Eh, heard all this before. Initially I'm pretty sure color and sound (and movies themselves) sold on the basis of gimmickry before they really took off as solid art forms in themselves. My point is that it's pretty premature to judge and most of this is the same sort of reactionary ranting that leads to guys like Murdock going on about how they prefer their news on dead trees and so on. 3D will come into its own, in time, that's all I'm saying. People need to stop freaking out that it isn't all Citizen Kane yet.
...that you youngsters are trying to add to my moving pictures? You already had to go and add sound to it, so I can hear all the yapping instead of the music, and now you want to add color? Damn it, I like me some intertitles. What's next? You'll try to add smell, or make it all Three-Dimensional or something, won't you? Or replace it all with something drawn by a com-PEW-ter. Get the hell away from my moving pictures, damn it. And GET OFF MY LAWN!!
Granted, they say it carries markers of having been lab-tampered, but that detecting the markers requires currently-unusual sophistication. Interesting, though.
I reviewed this guy and his lifestream idea back in 2004 (http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2004/08/10/scopeware/) and ultimately found myself pretty unimpressed. I mean, the core ideas are interesting but so patent-encumbered that it will be a decade before they are touchable, and the man himself holds some pretty irritating/intolerant views (cited a few in that post) that left a bad impression on the whole. Sad then, sad now.
I was presuming that it would be untouched simply because that's why people value typewriters from authors. Take one of those typewriters the submitter mentions, sand off all the keys so that they're evenly worn, take it back to factory state, and I doubt anyone would care about it. Same for a stripped laptop. Could be wrong, but I don't think I am.
I suppose you could do this if you never bothered to do any research. Personally, I find having the internet accessible while I am writing means I can easily look up technical details about something that I didn't anticipate needing to look up, and my writing is ultimately better for it. I suppose it depends on your personality and ability to concentrate, but I've never found it to be an issue.
Typically I write in OpenOffice.org and save to.odt and.rtf as well as doing a.pdf export at the end. I also tend to back everything up locally and on Gmail, which means I have easy access to an HTML conversion as well.
I was using Gmail drafts to keep ideas (so that I could access them from anywhere) backed up as well, but lately I've switched to Wave, which is incredibly useful for me since I can easily tweak them and move them into a proper writing program after they are somewhat more fleshed out.
I am a writer (or at least, I've written a couple of novels and a few hundred thousand spare words that are lying around waiting to be turned into novels, plus assorted other writing), and I have always written exclusively on a computer.
I should be clear that I'm not trying to compare myself with Stephenson or McCarthy; I'm fully in the amateur rank, but I would say that this is mostly a personal aesthetic thing. It's sort of related to the reverence people who hate "digital books" hold for paper copies; they'll give you loads of ultimately irrational excuses down to the smell of the paper as to why they prefer to read a "real book." I've been reading novels on a screen for years, and I've discovered that I quite like the ability to zoom in on small-font text or to hold thousands of books in the footprint of one on my desk (it's really a coffee table but shhh!).
Anyway, as for writing, it's like anything else on a computer. I don't think of it as "using a computer" - it's just a tool that lets me do what I want. Personally, I'd think that the ability to get a peek into how these guys organized their lives would be quite interesting (stumbling over their porn stashes, probably not so much, but undoubtedly revealing (hah!)). Think about all of the incidental stuff you could learn; art preferences (screensavers and so on), unfinished and aborted works, etc... I'd buy one from an author I liked, if I wasn't guaranteed to die poor by virtue of trying to be an artist myself.;)
...it seems to me that anyone intelligent enough to be particularly interested in chess wouldn't be overly enthusiastic about the possibility of brain damage over time from being struck in the head repeatedly. Concussions aren't funny. I mean, I'd hate to lose a game of chess to some 400-lb gorilla who got in a few lucky shots, and if you did this with any serious enthusiasm, your game of chess would almost certainly degrade over time.;)
I train in martial arts, but I avoid schools where being struck in the head is seen as a core part of training (I think MMA is fairly idiotic for this reason), and I think go is a much more interesting game overall. Combine go with something like a triathlon and I might find the idea more appealing as a mind-and-matter competition.
