Bum Scoop

Just a little chest-clearing, real quick, if I may (and I may, it’s my damn blog).

I’ve noticed this meme a few times in the last couple of months; coming along with the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, and with the Ocean Marketing fiasco. In formulation, it went something like this: “Oh sure, you all can get up in arms enough to protest this kind of dick move thing, now why can’t you get all worked about my pet issues?” And, on some level, I agree, especially with the protests of the Ocean Marketing douchebag. That might have gone over the top. But, you know, there’s a point short of over the top. Probably somewhere near, you know, the top, where you achieve critical mass and inspire people to make a change. And I think the sort of person I paraphrased above would probably still think it too much fury over too small an issue.

But here’s the thing, and I wish people would understand this better: it’s not that the same number of people don’t get worked up over other issues, it’s just that so few issues are as clear cut as a marketing douchebag talking to a customer like a condescending asshole (with a poor grasp of spelling and grammar). It’s really easy to get behind that. Same with SOPA and PIPA. The only people who might have really supported those bills were those who didn’t understand them (and thus not invested enough to protest or counter-protest) and the accountants running Hollywood.

Most other issues have been a crapshoot.

And that’s okay, on some level. As much as I might like there to be greater consensus on really important things, like taxes and healthcare and war (not that SOPA wasn’t critical, actually), the lack of consensus is the result of living in a multi-cultural society. It’s part of the bargain. A maddeningly frustrating part, sometimes, especially when we do see people coming together and making that kind of concerted effort. But, part of the bargain, just the same.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Here’s a link to what appears to be an Obama 2012 campaign Google+ account.

Here’s a link to a public discussion on a friend of a friend’s Google+ account.

(Quick recap: Obama account appears to be reposting legit Twitter stuff. The discussion features “Obama”–supposed to be a campaign staffer no doubt–rebutting the notion that all Muslims get blamed for terrorism perpetrated by a Muslim, but not all Christians get tarred with the same brush when a Christian commits an act of heinous violence. In rebutting it “Obama” says that the violence is based in the “quran” and so on, but Christian killers are just lone crazies, not following any commands from the Bible.)

So… either there’s a campaign staffer who is way, way, way off message… or someone has set up a reverse-astro-turf account.

Hey Google, how about getting the President to prove that it’s him?

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Last night Kathryn Allen posted a rather interesting story about an attempt at phone-based scareware. I’ve been dealing a lot with scareware on the job(s) the last couple of years. This is the kind of stuff that pops up as you’re visiting a website and tells you that your computer has 323 viruses found or something. And you click it and it downloads what looks like a real virus scanner, and shows you all these viruses and malware and such. And you can get rid of them, but only if you pay them $29.99…

Kathryn actually got a phone call from a guy named “Ben” who told her he was from Microsoft and they were proactively trying to help out with error messages that had been reported to Microsoft.

Which, itself should be a red flag for anyone because, typically, you have to tell Windows to send any error reports. And, typically, it tells you in the dialogue box that it won’t send any personal information, so how exactly does Microsoft know to call you…? Well, of course, they don’t. So, as Kat says, if you get a call from Ben or one of his ilk, tell him to take a hike.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Like a stupid smiling thing, every time I watch it. Enjoy, if it does the same for you:

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

(Testing the Dreamwidth Crossposter, like a good beta tester)

I would love to have, for my work laptop screensaver, a 3D fly-through of the notional internet. You know, there could be a giant Google-branded pyramid in the center and millions of little Google-branded spiders crawling all over everything. 4chan would be a swirling vortex of suck, and Apple's tower would all be shiny and elegant. Dreamwidth could be a small collection of huts out on the frontier, while you could watch LiveJournal getting picked up and moved from place to place. Microsoft would be this massive hodge-podge of components, all with the same blue paint job, but still looking like it could collapse in on itself at any moment.

And then I could sit there and pretend that I'm hacking the planet like they did in all those bad 90s movies about hacking the planet.

