Last week, I blogged the opening of Mirrormask, a new feature film written by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, directed by Dave McKean, with creature effects by the Henson Creature Shop. Gaiman is the writing genius behind the dream-like Sandman comics and the fable-like novels Coraline, American Gods and Anansi Boys (I finished Anansi Boys yesterday and boy was it a corker). McKean is the artist who has illustrated many of Gaiman's projects, books like The Wolves in the Walls (he also produced the amazing, lush paintings on the cover of my latest novel)

I've just come from seeing the film and I'm here to tell you, it's worth the price of admission and then some. The look of the film is the first thing that takes you: it's pure McKean, gorgeous and lush and surreal and vivid as a dream, perfectly capturing the feel of the Sandman.

Then you notice the writing. It's a rare film that successfully translates the ineffable oomph of a prose writer's style to the big screen. Gaiman's work is quirky, understated, funny and smart. In Mirrormask, it translates brilliantly to the screen. The dialog crackles. It's laugh-out-loud funny. It's spooky. It's weird and perfectly complimentary to McKean's illustration style.

This is a collaboration between three incredibly talented fantasists, two of whom have done so much work together that they clearly are in nigh-psychic communication with one another. I want to see this one again, and again. I haven't seen a film as lovely as this since Brazil. I haven't seen a film as enchanting since The Princess Bride.

The opening weekend grosses will determine the film's long-term success. You've got one more day to see it when it counts -- catch it tomorrow and help spread it to a world that needs it. Link

Update:: The Onion AV Club interviewed Gaiman and McKean about the production -- apparently they were at strong odds through the production process, showing that storms are as important as sunshine to collaboration. (Thanks, Ryo!).

Also, check out the Cinematical coverage of the piece, with a long interview. (Thanks, Karina!)

The latest issue of Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design Journal contains a slew of interesting news related to Katrina and other recent "weather violence." Sterling says:

It's easy to predict the future when all you have to do is predict the past. Every time people in power who deny the Greenhouse get their ass kicked, they always proclaim that nobody could have imagine such a thing. We don't have to "imagine" it, guys. All one has to do is document it. (...) the lede is that climate change has overwhelmed the pretense of civilian capacity. It's not about Bush power versus government power. We don't yet have a society capable of responding to genuine Greenhouse enormities.

Link.

Boing Boing reader oboreruhito tells of a Rita-shuttered newspaper printing again.

The American Press of Lake Charles, LA., is publishing its first paper edition since hurricane Rita struck, from presses in Lafayette, LA. To be handed out free of charge at a selection of locations in and around Lake Charles, the special 12-page edition is presented here in PDF format.

Link.

Also from obereruhito, sent last week just after Rita struck:

These are from a friend in Delcambre doing search-and-rescue, shot by Zack Thomas. Delcambre is about 8 miles from the Gulf Coast and is bordered to the north by a small lake. He reports coffins from graveyards floating in the water, about 500 boats doing volunteer rescues of people trapped in houses. Image 1, 2, 3, and 4 [shown above], a family with their prize-winning pig, just rescued from a flooded house.

Kathryn Cramer says, "An interesting development, politically: at least some of the right is uncomfortable with the militarization of disaster relief. (...) here is the Cato Institute version, as told to CNN: Link."

New work from Monkmus on TV, wüüt! The animation whiz tells Boing Boing:

The first episode of my little show, 'The Topside Rag', will be airing as part of a new compilation show entitled the 'Sunday Pants' on Cartoon Network this Sunday, Oct. 2 at 9:30 pm (check local listings). It's an animated rendition of my comic 'On A Lead' starring Bruno the Man. There will be 2 more episodes later in the season.

Link to Monkmus' website, and here's more info about Sunday Pants -- it sounds like a great show, featuring all kinds of animated shorts. Hand-drawn, computer-generated, and so on. Theme music by Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago!

Scott Lothes is traveling in China, seeking out and documenting the history of steam trains in that country. He's just arrived in a tiny, remote town called Lixin (Leesheen), in Heilongjiang.

Our group of rail photographers (...) spent the night in the railway workers' house in Lixin along the Huanan narrow guage coal railway. Lixin is the beginning of the steep climb for eastbound loaded trains, so it contains a modest servicing facility for the locomotives.

Modest would be a bit too gentle a way of describing the lodging accommodations, at least by western standards. There are absolutely no bathroom facilities, not even an outhouse. There is electricity, but it is quite sparse and the circuit of low capacity. A welder at the station caused the single-bulb pole light in front of the water tower to go dim, several hundred feet away. Our beds are best described as two wide, wooden tables covered in linoleum which may or may not have been cleaned with soap and water since they were built. We slept five to a bed, with blankets that may or may not have been washed since they were sewn. The one ingenious quality of the beds is that they are heated from beneath by the cooking stove (wood fired, of course) in the next room, and thus stay quite toasty, even on cold nights (of which there are plenty in far northeastern China).

Lixin can also be a very dangerous place at night, as three of us found out the hard way. I received one of the greatest shocks of my life when I stepped between two dark rails, expecting to find solid crossties, and instead found only open space. Five very swift feet later, my feet were on the ground in the bottom of the locomotive inspection pit. I would have escaped relatively unscathed had not my left cheek soundly struck the opposite wall on my way down. As a result, I now look like a chipmunk on the one side, it hurts to chew and bite down hard and there's a burst blood vessel in the corner of my left eye.