This article seems to imply that he "got rich" by investing, which is true but misleading. As far as I can tell, he made about a quarter of a million dollars in two months, and it was this capital that enabled him to play the stock game in the first place, since that ~six-fold increase means he invested at least $125,000 or so in order to get to a million (I'm not really sure what he has now, didn't bother watching the video and won't, but I'm guessing he has at least a million now or they wouldn't be calling it "riches"). He could have just as easily lost the money, in my opinion, this way.
Point is, if you don't have $100,000 to throw at the market (and possibly lose it all), it seems fairly intelligent to spend your free time making something you can sell to people, which the summary seems to be discouraging.
One of the most useful pixel art tools I've found so far is mtPaint - I did a lot of little isometric drawings for a game project I'm working on (e.g. this one of a park) entirely in this program. Far easier than using paint or a full-fledged image tool (although I did use GIMP for compositing layered tiles into final images at times).
Not everyone who is "college level" at that age is autistic. I passed the ACT exams at significantly higher-than-highschool-grad levels when I was 12, and my parents only held me out of university because they were afraid that I was too young to deal with the social aspects of it (code, more or less, for worrying that I'd have my pentecostal values corrupted by the evil liberal crowd that tends to frequent such places). They had no problems, though, letting me work "part-time" in their computer store, though, of course, starting about a year later when my dad opened one.:P
In any case, considering that one of his interests is martial arts, I think presuming that he has motor coordination issues is premature. I do agree, however, with a number of commenters who suggest that his "dislike" of video games is probably coming from adults around him who are pressuring him with notions that he shouldn't "waste" his time on such things.
Speaking from experience, I'm a bit torn on whether or not to be happy for him that his parents haven't held him back, or concerned for him that all of the exposure will cause him to have some sort of meltdown when he is a bit older (a scenario I consider pretty likely). It's pretty hard to go from being "kid genius" to "regular guy," which is pretty much the case as soon as you exit the academic world no matter how intelligent you are, since you are accustomed to people actually paying attention to what you say based on the merits of what you are saying and the novelty factor of hearing someone so young say "intelligent things," not how much money you have or how good you look. Like age differences, intelligence differences seem to look a bit less extreme when you get older, realistically, in pretty much all shallow social encounters, and only longer-term interactions with people tend to pull out the differences unless you are dealing with someone who really is suffering from some sort of ASD.
I don't entirely disagree with you. I take no offense at the implication that I lack masterful proficiency at creating art - although this is a separate conversation full of discussion about how much of the work of "polishing" content to make it appear "masterful" - from music to movies - is now done by individuals other than the actual content creators or originators of the ideas. This is another can of worms entirely, albeit a relevant one since it's unclear whether any one person can really be an "expert" anymore in the sense you seem to be implying.
I do think it's important to be careful not to overrate the importance of experts, though, because barring outright unbearably bad content, a lot of this becomes a matter of taste, as I implied in my original post. Much of today's most popular content both online and in traditional media has been created by people who were just messing around in their free time and who certainly haven't put 10,000 hours (a figure which, while it amuses me, is certainly not scientific) into content creation - in many cases, the creators are simply too young to have had that much free time, for one thing (university, full-time jobs, etc.)
Essentially the "old" system was a "chance" lottery, where publishers and producers took a chance on new artists fully expecting to take an actual financial loss on most of them while they hoped for a few superstars, and I don't really see that it was fundamentally superior or produced more "experts" than the internet has done so far. I think even if you look at successful artists in whatever medium as defined by the old system, you can see clear progression in skill in earlier works versus later ones, and I see no reason why you should expect anything else in the emerging new system.
I realize you're trolling, but to be clear, I didn't say you have to give your content away. I am saying that if it's priced outside of what your audience is willing to spend (something iTunes got right, it seems, while a lot of other people got it wrong) or somehow inconvenient (i.e. DRM), you can't expect them to just fork over the cash when there are a dozen other people itching to take your place in the provider chain and give them content for less.
This content is worth nothing without an audience, and our intention is to make it widely available - but at the right price, a price that rewards the labour of people who are producing those great works.
