Will tomorrow’s design be niftier?  Who knows?  I’m taking the opportunity that a weekly project affords to try and up my game each time… but whether you like the next (or the next, or the next) better is, well, it’s all a bit like Let’s Make A Deal, isn’t it? Only instead of fabulous prizes and curtains named Door #4, it’s fabulous bits of silly on whatever clothing options we’ve decided to offer this week.  But the basic premise stands: Either you decide this week’s is the design you want… or its gone and that’s that.

Which is something worth taking a closer look at, I think, because it seems a bit counterintuitive to the whole idea of the internet and POD.

If there’s anything we know about the internet, it’s that it’s going to be forever, innit?  It’s one big giant archive of information going all the way back to the dawn of time, certainly.  And that’s incredimazing, of course — we’re adding to the archives every day as things like Google Book search add out-of-print titles, and the Wayback Machine does its best to even give us snapshots of now-dead sites.  Mp3 repositories are adding out-of-stock or never-in-stock bootlegs and live recordings of music.  Nasa are putting up snapshots of dead stars (that’d be the dawn of time almost-hyperbole).  It all comes down to this: If it’s online, there’s no need to act fast.  You can bookmark it with Delicious and get around to it next week, if you like, or next year, or never.

And, with POD, there’s really no “…while supplies last!” either.  That’s brilliant, too, of course — a huge part of putting Shivering Sands on Lulu is just that: it can stay there as long as Lulu does, still pulling in a sale or two in ten years.

But, although I’m not advocating a fake or forced sense of urgency — because that’s a bit cheap, and more than a bit insulting to folks’ intelligence — there is something to be said about exploring how some online and POD systems do lend themselves to Being An Event.

It was Warren that first brought my attention to the concept of Event Internet (although he calls it “Appointment,” but I don’t love those so I’ve renamed for comfort), so I’m riffing off his playbook, here.  But he’s certainly not the only person playing with the idea.  There’s the well-documented Twitter-Flash-Mobbery that Amanda Palmer’s been pushing for a while, or Eliza Gauger’s Sweatshops, for instance.  Hell, just a few minutes ago, Wil sent me a link to this, saying: “It redraws random fractals every few seconds. You can’t save them, so you just appreciate them and then wait for the new one to show up.”  Which isn’t precisely an “event,” I suppose, but it sums up the idea rather nicely: You can’t save everything — although you can often record the live event to watch later — but sometimes, some things, even online, are about this moment.  And when they’re gone, you missed it.

So what the hell could that possibly have to do with Print On Demand which, as I just said, is so great because it just stays there forever?  Well, it’s all about looking at the tools in your kit and thinking about new ways to use them. 

Cafepress, for instance, only allow one of each item at any given time in a free shop.  Oh, sure, Warren and I could open a new shop every week, I suppose — except then you start running into the law of diminishing return visitors, as older store URLs get lost and forgotten.  There are ways around that, too, if that’s how you want to use the Cafepress toolset — but we decided to turn that built-in constraint into feature.  Hence, each week we only have one of each item — and when we want a new design, we turn over (almost) the whole stock. (We do have a few items that will stay forever, and that’s the beauty of that.)

But where it starts getting really interesting is when you start thinking “What else could I do?”

Brian Wood, for instance, delighted me yesterday with this little tidbit: “I have a POD book done through Lulu and for each convention I brought it to I changed the contents and cover of the book slightly, doing new print runs each time. You can upload and replace the print file as often as you like, which is great.”

Think about that for a moment:  Lulu allow you to upload new guts and/or covers for a single book as many times as you want.  What else could you do with a constantly updating physical object?  Corrections and updates, surely — but what about yearly volumes that over-write the last?  A URL-as-and-to-palimpsest of new-growth writing taking over the pages that may no longer be culturally relevant in this moment. Is it a counter-intuitive use of what we think of as a book?  Perhaps.  But its interesting, too, isn’t it?

What about POD magazines with no back-catalogue?  What possible use is that?  I dunno, yet, but I’m thinking about it.  Even that little widget there in the sidebar, when it automagically updates in a few hours, it’s going to be something new and never revisited.  And sure, that’s not a physical thing… except your eyes do say it’s there, so it sort of is.

