Month: September 2011

Chrysalis is now on the Nook

Barnes & Noble finally accepted that my tax ID was legit, and Chrysalis is now available on the Nook. And it remains available on the Kindle, if that’s your poison.

Now I suppose I have to go out and find some way to market this thing, eh? Not to mention finishing another book–which is so close I can taste it. And it tastes a lot like stale cigarettes, so I’d like to be done with it already.

What will the ruins of Facebook look like?

Just read a rather interesting article, The Ruins of Dead Social Networks. It brought back memories of sitting in my college dorm, searching through text file lists of BBS’s and dialing them up on a screechy 2400 baud modem to see what they had. Mostly, I was downloading files. Though there was socializing in those days as well, my virtual social life was spent on the larger national pay services. My “social networks,” in the current sense, were on GEnie (where a lot of science fiction authors hung out before the internet was the web & where some little known SF and TV writer announced “That Which Cannot Be Named”–later revealed to be Babylon 5) and, even further back, in high school, on the Commodore 64 network, QLink. I still remember when there was a mass exodus from GEnie to that new upstart (and supposedly much better) America Online, before they became merely an abbreviation, AOL.

Ah, nostalgia.

From the above article, here’s a link to someone who is trying to archive a lot of the old text files from the BBS days: Textfiles.com. Though I wasn’t directly involved in that scene, it still brings a twinge of vicarious nostalgia.

I guess if you’re looking for a moral, it’s just this: don’t get too attached to your Facebooks and your Twitters. Maybe they have reached a critical mass that makes them too big to fail. But the ruins of social networks littering the past suggests their time is limited.

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Video Games don’t kill people…

Don’t study the video game, study the player

No kidding. It’s nice to see research catching up to common sense.

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The Con Funk

The cruise was wonderful, and I had a really great Dragon*Con. Both recharged my creativity, and I was raring to go… until Monday afternoon when I had to drive home from Atlanta. A normally four hour drive turned into seven hours of hell, with pouring rain and a headache that would not stop. And now, the weather has turned cold and with it I’ve come down with my usual sore throat. Dunno what the science is behind it, but any change in the outdoor temperature, from cold to hot or vise versa tends to aggravate my sinuses and thus my throat. So not really suffering from post-con funk or ennui this year, but my body is having a non-essential inflammatory response anyway…

Which is all a long way of saying: I was planning on updating this blog fairly regularly from now on, but it’s gonna have to wait a bit longer. At least for anything substantive.

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