If it’s Thursday, this must be North Carolina! Just as soon as I finish breakfast, I’m off to give a couple speeches here in the Raleigh-Durham region:
Midnight.Haulkerton, a “Grok Rock” band from Australia, has very kindly recorded a song inspired by my new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present — just the first of more to come. This is about the coolest, most flattering thing ever.
Future shock, present shock, we’re already in past shock
Too much to go to and nowhere to go, we’ve got way too much to know
Something in the future’s already in the past, the present’s an illusion
Cos the world is spinning way too fastOverclocked, clock shock
This watch never stops
Overclocked, time’s fast
You’ve been blasted in the past
Midnight.Haulkerton, a “Grok Rock” band from Australia, has very kindly recorded a song inspired by my new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present — just the first of more to come. This is about the coolest, most flattering thing ever.
Future shock, present shock, we’re already in past shock
Too much to go to and nowhere to go, we’ve got way too much to know
Something in the future’s already in the past, the present’s an illusion
Cos the world is spinning way too fastOverclocked, clock shock
This watch never stops
Overclocked, time’s fast
You’ve been blasted in the past
I recorded a podcast this morning for the Thunderbird Six show, a science-related podcast from Thunder Bay, Ontario. We covered the usual stuff — copyright, DRM, science fiction, EFF — they’re funny guys, too.
Here’s part 7 — chapters 17-18 — of the reading of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe.
Just a reminder: I’m coming to North Carolina this Thursday, 22 Feb 07. I’ll be giving a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5PM and a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2PM. Hope to see you there!
Other upcoming events: Ad Astra Toronto Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Mar 8/9.
Irene Delse has produced a French fan-translation of my Forbes article, Giving it Away.
Reminder for Angelenos: Tonight is my Los Angeles book-launch for Overclocked, my new short story collection. It’s at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, the best comic-store in town. Hope to see you there!
Other upcoming events: Duke University, Feb 22; University of North Carolina, Feb 22; Ad Astra Toronto, Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, Mar 8/9
Reminder for Angelenos: Tonight is my Los Angeles book-launch for Overclocked, my new short story collection. It’s at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, the best comic-store in town. Hope to see you there!
Other upcoming events: Duke University, Feb 22; University of North Carolina, Feb 22; Ad Astra Toronto, Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, Mar 8/9
What the Internet is showing us is that there is a great deal of things that we previously believed to be non-substitutable that are in fact quite substitutable. News, right. Straight up news reportage. If the New York Times puts up a pay wall, you simply go to Google News and you can find another news site that carries essentially the same story that doesn’t have a pay wall or where you don’t have to register and still can get the same information. So to the extent that the New York Times long-term business fortunes rely on this strategy that even though people come to them, even though they are harder to get to than anyone else, because the brand New York Times is more valuable, I think is a doomed strategy. And for artists this is really becoming the case. Where I sit down to do something in front of my computer to kill an hour I can look at pornography, I can read a novel, I can get into instant messaging, I can play a massively multiplayer on my role-playing game and they are all one click away to finding the thing that’s just as fun as the thing that I was planning on doing. If the thing that I was planning on doing costs too much, or is to hard to get to, is a pain in the ass, or is down, it is actually getting easier every day to find something else to divert yourself with for an hour or two, or day, or whatever, and something that’s just as good, something that’s just as educational, uplifting, interesting.