I like this line, because it sort of encapsulates the paradox of trying to force your audience to pay for content when they are pretty clearly demonstrating a willingness to either "steal" it or jump to other content that is provided for free if you make it at all expensive or inconvenient for them. Your content has no value without them, but you want to be able to screw them over at the same time, essentially. Seems like a pretty clear case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Now, granted, I'm only an amateur artist/writer/composer, but I am pretty content just to have the audience. As a thousand other small content creators have said on Slashdot in a thousand similar comments before, this notion that people are going to stop creating stuff just because they aren't getting paid for it is demonstrably false. A lot of us do it because it's fun, like fixing motorcycles or watching television is to other people. You can make some sort of argument that the existing system provides "valuable" gatekeeping and quality control if you want, but then you are getting into the murky waters of subjective tastes and preferences, not to mention the vested interest in not having to compete that the "established" artists and composers who are the membership of these societies possess.
The short of it is that the old business models just won't work anymore and these guys are kicking and screaming on the "artists'" side in the same way that the various publishing/distribution associations are. This guy points out himself that concerts and live broadcasts are still doing pretty well. These are clues about the sort of thing that have actual monetary value now; it will take more experimenting and time before new models are worked out and clear paths are found to monetizing content that does not require some sort of physical presence to experience.
I don't think anyone actually has all the answers yet. I have some friends who are semi-professional content creators (musicians, mostly) who are grappling with this more directly, and even they don't have all the answers, but they seem to be doing okay performing locally and giving away their recordings essentially as advertising to fill seats at gigs. For my part, I'll just keep making stuff and throwing it online. I figure if the audience gets big enough, I might be able to eventually do it full time, which is enough of a dream for me.
...QWERTY at work or using Windows on this dual-boot machine, or Dvorak when I'm using OSX. The reason I still type QWERTY on Windows is precisely the gaming thing - it gives enough trouble already that I mouse left-handed (some games have trouble with honoring mouse-button switches) and I'm usually not willing to fight with both the mouse thing and keyboard layouts on a regular basis.
That said, I can type either layout with more or less equal ability, both somewhere up around 100wpm, and it only takes a moment to "switch" between either layout if I need to for some reason (I have 3 keyboard layouts on every system I use - QWERTY, Dvorak, and a Russian Cyrillic layout - that I use now and have a hotkey switch assigned for, and touch-type them all). I find with any keyboard layout there is a 2-3 week period of initial pain and then it just gets slotted into my brain as something I can rely on with the same ease as anything else.
That said, I do agree with the GP - I make more mistakes with brackets and such on Dvorak when coding, and more "normal" typos when writing normal English text on QWERTY. Not enough to make me bother switching on a per-task basis, but enough to notice. As to which I prefer, Dvorak is much more comfortable, but I see some utility in changing up my typing patterns on a regular basis as I like to challenge my brain and I suspect it may be good for my wrists to change up the typing pattern once in a while. (Queue inevitable jokes about wrists..ah well.)
I think one of the more common misconceptions is that people who write large amounts necessarily want to do so by continuous speech recognition. I write novels in my spare time, not that I've really done anything of note yet, but point being, I can't imagine sitting there at 3am blabbering at my computer while my gf is trying to sleep. Some things are just more suited for keys, and one of those things, for me anyway, is writing large amounts of text. Not to mention that I typically write while listening to music, and I think trying to listen to music and talk at the same time would give me a headache. Typing and listening to music in the background doesn't really clash.
However, I think my hearing of the word was forever corrupted by the South Park episode where everyone was playing World of Warcraft.;) Worth watching if you haven't seen it, for chuckles.
Ah, I didn't bother to follow through on the link so presumed that he was talking about SMS (altho he does mention it in that followthrough link).
Anyway, my original point stands; stupid people may twitter about what underwear they're wearing on a given day, but more intelligent people will find more intelligent uses for it, and 140 bytes can be more useful that he is giving it credit for.
(I should mention, though, that I have neither a mobile phone or a twitter account. One day, maybe!)