I’m awfully close to entering one of my fugue states where I just start saying things that don’t exist yet in a stream of barely decipherable consciousness, so I’m going to leave off with this: don’t just think about format as “how we get stuff from Point Brain to Point Audience” — think about why we use formats that are “permanent” or “ephemeral” or “static” or “dynamic”, and what we can do with any and all of the above.

And I’ll see you tomorrow with a new T-shirt of the Week.

Friday is FREAKANGELS — or, more precisely: Noon GMT Friday is when Warren Ellis’ (with the lovely art of Paul Duffield) FREAKANGELS goes live, with 6 new pages for the week.

FREAKANGELS is one of my weekly projects — my name’s down in the footer (which I should start calling the engine room, haha) of the site, ’cause I built ‘er and I’m up GMT noon every Friday to push ‘er live.  Oh, sure, we could go automated updates, but the best part of Friday mornings is when I sweep the sidewalk over at Whitechapel forum and start the weekly discussion thread.

Whitechapel, which I co-mod with Warren, is open 24/7/365, and Warren keeps the discussions new and turning over all week so there’s always a good and lively crowd — but the Friday morning comic posts are my chance to catch up with everyone while they’re all in the same place.  A bit like sitting down for dinner, but with delicious comics and first thing in the morning for most folks.

So that’s my Friday mornings.  And either you already knew that or you’ve no idea what I’m talking about.  In that last case, you’re going to want to start reading FREAKANGELS from the beginning.  And then stop by Whitechapel and say g’morning, yeah?

UPDATE 2: Install the (Happy()Sad) Tumblr Theme, if you wanna.

October was the month my brain completely kicked into OHMYGODINEEDTOMAKETHINGS overdrive.  About a million projects leapt into my brain, fully-formed (except for the formed part), and one of them was this:

And I just had to put it on a T-shirt.  There is no emoticon for those moments that are the intersection of :) and :( — not really.  Oh there’s a :/ face for conflicted or meh, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about those moments when life throws you a THIS IS AWESOME OH GOD IT SUCKS YAY BOO.  And those days?  Well I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of them in my life that I could wear a shirt for them.

I very briefly considered the sort of Product Event that Warren and I would use Cafepress for, but I really wanted to partner with a serious T-shirt vendor for this one — go with a traditional storefront and a 3-color ink process.  This is one of those… well I want it to stick around for a while, you know?

So I went to the smartest T-shirt guy I know, Diesel Sweeties’ Rich Stevens.  And Rich (who’s the smartest T-shirt guy I know) thought it was a winner, so I did all the fancy-schmancy layout and design, and Rich is doing all the fancy-schmancy… well, everything else.

We would really love your help spreading the word about this one.  If you love it and you buy one, then do me a favor and twitter/blog/tell your friends.  Hell, if you love it and you don’t buy one, or even if you kinda hate it, I’d still be thrilled if you help us get the word out.  Like I said, I want this one to stick around for while, and it will as sales merit.  So please help make sales merit:  Go buy one!

And, honestly, I’m not sure if that’s curiosity about my specific method, or if that’s asking for some sort of an endorsement for the best method.  But there’s just no real answer to that second question, beyond “whatever works!”

Because, look, Lulu’s uploader and templates are lovely.  I just happen to be allergic to them.  It’s nothing to do with Lulu, in particular– I’m just allergic to anything that’s easy. 

Because I’m crazy.  I’m the lord mayor of a little factory town called Crazyopolis. I see the words “one-click” or “get started in 5 minutes” or “ready-made” or, yes, “easy” — and I start screaming nonononono get it away get it AWAY!

Look.  Do you remember this?

The Radio Shack 150 in ONE Electronic Project Kit.  I had one of these.  This exact model, in fact.  And I don’t have any fucking idea what the other 149 projects were. No. Fucking. Clue.  Because about halfway through the first project, after taking a good long look at the whole-board schematic, I started trying to figure out what I could make it do… with no real interest in things like instructions or the laws of physics or if a bigger battery would make it catch on fire or if OSHA would approve my trying to incorporate it and my chemistry set and the dog into one mad experiment.

See? Crazy.

I’m just not the target demographic for templates.