Link

I emailed Scott on the road in China to point out that his blog had some hinky linebreak formatting going on, and he replied:

I unfortunately have very little control over how my blog entries appear. Blogspot is blocked in China, so the only reliable way to make posts is via email. I tried sending three previous posts from the control panel of blogspot (which I am able to access), but none of them have appeared yet. At least that's what I'm told, as I'm not actually able to view my own blog here! Rather frustrating, but the trains make up for it all.

If anyone has helpful suggestions, his email address is on the blog.

* "Space tourist" Gregory Olsen, NASA astronaut Cmdr. William McArthur, and Russian astronaut Valery Tokarev took off for the International Space Station this morning aboard Soyuz. Image: the craft just before launch at dawn in Baikonur. NYT story Link. Olsen is a dot-com millionaire; McArthur has flown in space several times and is set to be the next International Space Station commander. Tokarev serves as flight engineer for this mission. While they're all up there, they'll be inhaling a bunch of dust. It's a scientific experiment intended to benefit asthma sufferers back on Earth. Link

* DOOM godfather John Carmack will premiere his privately-funded spaceship at next week's inaugural gathering of the commercial space industry. Oh yeah, and, two words: rocket races! Link to Wired News story.

* Russian cosmonaut Gennady Sarafanov, who in 1974 commanded an unsuccessful mission to the Salyut 3 space station, died last Thursday at age 63. Link

* This Wednesday, October 5, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum formally adds SpaceShipOne to the "Milestones of Flight" gallery in its building at the National Mall in Washington, DC. SS1 was the first privately built and funded craft to reach space -- last year -- and will reside next to Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1. Paul Allen and Burt Rutan are expected to attend the dedication ceremony.

(Thanks, Michael Nank and Michael Grabois!)

Glenn Fleishman says,

I believe Om Malik had the story first that Google confirmed it was one of the bidders for SF's proposed municipal Wi-Fi network and will offer Wi-Fi for free to residents.

The network's goal is to bring the possibility of Internet access at speeds much higher than dial up -- which means high-quality VoIP is not a stretch -- to most of the city's population without requiring a phone line and at lower cost than the cheapest DSL or cable.

What's interesting, of course, is that like other municipal wireless proposals, speed is one of the issues. The first generation of these networks will be slow --Google is saying about 300 Kbps for most people. In Philadelphia their spec is 1 Mbps each way, but I will doubt if most people get more than about 500 Kbps based on how the networks will hook into homes (no exterior antennas, using high-gain Wi-Fi bridges). Google says SF for now, no broad plans, and figures advertising will pay for its costs.

The proposal shouldn't cost the city anything nor its citizens individually, although the city will likely make facilities available to the winning bidder such as poles and street conduits that would otherwise require permits and fees from any other private contractor.

Link

Oh the Google blog, Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, writes:

There are two ways people need to access information on biodiversity: either have a name for which they want more information, or they are at a location and want to know what they will find there. On Antweb, you can access information about ants via location – and Google Earth allows for any scale of access via location. So you can be in Santa Clara County and see what ants you are likely to find. Soon you will be able to create a field guide for ants in any location defined in Google Earth.

We tried to get NASA’s help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google. Its bizarrely-shaped abdomen is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs. Here's what it looks like.

Link (Thanks, Zac)

This joke doodle, from Randall Munroe's xkcd.com, made me laugh and laugh and laugh. It depicts a hidden message deep in the digits of Pi that reads HELP I'M TRAPPED IN A UNIVERSE FACTORY. Link (Thanks, Spill!)

Cheryl Mendelson is a housekeeping guru whose book Home Comforts is a stupendous, obsessive bible for those who would keep house efficiently and effectively. It is filled with minutae that can only be called cleaning porn.

Every porn has its specialized fetishes, and for housekeeping enthusaists, the next level of fetishism is laundry porn. Hence Laundry, Mendelson's latest 416-page hardcover instructional/historical guide to doing laundry. The Amazon sample-chapter is mind-boggling, like reading a manual for assembling and maintaining an experimental jet-engine: but of course it's not about jet-engines. It's about laundry.

All new clothes, sheets, and other household fabrics that are launderable should be washed once before they are used. After this, wash launderable clothes, linens, and household textiles when they look, feel, or smell dirty. Even if they look fine, you should launder them if you know that they have accumulated dirt and dust, because particulate dirt and dust will contribute to wearing them out. Particles of dust cut into cloth like tiny knives, weakening it and rendering it susceptible to holes and tears. Perspiration, food, and other substances that get on clothes during wear cause deterioration or discoloration in many fabrics.

On the other hand, because laundering and dry cleaning also age cloth, you should avoid resorting to them too frequently. Most of us today do tend to over-launder simply because laundering is so easy; children find it much easier to deposit a barely worn garment in a laundry hamper than to hang it nicely for airing or fold it neatly for the shelf. Of course, if you have perspired heavily in a garment, you must wash it before wearing it again, and what used to be called "body linen" -- underwear and other intimate clothing -- always needs washing after just one wear. But if you get a spot on a fresh garment, try washing or cleaning off just the spot with plain water or a commercial spot remover or a cleaning fluid (unless the garment is a silk or other fabric that may water-spot or unless the spot cleaning may leave a ring or faded spot -- test your procedure first in an inconspicuous area). And rather than throw the shirt you wore for an hour into the laundry hamper, put it on a hanger and let it air, then replace it in your closet for wearing again. Brush and air clothes and blankets, especially woolens, after use. Sometimes you can simply wipe down wools and synthetics with a barely damp, white, nonlinting cloth to keep them clean longer. (If you do this, be sure to air them until they are absolutely dry before replacing them in drawers or closets.) Wear T-shirts under dress shirts, and use camisoles, slips, or dress shields under blouses and dresses. By these means, you can often keep launderable garments free of visible soil and heavy perspiration so that they remain fresh enough for two or more wearings before laundering. If you are on a tight budget, all this is even more important for clothes that must be dry-cleaned.