Moreover, I have read more books since I got the internet than I did before, so that entire line of argument (oh, all information on teh internets are in 140-byte chunks, as he implies [yes, I know he's talking about SMS]) is misleading. You can find online versions of tons of novels and nonfiction materials legally (think Project Gutenberg, authors' websites, online publishers) or otherwise (underground scanned books, etc). And if you ever take a look in your library's reference section, a lot of reference books are just compilations of byte-sized (pun intended) chunks of information printed on dead trees that require manual searching/looking up. Think google but harder to use.
I don't see his arguments carrying a lot of weight; he's spouting off the latest FUD-fad and not actually thinking much about how people who weren't already stupid offline - that is, intelligent people - actually make use of this technology to enhance what they're capable of achieving/learning/etc.
That's all well and good, until you get on a sidewalk behind someone who is blowing smoke back in your face and you don't have a chance to pass them (happens a lot in the winter when there are snowbanks streetside and ice or buildings making them pretty damn narrow). In those circumstances, I fully sympathize with the gp. I've often been pretty damn irritated by it, especially considering the health implications. I move my ass past most people year-round, but I don't see why I should have to risk breaking an arm traversing ice to get around a smoker. I believe people should be 100% free to smoke...in their own homes, or in places where they don't blow smoke into the faces of non-smokers walking behind them. Keep it off the sidewalks and in places where you won't affect others' health.
...I didn't actually like American Gods. It just felt like there wasn't anything particularly new or interesting in the story that I haven't seen in territory covered by other writers like Douglas Adams , Tom Holt, etc. Maybe a bit 'darker' but I wouldn't say it made for better reading.
That said, I am still pleased that Gaiman is doing this. As a writer myself, I am all for people getting used to the idea that you can actually find books and stories to read online. Maybe if they like it (most will bitch about reading on a monitor, eye strain, etc - but it never bothered me!), they'll go hunting for more stuff and get around to reading my things someday. It's good for everyone who has any aspirations of being a writer when the successful guys help to change perceptions about how reading should be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, heard all this before. Initially I'm pretty sure color and sound (and movies themselves) sold on the basis of gimmickry before they really took off as solid art forms in themselves. My point is that it's pretty premature to judge and most of this is the same sort of reactionary ranting that leads to guys like Murdock going on about how they prefer their news on dead trees and so on. 3D will come into its own, in time, that's all I'm saying. People need to stop freaking out that it isn't all Citizen Kane yet.
...that you youngsters are trying to add to my moving pictures? You already had to go and add sound to it, so I can hear all the yapping instead of the music, and now you want to add color? Damn it, I like me some intertitles. What's next? You'll try to add smell, or make it all Three-Dimensional or something, won't you? Or replace it all with something drawn by a com-PEW-ter. Get the hell away from my moving pictures, damn it. And GET OFF MY LAWN!!
You can see this on their website: http://www.icontrolpad.com/
Looks like the posts date back to May 2008.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/dna-samples-used-by-crime-labs-faked-in-research-lab.ars
Granted, they say it carries markers of having been lab-tampered, but that detecting the markers requires currently-unusual sophistication. Interesting, though.
I reviewed this guy and his lifestream idea back in 2004 (http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2004/08/10/scopeware/) and ultimately found myself pretty unimpressed. I mean, the core ideas are interesting but so patent-encumbered that it will be a decade before they are touchable, and the man himself holds some pretty irritating/intolerant views (cited a few in that post) that left a bad impression on the whole. Sad then, sad now.
I was presuming that it would be untouched simply because that's why people value typewriters from authors. Take one of those typewriters the submitter mentions, sand off all the keys so that they're evenly worn, take it back to factory state, and I doubt anyone would care about it. Same for a stripped laptop. Could be wrong, but I don't think I am.
I suppose you could do this if you never bothered to do any research. Personally, I find having the internet accessible while I am writing means I can easily look up technical details about something that I didn't anticipate needing to look up, and my writing is ultimately better for it. I suppose it depends on your personality and ability to concentrate, but I've never found it to be an issue.
Sorry, I missed this last night.:)
Typically I write in OpenOffice.org and save to .odt and .rtf as well as doing a .pdf export at the end. I also tend to back everything up locally and on Gmail, which means I have easy access to an HTML conversion as well.
