Oh christ cough hack blarg splat.  Busy I can deal with – but I got knocked on my fucking ass by the deathiest death plague last week into this.  Seriously – we’re not talking about some pansy sniffle that just needed a couple of over-the-counters and some extra strong coffee, we’re talking literally knocked on my ass with no chance of getting Jack or Shit done for a few long days.

So I’ve got catch up work (that kinda makes me wish I had just gone ahead and died) before I can get back here.

Just going to make a couple notes to m’self here to remember what I want to braindump on the soonish:

• RSS: This apparently needs its own post, which is weird but there you go.
• Designing for infodump without hitting overload or saturation: This one’s going to be mostly me nattering, but there’s some evolution talk in there that might be useful
• Cafepress, continued: Now that Warren and I got ourselves accidentally upgraded to a pro site, there’s some addendum to previous theory/execution.
• Kindling: Yeah, may as well wait until after tomorrow to dig into that one.  Although Rich has kindly already roadmapped out the possible alternative.

But, yeah, today is mostly sniffling my way through my horrifically overloaded inbox before it collapses on and smothers me. What you should do is go talk to two very interesting ladies who are currently holding open residencies over on Whitechapel:

• The Residency of Emma Vieceli, whose Dragon Heir: Reborn online comic I’ve talked about here before — but if that’s all you’ve seen you’re missing out on a lot.
• And The Residency of Kelly Sue DeConnick, who, oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned here – which is just one of those oversights of familiarity, since Kelly Sue is one of those extremely valuable people that I can’t go a week without talking to.

So, yes, go there and talk to interesting people, and I will be back here when I’m a little closer to alive. 

Oh god this week and last week hell I don’t even remember last week but I’ve got a feeling this week is going to be more of the same whatever it was nnnnyyyarg.

Right.  Monday. TOTW is SPACE BASTARD: RE-ENTRY – and that’s a little bit of a hooray, because about a day after the t-shirt died the first go ‘round, I suddenly thought about making buttons and mugs and stickers (oh my)… but it was too late.  OR WAS IT?  It apparently wasn’t.  So, yay.

Work is very WORK, as you might have guessed from my complete punctuation breakdown up there.  No, I still don’t have much to say about it.  I could SCREAM about it, but that’d only be fun for me.  No, really.

Why oh why didn’t I have the foresight to turn this blog into an essay dump and advice column?  That way, on weeks like these when I can barely string two thoughts together (let alone a full braindump), you could just twitter me 140 character questions like “How does Lulu’s FTP upload option work, what’s the best oven temp for peanut butter cookies, and does she really love me?” – and then, instead of thinking up long-winded blog posts, I could just say: “It works great, 375 degrees F, and if you’re making her peanut butter cookies then she’d better!”

Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Marking/Mapping internet territory: Delicious links for the day auto-posted at midnight. Twitter/RSS auto-posts. Linkblogging. Geotagging. Picture tumblelogging (with credits, preferably).  “I went to this site, found these things, made a couple of notes/hobotags/signposts for future travelers, moved on.”  In this way we map the massive online space for our own benefit (to retrace our steps, to remember which houses had nice people and not mean dogs), bring home souvenirs (pictures, postcards, business cards), and point our fellow travelers to safe-but-interesting routes (in theory).  Of course, sometimes it’s really “I took a picture of the best part of this destination to save you the trouble of ever having to go yourself.”  (A concept that’d be a bit sketch in the real world, but fairly common online.)

Interspersed between other (more “destination in its own right”) content, those are interesting and often useful opinions.  As a “for myself but maybe useful for others” dedicated online notebook, those may also serve a solid purpose.  If you are an internet trailblazer looking to build a Frommer’s (with the audience to go with it)… then you’re in a very crowded market but best of luck to you.  But as a way to fill space – i.e. if you never read your archives, and no one else does, either – it’s the internet equivalent of scrawling Killroy Was Here in the sand at the beach.

Louise M has never read the book, but clearly recalls Carol Blymire having written a blog post about it.

Simultaneously, Cherie Priest has a vague memory of having seen it in a bookstore and with a more carefully constructed google search string, arrives at the same blog post.

