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Happy 80th Birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin

Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 80th birthday. I read The Dispossessed for the first time during my junior year of college, and its lesson, in a friend’s words, that “it’s always more complicated” has stayed with me, even if I don’t always remember it. Three Roads Four Ways to Forgiveness should be read by [...]

All of the Hurt, None of the Comfort

I’ve recently learned that my nickname, which my friend Karen bestowed on me back in 1989, is a term of art in fan fiction. To ‘whump’ a character is to write a fic where awful things happen to him, often at the hands of other characters from the book/show/movie, after which everyone realizes they’ve done [...]

More on the High Cost of Being Poor

Two recent, related posts about surcharges faced by the working poor. Andrew Leonard, writing at Salon, discusses debit cards. Which, outside of California, can expire if not used. Wal-Mart plans to stop cutting checks for employees who don’t have direct deposit and give them debt cards. The cards will incur fees for checking balances as [...]

Links for Labor Day Weekend

If this is a long weekend for you, I’m hoping you’re enjoying it. Julie Gomoll’s had it with twitter/facebook/social-media spam from people pitching their South by Southwest panel proposals. The best lessons on marketing from Second Life come from the people who are creating fashion, gadgets, and other things inworld. Learn from them. Your employees [...]

Blogging Verisimilitude

Cynthia and I watched Julie and Julia last Saturday, and I enjoyed it. However, in the scene where Julie, annoyed by her friends and depressed with her job, decides to start a blog* she goes to a web page with Salon and Blogger branding. I turn to Cynthia and whisper, “I’m certain that Salon was [...]

Slacktivist on the Current Contentions

Slacktivist has been putting out some great posts on the shrillness of some of the opponents of health care reform: In The IndigNation, Fred Clark talks about “The National Indignation Convention” (!) an early 1960′s movement, similar to the shouting mobs showing up at public meetings on health care, but were convinced that the danger [...]

No, its not malpractice…

I’m just going to link Gawande’s oft-cited report in the New Yorker about the cost of medical care in Brownsville, Texas (which caps damages from medical malpractice) so I can have a short URL to hand out to people who still think malpractice is the main driver of the cost of medical care in the [...]

Spatial Hypertext in Second Life

Peter Miller’s StoryMachine is a 3D spatial hypertext system (like Tinderbox) for Second Life. It’s been hooked up to TiddlyWiki, and the creators are looking at how to make it work with the new HTTP-in (every prim a server) functions in LSL so you can update the StoryMachine instance from outside of Second Life.

Attitudes towards Torture

The criticism of my country’s government over torture is well meaning, and deserved. However, there is a demand side to torture (just like censorship and security theater.) And in the United States, over 40% of my fellow citizens think it’s justified according to polling data published in The Economist. Stopping torture doesn’t just mean petitioning [...]

Crowdsourcing Caltrain Status to Twitter

There’s no official Caltrain twitter feed, so Ravi Pina created a service for people to post status on trains and the scarce bike cars to a shared account. Now Caltrain’s participating in it instead of starting their own feed. [ via San Mateo County Times ]

Michael Collins on Apollo 11 @ 40 years

NASA posted an amusing and candid interview with Apollo 11 Command Module pilot Michael Collins (he got to sit in orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin made the landing.) Heroes abound, and should be revered as such, but don’t count astronauts among them. We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that [...]

Dinosaurs on Dirtbikes and Shibuya in Summer

Leonard Richardson’s short story, Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs starts with a Thymomenoraptor trying to buy a handgun. You’ll hear Iggy Pop’s theme from Repo Man while you read it. Everyone’s been buzzing about the story, and it’s great. But I also want to point out Rachel Manja Brown’s new story, also in Strange [...]

Charles N. Brown, Publisher of Locus, has Died

Locus serves as the de-facto trade magazine for the business of writing and publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Charles N. Brown, who started Locus in 1968, died on July 12, while returning from Readercon.

“If you want to understand…”

For the Fourth of July, Maria Kalman’s sketchblog on Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant and flawed man. If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous, you need to go to [Jefferson's] home in Virginia. Monticello. This does not absolve [...]

JQuery is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Recreating the .Mac/MobileMe gallery using JQuery and CSS. [ via Fozbaca ]