I was using Gmail drafts to keep ideas (so that I could access them from anywhere) backed up as well, but lately I've switched to Wave, which is incredibly useful for me since I can easily tweak them and move them into a proper writing program after they are somewhat more fleshed out.
I am a writer (or at least, I've written a couple of novels and a few hundred thousand spare words that are lying around waiting to be turned into novels, plus assorted other writing), and I have always written exclusively on a computer.
I should be clear that I'm not trying to compare myself with Stephenson or McCarthy; I'm fully in the amateur rank, but I would say that this is mostly a personal aesthetic thing. It's sort of related to the reverence people who hate "digital books" hold for paper copies; they'll give you loads of ultimately irrational excuses down to the smell of the paper as to why they prefer to read a "real book." I've been reading novels on a screen for years, and I've discovered that I quite like the ability to zoom in on small-font text or to hold thousands of books in the footprint of one on my desk (it's really a coffee table but shhh!).
Anyway, as for writing, it's like anything else on a computer. I don't think of it as "using a computer" - it's just a tool that lets me do what I want. Personally, I'd think that the ability to get a peek into how these guys organized their lives would be quite interesting (stumbling over their porn stashes, probably not so much, but undoubtedly revealing (hah!)). Think about all of the incidental stuff you could learn; art preferences (screensavers and so on), unfinished and aborted works, etc... I'd buy one from an author I liked, if I wasn't guaranteed to die poor by virtue of trying to be an artist myself. ;)
...it seems to me that anyone intelligent enough to be particularly interested in chess wouldn't be overly enthusiastic about the possibility of brain damage over time from being struck in the head repeatedly. Concussions aren't funny. I mean, I'd hate to lose a game of chess to some 400-lb gorilla who got in a few lucky shots, and if you did this with any serious enthusiasm, your game of chess would almost certainly degrade over time.;)
I train in martial arts, but I avoid schools where being struck in the head is seen as a core part of training (I think MMA is fairly idiotic for this reason), and I think go is a much more interesting game overall. Combine go with something like a triathlon and I might find the idea more appealing as a mind-and-matter competition.
This article seems to imply that he "got rich" by investing, which is true but misleading. As far as I can tell, he made about a quarter of a million dollars in two months, and it was this capital that enabled him to play the stock game in the first place, since that ~six-fold increase means he invested at least $125,000 or so in order to get to a million (I'm not really sure what he has now, didn't bother watching the video and won't, but I'm guessing he has at least a million now or they wouldn't be calling it "riches"). He could have just as easily lost the money, in my opinion, this way.
Point is, if you don't have $100,000 to throw at the market (and possibly lose it all), it seems fairly intelligent to spend your free time making something you can sell to people, which the summary seems to be discouraging.
One of the most useful pixel art tools I've found so far is mtPaint - I did a lot of little isometric drawings for a game project I'm working on (e.g. this one of a park) entirely in this program. Far easier than using paint or a full-fledged image tool (although I did use GIMP for compositing layered tiles into final images at times).
Not everyone who is "college level" at that age is autistic. I passed the ACT exams at significantly higher-than-highschool-grad levels when I was 12, and my parents only held me out of university because they were afraid that I was too young to deal with the social aspects of it (code, more or less, for worrying that I'd have my pentecostal values corrupted by the evil liberal crowd that tends to frequent such places). They had no problems, though, letting me work "part-time" in their computer store, though, of course, starting about a year later when my dad opened one.:P
In any case, considering that one of his interests is martial arts, I think presuming that he has motor coordination issues is premature. I do agree, however, with a number of commenters who suggest that his "dislike" of video games is probably coming from adults around him who are pressuring him with notions that he shouldn't "waste" his time on such things.
Speaking from experience, I'm a bit torn on whether or not to be happy for him that his parents haven't held him back, or concerned for him that all of the exposure will cause him to have some sort of meltdown when he is a bit older (a scenario I consider pretty likely). It's pretty hard to go from being "kid genius" to "regular guy," which is pretty much the case as soon as you exit the academic world no matter how intelligent you are, since you are accustomed to people actually paying attention to what you say based on the merits of what you are saying and the novelty factor of hearing someone so young say "intelligent things," not how much money you have or how good you look. Like age differences, intelligence differences seem to look a bit less extreme when you get older, realistically, in pretty much all shallow social encounters, and only longer-term interactions with people tend to pull out the differences unless you are dealing with someone who really is suffering from some sort of ASD.
