I was watching Ax Men with my dad, which is a reality show about lumberjacks. You’d think this would be boring, but the five minutes I watched featured a guy who got so mad during a phone conversation, that he chucked his cell phone and unloaded his pistol into it.
“Better my phone than him.”
My dad gave me a look like, “Those guys would make mincemeat out of a pussy like you.”
A petition to make Hella- the official SI prefix for 10^27, for measuring things bigger than Yotta- (the prefix for (US) billion trillion). For instance: ‘the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts.’ It would also come in handy for eventually measuring Internet traffic and US national debt.
I don’t want to live in a world where this doesn’t happen.
The email is from someone who I think very fairly assessed the potential of a blog-to-book deal that consists largely of already-published material still available online. So please — no imagined h8. That C&C came to be in this particular way is a direct result of it not being a blog-to-book. And it is much stronger for it. […]
When we each have a project that suits a traditional publishing mechanism, we’ll both seek that out. And I’ll (being fucking honest here) totally take up the agent in question on her offer to circle back around with another book idea. No matter how it looks from a blog away, we all left that conversation happy to have had it.
This (plus the bits I left out) is all excellent news, and what I hoped/expected Melissa and Meaghan to say. I figured the commenters/rebloggers who wanted them to “stick it to the man” and send a Kickstarter screencap to the agent weren’t sharing the editors’ feelings.
This is a good project without being some Answer to All Publishing Questions. It’s already a good answer to one question: Can intelligent authors make a successful project and reach a good audience without the help of a publisher? Yes, as this, Robin Sloan’s Annabelle Scheme and many other Kickstarter projects show – and as thousands of other online projects show. Beyond that, it can be judged simply on its merits, and I expect this will be a good book, which matters most.
A stunning presentation (after the first three skippable minutes) about how the power of triggering certain psychological reactions earned billions of dollars for Facebook game makers.
The last few minutes are a little story of Future You, who will get points for brushing your teeth, points for your kid doing well in school, points for taking public transit and points for paying attention to ads.
Basically this game designer gets us halfway to Cory Doctorow’s concept of whuffie.
"There are a lot of things that give me pleasure, but nothing gives me more pleasure than participating in a really heated argument. That’s the most pleasurable thing for me. So sure I could just sit at home and masturbate all day, but it wouldn’t be as much fun as masturbating in front of other people."
— Playwright Bruce Norris, interviewed (as delightfully typed to me by Rachel)