Link (via 43 Folders)

This Chinese ebook reader is based on the same eInk technology as the Sony Librie -- it's an incredibly sharp, low-power-draw display that works well in direct sunlight as well as in dim conditions. However, the Librie is essentially a boat-anchor because of the DRM in it that expires all your books after six months (of course, you can homebrew your way around this)

The Chinese Hanlin eBook Model V2 is apparently much like the V2, but without DRM. It reads PDFs, HTML, Word files, ASCII, HTML, etc. Link

Attention Finns! Your government is preparing to pass a copyright law that is insanely overreaching. They've been influenced by local record executives who believe that listening to music on a computer is a privilege, not a right, and the process is being overseen by a culture minister who says that people who send email to Parliament are terrorists. Finland has bootstrapped itself into a serious industrial power by embracing technology -- this law proposes to make innovation and freedom subservient to the irrational prejudices and superstitions of clueless old technophobic record executives and their pet bureaucrats.

This Tuesday, Oct 4, Finns are taking to the streets of Helsinki in a rare and urgent copyright demonstration. This is your best chance to avert a disaster that will make the passage of the DMCA look like a visit to (ahem) Disneyland. This could be the most important thing you do on your lunch-break this century: if you don't stand up and be counted, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

On Tuesday 4th of October 2005 at 13:00 we shall organize a demonstration against the new copyright law in front of the Parliament Building. We invite members of parliament and representatives of the media to come to discuss the proposed copyright law and where our society should be directed in regard to immaterial rights...

Other fundamental problems with the new copyright law are as follows:

The forbiddance to disseminate information on how to deactivate copy protection measures, which goes against our freedom of speech.

The forbiddance to distribute information or computer programs that can deactivate copy protection measures.

The sales ban in Finland on articles that were originally published outside of the EEA.

The law will cause harm especially to Open Source software such as Linux.

Link (Thanks, Matias!)

The Better Bad News video blog has produced an hilarious video commemorating EFF's 15th anniversary (if you're in San Francisco tomorrow, you should totally go to the birthday party) called "EFF ANNIVERSARY PARTY INSPIRES 90 SECOND VIDEO BLOG WITHOUT PERMISSION NO COPYRIGHT HOLDERS INJURED" Link

A European company called Renova has launched a "luxury" line of black toilet-papers. Note to non-UK readers: "luxury" is a British adjective meaning "cheap and nasty." Link (Thanks, Ahmad!)

Mleak, a Flickr user, is producing photos of insects with corporate logos painted on them. I love the Nike water-strider and the Pepsi ladybug in particular -- and the gimmicked shot of a slug that has slimed the Coca-Cola logo is sheeer genius. Link (click the "next" link for more) (Thanks, Ian!)

Sharelle sez, "This girl has managed to run Mac OS 7.5 on her PSP. Biggest drawback: it takes 4 hours to boot up!" Link (Thanks, Sharelle!)

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest: remix the monsters of Middle Earth into contemporary settings. Some of these are great! Link

Ziploc now sells jumbo bags in 2' x 1.7' and 2' x 2.7' sizes. That's a lot of sammidges. Link (via Kottke)

I was privileged to read an early galley of Cherie Priest's debut novel, "Four and Twenty Blackbirds." Cherie is a Livejournaller who syndicated her lush, gothic novel on her LJ, where it was discovered by an editor from Tor and published.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is a genuinely scary southern ghost story that had me switching on extra lights in my hotel room as I devoured it. The story is a dysfunctional family revenge tale that rockets along at high speed as an incredibly likable, personable alterna-protagonist discovers her family's dark secrets. Link

Garfinkel says: "Saw your post on BoingBoing about the Shining trailer. Here is another from the same company. There is a third, Titanic, I am trying to track down. I spoke thru email with the guy who did the West Side one. here is what he had to say:

"Thanks for kind words. Actually the three trailers that are flying around the net were made by three different assistant editors here. The Shining was done by Robert (whom I forwarded your email), West Side Story, me, tom colella, and the Titanic by Dustin Stephens. We posted them for friends and within two days we had almost 300,000 hits. Crazy. They were made for the AICE Trailer Park contest. In fact here's the disclaimer from all the attention we've been getting:

The AICE only intended the trailers to be viewed for a private audience. They had no intentions for internet audience to view them and PS 260 did not intend for these trailers to be made for promotional or monetary reasons. There you have it. Glad you enjoyed them."

Link

Update:Here's the Titanic link. (thanks, Steve!)

I love this fake movie trailer for "Shining," consisting of footage from The Shining, which makes it look like a romantic dramady. Link

Update: Here's a NYT story about it.

National Geographic has a live webcam pointed at an African watering hole. Right now (8:52 pm in Africa) the infrared camera isn't picking up any animals getting a late night drink, but you can hear crickets chirping and other animal sounds.

PEAK VIEWING PERIOD: 7 a.m.-Noon Botswana Time



And in September as Mashatu moves into its summer season, Pete's Pond will see increasing traffic in the afternoon hours from about 4-6 p.m.