My friend Lee Barnett (AKA Budgie), on the other hand, isn’t stricken with my particular brand of crazy.  He put together his book, The Fast Fiction Challenge, using the Lulu system from start to finish, and it turned out just lovely.  In fact, I’d recommend you buy a copy, just to see how well it turned out. (Actually, I’d recommend you buy a copy, anyway, because Lee’s an excellent writer.)  He’s written up a bit of a review on his experiences with the Lulu system, which I hope he’ll put somewhere public so I can link it in a bit.

Jamais Cascio put together his book, Hacking the Earth, using, I believe, OpenOffice.  Which is free like street furniture so, you know, it’s not like you need to go expensive to go more DIY. (Also a book you should buy, because Jamais is made ov geenius.  And also because I did the cover layout.)

Edit: Jamais kindly nudged me with a correction to the above.

Actually, I took blog posts, formatted them in Apple Pages, converted to Word to use the Lulu uploader, fiddled with the formatting in Word to make it match my Pages layout, discovered that the Lulu-Word tool bites (completely different pagination and words-per-page from what I had uploaded), discovered that the Lulu setup can’t read Apple PDF, and finally printed the doc from Pages directly to a Postscript file. That uploaded beautifully and came out exactly as formatted.

And Wil Wheaton went the sanest possible route with his Sunken Treasure and Memories of the Future, and just found someone crazy (Will Hindmarch) to do all the layout. (C’mon, it’s Wil — I shouldn’t have to tell you to buy his books, you should already have them.)

So, honestly, there is no Best Way to put together your POD book, other than the way that gets it done with the least headache and the most satisfaction. 

If you’re the sort that gets your bolts off fiddling with settings and typefaces and widows and orphans and justification and margins and all that — or you want to try and see how it suits you — then, yeah, do some googling for how-tos or just dive right into whatever desktop program you’ve got to hand.  (If you don’t have InDesign, don’t run out and buy InDesign — you can really honestly do almost everything you need for POD with OpenOffice or Word.  And the couple of things you can’t do, you’re likely not even going to notice unless you already own InDesign, anyway.)

If you’re the sort that’s more interested in the crafting of the work you’ve already done, and want to move straight to the part where you’re selling it, just use Lulu’s system, or beg, borrow, or steal a friend with the layout crazies to help you.

The Best way to get it done is to just get it done.  And trying to decide where to start… well that’s not getting it done.

To the one percent of you that are interested: I’ve really no plans to write up any how-tos.  Lulu’s FAQ and Help sections, frankly, cover everything you could possibly need to know from start to finish.  I don’t know how well the other POD services out there have documented their upload/process/etc, but I imagine there are probably about a billion resources out there if you’ve got any skill with google. 

But I am– via twitter, blogs, Whitechapel, general internet chatter– seeing a lot of “Well, how’d this-or-that work?” comments and queries, and since I did just put Shivering Sands together (read: Warren did all the work, and then I made ‘er pretty), I figure I’ll try to answer some of those.

(And you can twitter at me if you’ve some burning question you want answered, too.)

So, today, to go ahead and get this one out of the way, I’m going to address the– well it’s not so much a question as it is a sentiment– thing I’m seeing the most: Apparently, there’s a bunch of folks paying close attention to how Shivering Sands does so they can figure out if POD is “worth their time.”

And I have absolutely no fucking clue what that means, so I’ve just got to talk about it.

The time spent on this book is a really simple equation: (Warren wrote some stuff) plus (I fed it into book format) plus (we uploaded everything into Lulu’s super-simple book-maker) equals (Tada! Book!).

Now, I have to assume that anyone asking about “worth the time” already has at least 32pp of content they want to do something with, right? Because, if not, the question that’s really being asked is “Can you give me some excuse to make something?”– and really, fuck those people.  Because if what you want to know is, if you get your thumb out of your backside and actually do something, is someone going to pay you for it?  Well, you’re looking at the wrong career, kiddo.  You don’t actually care about publishing so much as you wouldn’t mind a no-risk game that gets you a book and some money at the end of it.  If, you know, someone can assure you there’s a book and some money at the end of it before you do anything. 

If you’ve already started hyperventilating and thinking about typing up a scathing blog retort about how nothing’s worth doing without an advance (if only someone would pay you to start writing it) then I’m really very likely talking to you, and lemme just save you some time: your pingback isn’t even going to show up on my blog so I can pay you attention, so don’t bother.

