I’ve just gotten back from Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada, where I sat down for an interview with Graveyard Greg from the Short Story Geeks podcast. My bit starts around 26:40.
All About:
Podcast
My Podcast is a regular feed in which I read from one of my stories for a few minutes at least once a week, from whatever friend’s house, airport, hotel, conference, treaty negotiation or what-have-you that I’m currently at. Here’s the podcast feed.
Here’s a reading of my introduction for the 20th anniversary edition of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s Difference Engine, which is just out from Random House, with new material from Bill and Bruce.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Here’s my reading of Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic:
Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business. The remarkable thing about the newspapers’ piece of that business isn’t that they could reliably generate profits without accomplishing much in the way of innovation—that could just as easily describe the local car dealership. The remarkable thing is that over the last couple of generations, those profits supported the fractional bit of those enterprises that covered the news.
This subsidy relied on cultural logic peculiar to newspapers; publishers were constrained not just by their investors but by their editors (who expected the paper to be ethical in the short term) and by their families (who expected the paper to be viable over the long term). In return, a publisher could extract some of the value of the paper in prestige and sinecure instead of cash.
This system was never ideal—out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made—and long before Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington began their reign of terror, Gannett and Scripps were pioneering debt-laden balance sheets, highly paid executives, and short-term profit-chasing. But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared. In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt.
Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
To commemorate the sixth anniversary of the excellent Command Line podcast, I interviewed the show’s host, Thomas Gideon, now a staff technologist at New America Foundation. Command Line covers technology, games, civil liberties and related issues, and it’s one of my favorite podcasts — it was great fun to chat with Thomas on his podaversary. (MP3 link)
My wife Alice and I did a two-for-one interview with the Rum Doings podcast, a gamey, geeky good time: “Amazingly we get onto the economy of Star Trek, via the consequences of teleporters. There is much discussion of the consequences of new technology on, well, everything. And then comes piracy, geocoding, and the surprise appearance of LittleBigPlanet developer, Luke Petre. Finally, we move on to talking about MakieLab’s project to develop 3D toys linked to online gaming.”
Here’s my reading of Mark Twain’s classic short story, How I Edited an Agricultural Paper, a seriously funny and trenchant look at both journalism and agriculture.
The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing it. It should not be imported earlier than June or later than September. In the winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch out its young.
It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain. Therefore it will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his corn-stalks and planting his buckwheat cakes in July instead of August.
Concerning the pumpkin. This berry is a favorite with the natives of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more filling and fully as satisfying. The pumpkin is the only esculent of the orange family that will thrive in the North, except the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash. But the custom of planting it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is now generally conceded that, the pumpkin as a shade tree is a failure.
(Image: Small cotton house surrounded by agricultural fields, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kheelcenter’s photostream)
Update: Sorry, I dropped a line in the original recording; just uploaded a fix
Here’s part seven, the conclusion of my reading of my story-in-progress, Knights of the Rainbow Table, a story commissioned by Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson. Brian oversees Intel’s Tomorrow project, which uses science fiction to spark conversations about product design and use among Intel’s engineers, and he was kind enough to invite me to write a story of my choosing for the project. Intel gets first dibs on putting it online, but that’s it — I retain full creative control and the right to re-use it as I see fit.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Here’s part six of my reading of my story-in-progress, Knights of the Rainbow Table, a story commissioned by Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson. Brian oversees Intel’s Tomorrow project, which uses science fiction to spark conversations about product design and use among Intel’s engineers, and he was kind enough to invite me to write a story of my choosing for the project. Intel gets first dibs on putting it online, but that’s it — I retain full creative control and the right to re-use it as I see fit.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Here’s part five of my reading of my story-in-progress, Knights of the Rainbow Table, a story commissioned by Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson. Brian oversees Intel’s Tomorrow project, which uses science fiction to spark conversations about product design and use among Intel’s engineers, and he was kind enough to invite me to write a story of my choosing for the project. Intel gets first dibs on putting it online, but that’s it — I retain full creative control and the right to re-use it as I see fit.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Earlier this year, I interviewed IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan at The Story conference. Matt Locke, who put on the event, has just posted an MP3 of the chat.