Link (via IP)

Haunted Memories sells creepy posters of vintage photos that morph into undead ghouls as you walk by them. The site has a bunch of GIF animations showing the effect.
Link (via PCL Linkdump)

Did someone say unicorn chaser? Cory's last entry about the Peter S. Beagle novel really bummed me out. If you feel sad, too, after you support the author whose work was so shamelessly ripped off, check out this totally unrelated website:

I have always believed that unicorns existed, and that they are out there watching us, waiting for the day when we will be ready for them. Maybe when we stop hurting eachother, when we start treating each other with kindness. That's what the unicorn is all about, love, kindness, and peace. Maybe, just maybe someday, they will return to us, and bestow their gift of beauty upon us.

Link to "A Unicorn's Tears."

But first, all jokes aside, write a letter or donate some cash to support Mr. Beagle here. His prose is much better.

Previously: And now, we pause for a unicorn moment

Timeshifted unicorn chaser

A couple days ago, I blogged about the unabridged author-reading of Peter S Beagle's classic novel "The Last Unicorn." Now, Connor Cochran, Beagle's business manager, writes in with this grim news about Beagle being ripped off by the British company that adapted his novel for animation, and Beagle's difficulty in fighting back due to his general pennilessness:

London-based Granada Media has sold more than 600,000 DVDs and videotapes of THE LAST UNICORN worldwide, made multiple cable and satellite deals for same, and sold the live action remake rights for a quarter of a million dollars. Yet despite this great success, they refuse to pay Peter what he is owed under his contract. After two years of trying to reach an amicable settlement, with no progress, it is clear that Peter will only get what he is due by going to court. Unfortunately, there is no way for Peter to do so without outside support. Just about everything he earns right now goes to take care of his 100 year-old mother.

Anyway, right now he has nothing with which to hire the attorneys and accountants he will need to either beat Granada in court or force them to negotiate. So we need to get the word out to as many professionals and fans as possible, to generate public support, contributions to the legal fund, letter-writing campaigns to Granada execs, etc. (We've just gotten started, but so far both Christopher Lee and Rene Auberjenois, two of the voiceover actors from THE LAST UNICORN, have agreed to help. That's exciting.)

Beagle's written a limited-edition sequel to The Last Unicorn that you can buy here. Link

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit Mister Jalopy, and was greeted with one of my favorite smells as I approached his garage: the brain-eating tang of turpentine. Mister Jalopy was refinishing a small desk he'd found in a trash can.

It was in sorry shape, but I knew if anyone could turn it into a thing of beauty, it would be him. And I was right.

This desk would just be splinters in the landfill if he hadn't saved it. Now look at this little jewel! The clear green drawer pulls give it just the right touch of whimsy.
Link

Nissan's Pivo concept car elides the need for three-point turns -- instead, the entire cabin spins around so that you're suddenly facing in the other direction. Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Counter Intelligence columnist Jonathan Gold has a great piece on okonomiyaki, sometimes called "Japanese pizza." The best place to have it in the LA area is at GaJa in Lomita.

Okonomiyaki may be the homeliest food in creation, a squat, unlovely, vaguely circular mess of batter, cabbage and egg, slicked with a tarry black substance made from catsup and Worcestershire sauce, inscribed with mayonnaise, and dusted with curls of shaved, dried bonito that shudder and writhe on top of the pancake like a thousand pencil shavings come to gruesome life. Okonomiyaki is simultaneously crisp and gooey, sweet and savory, bland and funky as hell. When you are presented with your first okonomiyaki, you don’t know whether to kill it or to eat it.

Link

H5N1 Bird Flu kills nearly every person who contracts it, and it looks like it is learning how to jump from human-to-human.

Recombinics.com reports "H5N1 has clearly evolved and has become markedly more efficient at transmitting among humans, and has done so via recombination," and that, "H5 will clearly be resident in humans worldwide."

Today, an article in the Guardian reports that the UN official in charge of bird flu response efforts warned that "a global influenza pandemic is imminent and will kill up to 150 million people." A World Health Organization said the "best case scenario" would be 7.4 million deaths globally.

Yesterday, the US Senate approved spending $3 billion on anti-viral medications, "including one intended to fight avian flu."

Finland is planning to buy "5.2 million doses of a vaccine against the deadly bird flu, allowing it to protect its entire population."

Reader comment: Ken Seefried, CISSP says: Noted your BoingBoing post (among waaaay too many others). Thought I might make an observation.

The current set of statistics (76% fatality (per the Financial Times)...oh mah gawd!) seem to be based on reports that:

- 55 people caught it. That we know of.
- 48 people died. That we know of.
- All in essentially third world countries. With all that entails from a health care perspective.

Even the an original researcher takes the time to mention "Although this 76 per cent human fatality rate looked terrifyingly high, Dr Cox said it might be exaggerated by under-reporting of less serious cases of H5N1, which might not be recognized as avian flu." There could be one, one thousand or one million unreported non-fatal cases. With 1,000 unreported cases the fatality rate becomes, what, 4.5%? Bad, to be to sure, but not the second coming of the Black Death. Is it possible that in a third world country with 80 million people (say, Vietnam), much less the entire region from with the cases have been drawn, that there might be some unreported, non-fatal cases?

Maybe.

N.B. - There might also be unreported fatal cases, but let's be realistic...it's a lot harder to miss a dead body than someone with the sniffles.

I'm not saying that H5N1 isn't going to be a show stopper, world- beater pandemic or whatever. I've actually written two white papers for very large US corporations on business continuity issues associated with pandemic breakouts, primarily because I'm sure there's going to be something like this, some day (like there will certainly be a catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco or a Cat5 hurricane that will clobber New Orleans, but I digress). I'm merely pointing out that what has been reported so far seems to me to be more hysteria than science.

And Recombinomics is an interesting source. They seem to be in the business of anti-viral technology. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just sayin'....

