather Extremes of the West, is still a wild beast.”

It’s really strange seeing Couch up there, or at least the placeholder for it. I do very much like the jacket art:

I think it says a lot. The drawing of the white motorcycle in the snow storm in the lower left corner was a brilliant touch. It’s fun to look at all the formalities that go along with having your book there. For example, I was surprised to see the genre classifications:

• Fantasy - Contemporary
• Literary
• Fiction

And I have an ISBN! Wait, I have two:

• ISBN-10: 1931520542
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520546