Spotted today in the remarkable, newly renovated upstairs gallery at the (amazing, wonderful) Evolution Store in Soho, NYC: this exploded human skull, in a bell-jar. I covet this -- I'd settle for a replica, too. Anyone with a 3D printer want to knock one up and stick it on Etsy?

Exploded Skull photos

The Evolution Store

The Mandelbulb is an attempt to extrude the classic Mandelbrot Set fractal into three dimensions. I'm not enough of a mathematician to say whether it accomplishes this feat, but it is utterly arresting.

Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal: (via /.)

Jon Skovron's debut novel, the YA book Struts & Frets, is a dynamite, nuanced story about fannish love, musical obsession, first romance and true friendship. It follows the adventures of Sammy Bojar, a small-town, midwestern high-school senior who's life revolves around his band, a trainwreck of ego and conflict called "Tragedy of Wisdom." The band means everything to Sammy because music means everything to him. He frames his whole world with indie pop, seeking out authenticity with a driven, blinding passion.

Sammy's at the turning point in his life. His best male friend is coming out, his best female friend is in love with him (and it turns out it's mutual, though he didn't know it). The frontman for his band is a roiling, angry bully who is ever on the verge of physical violence. His beloved grandfather, a minor jazz legend, is sliding into incapacity as age and a hard life catch up with him.

The plot-points are all pretty standard YA set-pieces, but there's never a stale (or dull) moment in Struts & Frets. That's thanks to the incredible nuance and heart that Skovron brings to the interpersonal relationships, using these familiar emotional scenes as pivots for a deft emotional acrobatic act that is as moving as it is engrossing.

I was never a (good) musician, but I've always been passionate about music. I remember what it was like to be in the band, to be wrapped up in all the issues around creativity, friendship and identity; to seek out answers to life's big questions in music, to worry at the unanswerable questions of commercialism, success and popularity. Struts & Frets will feel instantly authentic to anyone who's ever felt the pride and shame of being an outsider.

Struts & Frets

You can find a lot of crap on YouTube, but you know what? You can find gems like this, too. I don't know much about the origin of this video, but it's one in a series of three ten-minute chunks on YouTube -- rare color footage of Tibetan tantric masters meditating, in retreat. Looks a few decades old. Start at 0:39 and just zone out. According to the notes from the uploader, the last 3 faces you'll see in the video are:

1) His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage in India
2) Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, great realized master in the Kagyu lineage.
3) His Holiness, the 16th Karmapa Lama (...) head of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Video: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

[PHOTO: "Jessie," a CC-licensed image by LeTiger.]

A few weeks ago, I blogged a funny video created by a Canadian high-school student titled "Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101." One of the many people who commented on that post was an anonymous commenter who wrote:

Ok, my parents found out i was gay by myspace (which i regret for putting my sexual orientation) and my parents will never accept cause my parents are really realigous for our christianity. They are so realigous, that i'm now homeschooled and going to a private school. Also i have no internet unless for emergencies, no friends houses, no phone, no boy friends til i'm 18. The only times i can get out is to christian youth groups so i have no life for the next 5 years ( cause i'm 13). Oh and my parents think all the wrong things in the world about gays, they even use the gay f word. I need help and i'm typing this from my PS3 cause they don't know it has internet. HELP!!! =O

It's hard for jaded internet people like me to know when someone's pulling your leg online, but I'll take this one at face value. Many other teens read Boing Boing, and perhaps one of them is in a similar predicament. So, Dear Anonymous:

Boy, that sucks. I don't have a way of contacting you privately, so I'll say it to the world. You are fine just as you are. There is nothing wrong with being gay, and everything right with being true to yourself, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise. But being gay and a teen is very hard when your family isn't cool with it. My friend Maggie suggests that you might want to check out these helplines and Web resources, so you can talk to someone who can help you sort stuff out:

♦ amplifyyourvoice.org (a teen LGBTQ site)
♦ billwilsoncenter.org (Web chat based teen counseling service)
♦ glnh.org (National LGBTQ help center, with phone counseling lines manned by other LGBTQ people. They've got a special youth line, online peer support and access to local services and organizations.)

If you are reading this post, Anonymous, I bet some other people will be writing suggestions for other good resources in the comments. Check them out. Good luck. There are many of us in the world who welcome you just as you are. Don't believe anyone who tells you that who you are is anything less than beautiful.

