Here’s part seventeen of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Monthly Archives::
October 2007
Christian Spließ just posted this fan-translation of my story Craphound, my very first professional publication! Like pretty much everything I’ve published, Craphound is under a CC license, as is this translation. Thanks, Christian!
Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.
Christian Spließ just posted this fan-translation of my story Craphound, my very first professional publication! Like pretty much everything I’ve published, Craphound is under a CC license, as is this translation. Thanks, Christian!
Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.
Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovakian, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,
Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovak, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,
Today, two groups of readers wrote to me to report that they’d translated my story “Scroogled” into other languages: Russian and Persian, to be precise. “Scroogled” appeared last month in Radar Magazine, a commissioned short story that tells the story of “the day Google became evil.” The story was published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike license (the first time Radar used a CC license) and it has already inspired translation into French and Spanish.
The Russian translation was undertaken by Ruslan Grokhovetskiy along with “about a dozen” of his friends, and they also whipped up this fan-art poster (also in English and Photoshop source-file) for their translation.
The Persian translation is from Jadi, who hopes that the Persian edition will be enjoyed by “Iranian, Tajik and Afghan audiences.”
See also:
Spanish fan-translation of Scroogled
Scroogled: CC-licensed story about the day Google turned evil
Scroogled in the Wall Street Journal
Update: John Walker has some format conversions, too: OpenDocument,
PDF,
Plain text
Here’s part sixteen of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Last month, I did an interview in Amsterdam with Mario Sixtus of Elektrischer Reporter, a German blog, about blogging, copyright and various other subjects. They’ve posted it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Podcast (Escape Pod, November 2007)
Forbes Magazine asked me to write a story about the Future of Work — describing what work might be like in 20 years. I wrote them a little vignette called “Other People’s Money” — it’s online today, and licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike:
He went for the fish first. Its scales were individual slices from the skins of old Nokia phones–back when it was just Nokia, not Marvel Comics Mobile–each articulated on its own little sprig of memory wire. The gills were scuffed iPod backings, the logos just recognizable under the fog of scratches. The eyes bore HP and PlayStation logos, respectively, and the lips were made from inner-tube strips that bore the smallest recognizable logomarks. As he lifted it, it settled into his hand, arching back to find his thumb and palm, nestling in there.
“It’ll work like an old-time phone,” she said. “It’ll even do a little lookup from old-style exchange numbers to different identity registers and try to get you a voice-call with someone.”
“Do people really do that?”
“Some do. Most just want it for the object-ness of it. It’s got a lot of emotion.” The scuffs, that’s what did it. They were like stories, those scratches, each one a memento mori for some long-dead instant in some stranger’s life.