“Piping Hot”

All right, let’s see if this works:  I’m going to call upon the interactive memory of the Internet Collective to identify, not a classic video game or 80s jingle, but an old and probably inconsequential book.  Because it’s an interesting game, is what.  Come on, I can’t be all helpful DIY ideas and commentary all the time.

So: I’m thinking about what to have for lunch today, when I suddenly have one of those Polaroid memories that’s so incredibly fucking crystal clear in the middle, and all faded at the edges, and abruptly stops after three inches.  I can recall (in fact, for a moment there I can’t NOT recall) with perfect clarity, a single page of a book I read (probably owned) when I had to have been barely five or six years old.

It’s a children’s book, probably, because the page I’m remembering has an illustration to go with the handful of words I remember: Lunch, a fried chicken leg, and a thermos of piping hot tomato soup. “Piping hot” is particularly clear, and that’s how I can gauge about how old I must have been and that I probably owned the book – the word “piping” has that extra brightness that accompanies my recollections of my first encounters with certain words, where I not only learned what they looked like, but had to decipher their meaning from context.

So it’s a book about… something… and somewhere in there a girl sits down to have a packed lunch of a fried chicken leg and a thermos of piping hot tomato soup.

I only remember it’s a girl having the lunch because of the accompanying picture:  a nuclear-era black and white line illustration of the girl sitting with a checkered napkin spread neatly in her lap, her impossibly tiny ankles crossed beneath her, primly holding a chicken leg the proportional size of a turkey’s, eyes closed as she takes a single, delicate bite.  I want to say that she’s in school or at the park, but I can feel that’s a more fuzzy idea that may well be imagination or an amalgamation of children’s books trying to fill in a synaptic blank.  I think she might have short, curly hair, but the focus of the memory is too tightly trained on the chicken leg, and it could just as well be a ponytail.  But there’s some tiny nag of something that’s saying “short, perfectly curled hair” was a relevant plot point.

And that’s it.  That’s all I’ve got.  A snapshot of a single page in a single moment of my childhood shaking free some many, many years later as I think about what to have for lunch.  Which is, as you may have guessed, probably going to be fried chicken and tomato soup.

I know, it’s gone a bit quiet over here.  Some of that’s just your normal gearing back up for the new year – everyone’s back to work, things are getting a little busier, there’s a little rush of jobs need clearing out of my inbox, etc.

Some of that’s me having started on some New Ideas that aren’t yet to a point where I have anything to show, yet.  I’ve dropped a few hints here and there about my thought processes lately, and readers of Warren’s site will have seen the day I dropped him five very long emails in a row (I’m scheming!) – I’m just at the point in that process where anything I have to say is going to be pages and pages and pages of theory and braindump… and some of you might not mind trying to unravel all of that, sure – but I haven’t the time to do it and to write it all down.

But! It’s Monday, and IEU is  over our holiday hiatus, so we’re back with a new TOTW!

 

Not a bad way to start the day, that.

Side-effect of not having had the time or energy to write down any of the spiderwebby thoughts that built up in my head over the holidays: I may burst waaaaaaay off seed topic and ramble on for a couple of pages about Other Stuff that really doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance in the sentiment unless you’re in my head.  Which is why two hours after I hit publish on yesterday’s post, I remembered what set me off on that train of thought in the first place, and realized I’d never quite gotten there.

So: What does your blog do?

Now, with that question I’m doing something that I hate: I’m saying “blog” when I really mean “homepage.” The page that you link in user profiles.  When you sign up for a new social network there’s usually a homepage url field.  It’s the link that shows up inn your twitter sidebar, and an optional bit of information you can link from Lulu or Cafepress.  It’s the thing some folks stick in email and forum sigs.  You get what I’m saying.  The url of the page that’s supposed to link to something essentially yours out there on the web, because sometimes you can’t sum up yourself in a 200 word bio.

For most people, at  this point, that just happens to be a blog.  Sort of.  At least, for most people, that happens to be a page that links to a blogging system of some sort.  (And twitter, tumblr, and flickr do all count as blogs, in that they are Web Logs.  They do log things, and they do it do the web.  That wordpress, twitter, tumblr, and flickr can all serve dramatically different content doesn’t really matter in terms of the origin of the word – they’re all, at the backend, chronological logs of web data.  There’s an entire other post in there, I know, so try not to argue that point too much, because it’s not the point of this post, okay?  All right, back on track.)