Keep your head held high, little happy mutant.

Diesel Sweeties' R. Stevens and Ariana Osborne are offering this wordy Venn diagram shirt showing the bittersweet territory between happiness and sadness for $18-19, and taking pre-orders now.

(Happy()Sad) Diagram Shirt (via Warren Ellis)

Bonnie sez, "Measuring close to a foot tall and crafted in durable all-weather resin, the Garden Jawa protects your tomatoes, zucchini, and daffodils from the dark side, armed with a garden tool bandolier, a garden hose, and a thumbs-up attitude. Reflective amber-colored eyes peek out from underneath his hood, challenging any unwelcome visitors looking to feast on his turf. True to nature, the Garden Jawa is still up to the well-known mischievous antics we know from the movies. Case in point: If you've caught StarWars.com's Flickr sets lately, you may have caught this little guy sneaking into Skywalker Ranch to snag some pics in front of the Main House. We've also caught him snooping around Lucasfilm's Presidio campus, reclaiming a bit of green from the dry California summer months. "

Garden Jawa a StarWarsShop Exclusive (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Stanford primatologist and anthropologist Robert Sapolsky scores big with this grad lecture on "The Uniqueness of Humans," a humbling, inspiring and sweet 30 minutes on what it is about humans that makes us unique from our animal cousins, and how many of the seemingly unique features of humanity can be found elsewhere.

Sapolsky make me want to go back to school, enrolling in the Stanford anthropology program, just so I can take his classes.

Class Day Lecture 2009: The Uniqueness of Humans (Thanks, Avi!)

Crafster member Leahseraph, the creator of these Super Mario Fire-Flower gloves "just winged it," making up the pattern as she went.

Geek Craft: Super Mario knitted flower gloves (via Wonderland)

Last week, I stumbled into a jam session with Frank Fairfield and other musicians by accident, and blogged a quick iPhone video snapshot. The next day, I started googling and YouTubing and Myspacing to find out more about each of the musicians, and found this. A stunning video of Fairfield performing "Nine Pound Hammer." Give me chills. Shot and directed by Keith Musil (I'm dying to know what he shot with, doesn't it look great?).

There are a few more YT clips in this series, they're all gorgeous. I missed Fairfield's live show last night at the Redwood in LA with Blind Boy Paxton, but I hope to catch them, together or separately, soon.

Robin from the Fleet Foxes described him like this, in Rolling Stone:

"He's like 26 years old and he sounds like Mississippi John Hurt," says Robin. Fairfield plays fiddle and banjo player and strums back-porch bluegrass, complete with shaky jug-band vocals reminiscent of The Foggy Mountain Boys from way back in the '40s (think O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

"He's kinda crazy," says Robin. "He has his own radio show where he just plays these old gramophones. He just puts a mic up and plays all these field recordings from the 1900s; it's insane. He dresses like it's the early 1900s. He's born out of time, and his voice is amazing."

Buy his music: His self-titled album Frank Fairfield, and the EP I've Always Been a Rambler (Amazon MP3s).

He's playing a bunch of West Coast US tour dates from now through January: San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and other ports of call.

Videos:
• Frank Fairfield - "Nine Pound Hammer"
• Frank Fairfield - "Short Life of Trouble"
• Frank Fairfield - "Tim Brooks"

Some blog posts about Fairfield: LA Record, naturalismo, passionweiss. And here's an LA Weekly profile.

If you've got a Master's in Library Science and a love of the Grateful Dead, the University of California at Santa Cruz is looking for you -- a rare job opening in the UC system, and what a plum gig it is: official Greatful Dead Archivist.

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

Grateful Dead Archivist (via Resource Shelf)

Here's a great look at Pop Up Lunch: NYC, a work-in-progress from Ali Pulver, a grad student at Pratt. The idea is to create a bunch of portable, temporary eating surfaces that hungry New Yorkers can chow down from after buying street food from a wagon or cart.

Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!

Hydrantables & Lunch Shelves Are Amazing New Achievements in Street Food Eating Technology

Pop Up Lunch: NYC

(via Making Light)

The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

CCrawford sez, "Michelle Khine couldn't afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem."

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.

A children's toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips (Thanks, CCrawford!)

