Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

This is going to be Coen’s first real-live cinematic experience. We’ve taken him to a couple of other theater movies before The Curse of the Were Rabbit (he was too young to really stay tuned to the whole thing), Control Room (he was in a theater’s ‘crying room’ and was too small to pay attention to the movie — which is not exactly kid material) and a movie about polar bears (after the trailers for the movie were over and before the movie started, he asked if we were done and if we could go. We did leave about a third of the way in). But this is the first movie he’s been aware of and that we’ve been planning to go to. He’s watched the trailer for the movie about twenty times.

Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I was six years old, we didn’t have a TV, and I lived in the country with goats, geese and two back-to-the-land parents and holeeeeee sheeit my brain was never the same. I suspect this won’t  be as much of a jump for him, but still, at a little over 4 and a half, it’s going to be a big experience.

Here’s a one minute video interview of me talking about libraries and Couch as interviewed by the most awesome Raya Kuzyk of Library Journal at BEA.

I loved this article by Paul Constant in the Stranger about the state of the publishing industry. While much of it focuses on the exorbitance of Book Expo America and big publishers, I especially liked the dichotomy  between the small presses rising up, embracing good lit, intelligent readers, The Long Tail and new communication methods (ie: SBP allowing free CC downloads of John Kessel’s book of short stories The Baum Plan for Financial Indenpence, for example), compared to the celebrity-and-wonder-hit-obsessed big publishing houses who, according to the writer, are not releasing any big hits this winter for fear that what they’ll release will turn out to be market-duds because national attention is turned toward the election.

(disclosure: Small Beer Press and I are mentioned mid-way through.)

I have to say - I put a lot of faith in the idea of The Long Tail. We moved through a hundred years of homogenizing behavior as a species as everyone tuned in to fewer and fewer sources of information, as cultures and traditions and languages were quashed because of the allure of modernity and capitalism. And so I hope that the new publishing mediums (blogs, the internet, etc) will encourage more and more niches to form to replace what was lost, if not necessarily by quality at least by quantity. 

So go! March yourself off to form your weird little club on teh internets! You’re helping to preserve the net cultural diversity of our species. 

I found this transcription on the kitchen counter when I got home last night. 

Later I asked Coen if his toes had names, too. He said most of them were named ‘Spandozia’ (sp?).

I’m busy as hell but I can’t help but mention my favorite birthday: May 18th, 1980.

On this date Mt. St. Helens thrust her upper half into the atmosphere, violently, and a crater/exploded volcano was born. It’s arguably one of the most important days of my life. I was 9 and a half years old and, living in Spokane, WA,  we were directly in the ash path. 

My mother was not big on media (I don’t believe we owned a tv at the time) and so we didn’t know about the volcano until a family friend bicycled to our house and pointed up to the edge of the sky where a legion of black pirate ships floated toward us. Awesome. An hour later the sky was raining ash! Holy crap! Completely in denial, I think we went on an errand - for what, gardening supplies or something? Our car shut down with its air filter completely clogged and we were driven home in a police car. 

For several weeks my brother and I were shut in, home from school with intense, brain rattling, parent hashing, floor scraping cabin fever. Ten days in or so (while we were still forbidden to go out) I distinctly remember my mother out mowing the lawn and ready to get on with the summer - a wicked tail of ash pluming up behind the push mower - while everyone else was in hazmat suits, etc. 

Later, it was my first real job as I gathered up ash to sell to the local potters’ community.

May 18th is also my half birthday. Mt. St. Helens seemed to be addressing me, or I thought so, at least in that way that a 9 year old believes that large cosmic events might manifest themselves for the explicit purpose of allowing one to get out of having to complete one’s report on Abraham Lincoln. I still wouldn’t rule it out. 

The mountain continues to fascinate me - Here’s a picture I took a few years back. If you haven’t dived into its crater via Google Earth yet, it’s worth a shot.

Happy Birthday, Mt. St Helens.

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!

Last night’s speech changed this election season for us, and I think it did for a lot of others too.

I have been most interested in a regime change, a sea change in how business is done in the White House, and I think either democratic candidate could bring that. However, I have never been given so much credit for intelligence and understanding of subtlety by a politician in my adult life.

We threw $100 down on the table and committed ourselves to a campaign.

What I was struck by most? Words matter.

Words matter, words matter, words matter. Speeches should be pretty. I want my politicians to be brilliant orators and to bring passion and depth to ideas.  I want speeches that unite, clarify, bring momentum - there’s been such a dearth of this in the last eight years.

If you haven’t read the speech - find it and do so. I fought tears a couple of times.

Other than that I’m home w/ a sore throat finishing the last of this novel, which is headed out today!

It seems to be bobbing between computers quite a bit, and so here it is encased in its flash drive. Rally!

Wouldn’t it suck if I lost the flash drive? Ha ha ha oh.

Boing Boing has a post on How alternate reality games work with links to Cory Doctorow’s notes from a talk he saw on the subject.

What is an ARG?

You’re watching a TV show, the character picks up the phone and makes a call and your phone rings

Great stuff. I think of it as hacking reality, and I’d like to make some kind of play with this for COUCH when it comes out - to leave real-world evidence of the passing of fictional characters.

The scavenger/treasure hunt/caper Operation Peachblow, run by our own Black Magic Insurance Agency has put these on since 2000.

But this blending of fiction and reality seems particularly interesting on a day in which yet another author has ‘Freyed’ her work:

In Love and Consequences memoir a fake

The 1000 words reading series at The Maiden in the Mist was a full house and awesome and the writers I read with - Daniel Thomas, Jill Stukenberg and Mel Favarra were just great.

Mel has updated the site with the work, including my strange little sci-fi piece.

Firefox 3 is my new favorite browser.

Many kudos to the Mozilla people for making FF 3 exponentially better on the mac than FF 2. Snappy, pretty, nifty new features, and an app that looks like it belongs on the mac, rejoice. There’s a small bit of bug fixing and cleanup left to be done, but it’s already outshining my other browsers. And since I regularly have 2-4 browsers open at once - Camino, Safari, Firefox, IE 7 & IE 6  in Parallels - it’s great fun to find I’m spending most of my time in the new Firefox.

Get Firefox 3 (beta 3) here