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• 8:15 pm on December 29, 2008 Permalink  

  Cryptic Confusion 2009 

  

  Well I’m not sure how this escaped my notice until now but it appears that Cory Doctorow of bOingbOing fame is going to be a Guest of Honor at the Confusion sci-fi convention in Troy Michigan this year. Im a fan of much that he has done, and have been known to have a good time at Confusion anyways so I think it’d be cool to go to this one. I’m also thinking It’d be cool to do a room party with music and hanging out and what not, maybe a cape and goggles themed party would be fun.  Anyone else going already and/or interested in collaborating on such a venture? There’s a discount for pre-registration still running until December 31st.

   

• 12:07 pm on December 29, 2008 Permalink  

  10 Years of IPM radio 

  

  On Saturday I went to the last ever weekly radio show house party at ipmradio.com.  You may ask yourself, “What is this IPM of which you speak?”  Well let me tell you.  IPM stands for In Perpetual Motion, which was originally a Detroit area zine in the early 90’s run by DJ and music connoisseur Marc Church. After a few issues, the publishers lost interest and Marc sold the name to an old friend of mine, Bob Perye. Sometime lateish in 1998 he decided to apply the name to an internet radio show he had been puttering around with on his own, and invited me to come out to his Lansing apartment and bring some music.  At the time I had been DJing regularly at a college station in Port Huron, so I kind of thought I knew what I was doing, and went ahead and brought out a bunch of stuff to play on these newfangled internets.

  I had no idea that 10 years later this thing would have grown to include countless guest DJs, live bands, and a house party almost every single weekend.  IPM would end up attracting the attention of local superstar DJs as well as national acts.  The main thing that I am grateful to IPM for though, is for serving as a sort of social nexus.  I have met a lot of cool people at IPM events over the years, many of whom have become close friends.

  Going forward, IPM is not really ending. The weekly social gatherings are done now, but the show will continue.  After a month long hiatus, the show is going to be redesigned and revamped to allow for remote DJs to submit regular sets and do live events from elsewhere.  There will still probably be big live events a couple times a year, but the focus is going to shift. IPM will serve as an umbrella for the production of a characteristically diverse set of online radio shows, pushing into the future as it always has. It was some good times and it will be missed, but I look forward to seeing what else we can do with it.

   

• 8:57 pm on December 19, 2008 Permalink  

  Help me make a book? 

  

  I have in the past enjoyed making books. Like, taking paper and binding it together with a cover and everything using glue and string.  It’s a pretty awesome and fun thing. So far I’ve only made blank books, with either completely blank or ruled (lines or grids) paper. Something that would be awesome, that I’ve been thinking about ever since I started this bookmaking thing, would be to do some handmade texts.  Like to print out some stories and bind them up.

  This seems like a much more difficult thing. The way most decently made books are done is in what are called ‘signatures.’  There are usually eight pages folded together to make a section that’s then bound together with other sections.  This makes the arrangement of printed pages a little trickier. So you’d have for example pages 1 – 32 in the first signature, with one page having page 1 and 32 on one side, and 2 and 31 on the other side and so on, so the whole section would read straight through when folded in half.

  So I guess the main problem is in how to print things out in this weird format, double-sided, with increasing numbering on one side and decreasing numbering on the other side.  I don’t really have a lot of experience with desktop publishing stuff, so maybe I’m missing something obvious.  I’ve looked in, for example, Word and Open Office, but I haven’t found an easy way to format a document like this.  So basically what I’d like to do is take a whole text from say the Gutenberg project, arrange it into signatures in a word processor, print it out on a laser printer and bind it up by hand into a sweet custom volume.  I think this type of thing might even have a market, and if I could whip them out fast enough I could probably sell them.

  So does anyone know how to do the formatting part?  I’d be eternally grateful for a walkthrough in something like OpenOffice, if it’s even possible.

   

• 2:48 pm on December 19, 2008 Permalink  

  Snowpocalypse! 

  Or perhaps Snowmageddon? This morning about 10 inches or so of snow has fallen.  And more is falling as I write this. It’s kind of fun, actually. Sidewalk shoveling is pretty decent exercise. It took me about a half hour or so, and in that time another quarter inch had already fallen.  Serious business.

  

   

• 3:56 pm on December 11, 2008 Permalink  

  WordPress 2.7 

  After a slightly harrowing bit of upgrading, I’ve now got this blog running WordPress 2.7 which just came out.  The UI is a vast improvement, and it seems to work real well.  I still have to recover some plug-in functionality that I lost when I had to blow everything away and rebuild, but all in all it’s for the best, I think.

   

• 9:59 am on December 11, 2008 Permalink  

  Ficlets is Dead, Long Live Ficlets! 

  

  On December 2nd it was announced that ficlets.com is going away.

  For those not aware, ficlets.com is a collaborative fiction site, based on story parts that are 1024 characters in length. It was designed by Kevin Lawver, while he was working for AOL. After he left, the company has decided not to support it any longer, and has scheduled it to be turned off on January 15th.

  I’m kinda bummed out about it, as this site has been a great inspiration for me to do writing in general.  I haven’t written a whole lot of ficlets recently, I admit that my enthusiasm kind of waned after Kevin left and the blog stopped being updated.

  So now, there’s some talk of an heir to ficlets being created by some of the original design team over on Kevin Lawver’s blog, as well as in the Facebook group “I Write Ficlets.” Kevin’s scheduled what he calls the “Ficlets Graveyard” to be released the day after Ficlets 1.0 shuts down.

  That’s a good thing.  I will happily follow the development of “Ficlets 2.0” to whatever home it ends up in. The original site is a great inspirational tool to keep writers writing. I think by breaking down writing tasks into 1024 characters at a time makes the whole process of writing longer pieces seem a little more doable. I’ve backed up my ficlets, so even if the site goes kaput I at least have the ones I wrote safely tucked away. With even a fraction of the support that AOL put into ficlets, it’ll be a good site.

  Ryster is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Ryster 6:49 pm on January 27, 2009 Permalink

    I’m sure that many Ficlets fans are sad that Ficlets.com is no more. We are in the process of constructing Blurbtree.com a site that might be helpful for them. It’s not a replacement for Ficlets, but it’s a clean start and we’ll build the site based on the feedback we get from the online community. Please give it a try and let us know what we can do to make it fit your needs.
    You can also get more information at our Blurbtree FAQ.

• 11:24 pm on December 6, 2008 Permalink  

  
  
  Cupcakes
  
  Originally uploaded by airosche5
  
  
  

  These are some delicious holiday cupcakes we made earlier today. There’s
  some swirly green and red batter and various flavored toppings on them.
  Yumz