(Image: Dave Lauridsen)

These newspaper carrier bags are made in India by an NGO that provides education and shelter to street kids. The bags themselves are very sweet and good for several uses before they're ready for the recycling box, and make good use of the striking designs from the newspapers they're folded from (I like the Bollywood poster ones, too!).

Newspaper Bags (Thanks, Alice!)

Master haunt modeller Ray Keim sez, "After a little bit of experimentation and a lot of patience, I figured out how to carve Putka Pods [ed: small, pumpkin-like dried seeds] into extremely tiny jack-o-lanterns!"

Putka Pod Possibilities! (Thanks, Ray!)

Thessaly sez, "For those who wish Halloween wasn't over: Caitlin Roper holds the record for making the world's largest collection of jack-o-lantern grapes. She cut the lids of six grapes and hollowed them out before hand-carving faces into each one. They may also possibly be the world's SMALLEST jack-o-lanterns, but this is not verified."

Largest Collection Of Jack-O-Lantern Grapes (Thanks, Thessaly!)

The Succeedblog is a lovely, optimistic, "wonderful things" approach to the web -- rather than amusing its readers with pictures of bad things, captioned with "FAIL," it focuses on pictures of great things, captioned with "SUCCEED". Lovely.

Succeedblog (via Make)

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is Eleanor Davis's kids' comic glorifying science, invention, and the joys of personal exploration. Julian Calendar is a bright 11-year-old who has moved to a new school where he is determined to fit in by masking his voracious intellect, but instead he finds himself (gladly) fallen in with two other science kids -- Greta Hughes, a "bad kid" with a reputation and Ben Garza, a "dumb jock" who shines on the basketball court but chokes on tests. Both kids are, in fact, natural scientists (as is Julian), but they aren't the right kind of smart to get ahead in school.

Together, the three of them form The Secret Science Alliance, complete with an underground lair chock full of marvellous inventions, and they set out to create the most wonderful things they can imagine.

But then the sour old R&D chief from down the block begins to steal their inventions, and the three find themselves embroiled in a caper that requires all of their skills.

Funny, inspiring, and wicked-nerdy, The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is filled with hyper-detailed drawings of secret lairs and scientific inventions, and handles the idea of multiple intelligences with a good deal of grace and compassion. The author says the book is enjoyable by kids 8 and up -- and as a 38 year old, I can affirm the "and up" part! I'm grateful to Ms Davis for sending me a review copy.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook

Joy! You can now buy a T-shirt featuring the likeness of everybody's favorite horrific-looking, behind-the-toilet-dwelling, cockroach-eating centipede. Will Bower from the Facebook group House Centipedes Are Your Friends sent a link to these great shirts, available on Etsy (where else?). The centipedes look hardcore, and (as you can tell by looking at the models) simply putting a Scutigera Coleoptrata on your chest is sure to make you appear 10x as hip as normal.

Scutigera Coleoptrata T-shirt
Scutigera Coleoptrata T-shirt, fitted version

Shanghai will host the World Expo next year, and city officials are preparing for the influx of foreigners with a campaign to ban citizens from wearing their pajamas out in the streets. An article in the Chengdu Business Daily expresses outrage over the campaign as a civil rights abuse. Snip:

Many Shanghai residents are used to loitering around the streets in their pajamas. But now the municipal government is making every effort to stop them from doing so, because it would be a "loss of face" for city authorities if a foreigner sees people walking the streets in pajamas during the 2010 World Expo. (...)

As a modern international metropolis, Shanghai has been playing host to foreigners for decades. So why have pajamas become embarrassing only now? And will it be okay for people to walk the streets in pajamas after the World Expo? Why should we change our habits and customs to suit foreigners' taste when we travel abroad as well as when we play host to them? Do we suffer from a sense of inferiority?

What's wrong with a person in pajamas? [via Rebecca MacKinnon]

A quick Google of "shanghai" + "pajamas" reveals many articles in Western media over the past decade about Shanghai's pajama-wearing citizenry, and their government's fruitless attempts to mandate their fashion choices. Apparently, walking around in the street in your jammies is a familiar part of local culture in old neighborhoods there, in part because the realms of public and private space are so blurred in daily life.

Rudy Rucker sez, "'Unfurling' is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco. 'Unfurling' stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns. The seven-year project began in 2002, when Isabel decided to free herself from the size of regular pieces of paper, canvas or sketchpad. The opening party for the 'Unfurling' show " is Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6 p.m.-11 p.m."

