A Byte of Python which is nicely available free.

The House of the Scorpion

Nancy Farmer, 2001
(more…)

Created out of the Swamp by a freak accident, Swamp Thing is an elemental creature who uses the forces of nature and wisdom of the plant kingdom to fight the polluted world’s self-destruction. Inspired by the creation of writer Len Wein and artist Berni Wrightson, Alan Moore took the Swamp Thing to new heights in the 1980s with his unique narrative approach. His provocative and groundbreaking writing, combined with masterly artwork by some of the medium’s top artists, made SWAMP THING one of the great comics of the late twentieth century. This volume includes Moore’s first seven issues, SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #21-27

VERTIGO

“Lobsters” by Charles Stross

“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.

“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”

“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

“Nyet–no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”

Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. “You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”

“Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Tellytubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”

—————-
I posted a link to this four years ago. Ran across it accidentally earlier today, it’s still a great fun short story.

Madeleine
L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88 - New York Times

Madeleine L’Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time,” died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn. She was 88.

Her death was announced yesterday by her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A spokeswoman said Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) had died of natural causes at a nursing home, which she entered three years ago. Before then the author had maintained homes in Manhattan and Goshen, Conn.

One of my favorite first and earliest remembered authors. Her work will go on being loved for a long time to come.

As a sort-of-shameless plug, my wife’s poetry press is about to release it’s next 3 books. The one of most interest for this post is: Jill Essbaum’s new book - Harlot (look, a cock!). Jill lives out of the country but has read for one of the wife’s reading series events. The other two new releases are Myth of the Simple Machines (by Laurel Snyder) and Shy Green Fields (by Hugh Behm-Steinberg). Laurel will also be reading in a few months in DC.

What is interesting isn’t necessarily that the books are being published, though that is nice, its that you don’t have to try to use a big press like Random House or Simon & Schuster to publish a quality looking book.

Essentially over the last 2 years the wife has built a small business in using a print-on-demand printing company (Lulu Books) to be the printer and distributor of the books she wants her press to publish. Each book gets an ISBN so it can be ordered through Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any local bookstore. She puts details and purchasing information on notellbooks.org to make it easier for people interested in the titles to get them.

Poetry books don’t sell very well (shocker?) so the traditional print business which requires a large print run to be done initially never makes money on poetry titles. The print-on-demand method allows the publisher (wife) to find authors they like (Jill, Laurel, Hugh, Shafer, PF, Bruce) layout the titles and produce a PDF file that is then uploaded to Lulu for printing as people request copies of the books. There is no up-front print run and no costs aside from ISBN and artwork. This makes publishing smaller sales items much more sensible, and profitable.

There seems to be a resurgence or increase in use of print-on-demand for smaller presses now, that’s a positive thing, it’s moving the power of publishing back into the hands of the people. Large print houses have to satisfy their share holders. they do this by spending little and making lots (obvious)… Poetry titles don’t do that, relatively speaking the cost a bunch and make next-to-nothing (save a few specific examples). Large publishers don’t have the need to publish first poetry books because they aren’t profitable, print-on-demand reverses that problem and lets people become publishers of content they want to make available to the masses.

I think the things the wife has done with No Tell Books and her poetry journal No Tell Motel are pretty revolutionary because they are doing things the ‘old school’ publishing industry is unwilling or unable to do, and being successful at it. No Tell Motel gets more visitors every day than most printed poetry journals get in a single year, she’s accomplished this by generating loyal readership, subscribers.

(or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer)

I just took a look at categories and realized that nothing with a book topic had been published since 12/05. That’s pretty disappointing, especially with evil_bastard as a contributing writer.

My last fun book was Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
————
“The primary protagonist in the story is Nell, a street urchin who illicitly receives a copy of an interactive book (with the quaint title Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer; a Propaedeutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c.[1]) originally intended for an aristocrat child in a neo-Victorian tribe. The story follows Nell (and, to a lesser degree, two other girls who receive similar books) as she uses the primer to overcome both her lack of education and her deficient parenting.

The Diamond Age is characterized by two intersecting, almost equally developed story lines: Nell’s education through her independent work with the primer, and the social downfall of engineer and designer of the Primer, John Percival Hackworth. The text includes fully narrated educational tales from the primer, set apart through different (sans-serif) typeface, that map Nell’s individual experience (e.g. her four toy friends) onto archetypal folk tales stored in the primer’s database. Although The Diamond Age explores the role of technology in child development, its deeper and darker themes also probe the relative values and shortcomings in communication between cultures.”
- Wikipedia

I tried to find a previous story that I’d written about Charles Stross’s Concrete Jungle but I could find it. So if you didn’t see it, that short story is freely available for reading here. I’d describe it as BOFH meets Van Helsing.

Anyways - I was updating my Amazon wish list with books, and remembered how much I liked Concrete Jungle. It took me about 45 minutes to hit the right combination of key words to find it again. When browsing through Amazon, I found that one of his books, Accelerando is freely available for download in PDF format from Amazon.

That’s pretty neat.

From Publishers Weekly
Stross (Singularity Sky) explores humanity’s inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, “Slow Takeoff,” “free enterprise broker” Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade’s transhumans. In “Point of Inflection,” Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can�sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx’s grandson, Sirhan, roister through “Singularity,” in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross’s three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics�breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space.

One of my favorite authors, Hunter S. Thompson, killed himself last night.

Link to story.

…
Then Jimmy took out all of the parts of the Bible that criticized rich people. Most of the surviving major churches didn’t notice that. But they did complain when Jimmy changed the traditional translations of Yusuf and Miryam to Jimmy Joe and Lulabelle, the name of his pretty new wife.

But when his Lulabelle ran off with a Bible salesman, Jimmy retired to one of his mansions and refused to let anyone print any more Bibles or use the Bible in any way that raised money.

The surviving churches sent delegates to Disney, begging them to get Congress to shorten the copyright period to put the KJV back in the public domain. But Disney had picked up the rights to a Restoration revenge tragedy that looked like a great vehicle for Britney Spears, so they made a counteroffer.

The People that Owned the Bible - a story