This is a quick (for long-winded values, I’m sure) segue from my ongoing (and going, and going) POD notes and rantings to a bit that may seem a little ahead of itself: Telling people that you’re Making Something.

Because you’re going to have to, when you’re done, you know.  And you’re likely going to have a little bit of an uphill time of it, because the internet’s half broken, isn’t it.  Oh, you know what I mean — you’ve got a blog, probably, but (Wil and Warren, you’re not to answer this one, because I’m not talking about you, yet) how many people read your blog?  I’m not being mean about it — this isn’t supposed to put you off before you even start, trust me — but how many people do you pull over, and worse, how many of those people do you interact with?

That’s where the internet is half broken, right there, that last bit: Comments are shit. 

And people keep trying to find ways to fix what is an inherently crap system is the main problem. I mean, how many fucking ways are there to leave a comment, these days?  You can log into a wordpress or typepad blog, only maybe some of your readers don’t have (or want to make) accounts for either, so there are OpenID plugins and trackbacks and ShareThis and Stumble and Delicious and Technorati (and oh there’s one that went to fucking weed, innit) and All Manner of networking and feedback and pingback and chatback and every-damned-thing-else to address a “problem” that’s, honestly? Not solvable.

Most of the time, people aren’t going to have anything to say in response.

But, without that feedback, a lot of us lose steam, because how else will we know we’re being heard, or that anyone even cares?

Which is how the internet’s half broken, of course.  Because one half, the Social Networking half, revolves around the idea that he who has the most friends, wins.  And the other half, the Individual and Personal half, revolves around the idea that a single person should have a comments form on every page, and somehow the magic of connectivity will fill the lower half of every post with feedback and community.

Hahaha.  But no.

I mean, yesterday I asked my 400ish twitter followers a direct question: What are you making?  And I got, as expected, about 20 responses.  Warren and Wil probably would have gotten about 100 (in fact, you can go look at the comments to Wil’s post on Making Things to see I’m absolutely right in that estimate), but they’ve both got HYUGE audiences.  And that’s responses to a direct question.  So what hope is there of building an interactive community around just general discussion and feedback?

Well… there’s really not.  Not if you insist on using just one bit of the half-broken internet out of the box.

But then what the hell DOES work?  See, here’s my crazy thought (and I got it from Warren who’s cleverer than you and me put together, so you know it’s true): We really could try interacting with Internet People like they’re real, you know, People.

Oh stop huffing, I haven’t even explained yet, and when I do, whatever you were about to shoot back will sound retarded.

Look, imagine you’ve got four friends over, or the five of you are out at the pub or whatever.  How amazingly awkward would the conversation go if, every time you made any statement, you then paused until each person responded directly.  Only once each person had said something could you move onto the next bit.

Like this:

• PERSON ONE says “Rough weather today!”
• PERSON TWO says “Yes”
• PERSON THREE says “Yeah it’s kinda blowing out there.”
• PERSON FOUR says “I had a rough day at work.”
• PERSON TWO says “Don’t  hijack the conversation! We’re talking about the WEATHER right now”
• PERSON FOUR calls person two a Nazi
• PERSON ONE gets into a long, involved attempt to mediate between PERSONS TWO and FOUR
• PERSON FIVE says “Too long, didn’t listen.  But it is cold out…”
• PERSON ONE says “Okay, good, we’ve all discussed the weather and I can see PERSON TWO is just going to pout until we move on to the next dedicated topic: How were our days at work?”

I mean, honestly, that’s a worst-case comment scenario, true — but it’s also just fucking ridiculous to think about EVER doing in “real” life, isn’t it?

Oh, I of course forgot the part where PERSON ONE is obsessively checking to see if weather.com has pinged his phone with a forecast that agrees with his initial statement.  And is also staring at the table next to them, hoping some strangers will come over and agree, too.

That’s really just no way to have a conversation, is it?

But we want our blogs and our internet communication to be interactive, so we go with the half-broken system, even though none of us are so socially stunted that we think that’s how it should work — just because that’s the system that comes built on to the tools we’re using.

And you’ll note I’ve lopped that system right off my blog, because I’m no fan of tech that solves a problem that isn’t really there.

Conversations don’t happen in blogs. (There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.  There are little networks of the faithful that do hang out in the comments sections of some of the bigger blogs, sure.) Conversations happen in forums, or on Twitter, and probably in GoogleWave while people figure out what to do with it, and in stranger places like FaceBook walls and roll-your-own networks, sort of.

(That last never really took off in the direction I expected, but then again, Cafepress have been around for ten years and we’re pushing for an uptick there, too, so I may just need to be patient)

But blogs aren’t social networks — they’re stations — and no matter how much crap we tack on to try and make them more interactive, they aren’t going to be (that definition of) networks because, ostensibly, a blog is a place where you talk and people dial in to listen.

That was a segue of its own, so let’s circle back to the original point: How do you get people to come listen?

Well, unless you’re very attractive and taking out 50-feet restraining orders on a daily basis, I don’t imagine you’ve got people peeking in your windows to hear you singing in the shower.  And when you go out to grab a drink, I somehow doubt hundreds of people walk over to you to find out what you’re thinking.