So, yes: What does your blog do.  Or, more importantly: What does your Thing With RSS tacked on do?  Because RSS is a huge and important tool in online communication.  I’d argue that it’s more important to have an RSS feed of your current content than it is to be easily crawlable by search engines.  Because your RSS feed is, more than your page URL, your broadcast frequency.  It’s the thing people can plug into their own RSS readers LONG after they’ve gotten tired of hitting actual pages every day.  For those of you that don’t update daily, it’s the only thing that’s going to alert some of your readers when there is new content.  And, again, I’m segueing into another post.  You see?  There’s going to be plenty here in the next few weeks.

So, finally back on track: if someone who doesn’t really know who you are or what you do wanted a link to your online content that they could plug into Google Reader – how would you describe what your site does?  How, in fact, would you make someone WANT to add your site’s RSS feed into their daily/weekly/whatever reading habits?

That’s apparently a difficult question.

There are a metric fuckton of creative people on Whitechapel, right? I know this because we’ve got artist and photography threads, we’ve got people constantly lamenting the “no fiction” rule, we’ve got musicians and comic writers and people that want to make magazines and all sorts of things.

And, so far, we’ve got six of them linking their blogs.

Whoa.

And, okay, there’s a little of what sounds like snark in that link.  It does look like I made a lot of really mean rules, carefully crafted to keep people from just posting: “Hi, my name is [name] and this is my blog.”  Which, yes, I did.  But that’s not mean of me:  that’s helpful.

Because, look, how many of you have made something, are in the process of making something, or trying to make something, or trying to think of something to make? Quite a few of you.  And of those quite a few, how many of you are going to want to tell people about that thing what you made?  I’m going to guess quite a few. Where on earth do you think those imaginary people that are interested in your Thing What You Made are going to come from? 

Yes, in a perfect world, you could quietly toil on your creations, and when you finished you could just put up a link and people would magically appear to buy it.  Unfortunately, the internet is not a perfect world.  The internet is a noisy and hectic world where, very likely, when you finish your creation and put up a link, you’re going to have to shout VERY LOUDLY to get the attention of ten real people.

If you want to sell something online, you’ve got to make a network online. You’ve got to go places and talk to people, yes – but unless you are struck by lucky lightning, you’ve also got to give those people something they can link and remember and pass along to other people.  And, for most of us, that “business card” if you will, is our homepage.  In theory, that homepage should be something people can bookmark to remember us by – but if it’s a static page there’s a very good chance that people will forget why they bookmarked it in the first place.  So most of us – by accident or with some thought – have created a blog of some fashion.

And then a lot of those blogs very quickly turned into “well it’s the place where I kinda collect stuff that’s cool, or that’s where mostly twitter updates and delicious links feed in automagically, but I haven’t really updated in forever and I know I should but I never know what to say so it’s not really current or relevant  or even MINE anymore.”

And yet (and we’ve done this in the past on Whitechapel and I’ve seen it in many other forums, so I know it’s true), whenever there’s an open “link your blog here” thread anywhere, that’s still the site most of us plug.  We just happen to do it with some variation of “My name is [name] and there’s really nothing interesting here, but you can follow it if you like, I guess.”

So, then, back to the Whitechapel thread I just opened:  for my own selfish sorting purposes, yes, but also in an attempt to get people thinking about those poor neglected blogs, I made some hard (and a little mean) rules.  Think about how you would like to sell your blog (your homepage, your web presence, your business card).  Think about how you would get a complete stranger, not someone who already knows and likes you, interested in who you are and what you’re doing.  Refine that down to an easily digestible paragraph (or picture, because I do know that some artists really speak better in images, and that’s fair).  Polish up that idea of what your homepage does into something short and informative, and then put yourself out there.

There’s only six up so far, right?  But they all look incredibly interesting, don’t they?  That’s the sort of thing that you could do if you wanted to.  And if you’ve got a book or some art or a shop or even if you’re just feeling a bit bored with whatever you’re doing online right now, that’s the sort of thing that you maybe should do.