I don't entirely disagree with you. I take no offense at the implication that I lack masterful proficiency at creating art - although this is a separate conversation full of discussion about how much of the work of "polishing" content to make it appear "masterful" - from music to movies - is now done by individuals other than the actual content creators or originators of the ideas. This is another can of worms entirely, albeit a relevant one since it's unclear whether any one person can really be an "expert" anymore in the sense you seem to be implying.
I do think it's important to be careful not to overrate the importance of experts, though, because barring outright unbearably bad content, a lot of this becomes a matter of taste, as I implied in my original post. Much of today's most popular content both online and in traditional media has been created by people who were just messing around in their free time and who certainly haven't put 10,000 hours (a figure which, while it amuses me, is certainly not scientific) into content creation - in many cases, the creators are simply too young to have had that much free time, for one thing (university, full-time jobs, etc.)
Essentially the "old" system was a "chance" lottery, where publishers and producers took a chance on new artists fully expecting to take an actual financial loss on most of them while they hoped for a few superstars, and I don't really see that it was fundamentally superior or produced more "experts" than the internet has done so far. I think even if you look at successful artists in whatever medium as defined by the old system, you can see clear progression in skill in earlier works versus later ones, and I see no reason why you should expect anything else in the emerging new system.
Just my two cents, anyway.:)
I realize you're trolling, but to be clear, I didn't say you have to give your content away. I am saying that if it's priced outside of what your audience is willing to spend (something iTunes got right, it seems, while a lot of other people got it wrong) or somehow inconvenient (i.e. DRM), you can't expect them to just fork over the cash when there are a dozen other people itching to take your place in the provider chain and give them content for less.
This content is worth nothing without an audience, and our intention is to make it widely available - but at the right price, a price that rewards the labour of people who are producing those great works.
I like this line, because it sort of encapsulates the paradox of trying to force your audience to pay for content when they are pretty clearly demonstrating a willingness to either "steal" it or jump to other content that is provided for free if you make it at all expensive or inconvenient for them. Your content has no value without them, but you want to be able to screw them over at the same time, essentially. Seems like a pretty clear case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Now, granted, I'm only an amateur artist/writer/composer, but I am pretty content just to have the audience. As a thousand other small content creators have said on Slashdot in a thousand similar comments before, this notion that people are going to stop creating stuff just because they aren't getting paid for it is demonstrably false. A lot of us do it because it's fun, like fixing motorcycles or watching television is to other people. You can make some sort of argument that the existing system provides "valuable" gatekeeping and quality control if you want, but then you are getting into the murky waters of subjective tastes and preferences, not to mention the vested interest in not having to compete that the "established" artists and composers who are the membership of these societies possess.
The short of it is that the old business models just won't work anymore and these guys are kicking and screaming on the "artists'" side in the same way that the various publishing/distribution associations are. This guy points out himself that concerts and live broadcasts are still doing pretty well. These are clues about the sort of thing that have actual monetary value now; it will take more experimenting and time before new models are worked out and clear paths are found to monetizing content that does not require some sort of physical presence to experience.
I don't think anyone actually has all the answers yet. I have some friends who are semi-professional content creators (musicians, mostly) who are grappling with this more directly, and even they don't have all the answers, but they seem to be doing okay performing locally and giving away their recordings essentially as advertising to fill seats at gigs. For my part, I'll just keep making stuff and throwing it online. I figure if the audience gets big enough, I might be able to eventually do it full time, which is enough of a dream for me.
...QWERTY at work or using Windows on this dual-boot machine, or Dvorak when I'm using OSX. The reason I still type QWERTY on Windows is precisely the gaming thing - it gives enough trouble already that I mouse left-handed (some games have trouble with honoring mouse-button switches) and I'm usually not willing to fight with both the mouse thing and keyboard layouts on a regular basis.