That would be awesome

The first, did you know Skippy has a blog? That’s Skippy of Skippy’s List: 213 Things Skippy Can’t Do. I think my personal favorite of the list may be #201: “Must not valiantly push officers onto hand grenades to save the squad.” But that’s just me. Anyway, Skippy seems to have gotten a blog, along with a few others, and it looks like pretty cool stuff, including user-submitted lists.

Sadly, I don’t think I was forbidden to do anything while I was in, other than that one time I was told I’d have all-night firewatch again if I said “actually” one more time… though in retrospect, I was being kind of annoying that day. Not my fault though that everyone else kept being wrong. Sheesh.

Anyway, in addition to that, linked from Skippy’s blog is a webcomic called Lawn Darts which seems to be following an Army (or National Guard/Reserve maybe?) Blackhawk unit as they deploy to Iraq. And, on the left of their page you’ll notice a bunch of other linked military webcomics, which I haven’t had a chance to go through yet and thus cannot recommend. But go read Lawn Darts. Oh, and this here is my favorite so far.

Crossposted with klech.net

Jason Stoddard, who is fast becoming one of my favorite science fiction people, has a tidy little call for action up on his blog. Succumbing to sweet temptation, he resorts to the old Top Ten list (and if David Letterman ever manages to get a cut of that action, he’ll dwarf Gates’ net worth in no time flat) to outline the things he thinks science fiction as a community can do to improve its standing, and the first five seem pretty easy.

So easy, in fact, that I think a lot of organizations are already jumping on #9 on his list, creating social networks. Baen has had mad success with Baen’s Bar, Tor is fixing to launch their own thing soon, SFWA now has a limited presence on LiveJournal and several magazines and book publishers use MySpace for bringing together readers and flogging new material.

The irony that’s long been tossed around is that there are so many science fiction and fantasy authors, “visionaries” to potentially abuse a term, that seem to be seriously intimidated by current trends in marketing, distribution, and technology. The practical result, I think, is that SFWA’s web presence looks as though it was cutting edge in 1995 (an upgrade from the previous incarnation which looked run-of-the-mill for 1994), a website designed by committee and bargain-basement prices because no one can agree on how important that presence is.

Whether or not it’s SFWA’s job to provide an appropriately cutting-edge face for science fiction and promote the work of its members is a separate question, and yet one that should probably be settled one of these days. I suspect that picture might come clearer following the coming elections.

Anyway, as usual Jason makes a lot of sense. The only potential question I have for his agenda is where the leadership is supposed to come from. SFWA seems a natural, and thus we again have a call to answer the question above, but has been sorely lacking and may never be up to the task. Even if they get their house in order, SFWA is going to spend a long time looking inward and checking to make sure they are doing best by the authors under the group’s current mandate. Expanding that to any kind of outreach type mission will be problematic at best.

So where is that leadership going to come from?

I don’t know, but it seems increasingly likely that it will end up being a loose association of interested parties who are going to take on some of these challenges from outside of the SFWA (and perhaps traditional publishing?) framework. I think John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow have already started down that road, in some fashion, and I think a lot of folks are eager to follow. Whether this informal evangelism of SF produces any converts is another open question, but one that can only be answered over time.

Crossposted with klech.net

I don’t know why this still amuses me. Much of the internet says it should be on the outs, now. It’s so old, and all that. I think I first saw it over six years ago.

Just in case you’ve never heard of it, here’s an explanatory link.

Crossposted with klech.net

A few notable things.

First is that Anthology Builder is hosting my one published short story, “Refuge” is available there. Not that you should go there just for that–there’s tons of good fiction there, and all of it deserves a second look.

I’m also liking this, incidentally, because it means when I do buy an anthology, I can provide links to the stories I liked (or liked best) here, directly to where you can buy them or preview them.

Second is that we finally had to convert my son’s crib to a toddler bed this weekend. Wednesday night he took a hard fall from it after trying to climb out. Scary moment, when I heard the hard thump on the floor, but he’s very much okay. (And just to prove how okay, he started reciting the alphabet without prompting or having it in front of him this week. Got it memorized, he has.)