"Unfurling" by Isabel Rucker (Thanks, Rudy!)

The man widely considered to be the father of modern anthropological study has passed away at 100 years of age. NYT, Bloomberg, Wikipedia, AFP.

"Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called 'primitive' races and those of modern western societies."

Author Jasmina Tešanović writes this guest-essay on the work of 63-year old Serbian artist Marina Abramovic (above), the "grandmother of performance art" whose work will be honored in 2010 in a MOMA retrospective:

All her work is centered on body, her body which went through severe trials all these years: cutting, beating starving, public exposure... the dividing line between spirituality and trials is almost invisible, the path of living leads to death. An artist should be prepared to die and prepare her own funeral, that the last performance of her life.

Read Jasmina's entire essay, after the jump.

I've written before here about the impact that Sue Townsend's comic Adrian Mole novels have had on my life since I was a young teenager, so it'll come as no surprise to learn that I was completely delighted by the latest volume, Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years, which is sweeter, darker, more sentimental and more grim than the earlier installments.

For the uninitiated, the Adrian Mole books chronicle the life of a young man born near Leicester, whose dysfunctional family, intellectual impulses, gormless bumbling and terrible poetry make for a meaty, multi-volume series that serves as a wicked history of Britain and the world since the 1980s.

In the latest volume, Adrian is nearly 40, and is increasingly estranged from his (latest) wife, the mysterious and sexy Daisy, who seduced Adrian in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Their five year old is a High-School Musical-crazed monster, their finances are in tatters, and they're living with Adrian's elderly parents in their converted pigsty. Adrian's mother is writing a fictionalized agony memoir called A Girl Called Shit, and the lovely bookstore Adrian works at is going bust. And there's something wrong with Adrian's prostate, a problem compounded by all the friends and acquaintances who insist on calling it a "prostrate."

And yet, there's plenty that's sweet here. Adrian is figuring out fatherhood. His childhood flame, Pandora Braithwaite (now an MP) is back in his life. His half-brother Brett is back, his career as a hedge-fund manager in ruins. His son, Glenn, on deployment in Afghanistan, is shaping up to be a critically minded sharp young man. And Bernard, the alcoholic librophile who's helping out at the store, turns out to have quite a good approach to life that Adrian stands to learn much from.

Reading these books every year or two is a magic experience. Townsend recounts and recasts recent history in a way that makes you realize just how funny and tragic it all is. Townsend's vision has recently failed her, but she continues to write these books at an amazing clip. It's a real inspiration, as well as superb entertainment.

Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years

Entire Adrian Mole series

Jim sez, "In a fit of creativity, my wife dressed our son and daughter as the Mario Brothers. Throw together a few simple items, and one hat pattern later and you have a simple sibling costume set."

Halloween 2009: Making Mario (Thanks, Jim!)

Ape Lad sez, "The bowling alley I once enjoyed as a child (in Riverside CA), is now furniture."

An abandoned bowling alley finds a second life in this beautiful series of furniture by LA-based designer/woodworker William Stranger. Crafted from reclaimed strips of wood salvaged from a local defunct Tava Lanes Bowling alley, the collection springs to life in a variety of forms including a series of wall hangings and a low coffee table.

Recycled Bowling Lane Furniture is Right up Our Alley (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Eric made this smashing papercraft "Big Head" costume for Hallowe'en this year, based on the Big Head mode from classic video games.

Head (Flickr) (Thanks, Eric!)

Hayley and Rachel went out this Hallowe'en dressed, respectively, as Cory Doctorow (as depicted in the XKCD webcomic) and a floppy disk. GREAT costumes, folks!

Look, it's Michael Geist! (Thanks, Rachel!)

Back in August, I gushed about the long-overdue reissue of Ariel, Steven R Boyett's classic post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery adventure novel about a world where technology stops working and magic returns. I mentioned then that there was a sequel coming in November, and today Elegy Beach, the sequel I've been waiting for for 26 years, hit the stands.

Elegy Beach is an odd kind of sequel. In Ariel, the world Changed sometime in the early 1980s, meaning that the post-apocalyptic adventurers in the tale were wandering through a society littered with the nonfunctional remnants of 1980s society. For Elegy Beach, Boyett has moved the Change forward, so that technology dies and magic takes over somewhere in the early 2010s. As Boyett notes, "to not update the pre-Change world would be even weirder. Do the characters just never talk about cell phones and the internet and relay towers and all of the pervasive evidence of such progress? To avoid the issue would be to risk losing the reader's identification with the world that has been lost, because that world would no longer be the one in which the reader lives."

