Little E didn’t believe I could just stick some blobs of cookie dough on a pan on my dashboard and actually have them turn into cookies.
So on Wednesday, which was almost the hottest day of the year so far, we tried it. … Read more
“…I really like it here, I’m quite attached to it, I hope I’m wrong.” – Ben Folds, “Don’t Change Your Plans For Me”
Part of me wants to laugh this one off. Part of me knows better. I’m sure nearly everyone here has heard of the NSA’s enormous Utah data center, though the details are necessarily vague. According to Wired:
…it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
Obviously no mere body of representatives elected by the people was going to stop this, right? 😆 But now we have a better idea of what they’ll be looking for and listening to. … Read more
You want to read almost 7% of VWORP!1 for free before taking the plunge?
VWORP!1 Sampler – 2.56mb PDF file
I’ll be looking over a new proof copy in the next couple of days, and provided it hasn’t been randomly rearranged by some algorithm designed to “correct” my carefully-arranged layout, I’ll pull the trigger and make it available to order.
For a variety of reasons, I’ve opted to use Createspace, which is part of Amazon and therefore is automatically available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, rather than Lulu.com. Believe it or not, this’ll actually make it cheaper for you; in the meantime, I just have to deal with the automatic document check system on Createspace trying to “correct” a layout that I actually thought out pretty thoroughly, thankyouverymuch.
Keep watching the big book cover link to the left…… Read more
I don’t think I’ve allowed anyone to visit here without getting an earful of the news that I’ve written a book about Doctor Who. But what about all these other things I’ve been working on? Well, let’s go down the list… … Read more
You thought you were gonna get off with “Fiddy Cent”? No. Since no one guessed that one, you have to do some extra credit work. … Read more
That is all.
(I crapped this graphic out in about 10 minutes this morning while Little E was eating breakfast. The more I look at it, the more I realize… I’d actually like a big-ass red towel with this design on it.)… Read more
Meet my new buddy Dinsdale the Drashig. He doesn’t make too many public appearances, not since his guest starring gig in the 1973 Doctor Who story Carnival Of Monsters. (Which, incidentally, you can read about in VWORP!1.)
He’ll be helping me hand out books at OVGE, but you’ve gotta be careful with him… … Read more
Every once in a while, an idea lands in my head from a dream, fully-formed, and I wake up and go “hey, gotta write that one down.” Today I took a nap and had such a revelation.
I stated a while back that I’d had a memoir that started out, at least nominally, as a Phosphor Dot Fossils book, but it just as quickly become something that reached far beyond the parameters of that particular “brand name” (if you can even call it that). It’ll still make many a mention of video games and computers and so on, but it’s not a straight-up video game guidebook of any kind.
What hit me today was the organizational idea for precisely the kind of straight-up video game guidebook that the other book had ceased to be. Ironically, the idea was familiar – I’d actually already seen something similar in a book about pre-’80s rock bands, many, many years ago (we’re talking back when I was in college, mind you), and suddenly that dormant synapse fired and said “Why not apply that organizational strategy to… this project?”
So suddenly the PDF book, that I’ve known for some time that I needed to write, has a shape and a purpose. Something unique that sets it apart from other books on the subject. It’s almost hard to explain – it’s both an organizational concept and a visual concept. The layout will be pretty involved.
Maybe 2014 or 2015, if I haven’t keeled over by then from all the stuff I have to roll out in 2013.… Read more
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