My latest Guardian column, “Jack and the interstalk: why the computer is not a scary monster,” explains the way my 2.5-year-old daughter and I use my computer as part of our imaginative play and storytelling, using YouTube searches, Flickr image searches, paper story books, toys, and trips around town to play and explore.

Now that she’s more active, she usually requests something – often something from YouTube (we also download her favourite YouTube clips to our laptops, using deturl.com), or she’ll start feeding me keywords to search on, like “doggy and bunny” and we’ll have a look at what comes up. It’s nice sharing a screen with her. She points at things in her video she likes and asks me about them (pausable video is great for this!), or I notice stuff I want to point out to her. At the same time, she also looks at my screen – browser windows, email attachments, etc – and asks me about them, too.

But the fun comes when we incorporate all this into our storytelling play. It started with Jack and the Beanstalk. I told her the story one morning while we were on summer vacation. She loved the booming FEE FI FOE FUM! but she was puzzled by unfamiliar ideas like beanstalks, castles, harps and golden eggs. So I pulled up some images of them (using Flickr image search). Later, I found two or three different animated versions of Jack’s story on YouTube, including the absolutely smashing Max Fleischer 1933 version. These really interested Poesy (especially the differences between all the adaptations), so one evening we made a Lego beanstalk and had an amazing time running around the house, play-acting Jack and the Beanstalk with various stuffed animals and such as characters. We made a golden egg out of wadded up aluminium foil, and a harp out of a coat-hanger, tape and string, and chased up and down the stairs bellowing giant-noises at one another.

Then we went back to YouTube and watched more harps, made sure to look at the geese the next Saturday at Hackney City Farm, and now every time we serve something small and bean-like with a meal at home, there’s inevitably a grabbing up of two or three of them and tossing them out the window while shouting, “Magic beans! Magic beans! You were supposed to sell the cow for money!” Great fun.

Jack and the interstalk: why the computer is not a scary monster

I’m just finalizing my schedule and packing list for ICON 35 A Steam Powered Convention of the Future, the science fiction convention in Cedar Rapids, IA, where I’m guest of honor this weekend. The event’s got several kinds of gaming (including two weekend-long LARPs), its own Stormtrooper garrison, an art show and masquerade, a writers’ workshop, and appearances from writers including Joe and Gay Haldeman (and many others). I’m really grateful to the ICON volunteers for bringing me to Iowa for the first time in my life, and can’t wait for the event, which promises to be a delight!

ICON 35 A Steam Powered Convention of the Future

Joe sez, “Hey Cory- Took your advice from little brother and started to teach
myself Python. I wrote my first little script which downloads your
complete podcast archive(see below). I did this after finding out the
iTunes feed was incomplete, and severely needing a Doctorow fix. I
was hoping you could share the script with some of the listeners who
might find themselves a smiler situation.”

Script tested in python 2.7

--------------------------------------------------------------
import os
from urllib2 import urlopen, URLError, HTTPError

def dlfile(url):
    # Open the url
    try:
        f = urlopen(url)
        print "downloading " + url
        # Open our local file for writing
        with open(os.path.basename(url), "wb") as local_file:
            local_file.write(f.read())
    #handle errors
    except HTTPError, e:
        print "HTTP Error:", e.code, url
    except URLError, e:
        print "URL Error:", e.reason, url

def main():
    # Iterate over image ranges
    for index in range(1, 160):
        url = ("http://www.archive.org/download/"
               "Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_%d/"
               "Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_%d_64kb_mp3.zip" %
               (index, index))
        dlfile(url)
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I did a fun little interview with NPR’s All Tech Considered yesterday, about my forthcoming short story collection With a Little Help: Sci-Fi’s Cory Doctorow Separates Self-Publishing Fact From Fiction

The Argentine sf zine Axxón has produced a Spanish noncommercial fan-translation of my novel Little Brother, using Argentine idiom.

En esta historia se utilizan muchos términos relacionados con la informática y la tecnología de las comunicaciones. Estimo que los lectores de Axxón están familiarizados con casi todos en su idioma original, el inglés; por este motivo y porque las traducciones al castellano de esos términos difieren según el país del que se trate, tomé la decisión de dejar los más comunes sin traducir. En cuanto a la terminología poco frecuente, en algunos casos el autor explica a qué se refiere y en otros incluí aclaraciones mías insertadas en el texto, esto último teniendo en cuenta que Cory Doctorow ha autorizado explícitamente cualquier modificación de esta obra que apunte a su mejor comprensión, ya que ha sido escrita con una intención específica que el propio autor expresa en la Introducción.

“Hermano menor” (Introducción y Capítulo 1), Cory Doctorow

(Image: Ilustración para la novela “Hermano menor”, Valeria Uccelli)

Update: I’ve just heard from Eduardo Hojman, my editor at Puck, that the Spanish edition of Little Brother will be published on March 7, under the title, “PEQUEÑO HERMANO”! It’ll be distributed worldwide — through Spain and Latin America.