But, okay, for the rest of you with 32pp of something– and that’s art or notes or blog entries or a story or recipes or instructions or your manifesto or anything– 32pp is what you need to make a perfect-bound book with Lulu, and that’s most of the time you need to put in, right there.

Lemme repeat that:  If you’ve got 32 pages of stuff that’s not doing anything else right now, you could have a book ready to start selling on Monday.

Now, granted, you’ll have to put in a little time telling people it exists after you’ve hit the “publish” button.  But time left to publish?  Depends on how fast your internet connection is: you’ve got to make a Lulu.com account, upload your content into their bookmaker, type your name and title into their covermaker, and hit a button to push it live.  Could take a whole hour.

And, of course, that’s just running with the pre-made templates on Lulu.  I’m a crazy mechanic that hasn’t used a template for anything, ever (and I’ll probably get into that in later posts) so it took me a leetle bit longer to put together Shivering Sands, yes. But, let me ask you: what’s your blog running on?  A pre-made template?  Something someone else made but it works so well for you that you don’t really think about it?  Well then, there you go.  Lulu’s got you covered.

(If you made your own blog install out of magic and popsicle sticks, then you’re a crazy mechanic, too, and we’ll talk later.)

So, I mean, you can watch Warren’s book for the next couple of months to see if he can somehow convince you that your time will be well spent putting together your own book, I guess.  But I really don’t know what the hell you’re looking for.  You just spent more time reading this than it’d take for you to get started on Lulu, so your measure of “worth it” is obviously a more complicated equation than mine.  Because my time was well spent the minute I got my proof copy in the mail and Warren and I both went “Ooh lookit yay!”

You’ve just got to figure out what you’re really waiting for, is what.

More on this soon — I think I’ve got a few nuts&boltsy things to post about this one. The cover and guts were incredibly fun to put together, and I know there’s at least a couple of you that are curious about the mechanicky bits of the POD process. But right now I’m just sooooo thrilled that it’s finally live and making its way out into the wild, so that’s gonna have to wait. (Also: I’ve barely got time to post *this*, but I’ll get around to the rest later, honest!)

Go read what Warren has to say about it, and then go buy one if you like!

… and that’s where most of you will have stopped reading.  "My friend did something" is a bit of a cue to click away, innit?  It’s right up there with "My mommy’s totally my biggest fan" as far as endorsements go.  Because here’s the thing — we pretty much all want the internet to have a little more personalization, but not that personal, not when it comes to reviews.

The unspoken answer to anything, any link or comment, that starts with "my friend made" is: "Well, but if it’s good, then why aren’t I hearing about it from strangers?"

But, well, whatever.  There’s a couple hundred of you that will have been tricked into clicking this link when I post it to twitter in a minute (using the cheat of a URL shortener so you’ll have no idea what you’re in for), and a handful of you will have had little enough to do for the next three minutes that you’ll read through anyway.  Haha, Tuesdays are the perfect time to spring a trap!

So.

My friend wrote this book:

And now, instead of telling you any damned thing about the book (because there’s a plot synopsis on Amazon, and it doesn’t tell you any more than I could), I’m going to tell you who this book was written for.

(Well, technically it was written for the two cats on the dedication page, because Adam’s a friend of mine, but he’s not quite right, if you know what I mean.  But that’s a measure of his sanity, not his writing.)

But more helpfully, the person this book is for looks a little like this:  You remember the Cartoon Express Train.  Adam remembers it, too — it’s in his bio at the end of the book, even — but you, well, you can’t really remember every moment of those years, but you can see the train snaking across the television screen when you think about it, right?  There’s a lot of the 80s that’s like that for you.  It’s not nostalgia, precisely — it’s those moment of faint-yet-clear memories.  Thundercats, ho! The invisible one-up mushroom just before the first jump.  Knowing is half the battle.  Those little dancing mice. The Snorks.  The Chipettes music video for "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."  Cookie Crisp cereal, but oh, what was that cereal with the furry golden guy with the big nose, did that even really exist?  And what the hell were those guys with the hologram stickers and removable glow-in-the-dark "capes" called?