If you’ve got any friends at all, I’d imagine you went out and found them, or got introduced by other people, or met them at work, or school, or by bumming a light 15 feet away from the bus stop.

If you’ve got online friends, I reckon you brought them over from the meat-filled world, or you met them over on Whitechapel, or someone on Twitter RT’d them, or you went looking for something in particular and found them by happy google chance.

And if you — and by extension, your Thing You’re Making — want an audience, you’ve got to tell those people when you’ve got something to show them, and lead them back.

Which is why, even though FREAKANGELS has been running into its third volume, now, Warren still twitters, blogs, and mails you a link, every week.  It’s why I sweep off the sidewalk and tell everyone the new discussion thread is open — and also ask everyone how they’re doing, because it’s a forum that’s tacked on to a comic, but it’s also a forum of people I know and want to hear from.

And it’s why Whitechapel is all everything else the other 6 days and 23 hours of the week, because no community is there for just one thing.  They’re there for each other, and themselves, too.  And that’s why you can hit 9 out of ten threads on Whitechapel and find links and directions out to other people’s blogs and stores and projects… and you’re far more likely to see comments in the thread than you are on the individual pages, just to hit that point a little more home.

So.  How do you find an audience for the Thing You’re Making?

You don’t.

You find people you like. And if you can’t find any, you find people that like the things you do.  And you join their community — or, if there isn’t one, you make it and you tell everyone that’ll listen until four people show up — and you find out what they’re doing and you tell them what you’re doing.  And you pay fucking attention to someone instead of your Google Analytics page of “unique yet nameless visitors” and maybe you end up buying their project before you even get around to selling your own.

And before you know it, you’ll have five friends who really probably don’t often comment on your blog, but they’ll all RT the link to your Thing You Made when you Twitter it’s live. 

Oh, and also, you’ll have five friends, and you won’t be that guy that bitches about how hard it is to make connections online.  That’s a win, too.

I realize it’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted, so this is just to say that I didn’t stop the planet and get off or anything. My mornings have been occupied by day-job work (as per usual), but yesterday afternoon I jaunted down to the Emerson Salon to get my hair done; and today I moseyed over to the Science Fiction Museum (its offices, rather) for an interview with a marvelous woman from a marvelous magazine.

(I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, though, so in deference to caution I’ll just be vague and conspiratorial.)

Anyway, each of these events took several hours including travel time to-and-from,* and the rest of my writer-work days have been occupied with the usual time-whittling business emails, phone calls, bill paying, and errand-running. So there are no new words to report on Ganymede, and no one is more rueful on this point than yours truly.

But the night is still young.

______________________________________________________________
* Yes, several hours for the hair. I think it’s worth it, once every five or six weeks, to have awesome peacock tresses. The day will eventually come that I change my mind, I’m sure; but for now I’m happy for an afternoon wherein I am not responsible for anything except holding still while the nice man paints up my ‘do.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when we briefly worked together with Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.

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Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Courtesy of crisper (many thanks!) four graphs of the pulp publication data:

And since some folks are asking for further breakdown and I can't do that right now, I've uploaded the original spreadsheets:

• Total list of the pulps
• Romance pulps
• Saucy/spicy pulps
• Science fiction pulps
• Sports pulps
• Western pulps

And, yeah, I know there were probably a lot better ways to do these spreadsheets, both mathematically and aesthetically.

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called ?order to net.?

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

Title:The Devil You Know
Word: starch
Challenger: @annie_kathleen
Length: 200 words exactly

My twenty-second reboot this year, apparently.

Apparently, of course, because I've no memory of previous reboots. That's the deal: for an incredible amount of money, you sign away five years. And one day you wake up, it's five years later, and you have only the guarantee that there are no outstanding warrants for criminal activity.

But reboots regularly wipe your memories. I know I'm more muscular now and I have dark hair instead of blonde. No idea when that happened; could be yesterday, could be two years back. According to the labels in my room, I insist on no starch when my shirts are laundered. Why? No idea.

I stand in front of the machine, pondering. It's always my choice, you see. They make that very clear.

I could decide not to reboot, say I've had enough. I'd forfeit the vast majority of the fee, but I could do it.

I'd have my old life back.

Or I can press the button, hope like hell that the reboot goes wrong, that it wipes out memories from prior to joining up.

I'm told I've pressed the button eighty-three times previously.

I ponder, decide which is safer.

Then I press the button.

© Lee Barnett, 2010

This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first fifty stories in the challenge can be found here. New challenges can be made here.

The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges...

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

This is, perhaps, the geekiest thing I?ve done in many a month, but it does help me answer a question that?s been bothering me for a while: if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that?

Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet. (Yes, I?m a stat wonk, I guess).