More to the point, the premise of Elegy Beach requires that the Change take place after the rise of the Internet and widespread, civilian use of software. In Elegy Beach, we meet Fred, the adolescent son of Pete Garey (himself the adolescent hero of Ariel). It's been decades since Pete went adventuring and now he is a single parent settled in a coastal California town, a close-mouthed loner who is lethal with a sword and passionate about books. Fred and Pete don't get on very well. Fred is apprenticed to the local sorcerer, and he does scutwork for the old man, grinding herbs for potions, doing routine castings, though he yearns to do more.

What Fred wants to do -- along with Yan, his best friend -- is codify the rules of magic. As members of the first post-Change generation to come of age, Fred and Yan understand the non-technological, magic society as normal and approach magic without the reverence and mysticism of their generation-gapped elders. More specifically, Yan and Fred yearn to create "macros" for magic, software-like constructs that allow non-casters to make use of spells that have been bottled by a new kind of spell. These bottled enchantments could become a kind of renewable resource, a kind of technology -- a system that would give the remnant of humanity that remains a hope for out-competing the centaurs who hunt them for sport and the marauders who destroy their fragile settlements.

That's the plan, anyway. But Yan and Fred's partnership dissolves when it becomes apparent that Yan craves power for its own sake, and betrays Fred's trust. Enter Ariel, Pete's unicorn familiar who has not seen Pete in 25 years, and once again Pete is on the road, this time with Fred and Yan's father, the four of them set on stopping Yan before he unmakes the world.

It's as good a setup as Ariel, and the story is every bit the cracking yarn that Ariel was, but I admit that I was distracted by the discontinuities between the two books -- Elegy Beach amounts to a kind of contra-factual future-history of a world I've been in love with since I was just a boy, and it was hard to keep the two straight.

Considered as a variation on the themes in Ariel, Elegy Beach is fantastic, a nonstop adventure that you can easily swallow in a couple of intense, white-knuckle readings. As a sequel, though, it's a little odd and distracting. Kudos to Boyett for trying something different, and what a wonderful thing that he's turned his hand back to novel-writing again after a long hiatus.

Elegy Beach

I'm giving two talks in the UK this week -- the first in Cambridge, as part of the Arcadia Seminar, held at Robinson College; the second is at Sheffield, as part of the DocFest premiere of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyfighting and art that features some interviews with me. Hope to see you at them!

Cambridge: 3 November 2009, 6PM
Arcadia Seminar: 3rd Nov. "Thinking Like a Dandelion: Cory Doctorow on copyright, Creative Commons and creativity"
Umney Theatre, Robinson College, Cambridge. Please email mh569@cam.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

Sheffield: 5 November 2009, 2:25PM-4:30PM
RiP! A Remix Manifesto
Showroom 1, Sheffield DocFest (tickets)

Update: CORRECTION -- I'm at Sheffield Doc/Fest from 1425h-1630h, not 1600-1800h as previously stated!

Chris sez, "I made a thing! This thing did not exist before I decided to make it. John Young called out to me from his universe, 'Make me a Ban Hammer!' So after a little 3D modeling and research, I conjured into existence the worlds only real Ban Hammer. If you are so able and inclined, you can print your own with the instructions given here."

Sisters and brothers, these are the first days of a new golden age of kipple.

Ban Hammer: 3D printed (Thanks, Chris!)

Sarah sez, "This Halloween my costume was inspired by Longoland's Monster Skin Rug (which I think is just so awesome). I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing some pics -- I called it the Longo Monster and got 3rd place for "Scariest Costume" at the 13th Annual North Halsted Halloween Parade here in Chicago. I spent the whole night getting hugged by strangers who thought it was adorable :) The body is a mechanic's jumpsuit covered in scales cut from white fleece."

Longo Monster -- costume inspired by Longoland rug (Thanks, Sarah!)

Penfold sez, "As a student of medicine and biomedical engineering, I enjoy the chance to make something a little creepy for Hallowe'en. The link shows a homemade anatomically correct latex-moulded mask of the musculature of the human face, as well as an unhappy pumpkin with an exposed brain. Feliz dia de los muertos!"

