To Lake County, With Love
Today I honor the people of Gary, Indiana, and their heroic stand against the forces of quite possibly irredeemable jackassery in Tuesday's primary election. I honor them with a juliandibbell.com first: A poem of my own composition, entitled Indiana Toll-Road Freestyle (.pdf) and written a couple years back, mostly during the reveries of my twice weekly commute between South Bend and Chicago. (Heartfelt apologies to Rakim, Eminem, and other rappers whose flow I seem to have had the nerve to think I could textually approximate. Much love to Lake County.)
12:49 PM
Friday, April 25, 2008
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"
Regular readers of the Daily Telegraph's book-reviews section may already be aware of my feelings on the matter, but I don't mind saying it again: Clay Shirky's new book kicks some serious Web 2.0-punditry butt.
1:58 PM
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Dept. of Mixed Bags: MY TINY LIFE Is Free At Last!
I am pleased to announce that my first book, the widely cited but long out-of-print MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), can now be downloaded in its entirety in a handsomely formatted PDF edition, completely free of charge. Or, if you prefer, the fine folks at Lulu will package up a perfect-bound paperback version for you at the shockingly reasonable price of only $17.48 ($5 of which goes straight to me). Either way, you get what for the last eight years or so could not be had for love or money: A brand new and fully authorized copy of MY TINY LIFE, yours to read, lend, dog-ear, shelve, and otherwise make use of in whatever way your heart desires and copyright permits.
I am pleased to announce this, yes, but I'll be honest with you: I'm not nearly as pleased as I was hoping I'd be.
I was hoping, actually, to make a rather grander announcement, one that I've been looking forward to through years of anxious and improbably complicated preparation but now, at last, should probably just hand-deliver straight to the shitcan of my broken dreams. I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated -- not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons "copyleft" license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.
Except it hasn't. And while the long, sad tale of how it came to this could easily be reduced to a couple sentences (and probably should), I'm going to risk a fuller telling now because, well, there's the off chance I am not the only person on the planet for whom it's news that carving out a little open space in the midst of the existing intellectual-property regime could possibly be as difficult as this.
God Help Me, It's True: I *Was* on Charlie Rose Once
Just when I'd finally convinced myself it was all a bad dream I had sometime between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the flight of the white Ford Bronco, the evidence resurfaces:
Skip to about 35:00 or 36:00. See the guy with the tragic early-'90s ponytail sitting to Charlie's left? Apparently that's me.
The discussion, I believe, concerned some kind of enormous alternate-reality chamber (recently declassified by NASA maybe?) in which people from all over the world were meeting to engage in social and even sexual interactions so arcane in nature that Mr. Rose needed it all explained to him by a panel of experts consisting of myself, Dr. Ruth's evil clone, and Ensign Wesley Crusher. I may not have all the details right, but that's as much as I can figure out for now, because I'm just not strong enough to watch this with the sound on.
Somebody please tell me it's not as mortifying as it looks.
7:33 AM
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
PLAY MONEY Goes Soft Great news, flexible-media fans: Play Money, my latest book, has just been relaunched in a convenient, low-cost paperback edition -- complete with a handsome new cover image (custom crafted by top-tier Second Life prim-sculptor Aimee Weber) and over 50% fewer typos!
1:53 PM
Thursday, August 30, 2007
The Best of Technology Writing 2007
I came home yesterday afternoon to a happy surprise: a box containing five pristine, shrink-wrapped copies of The Best of Technology Writing 2007, fresh off the UPS truck. This delivery and a token hundred bucks were my entire compensation for permitting the anthology's publisher, the University of Michigan Press, to include an article of mine in the collection, and I have to say I'm feeling very nicely compensated right now.
Look, it's hard to explain. I do understand that the plummy Steven Johnson quote on the book's cover ("just superb") doesn't necessarily reflect that fine tech writer's opinion about my own contribution or even, given the nature of blurbs, any honest opinion at all. I'm also pretty sure that, as is conventional with these sorts of collections, the bulk of the selections were made by some uncredited editorial functionary before it fell to the editor of record, legendary tech writer Steven Levy, to make the final cuts.
Still, just knowing that anyone in a position of editorial authority found my efforts serviceable enough to line up alongside pieces by Clive Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Howe, and the other tech-journalism luminaries assembled here is probably as close as I will ever come to the warm endorphin rush of getting tenure.
Oh, and as for that article of mine that made the cut, it's called "Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders," and it's a report I wrote for Legal Affairs magazine about my vain attempts to get a straight answer from the IRS on the taxability of virtual assets. You can read it here if you like. Or if you prefer, you can read it in one of those pristine, shrink-wrapped copies I found on my doorstep yesterday. I'm keeping one of them for myself, but the rest are going out at my expense to the first four people who ask.
11:53 AM
At the Games + Learning + Society conference in Madison last Thursday, I gave a very slides-intensive "fireside chat" entitled Pictures from a Chinese Gold Farm: Some Problems with the Promise of Serious Play, in which I proposed to problematize the very project many of the educators in attendance are engaged in -- the harnessing of play to the more serious ends of learning. As you can see, I wore my grandfather's seersucker jacket, which was a shoo-in, I figured, for first prize in the summer-conference-wear competition but was in fact bested handily by Henry Jenkins's suspenders. Henry's talk was pretty good too, as were many others, already well-covered by morediligentbloggers than I. In the end, I had the impression most of these folks were already well-equipped to problematize their project for themselves, thanks. I think they enjoyed the slide show, though.
(Personal bonus: About a third of my World of Warcraft guild was in attendance too. Did we get our geek on? Oh yes, we did.)
12:40 PM
kicks some serious Web 2.0-punditry butt.