In short, you don’t want the 80s back, you know better than to watch He-Man on hulu.com because it really was just crap, and you can sing the FAME theme song but you’re seriously not sure how you feel about the remake.  But you’ve got shared memories of a lot of REALLY weird shit you saw and read and remember from the 80s, and it’s not the shit you EVER see in those retrospectives, but you swear, you SWEAR it was real…

…You think.

Well, you’re the person Stays Crunchy In Milk was written for, then.  Because it’s not a book about what really happened.  It’s not a book about how crap things were, or how wonderful, or even how things were at all.  It’s a book about what never happened, that just happens to have been written by someone who remembers all those nearly-forgotten moments that you do, too.

And, y’know, it’s $12, so what the hell.

Bit drunk with power, me.  Muahaha and also ha. 

Anyone else?

Okay.  So the above is really not my shining design achievement of the decade.  Or even the week.  But it does the trick, yeah?  And, more importantly, it did the trick in little-to-no time at all.  Like, waking-up-and-getting-my-brain-moving time. 

Oh, what’s the trick it’s doing?  I’ll let Warren explain that. See, he and I do this sort of thing all the time: He off-handedly says "Hey wouldn’t it be hilarious if?" and I say "We should totally do that.  You know, if ever either of us have five spare minutes."

And I’d hazard a guess that pretty much anyone reading this is the same way.  Billions of little split-second thoughts hitting you and yours pretty much every day or week (or at least once a month) along the lines of "we should TOTALLY do that random and mostly just for the lulz thing ha ha ha hand me another drink wouldja?"  Am I right?  I totally am, and you know it.

So, then, here’s the thing.  Once I actually got sufficient caffeine in my system to type out "Hey you know what? Let’s!" it took ohIdunno maybe 20 minutes from start to tada.  15 of that was Warren deciding what he wanted the first one to say (since we’re gonna be doing this until he runs out of wit or my brain explodes….and, um, he’s never gonna run out of wit) and upload time.

And I mean, sure, yeah, he’s got a long-term game plan for the whole thing, to turn it into a proper running gag — but that’s the sort of planning you do after you’ve started the ball rolling, when you’ve got the momentum to put into the process.

But the salient point here — just in case it’s not sticking out quite enough to stick you in the eye — is that it took no. time. at. all. to toss together a shop and a bit of fun.  I cannot imagine that you’d have that hard a time of doing what-ever it is that’s been kicking around in your head.  And, yes, it is totally fair for you to say "but I haven’t got 3billion followers on Twitter to tell about it…!" and it’s also quite fair to say "But MY fun side project involves supplies and an Etsy shop and will likely take FORTY minutes to set up."

Of course, just because it’s fair to say doesn’t really make it all that relevant, now does it.  Especially since there’s places where you can go talk about your wares, and find new friends and community.  There’s a forum tacked onto every major sales site online.  There’s Whitechapel, and holidays coming up when folks are gonna wanna buy things they love and hate for people that match.  And 40 whole minutes? Really?  If you read this far, you’ve already used up 5.  Save up some of your daily blog-browsing time, and you’re set.

The thing of it is, you don’t need to be thinking "well how many of whatever would I have to sell to make it worth my blah blah blah" — you’ve just got to think "would I rather spend the next hour looking for neat stuff online, or would I rather, you know, make something neat.  And maybe someone buys one, and that’s one more person noticing me than right this second.  And also, hey, I get to make something!"

And now, my friend Matt Jones is gonna play me out for this post, since he said it best: Get Excited and Make Things.

So I have this friend, Sarah Sharp (that’s Trixie Bedlam, to you), and one day she says to us: “I think I’m going to go to every state in the USA, and take pictures of everything you’ve never seen.”

And none of us really doubted it, because that’s just the person she is.

But more than that, that’s just the person she was born to be. Sarah’s camera isn’t for taking pictures of sunsets and babies (although she totally has, and she may kill me for spilling her dirty secret) — it’s another eye growing out of her hand, and it’s an eye that seeks out the beautiful strange that you’ve always wanted to see and hold and love and die with.

And me, I’ve been on a lot of the roads she’s taken, and she still managed to find some secrets I never knew.