In 1967 or thereabouts Van Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with a record label, so he fulfilled his obligation by making up 31 songs and recording them in a single sitting. They're awful songs, but it's interesting to listen to a few. All 31 are available as MP3s on WFMU's blog.

[Morrison sings] on topics ranging from ringworm to wanting a danish, to hating his record label and a guy named George. Make sure you get past the first few tunes - it takes him a few to get cooking.

Link

Two fantastic editorials on the Authors' Guild lawsuit against Google and the threats against Amazon for selling used books.

The first is from William Patry, a renowned copyright scholar who is anything but a radical, talking about the angry rhetoric from publishers and authors over Amazon's used books:

An article in Thursday's (September 29) Wall Street Journal discusses complaints authors and publishers have about the fact that amazon.com offers books for sale at different prices: list price, new books at lower prices, and used books. Authors, literary agents, and publishers are quoted as saying they think they are being deprived of royalties and they want their share! It is really no fun to write about copyright owners acting like Luddite pigs, and being in private practice it has a definite commercial downside; I would much rather praise Caesar. But, things are as they are, and I have always opted for honesty over craven brown-nosing and over self-imposed censorship. I hope my twins forgive me...

I buy the vast majority of my books through amazon.com and pay alot of attention to the choices they offer for the book I am interested in. Choice is bad, apparently. I should have to pay list price and I shouldn't be able to resell it (at least through amazon.com) without amazon.com sending a check to the publisher, who will of course pass 100% through to the author, at least that is what a literary agent is quoted in the article as advocating.

Sad, is the only polite word I can think of for authors and publishers' utter failure to embrace an extremely beneficial system. The first sale doctrine was judicially created by the Supreme Court pre-1909 Copyright Act in order to prevent publishers from misusing copyright to maintain list price. Some things truly never change.

Link

Next, an editorial in the NYT from publisher Tim O'Reilly about the inanity of the Author's Guild's suit against Google for creating searchable indices of every book it can lay hands on, a move certain to do nothing but invigorate the book trade by putting references to books into the search results that are increasingly the only way that potential book-buyers get their information:

I'm with Google on this one. It would certainly be considered fair use, if, for example, I circulated a catalog of my favorite books, including a handful of quotations from each book that helps people to decide whether to buy a copy. In my mind, providing such snippets algorithmically on demand, as Google does, doesn't change that dynamic. Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes, "Tim O'Reilly 1000, Authors Guild 0". Link

Steadman, a band that used to be signed to the now-defunct Elektra label, has released 130+ downloads of music and video for fans to download and share. Simon Steadman adds, "Also could you mention that for information about upcoming shows and new songs please join our mailing list at the site?" Link (Thanks, Simon!)

A push-poll of Canadian teenagers from the Canadian Recording Industry Assocation reports that teenagers who download will become shoplifting software pirates. No word if it will also make you grow hair on your palms. Link (Thanks, Ian!)

For Wired News today, I filed this report on the eye-popping technologies on display at this week's iGRID2005 conference at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

In the image above, Calit2 director Dr. Larry Smarr shows UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox a zoomable 100-megapixel display that shows live image data (1 foot = 1 pixel maps of post-Katrina NOLA, shot by the USGS) streamed over an encrypted fiber-optic network link. Nortel provided the encryption, and the University of Illinois' Electronic Visualization Laboratory made the display grid happen. There's a 30-machine Linux cluster behind the screen, and you could feel the heat coming off of them!

At one point, a woman who'd evacuated New Orleans walked up to the display and said to UIC's Jason Leigh, "Can we go to my house please?" We did, and we "went" to the Superdome and to burning buildings... in incredible detail. The interlinked displays made this information so much more lifelike than it is on a small laptop screen.

What do high-definition video of seafloor volcanoes and avant-garde Japanese digital cinema have in common? They're both examples of the kinds of bandwidth-intensive information that can be streamed live from remote locations, over ultra-fast optical networks.

And both were demonstrated this week at iGrid 2005. The week-long computing conference, which showcases research in high-performance, multi-gigabit networks, was held at UC San Diego's new Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) facility.

"When you can stream content this high-resolution, you can start thinking about movie theaters as a place where live events can be displayed -- sports, fashion, politics, anything," said Laurin Herr of Pacific Interface, an Oakland-based tech consulting firm that produced the demonstration. "What color film did to audiences used to viewing black and white, what stereo sound did to audiences used to hearing mono, high-definition digital cinema will do to us."

Jaw-dropping demos abounded, promising just as much for scientists as for Hollywood. One experiment on Tuesday featured the first-ever live, IP-based transmission of high-definition video from the bottom of the sea.

Link to Wired News story.

During one high-def demo, scientists on board a ship in the Pacific had hoped to submerge their research instruments for a second round of live undersea footage.

They'd dazzled everyone with a live video feed from the ocean floor the day before -- translucent seafloor critters, "black smoker" volcanic vents, with everything so clear, the water disappeared. Magical undersea life, transmitted live in super-high-def, over IP. The thousands of miles separating us from this remote underwater world just vanished.

But powerful storms made that too dangerous to repeat on Wednesday, so the cameras stayed on the ship instead, beaming realtime interviews of the increasingly woozy crew while the storm pitched and rocked their ship violently.

As we watched that footage, transmitted over IP to optical networks on shore by way of a 15mbps Ku-band satellite, John Orcutt of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography turned to Dr. Smarr in the theater and said "It's still amazing."

Dr. Smarr gazed at the screen and was silent for a moment. Then he replied, "That's because it's the real world."

