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I didn't see any mention of Baen in the first most-of-a-page of comments, so I'll just mention they have a great free e-library and reasonably priced ebook program, as well as a science fiction e-magazine.

The other site I'd like to recommend is one to bookmark and check back every month or so: Alexandria Digital Literature, or AlexLit, used to have a truly marvelous collaborative filtering engine, where you'd tell it what books you like and dislike, and it would tell you what books you haven't already read that you're likely to enjoy. I found some of what are now my most favorite books that way. But the site is down right now and they promise a revised version "sometime in 2008." So keep checking it.

(I interviewed Dave Howell, the guy behind AlexLit, on one of the episodes of my Biblio File podcast.)

I'm going to be interviewing Phil & Kaja Foglio live this weekend about this very issue: why they decided to stop selling individual print issues of their Girl Genius comic book and turn it into a free webcomic to sell more trade paperbacks and hardcover collections. Call in with questions of your own.

I'm going to be interviewing Phil & Kaja Foglio live this weekend about this very issue: why they decided to stop selling individual print issues of their Girl Genius comic book and turn it into a free webcomic to sell more trade paperbacks and hardcover collections. Call in with questions of your own.

I will be interviewing Harmony Gold representative Kevin McKeever at 7:00 Eastern tonight about this and other new Robotech developments on my live talk podcast Space Station Liberty. Please call in with your questions!

G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

"You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."

I downloaded WengoPhone, gave it a whirl calling TalkShoe to log in. While it did call the SIP address just fine, unfortunately the dialer didn't generate the proper touch tones.

Which means it's not going to be useful to me. Pity.

As a group of con attendees I was with headed over to the nearby Ram brewpub for dinner, we were mildly startled to see that Privateer Press had redone the front page of their menu for them.

Tarrasque burgers. Yummy.

I was mainly there for the Robotech panels, having to do with the upcoming Shadow Chronicles movie. Had a hell of a time, wrote about it here.

Don't forget you can use ShareCrow to sync these commentaries easily if you have a Windows machine that uses compatible DVD player software.

(And check Commentary Central for a bunch of freebie alternate commentary tracks, including my own for Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro ...)

Just to note, the blurb suggests that Sharecrow's site is providing the commentaries. While it does aggregate links to a bunch of different commentary sites, the main place where aspiring commentators can have their commentaries hosted (first one is hosted free, others have a small fee--or you can link to files hosted elsewhere for free) is Commentary Central. This replaces the defunct DVDTracks site that Slashdot covered previously, which went defunct several years ago.

I'd also like to plug the commentary track that I myself recorded, for the Hayao Miyazaki film Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (which is getting a new special-edition DVD release from Mangled Video via Anchor Bay in just a couple of months, by the way--too bad it won't include my commentary!). I've continued to update and correct this commentary over the last few months, and it's grown into something I'm really proud of. Any comments on my commentary would be well-received...

In spite of this being an author who is (apparently) pro-ebooks, you can't find much of [Scalzi's] published work in that format.

You will soon. Scalzi's stuff will be included in Tor's move to Webscriptions.

We've tested a lot of e-book waters, including various cockamamie schemes involving overpriced e-books laden with DRM.

Oddly enough, a lot of those "books" didn't even sell enough copies to pay for their file-conversion costs. Meanwhile, it hasn't escaped our notice that Jim Baen has been doing something that works, that people like, and that makes money. I'm delighted to be doing this pilot program; I think Jim has been clueful on this issue for a long time, while almost everyone else in publishing has been staggering around on stage hitting one another over the head with inflated pig bladders.

It would have been nice to have A Fire Upon the Deep in open HTML like Baen's e-books, but it is understandable that Dr. Vinge (or his publisher) might have preferred for the book to be digitally protected. Since that is unlikely to change anytime soon, there is little point to letting the perfect be the enemy of the good; as digitally-protected e-book formats go, the PDM format is actually quite decent.

It's funny how history repeats itself. Last time this happened, in the 1950s-60s, the cinemas were losing viewers to that new-fangled TV contraption, especially after it got color. So they tried all sorts of gimmicks to get people to come out to the theaters. About the only one that stayed around was widescreen, though "Sensurround" might be considered an ancestor of the multi-channel Dolby and DTS sound systems that were another advantage the theaters had over home video...until home video got them too.

I wonder what new gimmicks will come out of this new panic. Universal digital cinema, perhaps? Will Hollywood finally surrender and start releasing movies simultaneously to cable, home video, and cinema? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

...as Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads would put it.

It's funny how the more things change, the more things stay the same. As I wrote in my journal, this is just the latest iteration of a problem that's dogged the movies ever since TV first came into its own in the '50s or thereabouts.

Back then, the ready availability of content, including old movies, on their TV screens was inducing people to stay at home more. So Hollywood tried every new gimmick to come down the pipe to try to pull those damned TV-watchers out of their homes and back to the movies--everything from three different kinds of widescreen, to 3D, to Smell-o-Vision, to Sensurround. Of those gimmicks, the wider screen is the only one that's really stood the test of time.

And now it's deja vu all over again...and filmmaker/entrepreneurs like Lucas, Rodriguez, and Cuban are trying more gimmicks--digital projection, simultaneous release to cinema, cable, and video...and even dragging the hoary old ghost of 3D back out of the closet again.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

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you mean minerva?
http://terrania.us/minerva/#whominerva

oh- she's a car... right.. sorry- nevermind

...has been posted to my journal, for what it's worth.

...I'm going to take this chance to plug the DVDTracks audio commentary I did for Cagliostro, inspired by a Slashdot story about the site. (As well as the journal entry I wrote recently describing how I put it all together.) I did a good enough job with it that a representative from a movie company considering making a live-action Lupin III contacted me and asked if I would serve as a consultant. (I never heard anything back from them afterward, though, and that was a couple of years ago.)

...I've just written a really lengthy entry in my essay journal going into the whole matter at great length, pulling in quotes and article citations from here and there and discussing the implications.

Okay, so I'm a self-promoter. But hey, I put some good time and effort into writing it, and I'm proud of my work.

MMORPG players have been paying it for years. I gather there are even MMORPGs out there, such as Second Life, where the whole point of the game is to pay real money for virtual goods. This is just stripping that down to a single-person world is all.

The news actually came out via BoingBoing over a week ago...I wrote about it in my essay journal.

Have a Coke and a Smile...Or Else