So now she’s got a book. And it’s a big, beautiful, sprawling thing with sharp corners and wavy lines, just like the country whose soul it steals it’s showing off. You can preview it, if you only want a glimpse, and you can see some dirty-glass reflections of it on her flickr stream, and you can buy it if you want to make that trip from the comfort of your couch. And if, like me, you think it’s very likely the most beautiful thing you’re going to see today, you can give her the universal signal for “can I get a lift?” and vote for her book in the Best Blurb Book contest.

Go look at WarrenEllis.com to see why I made this pretty little cover…

Kid’s books, see, those are easy.  There’s only one prerequisite for a kid’s book: No matter how grand the adventure, we must–before the last page is finished–go home.  That’s it.  That’s all it really takes to be a book for children.  Wendy Darling must fly back to London, Alice and Dorothy must wake up, Bilbo must back to the Shire, the Pevensie children must return through the wardrobe, Meg rescues Charles and everyone goes home. And there is plenty of room in the rule for orphans and lost souls–after all, the rule is not that we must return home, only that we must end up there, even if we never dared hope that there existed. So James finds a peach and a family, the March Girls all find husbands or die, and Uncle Beazely is made a permanent resident of the zoo.

There is no variation from this one, simple rule.  It make take different paths to get there, that’s what’s called a plot, but the rule is sound and true.  What about Bridge to Terabithia, you ask?  You mean the one where Jesse builds a bridge so he can bring his sister to their home?  Yeah.  Charlotte’s Web is all about an adopted mother making sure her piggy son will always have a home. And there are plenty of books that never leave the home, so it’s easy to make sure that’s where it ends.

I can do this all day–it’s a rule.

It’s a rule, because it’s hard-wired into our collective consciousness. Children will eventually grow up and leave the nest, but while they are kids they must always find their way home. Of course there may be adventures or hardships, reasons to run away for fun or profit. But they must always know their way home and never stop trying to get there, so we write those instructions into our stories.

‘Course, that doesn’t mean books for grown ups are all about getting lost, but do consider: can you think of many Adult books that aren’t about going somewhere new, or you can’t go home again, or you’re going to die if you don’t move, or oops you got killed by a clown?  Of course you can, at least a few.  There are adult books about taking your home with you when you go, or building a new and better one when you get there.  There is even the occasional book for orphans and lost souls that finally get their chance to find the home they missed as children.  The cautionary tales we would never dare tell kids while they’re young: you may not make it home while you’re young, we’ll explain it when you’re older. 

The difference between Adults and Children is that when you’re young, home is a place you go, and when you’re older, home is a place you make (or try to. Or die on the way if there happen to be killer clowns or ninja assassins or a mid-life crisis ending in a Tijuana bathtub full of ice.  These things do happen).

But that’s what confuses me about YA.  There are two very well separated classic columns: Nest and Flight, to you birds in the audience. It seems like that should cover everything.  But, apparently, this generation of kids and grown ups has gotten… well, there’s no polite adjective to finish that sentence, so I’ll just move on to my observations.

YA seems, to me, to fall into one of three categories:
1. A Children’s book, but with scary phrases like "lying parents" or "questionable authority figures"–because heaven knows that you’re not allowed to find out about those things until you’re an adult.
2. A Children’s book, but with scarier words like "fuck" or "drugs"–because heaven knows that you don’t find out about those things until you’re an adult.
3. Or, an Adult’s book, but without lies, sex, or drugs–because heaven knows you can’t make it two steps without running into those things when you’re an adult.

Which… really just seems unnecessarily… well.  Again, I’m at a loss for lady-like adjectives, and let’s keep this a post for kids, shall we?

Now, this isn’t a rant about the [expletive deleted] concept of "age appropriate" material, because heaven knows that ship has sailed and sunk. This is just a post of rules and observations with the obligatory old-lady "in my day" tacked on, for fun.  Because it suddenly occurs to me that when I walked over the invisible line in the library, from the colorful home of Children’s books to the scary grey roads of the Adult section, I didn’t feel like I’d skipped a step.  I never looked for something on the cusp, never found myself wanting something for adults that were a little younger.  And I wonder how kids–excuse me, young adults–feel when they get to that in-between way-station of YA.  Do they wonder, I wonder, how they’re supposed to get home from here?

But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred. The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. A correspondent recently pointed out to me that the poetry-writing computers in Vermilion Sands are powered by valves. And why don’t all those sleek people living in the future have PCs and pagers? I could only reply that Vermilion Sands isn’t set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present.

