Tag: cory doctorow

Ass over teakettle and a farewell to free ebooks

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About three weeks ago I had freak accident on my bicycle. My chain froze as I was pedalling up a hill. I went ass over teakettle and performed a lovely three-point faceplant in the weeds (2 hands + 1 face = 3 ), spraining eight fingers & two thumbs and bloodying up my left cheek, which led to two visits to the emergency room and one to my doctor who told me that much of the symptoms in my hand were coming from my neck, where CT scans revealed “moderate to severe arthritis.”

As I picked myself up off the ground, in shock at the gross betrayal of me by my insubordinate bicycle and angry at gravity, and with my hands hurting ferociously and tingling in equal measure, and later, after calling my daughter, who was off in our family’s only working car, to ask her to come drive me to the hospital, I realized that I was not Cory Doctorow. Even after my daughter had picked up my wife who took me to the emergency room at Martha’s Vineyard hospital & I had heavenly dilaudid pumping into my vein I still was not Cory.

I’m mostly all better now. I even rode my bike a lot yesterday, despite the heat, right down to the Tisbury Street Fair, where I served strawberry shortcake with the guys in the Firefighters Association. It’s been three weeks since my bike mishap & I’m still not Cory. Consequently, I’ve stopped giving my books away for free.
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BoingBoing reunited with its evil twin! — The Conclusion of Cory Doctorow’s visit with Wetmachine

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A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow, major-domo of House GeekZeitgeist, stopped by for a chat with Wetmechanics John and Gary. Earlier installments of our conversation can be found here and here.

Highlights from this episode:

  • Wetmachine is revealed as the evil twin of BoingBoing! (Or, in any event, its aspirations to same are revealed.)
  • Cory recapitulates how the seminal Clarion writer’s workshop was saved from extinction;
  • We explore the philosophical tug-o-war between the transhumanist and bioconservative impulses, touching on light subjects such as disabiliy rights and societal pressure to selectively abort “defective” fetuses in the post-Human-Genome-Project era.

You’ll get to hear Cory ignore my rambling introduction to my soon-to-be revealed novella The Pains as he paws Gary’s iAudio X5, the mp3 player used to record the interview. (Which, as Gary points out, is much more politically correct than a iPod, since it supports the open-sourced Ogg Vorbis audio format, and doesn’t contain any stinkin’ drm.)

Most tantalizing of all, you’ll get to hear Cory’s enthusiastic reponse to the killer illustrations from The Pains, soon to be appearing in a Wetmachine entry near you!

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Why your wetmachine page hasn't finished loading

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It’s because the server that hosts the little “linkbox” that normally sits on the right-hand side of the page is down.

I’ve been meaning to convert that app to a stand-alone “SOLO” app for some months now but I never seem to get around to it. I’ll take this as one more strong nudge in that direction. No time to do so this morning, however and alas, as I’m off to the airport soon with a ton of things to do first (including putting up the link to Part Three of our Cory Doctorow interview. . .).

But if you happen to be the Wetmachine webmaster and you’re reading this, feel free to comment out the linkblox. The server that hosted it got rooted on a php exploit and it may be down for a while.

The Realpolitic of Bits — More of Cory Doctorow’s conversation with Wetmachine

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As mentioned here, Cory Doctorow (“world’s most wired human” etc), recently spent an hour talking with me and wetmechanic Gary Gray. In part two of our talk you’ll hear Cory say, “what the mafia likes is high-margin goods” and “there is no more thankless job in the world than being the Pecksniff who tells people that what they want is bad.” He also waxes eloquent on: cathedrals after the Reformation: the collapse and possible restoration of the serendipitous market for books: the making of films suited to the economics of the internet, and more.

You’ll also get to hear me mumbling, muttering, interrupting myself, and being generally inaudible but nevertheless somehow compelling. As a bonus, Wetmachine fanboys and -girls (I know you’re out there!) who play close attention will even hear the legendary Gary making an observation about movies and symphonic music!

The book that I recommended to Cory was Illicit by Moises Naim. When I was referring to my own books, which you can find by looking to the left side of this entry, Acts of the Apostles is the first, more accessible book, and Cheap Complex Devices is the less accessible one that I wrote special just for you smart people. The book I have under development is called The Pains, and you’ll be hearing more about it soon.

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