- The very real problem of digital decay:
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?
There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]
- The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
- Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
- I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
- And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]:
various
Tuesday various
- Apparently Texas history has a liberal bias and needs to be fixed. This would be funny if these people weren’t responsible for teaching America’s children. As Mary Helen Berlanga (D-Corpus Christi) reportedly said, “Until we are ready to tell the truth about history, we don’t have a good history or social studies textbook.” [via]
- I’m not so sure about this Doctor Who alignment chart — is David Tennant’s Doctor really Chaotic Evil? — but it is interesting. [via]
- Peter Sagal on “How Many Writers Did it Take to Make The Fugitive?” Sometimes, too many cooks doesn’t spoil the broth.
- According to the Vatican’s Chief Exorcist, “the Devil is lurking at the heart of the Catholic Church.” [via]
- And finally, the street performers I see in the NY subway are never this interesting. (Though I did once see Chewbacca at Grand Central!)
Monday various
- How to use a semicolon [via]
- A Muppet Wicker Man [via]
- A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things [via]
- Why DRM Doesn’t Work [via]
- And finally, how can you not like a short-short story that starts “Some time after sharks took over the skies…“?
Wednesday various
- Juliette Wade on How much description?
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it’s relevant, describe. If it isn’t, don’t. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
I get a lot of stories for Kaleidotrope where I learn more about a character’s hair and eye color than a do about who they are or why they’re doing something. Most of the time, if it’s just window dressing, you can drop it. Writing isn’t a visual medium. You have the reader’s imagination to help you, and moreover will often have a less satisfying story if you don’t let it. [via]
- I really like Warren Ellis’ challenge to artists to redesign Superman…as if the artists had never heard of Superman. Some of the results are really interesting.
- Along a slightly similar route, the Hypothetical Library: “imaginary book covers designed for actual authors.” [via]
- And along a very slightly similar route, John Seavey imagines a universe in which only the first Star Wars movie is canonical.
- And finally, I just like this quote from Jonathan Carroll, so I’m posting it.
Tuesday various
- So Yoko Ono only okayed the Citroën car commercial to keep Lennon in the public conciousness? That’s good, because before this, I’m sure many people were thinking, “John Lennon? Who’s that?”
- Another from the fine line between irony and hypocrisy department: Sarah Palin Crossed Border for Canadian Health Care. Why does she hate America? [via]
- Having just recently rented or purchased some DVDs and Blu-Ray discs where this is a particular problem, I can totally get behind John Scalzi on this:
…if someone were to introduce legislation requiring home entertainment companies to have a “just play the damn movie†button at the start of every DVD, Blu-Ray or any other future movie-playing technology, I would call my Senators and representative every fifteen minutes until they voted “yes†on that bill.
- Charlie Stross on how books are made. [via]
- And finally, A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever [via]