Of course, for some folks, all their homepage really is is a notebook-lifestream-junkdrawer-thingie.  There’s nothing really wrong with that.  Nor is there anything wrong with a page that really is just a personal rambling journal that happens to be public-ish, and it doesn’t really matter that its not locked because no one read is, anyway.  I’m not going to tell you how to use the web, because I’m not you and I don’t know what works for you.  If you honestly have no desire to make your site into a destination, or your RSS feed into a must-read… then, hey, that’s cool.  If your tumblr is something you use as a scrapbook for web-thoughts just for you, or your flickr is just your own personal album and you’d just as soon no one pay attention to it, anyway – again, that’s your call and that’s totally cool.  Hell, almost my entire Delicious account is private, because the links are really just for my use.  maybe your wordpress blog is all just Delicious links that you want to keep sorted in that particular archival system.

In no way am I saying if you don’t have a site to link that there’s something wrong with you.

What I’m saying is: if you do have a site that you want to link, if you sometimes sigh that your Analytics account never tops twenty readers, if you wonder how you’re going to go about reaching the people that you think would like your new magazine, if you’re a step away from being a bit surly about how hard it is to get attention online – basically, if you’re looking for interesting people to be interested in you and what you do… Well.  Then you might want to think about how to tell people about the site you want them to remember and visit and share with their friends.

And if you haven’t got one of those sites yet, well, it’s January 2010 – now’s maybe a good time to start one.

When you figure it out, seriously, come tell me (and the other nearly 8000 people on Whitechapel) about it.

I can’t go a year without circling back to the web as radio.  (Actually, I can’t go more than a month, but there’s plenty of stuff that my poor friends have to listen to that I don’t post here.  Well, I don’t post here all the time.)  At any rate, I know I’m right because Warren can’t go more than a year without circling back to the web as radio, either.  (And if you’ve got your copy of Shivering Sands, you’ll have seen that he’s been calling broadcasts for what they are much longer than I have.)

But Warren’s usually on about music radio.  That’s due, largely, to the fact that he’s a musician. (Not the Australian one, no. But a musician nonetheless.) I won’t have been the firs to say he makes singles and albums for a living.  I’d call Crooked Little Vein a musical, except that he’d kill me for it. But that mental image you just got of a dancing Uncle Sam, well that’s my gift to you.  And Shivering Sands and Knock John, well, I don’t think anyone could argue if I called them samples and soundscapes.

But for me, well, music’s a thing I listen to, or make sleeves for, or format the liner notes of… but it’s not a thing I make, so it’s not a thing I talk about.

Talk, though, now that’s the radio I remember. And not just the morning and afternoon talk radio that came about as commutes grew from down the block to two hours both ways including bridge, tunnel, and ferry. Nah, I remember all the talk.  DJs and hosts, sure, but also CBs and Short Waves.  Every other damned thing on the AM band.  Numbers channels and the staccato beat of chatter breaking through the static.  Call-ins and surgeries and even request lines.  Airport control towers and walkie-talkies.  Those were the sounds I turned, tuned, and listened to.

Some of that difference is down to the ten years and 6000 miles difference in how Warren and I came about the radio.  When he were a lad, the pirates were just about to straighten up and fly right, but the legends were still going strong.  The BBC ran the radio, but the good stuff was a quarter turn to the left.  And if you wanted strange and ghostly mystery talk, well you could pick up Norwegian when the wind was right, and that wasn’t even all that odd. 

But when I were a lass, Radio was that thing you turned on when the TV wasn’t around.  It was the thing you scanned in the car and the back yard, and the first thing Radio Shack helped you build.  It was the thing in the cab of delivery trucks that still picked up chatter going over the mountains.  And living in California there were equal parts Top Forty and Cowboy music, if you wanted it, but if you switched to the AM dial it was nothing but ghostly mystery talk, with a fair bit of Spanish cut through with Opera as the signals fenceposted, bursts of half cut-off words as an 18-wheeler cut through the local college station, and sometimes, the sound of someone crying or laughing in the dark but you could never tune in clearly enough to hear which.

That, to me, was Radio.  The sounds of imaginary people talking to an imaginary world. And me, very much an imaginary little girl, listening intently to everything they had to say, safely unable to answer with anything but my imagination.

