Is anything in my life tweetable?
Do I really need another on-line forum for airing my opinions and brain farts?
The only way to know is to give it a go.
Hey, that would make a good T-Shirt!
The only way to know is to give it a go.
Maybe done in some bubbly hippy font and a smiley face at the end.
Gee, you can tell I've had a few days off and wound right down. Anyway, I'm on the Twitter, it is part of the interwebs. If anyone can tell me how to drive it, that would be swell. I think my phone needs a different thingo to be able to talk to it. As usual, look for me as orbitaltorch and say hai, I love that.
We had a GIGANTIC storm a few days ago - sheet lightening, Thor stamping about the place, rumbly thunder to move the foundations, flooding rains, wind to tear the atmo off. It was brilliant. Went for hours and took the power intermittently. I live on top of a hill and my street flooded to about knee height (so just above most people's ankles-ish) so there was a lot of water around. I loved it, and I loved that it cooled everything down by at least 10 degrees for the next few days and we've been back to mid 20s temps, and now everything is green and growing manically to catch up. There's even cool breezes! Oh how pleasant life can be when the physical world is not trying to scald you off the face of the planet.
I stood outside for a while after the bulk of the terrifying bit had passed and took some video on my phone so I would have a sound file of the rain and the frogs going all poly rhythmic gamelan style. Later in the summer if it goes all dry again I will have 45 precious seconds of proof that water can and does sometimes fall freely from the sky. Folk wisdom says that we'll have a wet season this summer. Why? I've heard everything from the large number of flies, ants in the house, 3 dust storms equals a wet season ahead, and my favourite of all, my mother's trick foot. Yes, her barometrically sensitive foot has been aching. It is accurate slightly more often than the meteorologists, but I'm not going to buy another lemon tree just yet!
The weather aside, I baked a banana cake* last night as a house warming gift for Sister2 and her partner who have moved into their dream(ish) home this weekend. I doubled the recipe, thinking that would make for a nice generously sized cake. Kindof an innocent thing to do but the outcome is a monster. I did not think through the fact that getting the larger sized spring based pan and then doubling recipes would result in a cake too large to fit on any plate, serving platter or tray that I have. If I could handle it safely, I would weigh it just to satisfy my curiosity but I am loathe to put it under any further structural strain than just sitting there, being a presentation problem. Hmmm. At least I know it fits on the base of the pan it was cooked in. That will be my back-up position. It is tall too, nearly 7 cm by what I can judge. Holy giant cakes Batman!
I was hoping that it would be a short-lived problem, that we'd be tucking into the moist banana-ry deliciousness of it for morning tea today. But no. They are inconveniently busy with cleaning the old house. I will have to wait the endless hours until afternoon tea. The cake is implacable. It knows it must be gifted whole. My mouth is uncontrollably watering in anticipation. Oh Caped Crusader, if only I had made a little muffin from just some of it!
BTW, while I've been telling you about the cake, twitter has told me about the new Cory Doctorow novel 'Makers' that's out. Happy Happy!
Make cakes people, and be happy.
The only way to know is to give it a go.
*I used the recipe from "Women's Weekly: Old - Fashioned Favourites" which I can recommend heartily to anyone with a sweet tooth and a preference for simple classic dishes. Easily found in good newsagents and occasionally even in the supermarket.
Showing posts with label Cory Doctorow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cory Doctorow. Show all posts
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Cory Doctorow Speaks Sense at Melb Writers' Fest
In a session called "Free and Easy" Cory Doctorow did his best to share his knowledge and insights to a motivated and interested audience through the obstacles of Charles Firth's ignorance and bull-headedness. There was also an annoying woman MC who added no value to the proceedings (sorry whoever you are, but you should have just given the man the stage and stayed out of the way) particularly given that the topic was about copyright, reproduction and making a living in the digital age.
I'll own up right away - I haven't read anything about him or by him. I didn't know he had his own wiki page (which he does) I just knew that I'd shelved his books a *lot* at kino and here he would be talking about making a living but giving away copies of his books for free on-line. It's true - they're available under the creative commons right there at the bottom of his wiki entry.
