Here’s a recent Bookbanter interview about Makers:
My latest Guardian column, “The mobile revolution has arrived,” describes the way that touring with a rooted NexusOne phone fundamentally changed the experience of being on a book-tour, delivering a touring author’s two most precious commodities: better food and more sleep.
Travelling with your own internet source is brilliant. At Atlanta airport, I was stuck for four hours while a monster storm hammered the building with barrages of lightning. Immediately, every one of the expensive Wi-Fi networks in the building went dead as thousands of stranded travellers tried to use them all at once. I found a corner with a mains outlet, plugged in the laptop, tethered my phone, and enjoyed my own private network connection. It wasn’t fast, but it was free and it worked.
I still have a US T-Mobile account from when I lived in the US, and I pay for the unlimited data plan there (which, like the Orange UK Sim I use here, has a bizarre and fraudulent definition of “unlimited” that includes a data cap). It’s easily worth keeping the account alive for those times that I’m back in the US – one day’s 3G savings (not having to pay for expensive hotel and airport broadband) pays for a month’s mobile service.
Review:
Realms of Fantasy
Once again, Doctorow is on the cutting edge with this exciting blend of economic theory, technological advances, game theory, and social activism. This isn’t just another YA adventure, it’s a manifesto for a new generation of Internet-savvy thinkers and doers.
Realms of Fantasy
Part two (of two) of “The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening“, originally published on Shareable.net.
(Image: Tilt and shift – Leicester Square at night, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rthakrar’s photostream)
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 the full audio from the Cover to Cover, Open Book interview I did with Berkeley’s KPFA. The edited, 29-minute version that aired doesn’t stay online thanks to “bullying” with the SoundExchange rights-society, but Eric Klein, who conducted the interview, was kind enough to upload the whole thing.
Review:
Toronto Star
The big, fat fantasy/sci-fi novel of the season avoids the supernatural, except as expressed in game worlds online. Canadian Cory Doctorow’s For the Win may even be labelled “probable” rather than “speculative” fiction.
Deirdre Baker, The Toronto Star
Here’s the full audio from the Cover to Cover, Open Book interview I did with Berkeley’s KPFA. The edited, 29-minute version that aired doesn’t stay online thanks to “bullying” with the SoundExchange rights-society, but Eric Klein, who conducted the interview, was kind enough to upload the whole thing.
Here’s a short interview I did about my reading habits with the Globe and Mail‘s My Books, My Place section:
I didn’t move to London so much as ooze there. I had a year of going back and forth a lot. April ’04 was when I actually landed. Now, I’m married to a Londoner and we have a little baby who’s a Londoner, and I’m a pretty happy Londoner.
I used to work out of our place until we had the baby. One of the things about getting my own office – my wife calls it the Mancave – was getting my own Napping Sofa. I have a daily schedule that involves an hour of lying on my Napping Sofa, reading.
Writers need to read. I do a lot of reading on the road. I picked up a book yesterday in New York – it’s a hard-boiled noir detective novel about burlesque called The Corpse Wore Pasties, and it’s quite funny. It’s from Hard Case Crime, which publishes books that look like those beautiful Chandlers you see in Mylar bags in antiquarian booksellers for $500, except brand new – it’s like they fell through a time warp.
Here’s part 2 of the interview I conducted in Second Life with the Copper Robot show. In this part, I talk about the research that went into For the Win.
“For anyone who’s my age and uses computers, you would have to undertake an extraordinary effort not to be a gamer,” he said. He started computer games at age 8, when a neighbor got Pong, and they became obsessed with the game.
“We think you’ve got to be somebody who spends 70 hours a week playing World of Warcraft in order to call yourself a gamer,” Cory said. However, that’s not true, he said. Likewise, most people think of gamers as either being children or overgrown children, but 50% of FarmVille players are 50-year-old women with high school diplomas, Doctorow said.