And then we all got to the web, didn’t we?  And our blogs all became our own little broadcast stations.  And me, I still love sifting through the chatter so I didn’t mind so much that that’s pretty much all there is. The Twhirl window I’ve got on the other monitor right now is nothing but a CB that’s wide open and ready to cut through my drive whenever I give it a glance.  I only thumb the mic to answer someone else or say when I’m pulling in somewhere, but there’s plenty of other folks keeping the chatter up all day and night. Your blogs are your short waves, your BoingBoing and other curators of the web are the Top Forty channels I can tune to when I want to hear the pop hits of the last month, last week, and today.  Places like Coilhouse remind me of the college radio of my youth – not because the lovely ladies are amateurs by any means, but because I’m of the age where the college stations where you went to hear the bootlegs, the obscure, the alt, and the imports – the Avant 40 with hours of liberal talk, if you will.

But the thing is, I don’t mind the chatter, and god knows that’s all I do… but I wonder sometimes: where is the rest of the music?  ‘Cause it turns out, as always, that Warren’s right and I’m just rambling sentimental.  Because if everyone’s a DJ, then who’s writing the bloody songs?

And, more importantly… where the hell does someone like Warren go to listen to it?  Are there few-to-no pirates because there’s nothing for them to play?

Oho, turns out there was a point to all that sentimental rambling, and this is it: Are you an online DJ, call-in host, personality, or musician?  Take a look at your own blog, if you have one, and tell me what it is.  Is it starts and stops to fill the space between tracks? Is it your own Top 40 of mostly links and tumbles?  I mean, you’ve probably got something like a blog, because that’s very web 2.0 of you… but is that what you actually need?

I’ve talked the radio metaphor out, for now, so let me throw it off and be a bit more blunt about it: What are you trying to do online? If you’ve got a long haul day job that you’re perfectly happy with and all you want is something to let you tell dirty jokes at 3am to pass the time, well then you’ve got Twitter and Facebook and you’re all sorted, fair enough.  If all you want to do is curate, then you’ve got Tumblr (or a Wordpress/Blogger account that’s way more than you actually need, but works fine) and if you’re very good at it, you might have even carved out a twenty-or-two-hundred niche for yourself.  If you haven’t really settled on anything, you’ve probably got accounts all over the place, and they all pipe into a lifestream service of some fashion that you really thought was a good idea in 2008, but haven’t thought much about, since.

But if what you do is Make Things, first and foremost, and all the rest is noise… well the internet hasn’t caught up with you yet.

Now, Warren and Wil and many others have done a very good job of making do with the internet they’ve got, but it’s a fuckton of work.  They’re their own DJs and Hosts and Musicians, and they’ve cobbled together massive radio towers with blogs and syndication and twitter and forums and every other bit of metal and tech they can get their hands on.  And bless ‘em, they know how much work it is so they even do Top 40 broadcasts to link new artists to lend a hand.  But, fuck me, that’s an awful lot of work.  And when you’re just starting out, it doesn’t seem entirely fair that you’ve got to do that much just to get a few listeners, does it?  Especially if you’re not really interested in doing anything but Making Things.

But it turns out that Social Networks aren’t social or networks, so for right now, that’s your lot.

For right now.

But I’ve got a hunch, somewhere along the lines of a Prediction Ov Footure, that we’re juuuuust about to figure out the next step.  That we’re juuuuust about to realize that just because everyone can have a blog, doesn’t mean everyone should be focusing on keeping one.  That “lifestreaming” was pretentious bullshit from day one, but aggregation makes sense if it’s done right. That keeping the front page of a site fresh doesn’t necessarily mean pushing relevant information down to replace it with pointless chatter is the right way to go about it. 

Someone’s going to figure out how to make stations on the web that you want to leave the dial locked to, because it’s always good, and the only way to get on there is to actually have something worth listening to.  Not in the current Top 40 linkblog sort of way, but more in the best-kept-secrets-aren’t-that-secret piratey sort of way. And then, of course, someone will call it Web 3.0 and I’ll want to shoot them, but we can’t have everything.

But we don’t get there by sitting back and waiting for it.  We get there by doing what Warren and Wil and some other folks are already doing: cobbling together their own stations with sweat and constantly good content and making dangerous leaps of POD and interesting new formats until the rest of the world can’t help but notice.  Spending less time on Facebook collecting husks and more time making actual networks of listeners.  Because getting real people one at a time is an awful lot of work, but it makes more sense than collecting a hundred of nothing at a time and then wondering why all you ever hear back is static.

