We’re back. It looks like yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA protest got some attention and, hopefully, made enough waves to get the right people thinking in the right way. For once.
At the very least, it gave me a chance to play in the #FactsWithoutWikipedia game for a while, producing gems such as these…
In a few minutes, you won’t be able to read this website.
Like so many others, I’m joining the blackout on January 18th to protest the SOPA/PIPA legislation being considered by the US Congress.
If you don’t know what SOPA or PIPA are, let me summarize: SOPA and PIPA are ill-conceived, poorly drafted legislation created by people who readily admit their ignorance of the very technologies they are attempting to control.
Better yet, watch this…
No matter your politics, faith, ethnicity, or social class, you care about this.
I know you do because you are on the Internet right now.
You look at websites. You read blogs. You watch videos. You connect with friends on Facebook and Twitter. You read the news. You listen to music and read books. You do research. You buy stuff.
This legislation has the likely potential to dramatically, negatively impact how all of those things function. It has the potential to ruin everything that makes the Internet what it is.
This isn’t hysteria, this isn’t some crackpot fringe conspiracy theory.
Get the facts, take a look at who stands in opposition. And don’t forget to contact your representatives to make sure your voice is heard.
“I think what weird fiction tries to do, it’s unsettle you to some degree. But it also wants to make the world bigger than you ever thought it was, or could be.”
From a great interview with Stephen Graham Jones over at Weird Fiction Review.
…I suppose there’s a little bit of shame there.
First off, Lulu is having a sale between now and the end of the month. You can order any of my books at 25% off. Which isn’t half-bad, if you stop to think about it. It’s perhaps only a quarter bad. Or good. One of those.
Just use coupon code LULUBOOK305 at checkout.
And this review of Assam & Darjeeling just showed up today over at GoodReads…
“You have to think well of an author who acknowledges his debts to Dante Alighieri and the Brothers Grimm. While it is true that “Assam and Darjeeling” is suffused with those literary spirits, not to mention L. Frank Baum, “Touched by an Angel,” and a Greek myth or two, the quest at its heart is also an original and perceptive look at relationships, especially relationships between brothers and sisters.”
Baum’s a comparison I’d not heard before. I don’t know that I measure up, but I sure do like it.
Read the rest of the review here.
“Almost four million children in the UK do not own a book, according to a report by the National Literacy Trust.
…Poorer children and boys were less likely to have books, it added.
…About a fifth of children said they had never been to a book shop or a library.”
This weekend it became clear to my wife and me that the baby a bigger bookshelf. Sophie isn’t even two yet. She’s just learned most of her letters. We read to her every day, every night. On her own, without any prompting, she will go to the shelf and take down books and look at them. Sometimes she’ll do this for almost an hour.
She’s been to bookstores. She’s been to comic book stores. She probably has almost one hundred books of her own. Also a handful of comics.
I don’t say this to highlight what wonderful parents she has. I just want to put some context in place around how surprised and horrified I was by this BBC News article about the ever-widening gap between children and books.
Books were my refuge and my world as a child. They still are. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that some children might not have any books available to them at all.
Naive. Sheltered. Privileged. Yes.
Guilty on all counts.
It’s obvious. I hadn’t thought about it before now, but if you’re poor, you’re not going to have fewer books. You might never have books.
I know there are good organizations out there, people who are dedicated to doing what they can to correct this. At least one of them will be getting some money from us this holiday season.
I’ll let you know who as soon as I know, so you can do the same.
I just watched this last night. It’s wicked funny and you get a very fun performance from that nice Mr. Neil Gaiman as well…
(And you can watch it for free on Hulu. Because technology is awesome.)
comicbookGRRRL has posted a full transcript of her interview with the extraordinary gentleman Alan Moore in which he waxes on all sorts of excellent topics, including his next novel “Jerusalem” which sounds fascinating…
“And at the same time as this I’ve been working upon my novel Jerusalem which is at the moment on a pretty spectacular chapter where I’ve got a massive four dimensional hallway up above the world that is only above one area of the world geographically but it is above it in every particular moment of time. So it’s this immense hallway, two miles wide, a mile high, and running down it is a naked old man with a naked 18 month old baby girl riding on his shoulders, and they’re running down the length of time and they are seeing the big freeze when the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Gulf Stream stops, and then a bit further on there’s a sort of a more jungly area, where presumably the warming of the planet has kind of counteracted the cooling down that would happen in these latitudes if the Gulf Stream were to stop, and you’ve got post-humans, genetically engineered to survive in a world with less food, and then after a few more thousand years of pounding down this corridor there’s no more people any more. And then you start to get mega-fauna that have come up from the drying oceans, giant squids that are using their bodies as basically digital televisions, using the pigment cells in their skin to mimic their surroundings, and land whales that look as if they’re part goat! Because I found out that apparently when whales came up on to land for the first time, the thing that they were closest to genetically was the goat. So I’ve got these horned whales with hooves, dragging themselves through these clearings, you know, towards the end of time.”
I just finished rereading Moore’s first novel Voice of the Fire. It’s easily one of the top five favorite books on my shelf. I cannot wait to get my hands on “Jerusalem”.
Read the whole interview here.
Believe it or not, this is research for the next book I write after I finish my next book.
(Also, in case you’re wondering what I want for Christmas. Hint.)
…a fellow in a dream told me “He who dies…” but I woke up before he could finish what he had to say.
Tonight I finally heard the end of that phrase thanks to Boardwalk Empire.
So there’s that.
(Best show on television, by the way.)
