Via David Brin, a plan to send out automated spacecraft which will convert asteroids into other automated spacecraft and send them where we want them.
Jul
23
Jul
20
I’m picturing a kind of animist future world in which every living and nonliving thing is linked into a descendant…
I’m picturing a kind of animist future world in which every living and nonliving thing is linked into a descendant of the Internet, and in which bits of intelligence have been incorporated into many of them – so you can have an actual conversation with a tree, and this is a normal part of your day.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/
Jul
18
Via Deb Chachra’s newsletter, an article which makes the point that the reason VR is cool is that instead of tiny…
Via Deb Chachra’s newsletter, an article which makes the point that the reason VR is cool is that instead of tiny muscles controlling a tiny joystick or touchpad or whatever, you are controlling the game with your whole body and your whole physicality.
(Friends of Damian Trasler will quickly detect why I thought of him while reading.)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-14-vr-is-a-revolution-in-control-more-than-immersion
Jul
18
I knew indie romance authors were killing it, but I had no idea they were killing it this hard.
I knew indie romance authors were killing it, but I had no idea they were killing it this hard.
A thorough analysis by Data Guy of the US romance market, most of which is invisible to trad pub methods of analysis. Given as a presentation at the RWA conference. Goes into subgenres, KU vs non-KU, length of series, impact of having the first book free, and lots of other useful stuff.
I have a detailed outline, a rough outline, and an idea for some romance novels. Hmmm.
Jul
18
Here’s an interesting thought.
Originally shared by Larry Panozzo
Here’s an interesting thought. At one point we were primitive creatures in, colloquially speaking, a jungle. There are even still a few primitive peoples in actual jungles. But now what mankind has rapidly created is a technological jungle that most of us hardly understand, and nobody really understands all of it. As we progress, this jungle is only going to get denser, and while we will no doubt build machines to help us navigate it while simultaneously building machines to make it a better jungle, we still will be entirely dependent on the machines to navigate the jungle. At times we may find ourselves lost in our own jungle.
Furthermore, we are already reaching the point when individual pieces of technology become so complicated that nobody fully understands them. Google is 2 billion lines of code. I’m willing to bet some good money that no one person knows exactly how the google search engine operates, yet it does and billions of people rely on it.
The problem I see with this is that if we don’t engineer technology now that can troubleshoot complex technological systems, there will be a point when complex things break and no one can fix them without massive, expensive collaboration – just because no single person will know enough of the system! (I feel like this has already happened in economics and politics.) I’m not sure we’ve really reached this point yet, but it is at most just a couple decades down the road.
Jul
18
Although the whole thing is good, I’m sharing this video (I hope) starting from 58:25, when Brandon Sanderson starts…
Although the whole thing is good, I’m sharing this video (I hope) starting from 58:25, when Brandon Sanderson starts talking about issues of representation in writing, considered as a spectrum.
He starts with blatantly obvious objectification and moves on up, freely admitting that some of his published books have these issues (he doesn’t give this example here, but the first Mistborn book has only one woman, though she’s a fully realized character).
This part of the video is about 9 minutes, and well worth watching if you’re a writer trying to include characters who aren’t like you.
Jul
18
Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | The Guardian
Originally shared by Walter Roberson
Jul
17
OK, I’ve decided.
OK, I’ve decided. I’m taking my first two books away from Smashwords for wide distribution, and publishing them through Draft2Digital instead.
Why? Because Smashwords recently sent me an email telling me that I needed bigger cover images to be in their premium catalog. I went into Photoshop and blew up the images I had to the size they asked for, and re-uploaded them.
Now one of the two is failing inclusion in the premium catalog, based on some fussy aspect of internal formatting. Which I didn’t change. It’s been in the premium catalog since 2009.
I once directly challenged Mark Coker in the comments on a Passive Voice post about the fact that Draft2Digital is so much easier to use than his service. His response was “it’s not really that hard”. But, Mark, it’s harder than it needs to be, and harder than your competitors. Maybe consider that a problem for you, as well as for the customers who are giving you this feedback?
Draft2Digital also pays me when I reach a much lower earnings threshold ($10 instead of $50, I believe). (This isn’t actually the case, when I checked. It’s $10 for SW too, but they pay quarterly rather than monthly.)
So, while I’ll leave City of Masks and Gu up at Smashwords itself – at least until I get my next payout – I’ll be using D2D for the broader distribution. I can’t be bothered fussing with Smashwords’ silly system for the small number of sales they bring in.
Jul
17
What do you do if you receive a story rejection that says the pace is too slow; revise it, adding 200 words; and get…
What do you do if you receive a story rejection that says the pace is too slow; revise it, adding 200 words; and get another rejection that says it now feels rushed?
Well, if you’re me, you sit down and write a post about pacing, how it’s perceived, and how, as authors, we can control that perception.
Jul
17
The really interesting thing here is that this is not coming from an ideological position by the company of “there…
The really interesting thing here is that this is not coming from an ideological position by the company of “there should be more of these images available”. It’s based on data mining of popular culture, social media, and what people are already searching for on their site.
Originally shared by Derrick “Quite Clever” Sanders
h/t Tonya Wershow