–J.G Ballard

And suddenly I realize:  It’s not about the future we didn’t get.  It’s not.  Today’s my birthday, and I’m old. I’m the age my childhood self thought would live in a world with daily moon shuttles and teleporters and food replicators and VR headsets and flying cars.  I’m the age my childhood self thought would be a best-selling science-fiction short-stories writer, making up a future even more amazing than daily moon shuttles and teleporters and food replicators and VR headsets and flying cars.

Only:

• We haven’t been to the moon in years, and
• Teleportation isn’t looking any more likely, and
• People are starving in my own city, and
• VR Headsets look LAME, and
• I don’t even drive a non-flying car, and
• There aren’t any best-selling science-fiction short-stories writers.

But I’m not sorry.  I’ve got no apologies to my childhood self that the future didn’t shake out the way the stories (especially the secret ones I told myself) said it would.  Because now that I’m old, I understand what my childhood self didn’t: The Future isn’t something to live for.  Shiny or apocalyptic, The Future isn’t a destination.  The Future isn’t some terminal where the last train puts you out and then there you are.  The things we plan for and look forward to are all well and good and necessary — but they aren’t the point.

The point is the visionary present.

The point is what we do with our dreams of the Future, Today. What would you do, if you lived on the Moon, and why can’t you do it here?  Where would you go with a teleporter, and why don’t you start walking there, now?  What would you imagine, in a Virtual Reality, and why can’t you start at Home Depot? 

What would you create, if you worked in The Future?  Who would you love, and how would you live?

Me?  I’m old, today.  And things didn’t work out the way I planned, not at all. This world and my life are a million miles away from what I expected.

Funny thing is, though: It’s a million times better than my childhood plans.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped dreaming just about tomorrow, and started dreaming about now.  I started dreaming about how to use the tools I’ve got to hand.  I started dreaming about the life and love I’m living now, and those dreams started leaking into reality, and making new and better dreams that come true every single day.

Oh, my life’s not perfect — far from — but it’s good, and getting better, every day.

My birthday gift to myself this year is this wonderful Present, and my visions of where I’m going right now, and forever.

And you, you in the back that just scoffed at this old woman waxing poetic on her birthday, you shush.  If what I’m saying seems too pretty to be true, you’ll understand it when you’re older. Live a little, first, and then get back to me.

You’re going to need: a desktop Twitter app that can filter twitter results into your timeline, a plaintext list of the usernames of the people you’re following, and the ability to cut and paste.  For the app, I’m using Twirl.  I haven’t really looked at any others, but I assume the functionality isn’t Twirl exclusive.

All right.  Look at the bottom of your Twirl client.  See that little magnifying glass icon on the right?  That’s the search function.  Click that, and you should get the option to use one of two searches — TweetScan and Twitter Search.  I have no idea if TweetScan uses the same syntax, so I went with Twitter Search.

Here’s where the copy/paste comes in.  You’re going to need to plug all of your twitter contacts onto the search function using this syntax:

from:username

That’s why I recommended a plaintext file — I just ran a simple replace on my list to go ahead and plug in the "OR from:" syntax in so I could c/p/rinse/repeat.  The "OR" part of that replace is because I know that’s a LOT of searches for many of you.  Twhirl will let you plug in five at a time using the OR syntax like so:

from:jill OR from:userbob OR from:jiiminycricket OR from:chattybitch OR from:tada

You want to use the OR syntax here because AND will try to match a post made by multiple people, and those don’t exist.  Basically, what you’re doing here is bypassing Twitter’s new filtering.  Although the Twitter client will look at your contacts @replies and filter out the ones to people you’re not following, those @replies will still show up in the public timeline.  so when you search for EVERY Twitter send from:userbob, you’re going to get EVERY twittersend — even the @replies.

For each set of five usernames you plug into the search fucntion, hit the magnifying glass icon to perform the search, and then a little "activate" button will appear at the top of the screen.  Go ahead and hit that button, and you’ll get two tick boxes back at the bottom of the screen. "add to home" and "notify."  These are the magic tick boxes that will make sure these new searches get folded right into your frontpage timeline. 

Don’t worry, Twhirl is smart enough to filter duplicates, so you’re not going to get @replies and TWO versions of normal comments on the main timeline.