Hallowe'en 2009 (Thanks, Penfold!)

Two years ago, I blogged Flickr users andibob909's steampunk wedding and now they're about to have a baby! I learned this by admiring the awesome Darth-Vader-and-Death-Star pregosaur costume. That is one lucky foetus and one awesome mom-to-be!

Darth Vader and the Death Star

"Scenting the Dark," Mary Robinette Kowal's debut short story collection is slim and spare and eminently satisfying. Kowal writes science fiction that uses our relationship to technology to expose our relationships to one another. Kowal is one of science fiction's most celebrated new writers, a winner of the Campbell Award for best new writer and a current Hugo nominee, all on the strength of her short fiction (she has two novels forthcoming from Tor), and it's easy to see why.

For me, the standout story here was Jaiden's Weaver, a tale that combines the astronomical reality of life on a ringed planet with a subtle and moving coming-of-age story. Like the other stories in this volume, it epitomizes Kowal's gift for using rigorous science fiction as a lever for prying open the subjective reality of the people who inhabit the futuristic world of now.

"Scenting the Dark" is a slim, handsomely made hardcover volume from the specialist house Subterranean Press, a great gift and a great treasure for yourself.

Be sure to check out Kowal's website for readings of her work (she's a talented and accomplished voice actor and puppeteer -- she read my story After the Siege for Subterranean's podcast), free downloads (she's a copyfighter, too!), and other supplementary material.

Scenting the Dark and Other Stories

Jeremy sez, "Shareable tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real in your life. In a shareable world, things like car sharing, community gardening, and cohousing bring us together, make life more fun, and free up time and money for the important things in life. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world. The remarkable successes of Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Burning Man, Freecycle, and Creative Commons point the way. They tell a hopeful story about human nature and our future, one we don't hear enough in the mainstream media."

Shareable (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Zoran sez, "The night before Halloween is known as Mischief Night because it is a time for young people to act out and do things that may get them in trouble with neighbors, with the law, and with satan. One of those pranks is downloading music illegally, usually in search of a fitting soundtrack for All Hallows' eve, one that will frighten the trick or treaters. Well this year, we can all focus on bigger and better things, thanks to a set of demonic artists who believe that it is in their interest to give away some of their sonic concoctions for free, because it will help them to cast their spell on a wider audience."

Creative Commons Halloween Mix (Thanks, Zoran!)

As promised, here's the details on the short Canada/US tour for my novel Makers in November:

November 12, 7PM
Toronto, ON, Canada
The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy
239 College Street, 3rd Floor, +1 416 393-7748
Books by Bakka Phoenix
(you can pre-order signed copies from them if you can't make it).

November 16, 7PM
Cambridge, Mass
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue

November 17, 7PM
New York City, NY
Borders Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle (@59th St and Central Park West)

November 20, 11AM and 1PM
Philadelphia, PA
Free Library of Philadelphia
1901 Vine Street

November 20-22
Philcon, Cherry Hill, NJ

If you're with the press and you'd like to arrange an interview, please contact Justin Golenbock (USA) (Justin.Golenbock@tor.com/646.307.5413) or Katherine Wilson (Canada) (Katherine.Wilson@hbfenn.com/905.951.6600 x271).

Kevin Haw writes in to tell us about World of Warcraft and Philosophy, a new collection of essays and stories:

Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Adam Smith... Sure, they were all great thinkers, but how long would they have lasted in Ulduar?

Continuing with the ongoing Popular Culture and Philosophy series, World of Warcraft and Philosophy, (Wrath of the Philosopher King) will be hitting bookshelves on November 1st. This collection of essays and short fiction addresses the ethics, economics, and metaphysics of Azeroth and its inhabitants. Along the way, the collection takes quick excursions on issues of gender identity, leadership, hate speech, and the likelihood of the IRS auditing a troll. Add in shoutouts to Machiavelli, Gary Gygax, and Thomas Jefferson (and, yes, even Cory Doctorow) and you've you might find yourself leveling up in intellect as well as your combat skills.

World of Warcraft and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) (Thanks, Kevin!)

