Library Addition: Out of Space,
Part 1: Going Down
(text)
What could go wrong on a brief trip to Interstellar University? Plenty,
as it happens.
That’s right: the first new fiction in almost two years. It’s finally
been released. In fact, I actually went back in time and released it over a week
ago! Really!
Okay, it just took me a long time to update the Library. It’s actually a complex process,
or, rather, a complex lack-of-process. I start new series so infrequently
that ZedneWeb’s structure has changed since the last time.
Plus, I’ve had some business trips in the beginning of the month that screwed
up my posting momentum, leading to almost missing February altogether. (As it
is, I’m just barely squeaking by.)
But I think the time-travel explanation is more fun.
Ye olde Pile of Links
Even with those two trips, I’ve
managed to visit quite a few sites in the past month, and I’ve forgotten
about most of them. But, of the ones I haven’t forgotten about,
the following are the ones I found most conveniently-written-down-in-a-handy-list.
(Yes, I am part German. Why?)
NUBlog
points to an article discussing the danger of banning
Napster-like services in a free society. In it, the author writes,
“If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal,
we’ll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy. You can’t have
both.” This perhaps sounds excessive, but read the article. There is enormous
pressure by powerful companies to change things to make piracy impossible,
but the danger is preventing people from copying files for legitimate reasons
(as I’ve discussed previously).
NUBlog also leads me to Plastic, another Slashdot-style
news-link-with-reader-comments site. Dunno how interesting it is, as I have enough
stuff to keep track of without adding more discussion forums to my regular reading
list, but I did find two interesting links.
The first is to Dogma 2001,
an article at Gamasutra which proposes ways to bring innovation and an emphasis
on gameplay back into video games by forbidding the more common, tired clicés.
Most of the games I’ve played recently (not many, as it happens) would not
qualify under Dogma 2001, but that’s kind of the point, I guess. Think of how
new and different Tetris was, back when there weren't a thousand derivatives on the
market. How often do you see something so different on the market?
The other is an article discussing the U.S. military’s tendancy to
pay
for weapons systems before it’s known if they work. This, claims the
article, is not an especially shrewd strategy.
Elsewhere, Salon
has done a profile of
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama,
two of the four shows I watch regularly these days.
The remaining two shows are Buffy and Angel, whose
fans have developed quite the enormous heap of interlinked web sites that I won’t
be pointing out here, except for this hypothetical look at
the number of vampires a region
can support, complete with graphs and equations.
And finally, a look at the rise
in Satanism among Harry Potter fans and the latest
questionable
activities by Bill Gates (the latter via Mark Engelbert).
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