The Melb WritFest (MWF now, ok) have this weird thing going where they charge you to go to nearly any session!? What the!? When you've flown 2000kloms to get to it, and then had a closer look at the fine print, this feels like a rude shock. I know $20 isn't much in the context of the flight and travel costs and everything, but it seemed weird on principle. Having said that, if I could have paid more to just get an hour of download & QA from Cory (sans the interruptions) it would have re-wired my brain.
Enough gum flapping.
(there's a lot of paraphrasing here - my notes are shot, don't blame him for any crappy expression.)
He opened with a short take on the information economy - what is it really - in little ways it's people finding a plumber on google, or using a satnav to find the airport, or Facebook to choose a restaurant. These are the meaningful, personal ways that the information economy has started to become a reality. Reality is always messier than the theory expects it will be. Bits of stuff have value and cost cash but bytes of stuff flow around protection. Pirated movies anybody? The economy for a while (about 70 years) has been predicated on controlling the copies and being able to sell them, and as we all know, this system is flailing about right now. Cory drew an interesting line to the resurgence of the vaudeville model - where the "charismatic" performer takes the stage and access to the event is controlled and a dollar is charged at the door. Those same people who about 70 years ago got told to stop touring and produce records - which would do all the touring for them. (I hope he got a decent cut of the $20 I paid to see him then!).
Creative types still need to put bread in the toaster and kibble in the bowl - so what is there to sustain them if all the copies are free?
How does the rent get paid?!
Well, for Cory Doctorow, the rent gets paid for by (leaving other speculations aside) people buying copies of his books. People buying copies of the same books that are available for free on the web. Free books with no encryption, no time-outs, no dodgy sample chapter set up. Whole texts. Buying, with actual cash.
Here's how this works in his own words:
"Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales." (Read the whole article).
Anyone who's worked in sales or a bookstore or ever just been honest about their own buying habits is going to get that line of reasoning right away. Charles Firth didn't. (That's the last time I'll mention him. No need for my pain to be your pain).
But we're in SF world. A *special* world.
Cory again (from the same Forbes article)
"How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import."
Yeah! But what about books that aren't SF? What do you with your future-dude glasses see for the daggy, non SF writers and this on-line world. I love SF, but my attempts to write it have always been lame. I can write other stuff though - how can I pay the rent? Google ads? Is that my best option?
The long tail takes a long time - I'd like to earn some money in my lifetime. Sure, the value (be that entertainment, education, whatever) of the work is the longer-term purpose, but the day to day of spending my hours toiling in a job for someone else is the issue.
I think that was going to be his next point though ... that the long tail does take a long time (the great enemy is obscurity) and that free distribution escalates finding your audience. It also begins to create a market for you the writer. Yeah you. What is writing after all but one of the ways that you put your thoughts into an order and have them tussle each other? You'll have to deal with the idea that your writing might lead you to blogging, or talking or teaching or being interviewed by Forbes Magazine.
The session kinda deteriorated towards the end, but apart from the content that I have tried to capture pretty faithfully above, the best thing I got out of this was inspiration. I sat afterwards and watched probably 20 people line up and buy one (or more) of his books and get them signed. Ka-Ching! But we all know how lush it is to hold a book, and feel the grain of the paper, and when you've stood in the line and had it signed - well - it's special. Even for the person who eventually buys it on Ebay.
We buy the books we love - that's the new model. I expect the luxe-model Hardcover to emerge soon and be a hit - but only for titles that have proved themselves in the tail. Remember how gob-smacked we were when DaVinci Code came out - after 4 years in the large format illustrated hardcover - and had another spike?! Well that's a taste of things to come.
Books that earn their chops will find a place on the shelf rather than the harddrive.
It was inspiring because he was totally credible. This wasn't some suit-monkey sprouting shit from an online MBA. Authentic reporting from the frontline. I'm grateful to him for kicking me over into thinking about my own life and my own creativity within the context of post-scarcity economics.
In short then, a really great session. Plus, I was so wired from it that I got talking to someone else from the session (Melbourne is so friendly, in Sydney she would have called security) and learnt a whole lot more again. Hopefully as I return into this mundane orbit, loads of it will stay with me and the dream will keep breathing.
I'll own up right away - I haven't read anything about him or by him. I didn't know he had his own wiki page (which he does) I just knew that I'd shelved his books a *lot* at kino and here he would be talking about making a living but giving away copies of his books for free on-line. It's true - they're available under the creative commons right there at the bottom of his wiki entry.