That said, I can type either layout with more or less equal ability, both somewhere up around 100wpm, and it only takes a moment to "switch" between either layout if I need to for some reason (I have 3 keyboard layouts on every system I use - QWERTY, Dvorak, and a Russian Cyrillic layout - that I use now and have a hotkey switch assigned for, and touch-type them all). I find with any keyboard layout there is a 2-3 week period of initial pain and then it just gets slotted into my brain as something I can rely on with the same ease as anything else.
That said, I do agree with the GP - I make more mistakes with brackets and such on Dvorak when coding, and more "normal" typos when writing normal English text on QWERTY. Not enough to make me bother switching on a per-task basis, but enough to notice. As to which I prefer, Dvorak is much more comfortable, but I see some utility in changing up my typing patterns on a regular basis as I like to challenge my brain and I suspect it may be good for my wrists to change up the typing pattern once in a while. (Queue inevitable jokes about wrists..ah well.)
I think one of the more common misconceptions is that people who write large amounts necessarily want to do so by continuous speech recognition. I write novels in my spare time, not that I've really done anything of note yet, but point being, I can't imagine sitting there at 3am blabbering at my computer while my gf is trying to sleep. Some things are just more suited for keys, and one of those things, for me anyway, is writing large amounts of text. Not to mention that I typically write while listening to music, and I think trying to listen to music and talk at the same time would give me a headache. Typing and listening to music in the background doesn't really clash.
Oh, I used to hear it your way.
However, I think my hearing of the word was forever corrupted by the South Park episode where everyone was playing World of Warcraft.;) Worth watching if you haven't seen it, for chuckles.
OMG PWNIESS!!!
Ah, I didn't bother to follow through on the link so presumed that he was talking about SMS (altho he does mention it in that followthrough link).
Anyway, my original point stands; stupid people may twitter about what underwear they're wearing on a given day, but more intelligent people will find more intelligent uses for it, and 140 bytes can be more useful that he is giving it credit for.
(I should mention, though, that I have neither a mobile phone or a twitter account. One day, maybe!)
I agree.
Moreover, I have read more books since I got the internet than I did before, so that entire line of argument (oh, all information on teh internets are in 140-byte chunks, as he implies [yes, I know he's talking about SMS]) is misleading. You can find online versions of tons of novels and nonfiction materials legally (think Project Gutenberg, authors' websites, online publishers) or otherwise (underground scanned books, etc). And if you ever take a look in your library's reference section, a lot of reference books are just compilations of byte-sized (pun intended) chunks of information printed on dead trees that require manual searching/looking up. Think google but harder to use.
I don't see his arguments carrying a lot of weight; he's spouting off the latest FUD-fad and not actually thinking much about how people who weren't already stupid offline - that is, intelligent people - actually make use of this technology to enhance what they're capable of achieving/learning/etc.
i suppose we're going to split up into morlock and eloi too?
;)
You must have missed this.
That's all well and good, until you get on a sidewalk behind someone who is blowing smoke back in your face and you don't have a chance to pass them (happens a lot in the winter when there are snowbanks streetside and ice or buildings making them pretty damn narrow). In those circumstances, I fully sympathize with the gp. I've often been pretty damn irritated by it, especially considering the health implications. I move my ass past most people year-round, but I don't see why I should have to risk breaking an arm traversing ice to get around a smoker. I believe people should be 100% free to smoke...in their own homes, or in places where they don't blow smoke into the faces of non-smokers walking behind them. Keep it off the sidewalks and in places where you won't affect others' health.
...I didn't actually like American Gods. It just felt like there wasn't anything particularly new or interesting in the story that I haven't seen in territory covered by other writers like Douglas Adams , Tom Holt, etc. Maybe a bit 'darker' but I wouldn't say it made for better reading.
That said, I am still pleased that Gaiman is doing this. As a writer myself, I am all for people getting used to the idea that you can actually find books and stories to read online. Maybe if they like it (most will bitch about reading on a monitor, eye strain, etc - but it never bothered me!), they'll go hunting for more stuff and get around to reading my things someday. It's good for everyone who has any aspirations of being a writer when the successful guys help to change perceptions about how reading should be done.