It’s been a while since I’ve posted a links list here, and there’s been a ton of interesting stuff popping up lately. So, without further ado…
zomg important stuff
- Henry Jenkins: If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. HJ begins to outline the new platform for C3 and his general research.
- Timo Arnall on the Internet of Things. Go now: Inkblots alum doing amazing stuff.
generally awesome stuff
- NYT: What Convergence? Why it’s taking so long to get the Web on our TVs.
- Agents in the Trades. Gotta find a copy of the Feb. 09 The Writer.
- HarperCollins’ new format: video books. Bwuh?
- Underland Press. Fascinating new micropublishing house specializing in the New Weird.
- In defense of the MFA. “The only people impressed by an MFA in writing are those who don’t write and never worked in publishing.” Ouch.
- Digital ghost towns. More awesomeness from the Tomorrow Museum.
- The business of webcomics. J. Jacques does it again.
- Q&A with Mike Carey. I love the bits on adaptation.
- The laws of the thriller. “When popular novelists, stung by critical disregard while contemptuous of it, reject literariness and describe themselves as storytellers, they may often be wrong in all but the barest mechanical sense, but they raise some useful general points: rather wholehearted pulp than earnestness; rather economy than “weight”; and rather winter in a canning factory in Narvik than John Grisham.”
- TIME: Content, once king, becomes a pauper. I prefer “once and future king”.
- Announcing BigIdeaAuthors.com. April 20 can’t arrive soon enough.
- Indigo’s Shortcovers initiative. Interesting: physical books + e-books + iPhone.
- Marvel’s motion comics, Vertigo’s $1 first issues and ‘literary’ OGNs. Fun year for comics ahead.
- Sarah Weinman on O’Reilly’s future of publishing conference. “We can dream of the future all we want, one where the reading experience is a marvel of social interaction and multiple communities and fresh ideas, and dreaming is good. But change is also slower and much faster than we can possibly anticipate – and in the end, experts and enthusiasts alike only know as much as what’s right in front of them, nothing more.”
- John Crowley on Giordano Bruno. RIP Giordano.
- BBC: Alien life may exist among us. Cats explained at last!
- Coraline fun facts. Sad truth: I still haven’t seen it yet.
- Theodora Goss on the humor of Lord Dunsany. “Life is real, life is earnest…”
- Seven reasons why
musiciansanyone should use Twitter. Awesomesauce. - How successful writers keep up their self-confidence. I’d add “not take classes from bad professors.”
- Gwenda Bond on Bones of Faerie. I smell a must-read.
- Tor.com on Bones of Faerie. “”Nothing has been seen or heard from Faerie since, but the world is filled with the deadly magic the War left behind: trees that seek out human blood, glowing stones that burn with cold fire, forests whose shadows can swallow a person whole.” Oh, hells yes.
- Uncle Warren on the $500 miniseries. He’s right: the game, it is a-changin’.
- Trackmate. Intriguing: “Trackmate is an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system.”
- Dmitri Orlov on social collapse. Grim. (From Bruce Sterling.)
- Starbucks announces instant coffee. Srsly, ‘Via’? Via what?
- Bruce Sterling: 2009 will be a year of panic. It already is.
- Bruce Sterling: 2009 when the 21st Century really begins. It already has.
- Q&A with Gregory Frost. What are you hardwired for?