And if you’re good at talking, keep talking – there’s folks like me that turn the dial listening for what you have to say. But if you’re only talking hoping for someone to stop long enough for you to show them your music (or art, or book or photos or what have you)… well, I’ll bet that’s not working out as well as you’d hoped, is it?  Can you chatter less, work more, and still be heard?  Sure you can.  You’ve just got to chatter less, work more, and find real people who will tell their friends that you’re always worth a listen.  It looks like a slower way to build an audience, but trust me, 20 avid listeners beats out 500 channel hoppers any day.

Every year, Kieron Gillen does up his personal Top 40 of the previous year, and they’re always fantastic.  Music is something that I listen to, but I never think too much about it past “well, that was blah” or “oh yes, that’s going on repeat.” So I find Kieron’s yearly lists an excellent read not because they’re in-depth reviews or beat-by-chord analyses, but because they’re bite-sized little queries: “Did you hear this song?  But did you hear this?”

I also almost never agree with his rankings. But that’s really not the point at all, because it’s not my top 40 list. It’s a glimpse at how one of my friends (and one who’s a bit more invested in and attentive to the why and how of music than I am) heard the world in the previous year.  And that’s always fun to read, so you should go look, too.

That’s the first music wrap-up I look forward to every year.  The second one is the yearly pop mash-up.  I unapologetically love that every year, several people take the top 20/25/40 charts and smoosh them all into one big “this is what last year sounded like” track.  And this one, from DJ Earworm, is probably the best I’ve seen yet:

That’s the amalgamated poptimism of 2009, right there, isn’t it? Almost every single one of those songs on their own were cheesy little party balls from a crap year for the economy and fun and a whole mess of other things – bubbly little ditties crafted for maximum earworm value and escapism.  But add them all up and they sound all right, don’t they?  They’re still cheesy, they’re still a poppy little earworm that’s far happier than anyone really was last year… but listen, isn’t that the sort of get back up and keep dancing sound you want to take from last year to move you into this one?

It certainly sounds good to me – a ribbon of shiny all rightness pulled off the box of meh that was 2009. It’s a bit of a lie, but it’s one I whole-heartedly endorse on a regular basis: keep the good, file the crap under “lessons learned” – and make something else. But, like I said, music is just something I listen to.  I leave it to the smarter folks to write about the rest. I just like having something nice on to keep me company while I work.

it is the role of the artist to challenge society. no one who lives within the system and makes conventional choices is capable of expanding the box we find ourselves in. that?s why it?s called, ?thinking outside? of it, and to do so, you have to be aware of it first. I believe ?artists? are people born with the dubious skill of acute box-awareness. I say dubious because, if they are anything like me (and I suspect they are, or I am like them), once aware of the confines placed on our existence it becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate them.

there are a lot of assumptions made about what constitutes a successful life. there is, I think, a certain amount of gender-based difference as to the specific expectations on an individual, but the checklist as I understand it runs: stable job, house, car, children, and subsequently future generations. all as expensive as possible. these things equal security, and if yours is like mine, your family says they ?just want you to be happy,? but what they mean is, ?I just want you to be safe, secure, and never take risks with your future.?

the laughable thing, the thing that keeps me from settling happily into the box, surrounded by wood-chips and a little exercise wheel that keeps me running constantly, going nowhere, is an underlying inability to believe that the checklist is actually working out for anybody.

As of right now, my little brother is 21 years old.* I wish oodles of happy natal felicitations to the lad — who can be found right here online. May he have many, many more gleeful, productive years ahead! And even though the occasion veritably cries out for me to tell embarrassing stories about him as a wee nublet of a boy, I will do no such thing.

At this time.

---

* He’s … um … rather significantly younger than me, yes.

My day was actually similar to:

G’night.

(I have no credits for the shot. Please add them in comments if you know.)

So who can tell me what the Deathfall is? Has anyone in the class ever heard of that before? ... Yes, um, Bladeflake? Yes? ... Well, sure, that's one way to put it. It *is* a sort of "crazy blizzard", I suppose.