Remember the La-Z-Boy DWI story Pesco blogged earlier this week? A local paper reports that the lounger is headed for eBay. See also this update at Smoking Gun on the case of Dennis LeRoy Anderson, who drank "eight or nine beers" before driving the motorized lounger into the street and smashing it into a parked car. Snip:

Anderson's customized vehicle, seen in the police evidence photos on the following pages, is powered by an eight horsepower Kohler lawnmower engine, and has a stereo, headlights, a built-in cup holder, and a "Hell Yeah It's Fast" bumper sticker. The ride, however, does not have a seat belt.

Proctor Police Chief Walter Wobig described Anderson as a "super-nice guy." The cops say they'll soon put the man's cherished chair up for sale on eBay, under state forfeiture laws (auctioning it off was one option, the other was using it for official police business, LOL). If anyone can find the eBay listing once it goes live, I'd sure love to see it -- and, hey, maybe bid on it.

Related articles: Proctor Journal, BBC, Duluth News Tribune, Wired.

Lee sez, "Kevin Van Aelst, who photographs household objects to explain basic life processes. He uses gummy worms for DNA, clothes for the heart and other things you'd find around the house."

While the depictions of information--such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or anatomical model--are unconventional, the truth and accuracy to the illustrations are just as valid as more traditional depictions. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Kevin Van Aelst (Thanks, Lee!)

Dark Horse just sent me a review copy of The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century, a gigantic, slipcased hardcover containing the full run of the Give Me Liberty comics and associated titles.

I have Frank Miller's Give Me Liberty graphic novels to thank for getting me interested in graphic novels as a literary form. I read the first Give Me Liberty collection when I was seventeen, after having it thrust insistently into my hands by my roommate Erik Stewart. Erik judged -- correctly -- that I'd find in Miller's groundbreaking tale the same satisfaction I got from reading the best sf novels. He was so right.

Give Me Liberty is the story of Martha Washington, a kid from a futuristic version of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green projects, simply called "The Green," who joins the US Army in order to escape from poverty. Martha finds herself serving in the army of a country locked in a death-spiral, plagued by political assassination, partisan division, secessionists, cynical corporatism... Her military education becomes a political education and on the way, Miller and Gibbons impart a raging, angry story about corruption and injustice, paced so relentlessly that I found myself buying the single issues between the collections and re-reading them looking for clues as to what might come next.

Miller created Give Me Liberty for Dark Horse after he jumped ship from DC, for whom he had made a fortune with his noir Batman: Dark Knight books, which changed the field forever. DC loved what Miller had done, but they wanted to impose restrictions on his creativity intended to assuage blue-noses who were worried that comics might corrupt the kiddees. Miller told them to pound sand and went to Dark Horse and created this remarkable story, which prefigures some of the best sf comics written since, including Ellis's brilliant Transmetropolitan and Brian Wood's fantastic DMZ.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century is the perfect way to revisit that remarkable story or to discover it for the first time. A giant, heavy, high-quality book, it is made for a lazy afternoon on the sofa or the carpet, devouring the whole Martha Washington canon (along with sketches, notes and other assorted nice bits). It'd be a fine (and potentially life-changing -- see above) gift, and makes for a very satisfying indulgence, too.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century

Reminder! Tonight's the launch for my latest novel Makers at Forbidden Planet London from 6-7. Forbidden Planet's happy to take your pre-orders for inscribed copies if you can't make it, and they'll cheerfully ship 'em wherever you are.

Forbidden Planet Megastore: Cory Doctorow signing Makers

If you live in Canada or the US, click below for more info:

Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google's collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game:

The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D (via Futurismic)

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great.

I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration).

There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Mighty is my w00t!

Makers

Boing Boing reader Greg Zilm sent in this photograph of a fine pumpkin homage to William S. Burroughs.

Update: Confirmed, the couple were captured. Their boat is believed to have been spotted.

A British couple in their mid-fifties who pretty much live their lives sailing around the world on their boat, "The Lynn Rival," are feared to have been captured by Somali pirates. Above, a screengrab from the blog Paul and Rachel Chandler maintained throughout their travels (blog.mailasail.com/lynnrival). The "thumbtack" icon shows the last spot they registered online before disappearing a few days ago while traveling waters off the coast of East Africa.

More on their story in the New York Times, and the UK Times.

"Before the fanny packs and Andrea Bocelli concerts, your parents (and grandparents) were once free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super awesome."

myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com [via Dangerous Minds, thanks Tara McGinley!]