The bummer is that the guardrail we bought for the bed is too big and not suited to these crib convertibles. I rigged it to make it work, but it’s still not quite ideal, so we’ll be looking for something else soon. Also, when he woke up this morning he actually waited for me to get him out of bed, which was … well, nice. Especially since I’m pretty sure he woke up before I did.

Crossposted with klech.net

When one publishes something, for better or worse, they are putting it out there, placing it on display, making it public; that is, after all, the core of the word. The creator, as much control as he or she had of it up to that point, no longer controls the work to a nontrivial degree.

Certainly, copyright law has all kinds of specific conditions and whatnot as to how much a copyright holder controls the copyright, but really… that’s a commercial thing. I’m not well-versed in its intricacies (though, anyone following the SFWA/Doctorow stuff of late might start to think they qualify as IP experts what with all the know-how being chucked about), so I’m going to take the time-honored tack of ignoring it entirely.

I’m more interested in the cultural applications, anyway.

Or maybe it’s the practical.

At any rate, I feel like… once you put something out there, it’s out there. Your control over it is limited. The best–the very best–you can do, given how national economies are structured, is control the sale of it, when actual money changes hands. Though even that is limited, and often the subject of diplomatic hand-wringing (at least when the big copyright holders start leaning on their elected representatives). But that’s about it.

You don’t have control over which libraries buy a book, for instance, nor over how many people borrow it. You can’t dictate how many friends one lends the book to, or how often it is re-gifted. Hell–you can’t even make an inch of headway on how many times an individual volume is resold. No author can stop anyone from going on television and telling viewers to buy only used books. They can’t even manage to get Amazon to stop advertising used books on the same page as new.

The funny thing is, the culture has always managed to place value on an author’s output in spite of the many cheap-as-free ways of getting their work, prior to the internet age. That value has seemed to decline in recent years, to some degree, and especially in comparison with movies and music and video games, but it’s still been there, and some would insist more people are able to make money writing than ever before.

So I wonder at the wisdom of those who would suggest that allowing works to roam free on the internet is tantamount to cutting one’s own throat. Has the culture lost the ability to place a value on work? In the very worst case, if everyone becomes so enamored with freebies that they buy no creative output whatsoever, then there simply will not be any new output for them to pass around. Perhaps at some point this will not be a problem since there will simply be so much freely available that no one person could get through everything out there, but it doesn’t seem likely.

But clearly that’s not so. The culture still values creative output–and supporting the creator–even if the essence of it is available for free. John Scalzi may well still have Agent to the Stars available as shareware out there, somewhere, but it sold well enough in hardcover that Tor feels like they could make money on it selling it in paperback. Howard Tayler gives away free the bulk of his creative output, and yet still manages to sell massive quantities of printed versions of his work.

If a freebie culture caused the devaluation of the thing that was given away, clearly Scalzi and Tayler should have been among the very first to be affected negatively, rather than affected very, very positively.

And so, I find it frankly astonishing that, as the cornerstone of a group’s copyright policy, they should name two particular websites as targets of interest for aggressive negotiation and conciliation. Seriously? That’s like pursuing an agreement with the occlusal surfaces of teeth #3 and #4 of the hydra’s sixth head such that they will not grind on you if you happen to be eaten by it.

Once a book is published, it’s almost certainly going to be digitized and distributed. The only reason it would not is that no one cares about it, in which case the author has much bigger problems. The technology of distributed file sharing and the reality of sovereign, foreign entities that don’t have to care about domestic law is going to be enough to ensure that that book is going to be out there, meandering around.

There is no deterrence, other than not to publish. There is no strategy that addresses aggressive moves against a couple of distributors that will not need to be applied to every distributor. The RIAA has pursued that strategy to its logical conclusion, and wound up suing seven year olds and computer-free grandmothers. And like in the negotiation with the hydra’s teeth, there is no end to the fight once engaged.

The solution, of course, is making friends with the hydra.