The Melb WritFest (MWF now, ok) have this weird thing going where they charge you to go to nearly any session!? What the!? When you've flown 2000kloms to get to it, and then had a closer look at the fine print, this feels like a rude shock. I know $20 isn't much in the context of the flight and travel costs and everything, but it seemed weird on principle. Having said that, if I could have paid more to just get an hour of download & QA from Cory (sans the interruptions) it would have re-wired my brain.
Enough gum flapping.
(there's a lot of paraphrasing here - my notes are shot, don't blame him for any crappy expression.)
He opened with a short take on the information economy - what is it really - in little ways it's people finding a plumber on google, or using a satnav to find the airport, or Facebook to choose a restaurant. These are the meaningful, personal ways that the information economy has started to become a reality. Reality is always messier than the theory expects it will be. Bits of stuff have value and cost cash but bytes of stuff flow around protection. Pirated movies anybody? The economy for a while (about 70 years) has been predicated on controlling the copies and being able to sell them, and as we all know, this system is flailing about right now. Cory drew an interesting line to the resurgence of the vaudeville model - where the "charismatic" performer takes the stage and access to the event is controlled and a dollar is charged at the door. Those same people who about 70 years ago got told to stop touring and produce records - which would do all the touring for them. (I hope he got a decent cut of the $20 I paid to see him then!).
Creative types still need to put bread in the toaster and kibble in the bowl - so what is there to sustain them if all the copies are free?
How does the rent get paid?!
Well, for Cory Doctorow, the rent gets paid for by (leaving other speculations aside) people buying copies of his books. People buying copies of the same books that are available for free on the web. Free books with no encryption, no time-outs, no dodgy sample chapter set up. Whole texts. Buying, with actual cash.
Here's how this works in his own words:
"Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales." (Read the whole article).
Anyone who's worked in sales or a bookstore or ever just been honest about their own buying habits is going to get that line of reasoning right away. Charles Firth didn't. (That's the last time I'll mention him. No need for my pain to be your pain).
But we're in SF world. A *special* world.
Cory again (from the same Forbes article)
"How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import."
Yeah! But what about books that aren't SF? What do you with your future-dude glasses see for the daggy, non SF writers and this on-line world. I love SF, but my attempts to write it have always been lame. I can write other stuff though - how can I pay the rent? Google ads? Is that my best option?
The long tail takes a long time - I'd like to earn some money in my lifetime. Sure, the value (be that entertainment, education, whatever) of the work is the longer-term purpose, but the day to day of spending my hours toiling in a job for someone else is the issue.
I think that was going to be his next point though ... that the long tail does take a long time (the great enemy is obscurity) and that free distribution escalates finding your audience. It also begins to create a market for you the writer. Yeah you. What is writing after all but one of the ways that you put your thoughts into an order and have them tussle each other? You'll have to deal with the idea that your writing might lead you to blogging, or talking or teaching or being interviewed by Forbes Magazine.
The session kinda deteriorated towards the end, but apart from the content that I have tried to capture pretty faithfully above, the best thing I got out of this was inspiration. I sat afterwards and watched probably 20 people line up and buy one (or more) of his books and get them signed. Ka-Ching! But we all know how lush it is to hold a book, and feel the grain of the paper, and when you've stood in the line and had it signed - well - it's special. Even for the person who eventually buys it on Ebay.
We buy the books we love - that's the new model. I expect the luxe-model Hardcover to emerge soon and be a hit - but only for titles that have proved themselves in the tail. Remember how gob-smacked we were when DaVinci Code came out - after 4 years in the large format illustrated hardcover - and had another spike?! Well that's a taste of things to come.
Books that earn their chops will find a place on the shelf rather than the harddrive.
It was inspiring because he was totally credible. This wasn't some suit-monkey sprouting shit from an online MBA. Authentic reporting from the frontline. I'm grateful to him for kicking me over into thinking about my own life and my own creativity within the context of post-scarcity economics.
In short then, a really great session. Plus, I was so wired from it that I got talking to someone else from the session (Melbourne is so friendly, in Sydney she would have called security) and learnt a whole lot more again. Hopefully as I return into this mundane orbit, loads of it will stay with me and the dream will keep breathing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)