Last month while I was in Melbourne, I did a great interview with The Book Show, the ABC’s national book program. They’ve just made the show live, with downloadable audio.
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Rich sez, “The webcomic XKCD had a meetup in Cambridge today. A few hundred nerdy folk showed up, and a few dressed as the stick figure characters, but even better were the people dressed up like Cory Doctorow!
For more pics of the event, see Flickr photos tagged with ‘xkcddreams’.”
(A word of explanation: XKCD is a marvellous, unapologetically nerdy comic, and Randall Munroe, the creator, once did me the immense honor of making me the punchline of a strip, wearing goggles and a cape. This has become something of a running joke now, much to my delight)
(Thanks, Rich!)
See also:
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Bloggin’ ’bout my generation
Pi joke
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
My latest Guardian column, “Free data sharing is here to stay,” is live — it’s an argument about the “information economy,” and whether restricting copying hurts or helps it.
It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went like this:
“We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.”But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants.
Intel’s Josh Bancroft has posted the audio from my talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Privacy Isn’t Dead — Let’s Not Kill It. It’s a little 20-minute rant on privacy and technology — how the 21st century could be a century of technologically empowered freedom or technological oppression.
Sterling Eyford, a freelance audio engineer and radio reporter, took the video from my Beijing Bookworm talk last week, extracted and sweetened the audio of the speech part, and put it up as an MP3. Sweet!
IDW comics have produced a six-issue series of comics based on my short stories (they’ve adapted Anda’s Game, After the Siege, Craphound, I, Robot, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, and Nimby and the D-Hoppers). I had approval on all the scripts, interiors and covers — and I’m really happy with the caliber of work IDW got for me. The series launches this month with Anda’s Game, and IDW will sell you a subscription to the whole run for $23.99. Once the series concludes, IDW will publish a trade paperback collection, and we’ll be doing a Creative Commons release of the whole work to coincide with the trade.
See also:
IDW will do six comics based on my stories
Sam Kieth cover for comic of Cory’s Anda’s Game
Model contract clause for works in Creative Commons
Radar commissioned me to write them a science fiction story about “the day Google became evil.” I wrote them a little short-short called “Scroogled,” about the perfect axis of evil: the DHS and Google, working hand in hand. As part of the contract negotiation, I got Radar to agree to release the story under a remix-friendly Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so you’re free to make movies, slideshows, songs, art, or new texts from this one.
Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.
“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration—Powered by Google.
I gave a talk in Beijing this week at the Beijing Bookworm, an excellent bookstore/cafe. Filmmaker Victor Muh recorded the whole thing and put it up on YouTube!
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
A couple weeks ago, I was on a great panel on copyright at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, called “Defending the Public Domain from Corporate Copyright Maximalism.” Steve Stair videoed my introductory remarks and posted them to YouTube.
The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop has announced its instructor lineup for summer 2008 — and it’s a stellar bunch! Clarion is a kind of six-week boot-camp for sf writers (I’m a graduate, sometime instructor and member of the Board of Directors for The Clarion Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the workshop), and this year’s teachers are: Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman.
Not to be outdone, the Clarion West workshop (a kind of sister workshop, but located in Seattle instead of San Diego) has announced its lineup for this summer: Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas, and Chuck Palahniuk.
Yes, I taught Clarion this past year and will teach Clarion West next year. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll end up doing another (undisclosed) Clarion next year, then I’m taking a several-year hiatus. These things are incredibly rewarding, but man, they’re hard work!