So go ahead and hit the "New Search" button at the top of the search screen and repeat that process, five usernames at a time, for the rest of your list.  Then, if you want instant gratification, restart your Twhirl client and watch the @replies magically filter into your timeline.

(Note: on startup, Twirl loads searches, then @replies to YOU, then everything else.  It’s going to take just a little bit longer to load than usual from now on, but that delay should JUST happen at startup.  As @replies filter in, your client should operate as usual.)

"But Ariana," you may be saying, "I’m following 3000 people! Do I really have to copypaste 600 times?"

Well, no, you really don’t.  In fact, I don’t actually know if Twhirl will handle that many searches.  But now may very well be the time to ask yourself if you REALLY follow 3000 people.  Do you REALLY need to see @replies from all of them?  It may be time for you to apply your own mental filter to your list: are there people you really want to read EVERYTHING they say, and some you really kinda just scan?  It’s your call.  Like I said, I don’t know where Twirl maxes out, so you’re welcome to try adding them all.  Me, I follow 37 people, and I’m genuinely interested in and speak to all of them on a regular basis, so It was ridiculously simple for me.  Your mileage may, as they say, vary.

"Hey Ariana," you may also be asking, "this looks really fucking easy.  Do you think Twhirl may plug this functionality into a future release?"

I dunno!  I don’t even know, at this point, if it’s going to be an issue past the weekend.  Twitter may roll back to the previous functionality and this may all be moot by Monday.  But it’s certainly a really simple fix from the user end, so yeah, I’d expect we’ll see the functionality rolled into a simpler tickbox in future desktop client releases.  Not rocket science, is what I’m saying.  But in the meantime, here’s your workaround.

Tada.

Magazine is the name for an item or place within which ammunition is stored. From the Arabic makhāzin, plural of makhzan “storehouse.”

Wouldn’t it be lovely if that c/p were true?

I mean, think about that for a moment.  What if a magazine really were an item within which ammunition is stored.  I mean, it certainly used to be.  At one time, magazines were slender little floppies that stored some-odd-word bullets of information that you could hide in your bag to load into your mind gun at will.  And if you came across a fellow revolutionary running low on ammo, well, you could hand them a refill right in front of the authorities with no one the wiser.

Now? No, not so much.  We’ve softened the word — put a high gloss finish on it and poured the gunpowder out of the cartridges to make it into a safe facsimile.  Like little mass-marketed military replicas and pretty little sterling silver imitation bullet necklaces, a magazine today looks an awful lot like it might contain something useful — but for the most part it’s just stocked with blanks.

Yeah, I know, right?  Way to beat an out-of-date metaphor, hm?  Especially when a demilitarized media means a peaceful one, yeah? Why on earth would I bring up the violent origins of a word that’s evolved into such a lovely, innocuous little package — and one that’s nearly dead, at that?

You’re absolutely right.  Forget I said anything.  Keep your right to bear arms and throw down your munitions.

I’m sure no one will take advantage of you when all you’re left with is an empty "click."

TWITTERFRIENDS! Yes, I mean you. Projects, releases, things of interest that YOU did this week.  Tell me (use #whatdimiss).  Links++ good.

And, honestly, I didn’t expect too much.  But, surprisingly, I did get ten replies: 2 WATCHMEN related, 3 webcomics, 2 reviews (one of those the aforementioned WATCHMEN), 2 writeups on the economy(!), 1 software project, and this:

sispurrier: Fretted, stressed, contemplated murder, ate tofu, forgot to wank, drew a map, bought a car, swore at a git, drank tea.

Which probably covered the other 400+ silent followers of my Twitter account, too.

Unfortunately–although I’d intended to write up my own happy commentary on the links I did get–today I’m dying of DeathPlague3000, and I’ve already pushed myself closer to death just writing up this little bit here. 

Fortunately (I do like it when a bad has an "on the other hand"), I had the foresight (ha ha, no, not really) to ask for replies to be hashtagged. Which means I don’t need to write up anything at all, I can just shoo you along to #whatdimiss, and you can catch up all by yourselves.

Thanks to: evangineer, omniphobe, jamesmith3, billymeltdown, WillCouper, sispurrier, adampknave, atavistian, rickiep00h, and zdarsky for playing along.