Oh, and here are details and some little screengrabs from the avant-garde Noh movie: Link. It was pretty amazing, too!

Previously:

iGRID2005: Xeni's notes

Live webcast of undersea volcanoes @ IGRID2005

A travelling exhibit on Disneyland's history opens today at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI (my Flickr photos from the Henry Ford). Unfortunately, the site consists entirely of gigantic, non-quotable, non-bookmarkable Flash pages with tiny illustrations and an overwhelming flood of registered trademark symbols, which render me temporarily blind. So I can't tell you much about the exhibit, except that its website sucks and its subject-matter interests me a great deal. Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

Remember our previous blog-posts here on Boing Boing about The Lonely Island guys who were recently hired on Saturday Night Live? Well, this Saturday night is the opening night of the 31st SNL season, and I filed a story for Wired News about the long internet road that led to forthcoming TV debut of "the three dudes".

Live from New York, it's -- three comic talents who first made a name for themselves on the internet.

Andy Samberg will become a performing member of Saturday Night Live's 31st season cast debuting Oct. 1, while Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer have joined the show as writers.

But all three got their first big break online, thanks in part to the viral popularity of video shorts they released on the net.

In a move that may have helped fuel rapid grass-roots distribution, the comics released their work under Creative Commons licenses, which essentially let anyone copy a given work for free provided that person doesn't try to profit from it.

Link (Thanks, Macki!)

Earlier this month, I pointed to a New York Times preview of "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today's NYT takes a deeper look at the exhibition with a long review and narrated slideshow by Michael Kimmelman. (Seen here, detail of "Henri Robin and a Specter" (1863) by Eugene Thibault.)

From the text:

The exhibition's deeper subject is the dreamer in all of us. The art in these ham-fisted photographs of transparent tomfoolery, such as it is, is generally not formal but mystical. I don't mean that the images of spirits and ectoplasms and mediums lofting card tables into the air are believable (although they are, I suppose, if you wish them to be). I mean that they inevitably sail past their intended goal, which is to document the unbelievable, and end up in a realm of higher truth. They remind us that art is a wonderment defying logic.

How else to describe, except in terms of wonderment, the deliciousness of the implausible image of the French medium Marguerite Beuttinger accompanied by her twin spirit, a trick of double exposure that evidently fooled somebody at one point. A blurry Marguerite is standing beside a seated Marguerite whose body is so slight that it makes her look like her own dwarf twin. The effect is marvelous, as is the multiple exposure of the ghost of Bernadette Soubirous, in white robes, gliding under a trellis, gradually evaporating into a brick wall.

Link

Wired Magazine has a fantastic, in-depth feature on Tim O'Reilly, the publisher of O'Reilly and Associates (world's greatest tech books, hands down). The feature is written by Steven Levy, he of Hackers, Insanely Great and Crypto fame (Hackers was a huge influence on me and a big part of how I ended up working in tech). Between Tim's insight and Levy's vivid writing, this is one of the best profiles I've ever read.

By 1983, O'Reilly had learned enough about computers to start his own business. He set up shop in a converted barn in Newton, Massachusetts-, with about a dozen people, all working in a chaotic open room. "The company then was a loose confederation of people who knew Tim," says Dale Dougherty, who fell into the circle in 1984 and is now O'Reilly's most trusted associate and a 15 percent partner in the business.

What happened in that room was a small revolution in technical writing. The O'Reilly approach was to figure out what a system did and plainly describe how you could work around problems you encountered. "The house style was colloquial - simple and straightforward," Dougherty says. "And the other thing was to tell the whole story, not just what's easy to say."

In 1988, O'Reilly and Associates was producing- a two-volume guide to the programming libraries of the X-Windows system; in the process of showing it to vendors for licensing, people kept asking if they could buy single copies. MIT was about to host a conference on the system, and O'Reilly figured he'd give it a shot. "We went to a local copy shop that night and produced around 300 manuals," he recalls. "Without any authorization, we set up a table in the lobby, with a sign saying copies of an Xlib manual would be available at 4:30. By 4 pm, there was this line of 150 people. They were literally throwing money at us, or sailing their credit cards over other people's heads. That was when we went, 'Publishing could be a really big business.'"

Link

Earlier this month, the BBC ran a documentary called "Child Prodigies: Too Much Too Young?" Here's a very odd clip from the program showing a woman subjecting her toddler to absurdly fast flashcard "training," including a game that could be called "Name the Dictator."
Link to RealVideo clip, Link to program page (via Mason Inman's Moonshine Lard Man)

Otherworld Excursions offers guided tours run by famous role-playing game designers who take you hiking through rural and urban treks, immersing you in the role-playing elements of the natural environment:

See the occult architecture of Chicago as only Kenneth Hite can show it to you--then use this knowledge to survive (or, at least, be the last one to lose their mind) in an original roleplaying adventure of eldritch horror!

The Windy City is the birthplace of urban horror. Riding on the L with a faceless mass of drones being herded back to their soul-crushing jobs, Fritz Leiber looked out across the sooty rooftops and envisioned the kinds of ghosts that the metropolis demanded. In his classic novel Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber invented the arcane science of megapolisomancy, the magic of cities. Or so the story goes.

Is it possible that Leiber didn't create a fictional concept, but instead revealed a hidden truth? Were the street plans for the great American cities laid out like circuit boards to channel psychic energies, with steel-girdled skyscrapers designed as capacitors to store up these forces until they were needed for some cosmic ritual? (The Ghostbusters script could well be calculated misinformation, or a nod to fellow initiates).

