Hey, Vancouver! I’m headed your way tomorrow for a pair of ticketed appearances at the Vancouver Writers Festival, the first with William Gibson at 2PM, then another at 5PM with Margaret Atwood and Pasha Malla. On Sunday at 6PM, Kidsbooks (one of the last great independent children’s bookstores in the country) is hosting an event for me at the West Point Grey United Church. On Monday at 11AM I’ll be at the Great Northern Way Campus Centre for Digital Media at 11AM, and then at Victoria’s Bolen Books at 7PM. After that, I head to Seattle, Toronto, and Boston — here’s the whole schedule. Be there or be somewhere else, but if you can, be there!

Hey, Edmonton! A reminder: I’ll be at the free PAGES library conference tomorrow morning at the Stanley Milner Library. My keynote is at 9:15 AM, followed by a Q&A at 1130h and a signing at 1, before I head out to Vancouver for the Vancouver Writers Festival where I’ll be doing two ticketed events; one with William Gibson and the other with Margaret Atwood and Pasha Malla. There’s more stuff in Vancouver to follow, then Victoria, Seattle, Toronto and Boston (here’s the full schedule). I hope you’ll make it — tell your friends!

A reader of Pirate Cinema sent me her amazing story of how she became a video remix artist, and how she views the law and rules for copyright. We’ve published it as a feature on Boing Boing; here’s a little taste of it:

When MegaUpload was shut down, the Japanese media fan community was in an uproa, as it was our main way to directly share our sources and creations. Patchy torrents are now all that remains, along with a handful of somewhat reliable cloud servers. Those aren’t even guaranteed, and in the bleakest of moments we worry that we’ll have to resort to the days of recording to video or DVD and sharing videos that way.

We’re slowly rebuilding, but we’ve been hit hard. All of our archives are gone. Communities that had thrived for years—places you might find a long-forgotted drama from 1987—are gone. The videos that I had made and hosted on MegaVideo are gone. All of the files I’d hosted and provided for people are gone. Even the ones I had created myself, for classwork and without any copyrighted material, are gone. They exist only offline, in random external drives, where they cannot be shared.

Hey, DC! I’m heading to Bethesda today for my Pirate Cinema tour — I’ll be at the Bethesda Public Library tonight at 7PM. Come on out and say hi before I head to Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Toronto and Boston! Here’s the full schedule.

I recently sat down with Thomas Gideon of the wonderful Command Line podcast, and talked about Rapture of the Nerds, Pirate Cinema, and the future of the Internet. It’s always a pleasure to be on Thomas’s show.

MP3 Link

We’ve hit the halfway mark on the Humble Ebook Bundle, a name-your-price, support-for-charity, DRM-free ebook promotion. With one week to go, we’ve added in FIVE more books: XKCD Volume 0; Zach Weiner’s Save Yourself, Mammal and The Most Dangerous Game; Penny Arcade: Attack of the Bacon Robots; and Penny Arcade: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings.

If you’ve already bought the bundle and paid more than the average, these are unlocked and ready for you to download. If you’ve bought the bundle, but didn’t beat the average, you can go back and pay the difference to get them. And if you’re new to the bundle, you have seven days to buy these ones. Don’t miss out!

Humble Ebook Bundle

I’m heading to Philly tonight on the Pirate Cinema tour, and jrdnmlr from the Hive76 hackspace has downloaded the 3D scan of my head from Thingiverse, and is, even now, printing it out in sugar, using a Barracuda extruder. Can’t wait to see it IRL.

I’m heading to Philly today for an event at Indy Hall, co-sponsored by the awesome Geekadelphia and the Hive76 hackerspace. From there I go to Bethesda, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Toronto, then, finally, Boston! Here’s the schedule, looking forward to seeing you!

This weekend I appeared on the This Week in Tech Podcast, to talk about the tech news of the week, as well as Rapture of the Nerds, Pirate Cinema and Humble Ebook Bundle. The other guests on the show were Jason Hiner and Larry Magid, and Leo Laporte, as always, played host. It was a great time, and the audio and video is live.

I did a little eight-question interview with the CBC’s CanadaWrites program. Here’s a few of ’em:

6. Sharon Butala asks, “What do you think of the age-old notion that the best writing comes out of a life led outside the bourgeoisie, where so-called “rules” of normal middle-class life are deliberately broken and impulse is your guide, rather than duty or convention?”
Sounds self-indulgent to me. I’ve done great writing while working a bourgeois day job, while working a bohemian day job, while working no day job. I’ve also written bad stuff in all those contexts. The best writing comes from practice, discipline, insight and talent (in that order).

7. Lynn Coady asks, “Is there a poet, philosopher, musician, painter or any other type of artist outside the world of fiction who has inspired your work in a concrete way at some point or another? If so, who?”
Musicians especially—in totally irrational, impossible-to-describe ways. There’s just some music that puts me somewhere else. It’s like the best part of taking drugs. Some of those musicians are David Byrne, Tom Waits and Leo Kottke (there are others).