You see, when you are all grown up and you have done all the grown-up things you were meant to do in your life, and you begin to hear the icy groan in your limbs - the creak and crack that happens as your crystalline bones weaken with age - then you will gather your strength one last time, along with all the other Ice Lords of your age, to make the trek over the mountains, across the plain, all the way around the world to invade and besiege the fiery tropical realm of the Fire Princesses.

Yes, of course it's very hot there! Blistering! The Princesses live in eternal daylight, the sun forever above them, their homes built right into the thousands of sputtering, shaking volcanoes that smolder in the bright, scorching light. And the Princesses themselves run red-hot with the boiling fluid that runs through their veins.

Yes, Stormhammer. It does sound like a dangerous place and yes, in fact, it can kill you. It *will* kill you. It *does* kill you. The Deathfall is the last thing you do in your life: You invade their land and you slake your desire on any and every Princess you can. Their flesh will burn your eyes and splinter your skin but your icy seed can survive - and it will. You will leave it in as many of their boiling wombs as you can before your body can take no more, and you melt.

That's right. You will melt. All that is you will eventually fail to hold and you will break into pieces and vanish as steam off the body of your final conquest. That is how we Ice Lords die. And that is how we make new life.

Yes, babies. This is where babies come from. The seed's stony case will melt and fertilize and the Princesses will bear new children. Those who are girls will be, of course, Fire Princesses, to be raised under the bright and scorching sun. Those who are boys will be Ice Lords, to be raised here in the comforting embrace of night.

How? Well, of course the newborns cannot travel all the way back around the world on their own, and they cannot survive long among the volcanoes. So they must be brought to us. Each year, at the Birthspring, the oldest among the Princesses - the ones who have done all the grown-up things they were meant to do in their lives, who no longer feel the heat of their own blood, whose skins have begun to crack from the smoke - gather their strength one last time to trek across the plain and over the mountains, all the way around the world before the last of their life-spark expires... to bring us our sons.

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For consideration: ...it's like MARCH OF THE PENGUINS meets a Ralph Bakshi cartoon...

a visit to Doctor Beef?s Storm Troopin? set on flickr is always a worthwhile activity.

For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.

My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.

Inflection Points

View more presentations from Jamais Cascio.

By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.

The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.

• Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) on Atemporality | transmediale
  "If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session is being introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality."
  (tags:video )

Jack Bauer saves the day... with AOL 3.0

unhappyhipsters brings me a special kind of joy.

unhappyhipsters:

At the art opening, he?d been convinced the blank canvas symbolized endless possibilities. Back at home, it was just one more reminder of his own desperation.

(Photo: Raimund Koch; Dwell, April 2009)

true story.

bigworldsmallvictories:

Sentimentality follows preservation.

A

Good morning! Fancy A Fierce Pancake for breakfast?

HOW MUCH IS THE FISH? HOW MUCH IS THE CHIPS?! (Lara! Thank you!)

Egads, how could I have forgotten about these freakwads? I once loved their one-and-only studio album, A Fierce Pancake with the same passion reserved for exceptional goofballs like Primus, Billy Nayer Show, Mr Bungle, Idiot Flesh, Violent Femmes, Fishbone, and Adam the the Ants. But it’s been a long, long time since I last listened…

Is it just me, or does Mick Lynch look uncannily like Siege (yanno, if Siege were crossed with Ed Grimley and a lemur)?

Formed in London in 1983, Stump were a legendary Anglo-Irish indie/experimental/rock group inspired by Captain Beefheart. The lineup was Kev Hopper on bass, Rob McKahey on drums, Chris Salmon on guitar, and Mick Lynch on vocals. They toured a lot in the mid 80s on a couple of brilliant, bizarre EPs, and their energetic live shows quickly earned them a cult following. Then they got signed to a major label, apparently squabbled constantly during the production of AFP and broke up soon afterward, a quarter of a million pounds in debt to their record company, and never to be heard from again.*

The entire album is cracked fucking genius. It’s also very difficult to track down anymore. Beg, borrow, steal a copy if you can.

Read the rest of Better Than Coffee: A Fierce Pancake

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Post tags: Better than coffee, Crackpot Visionary, Dance, Geekdom, Music, Punk, Silly-looking types