So, here you go. The link brings you to a spreadsheet I created, covering the years 1896-1960, with seven categories: Overall, Detective Pulps, Romance Pulps, Saucy/Spicy Pulps, Science Fiction Pulps, Sports Pulps, and Western Pulps. (I?d present the information as an easy-to-read table, but?-embarrassingly-?I never learned how to make them). Each entry is for the number of magazines?-not issues?-in that category published that year, so for 1898 there was only one pulp published, in 1931 there were 150 pulps total published, including 28 detective, 24 romance, 8 saucy/spicy, 8 science fiction, 2 sports, and 33 westerns. The number in the Overall category won?t equal the sum of the other categories because I omitted smaller pulp genres (boxing, weird menace) and pulps publishing general pulpy adventure fiction and because some pulps, like Western Rodeo Romance, fit into two categories.



Now, admittedly, this is a hasty and imprecise collection of data-?what would be more useful would be a) the number of pulps published broken down by month as well as by year (can?t be done-?that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps) and b) the sales figures (someone may have some of that data, but, again, that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps). But we can draw some tentative conclusions from this.

First, the pulps didn?t die around 1950. That was the peak post-WW2 year for them. The death of the pulps was a gradual thing, although by 1955 the end of the medium and its replacement by the digest format must have been obvious. Nonetheless, I think it?s fair to say that the death of the pulps and the transition to digests took a while. One obvious precursor was the transition from dime novels to pulps in the 1910s. I don?t have the data to do a similar spreadsheet on dime novels (although, hmm, I could put one together using Galactic Central), but I know, based on the western and detective dime novels, that their death and replacement by the pulps in the 1910s was gradual and not sudden. I think the death of the pulps was like that.

Second, and I know this will be hard for the sf zealots to read, but...sf wasn?t the most important genre for the pulps. (And, please, never write the phrase "the pulp genre." There was no such thing. The pulps were the medium, not the genre). Until 1939 there were more spicy pulps published every year than sf pulps. (Why the number of spicy pulps declined is another question, one I can?t answer). From 1937 to 1951 there were more sports pulps published every year than sf pulps. Westerns clobber sf. And romance pulps...well, this will gall the geeks, but romance pulps were more important to the industry than sf pulps. (And the average pulp romance story was approximately eight times better written than the average pulp sf story, but that?s another issue).

Third, take a look at the saucy/spicy list. The first one came out in 1912. That?s before detective pulps, before westerns, before sf, before romance, before everything except general fiction, adventure, and railway. The saucy/spicy pulps are criminally understudied, not least because they are much less available to scholars than even the romance or sports pulps, but they were around for a long time and deserve further study. Hell, from 1915 to 1924 they made up at least 10% of the entire industry.

Fourth-?the number of Westerns! Criminy! For such a formulaic genre (with a few exceptions) it was remarkably popular. In terms of market share, from 1936, Westerns were the heavyweight of pulps, never making up less than 25% of the entire market.

Fifth, look at the overall numbers for 1929-1931. You?d think that the first three years of the Depression wouldn?t have been a good time to enter publishing or increase the number of pulps that you were already publishing, but clearly people thought it was. I don?t have numbers to hand, but I suspect the economy took a substantial dip from 1931-1933, which would explain the decrease there, but after 1933 the numbers resume increasing.

I?m sure other conclusions will occur to me later, but that?s what I?ve got for now.

I occasionally do these. And today's an occasion. So why not?

A - Act your age? Like most other people, sometimes I act younger than my age, positively childishly in fact.
B - Born on what day of the week? Monday, so I'm told. I don't remember it all that well. I'd put money on the fact that I cried like a baby though.
C - Chore you hate? Filling out memes.
D - Z See answer to C

Interesting though, sparked by something Antony Johnston wrote.

I wonder who I've known the longest online, i.e. who, that I now often interact online with, I've known the longest.

I'm excluding people where the only online contact is by email or IM, because that's just replaced letterwriting or the phone. So that takes out Ian, my oldest friend, because although we email each other, he's not on Twitter and doesn't use Facebook.

And I can't include Laura because although we occasionally "like" something each other has put on Facebook, or chat on IM, it's not exactly as if that's a large part of how we communicate with each other. Similarly, I'm excluding my younger brother because... well, I've known him for 44 years. It kind of skews the results.

OK, so lets set some parameters.

I'm not including anyone I've known for more than 15 years, because I got online in August 1995. I'm limiting it to people I have interacted with, or still interact with, via a message board, forum, Twitter, Facebook or chat rooms.

Obvious answer is people like Warren, Neil, Dave... comics pros with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends after we first met at Compuserve's Comics/Animation Forum, and other friends from Compuserve like Rich Johnston, Alan Porter and Elayne Riggs. (I'm excluding Tony Isabella and Dez Skinn because, although friends, again I only ever really speak to them by email these days)

Despite Colin Murtagh being a close friend, I'm pretty sure we didn't meet for a few months after I got online, and I didn't meet Tony Lee until this century. (Always surprises me, that one - that I've only known Tony that relatively short space of my life.)

So yeah, Warren, Neil, Dave. It's all your fault, mates.

It's genuinely astonishing to me how many people who are important to me as part of my life now... have only known Philip as a fact, i.e. they didn't know me before he was born.

From the Straits Times of Singapore, 23 July 1928.