If anyone knows what's really going on, it is Kenneth Hite. Guided by his uncanny mastery of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, you'll spend a Saturday afternoon inspecting the architectural evidence. Then head downtown to the Hotel Intercontinental--which was constructed as an athletic club for the Medinah Shriners, but may serve another purpose for their secret masters. Here, you'll experience an unparalleled evening of roleplaying led by Kenneth, and learn first-hand why he wrote the definitive chapter on "The Joy of Research" for Gamemastering Secrets. It'll be a day trip you'll never forget, which could be problematic if you still have to go into the city after dark.

Link (Thanks, Tavis!)

My friend Greg Costikyan -- an award-winning game designer of such classics as Toon and Paranoia -- has co-founded a new "indy label" for games called Manifesto Games:

Game industry veterans Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson announced today that they are joining forces to launch Manifesto Games, a new venture to build a strong and viable independent game industry. Its site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download--a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find "the best of the rest," the games that the retail channel doesn't think worth carrying. Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs.

While games were once the domain of hobbyists, today, the game industry considers any title that sells fewer than 1 million copies to be a failure; "The typical game store only has 200 facings," notes Costikyan, Manifesto’s CEO., "They can only carry best-sellers. On the Internet, there is no shelf space and you are limited only by how well you can market yourself, your site. This is where niche product can rule." Manifesto believes that an independent game market is analogous to film or music, where less commercial offerings aimed at identifiable markets and produced at lower budgets than the "blockbusters" can achieve profitability and critical success.

"The game industry has become moribund,” notes Costikyan. "Because of ballooning budgets and the narrowness of the retail channel, it is now essentially impossible for anything other than a franchise title or licensed product to obtain distribution. Yet historically, the major hits, the titles that have expanded the industry to new markets and created new audiences have been highly innovative. It is time for us to find a way to foster innovation, because it's not going to happen if we leave it to the large publishers."

"Many companies are entering the direct download space," Costikyan continues, "but in most cases, they're either focusing on casual downloadable games, or on offering the back catalog of major publishers. It’s amazing that casual game publishers can succeed selling games to people who, historically, haven't bought them, but we’d rather try to sell games to people who already buy them. By offering greater exposure to independent games, we'll be introducing gamers to a universe of games they haven't already seen--and that, we think, is the winning strategy."

Link

This is awesome. It's like combat sous vide. Snip:

"Honeybees that defend their colonies by killing wasps with body heat come within 5°C of cooking themselves in the process, according to a study in China. At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death."

Link

I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on the class action suit filed last week against the Google Print Library Project by the Authors Guild, a biographer of Abraham Lincoln, a children's book author and a former U.S. poet laureate.

Bottom line? Lawers, unclench: this should be considered fair use.

Google will make its money by selling ads next to book search result pages, just as it does when you search for images or Web pages — but the company says it won't show ads on pages that display books from libraries.

(...)[T]his isn't the same as the recording industry's war on file-sharing or the Motion Picture Assn. of America's battles against DVD bootleggers. Google isn't pirating books. They're giving away previews. And in order to provide those keyword-searchable peeks, Google may have to scan entire books. For example, let's say you're a pug aficionado. A search on print.google.com for "tiara" + "pug" can't point you to the instructive masterpiece "Putting Party Hats on Dogs" unless the scan process got all the way to page 237, where the chapter "Princess Tea Parties for Toy Breeds" begins. OK, there is no such book, but work with me here.

Perhaps the Authors Guild members would prefer that search companies pay them for the right to build book search services. If Google has its way, their logic goes, we'll lose control over who can copy our work, and we'll lose sales. But Internet history proves the opposite is true. Any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold. Amazon.com's "look inside" feature works similarly. And, surprise, the Authors Guild has squabbled with it too.

If the paranoid myopia that drives such thinking penetrates too deeply into the law, search engines will eventually shut down. What's the difference, after all, between a copyrighted Web page and a copyrighted book? What if Internet entrepreneurs could sue Google for indexing their websites? What if the law required search engines to get clearance for every Web page? Even a company as large and well-funded as Google couldn't pull that off because what's on the Internet, and who owns that content, changes constantly.

Link

Jerry Juhl, who wrote for the Muppet Show and served as creative producer for Fraggle Rock, died Monday from cancer. Link to a remembrance by Ken Plume. (Thanks, John "Widgett" Robinson)

My friend James Glanz wrote a piece for last Sunday's New York Times about "the menacing, half-lit world inhabited by the network of Iraqi stringers that Western news organizations rely on." One of those stringers, a man who worked with Glanz, was murdered earlier this month.

As important as they are for people around the globe who want to know what is happening in Iraq, the stringers cut only a shadowy profile outside the newsrooms where they send their reports - by choice, because their lives are continually under threat. Who the stringers are, how and why they do their work comes into much sharper focus for the Western journalists who work with them. And, sooner or later, the Western journalist gains a vivid appreciation of the risks the Iraqis run in helping to collect the news. But even with us, there are limits; we aren't seen much together outside of work; we do not share their family celebrations.

One week ago, a different stringer from the one who had been merely warned met with a much more tragic fate. Men claiming to be police officers showed up at the home of Fakher Haider, a stringer in the southern city of Basra who worked primarily with The New York Times, and took him away in front of his family. Mr. Haider was found dead hours later.

Exactly why Mr. Haider was murdered, and whether it was related to his work for this newspaper, have not been determined. But he had just filed a report on clashes between British forces in the area and members of a militia that has infiltrated the Basra police force but is loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Haider's killers arrived at his home in at least one police car.

The advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders reported on its Web site last week that when Mr. Haider's death is included, 72 journalists and "media assistants" - stringers - have been killed in Iraq since the American-led invasion. The great majority were Iraqi, but not all: Steven Vincent, an American freelance reporter, was shot and killed in Basra in August after being taken away, also by men in a police car.

Link

Snip from New York Times story:

[C]ome Saturday it will look as if a tornado had picked up a Prada store and dropped it on a desolate strip of U.S. 90 in West Texas. That is where Prada Marfa, a permanent sculpture by the Berlin artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset will be installed. (Actually it will go up in Valentine, Tex., about 26 miles outside Marfa, a town of 2,400 that has become a magnet for artists and art lovers.) The sculpture is meant to look like a Prada store, with minimalist white stucco walls and a window display housing real Prada shoes and handbags from the fall collection. But there is no working door.

Link

Disclaimer: Suicide Girls is a Boing Boing sponsor.

Responding to a Boing Boing post from earlier today, Steve Simitzis of Suicide Girls says:

Well, since you posted about the criminal case (which isn't over yet), the case is United States vs Chad Grant, not Suicide Girls vs Chad Grant. It's a criminal case - your post would imply that it's a civil dispute between us and him, which it's not. We reported the intrusion to the FBI, and from there, the government decides whether or not to prosecute. I already gave my testimony (yesterday) so I feel okay talking about it.

But anyway, the reason why the two situations (the criminal case and the upcoming government crackdown) are connected:

During the investigation, the FBI asked us to provide them a list of every single photo set that contains bondage, blood play, urination, etc. In short, anything a jury might find "obscene". The idea was that the defense would try to discredit SG by displaying in graphic detail how we're disgusting and therefore evil. And the prosecution wanted to be ready for this attack, by knowing everything we had in advance, so they could either try to downplay it or make some other point about it. Either way they wanted to be prepared. But of course that's irrelevant to the case, since the defendant (a) also worked for an "adult entertainment" company, and (b) we're not on trial anyway - he is, for computer intrusion.

So, as requested, we started assembling the list of photos containing said naughty content, when news of the upcoming crackdown started to surface. And it immediately became crystal clear: if we were handing over a list of every photo on our site that contains the content they're about to start prosecuting, and if someone in the Attorney General's office would have that on file, it would be a quick and easy few steps from there to going after us, a fairly well-known site. We felt that we were too close to the fire at that point, and took the content down.

So - were we contacted by the FBI specifically because of the "war on porn"? No. Were we contacted by the FBI and asked for a list of all our "obscene" content? Yes. So when people were asking "were you contacted by the FBI?" we really couldn't give a straight yes or no answer without talking about something we couldn't talk about.

Previously:

Suicide Girls: rumor-debunking time

Reader comment: Shannon Larratt of BMEzine responds to Steve's statement:

So you took down content to help you win a case against a competitor (even if by proxy), effectively admitted on the public record that you feel this content is legally obscene and you're ashamed or afraid to show it in court, played a highly misleading PR game, and didn't come clean about it until the PR started to go bad?

As I said before, as someone who really has had a real threat of prosecution and had to uproot my whole life and company to avoid being shut down due to being unwilling to compromise the ethics of my site, I really think it's unfortunate that you guys did not have the strength of character to do the same, and I think it's even worse that you'd manipulate the courts by playing along with the FBI like this. It's not going to be helpful.

I'm sorry to be so blunt about this but I really feel you guys need to take a stronger stand, especially because if they ever actually did come after you on this point you're such an easily defendable target.

PLEASE restore the content, along with a pledge to fight to protect it.

I bought a fresh can of self-defense spray at my friendly neighborhood weapons depot last week. "Sabre" is a potent mix of military-grade tear gas and pepper spray. It's at least a few times stronger than Chanel Number 5. and at $9 each, it's about twelve times cheaper. One detail on the packaging was really funny, though. On the back side of the box (partial scan shown above), a series of line drawings depicting potentially threatening foes you might need to use it on, or situations you might use it in. One of them is a blonde teen "student" smoking a cigarette, seated beneath a school sports pennant, and it's not entirely clear whether he's a victim or an aggressor. Link to full size.

Leon Holliman Jr., 37, of Jacksonville, Florida was reported missing from the River Region Human Services facility last month. On Sunday, he was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer in the back. The police had to shoot out the ambulance's tires to catch him. He's now undergoing psychiatric evaluation. From the Associated Press:

"I don't know how the man got it up in there," said Sgt. Robert Pearson. "It was a six point buck."

It wasn't known where Holliman got the deer, which had been dead for some time, Pearson said.

Link

Apparently, Holliman was nabbed and released earlier in the weekend for other unusual behavior. From EMS Network:

Lieutenant Scott Nanney says officers saw the man with a wheelchair near the hospital.

"Actually he was in the wheelchair riding it in the middle of the road and intoxicated. So, that's when officers decided to take him into jail for four hours."

Police say the man wasn't charged with anything in the wheelchair incident.

He was only taken to jail for his safety, until he was sober enough to leave.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Chicago artist Taylor Hokanson constructed a massive computer keyboard that you type on with a sledgehammer. Temporary Services, the art group behind the amazing Prisoners' Inventions project from a few years ago, is exhibiting the Sledgehammer Keyboard at their Chicago experimental art/culture space Mess Hall on Saturday and Sunday. Temporary Services member Salem Collo-Julin says: "Users will be able to try it out for the first time this coming weekend during a street fair that's happening outside of Mess Hall. You slam your message into the keys, and your message is projected into our space."
Link to Taylor Hokanson's site, Link to Mess Hall