November 10th, 2007 | brainjuice
Here’s an odd question that occurred to me tonight, and I’m turning comments back on for it:
If this blog was part of a network of blogs that you might consider fellow-travellers and associated persons — what blogs would those be?
WARREN ELLIS
Kieron Gillen - 09 Feb 10
The whole run of Plan B magazine has been released as a single 670Mb PDF. That’s 46 issues of some of the finest music writing of the decade. And a lot of posturing pretentiousness too. It’s like two of my favourite things for the price of one. Or none, as it’s a free PDF.
If you’ve any interest in music in the 00s, or music full stop, this is a great thing to just have on file. You’ll discover a new band every time you browse it.
Hell, it’s even worth getting if you’re one of the games journalist sorts. For the first 10-20 issues or so, I was doing games stuff for it. And Quinns and Mathew Kumar too, who I bullied into contributing. Very much written for the non-gamer about games which get pretty much no coverage, we had fun trying to decode the concept of Outsider Games.
Whole thing here. Go gets!
Coilhouse - 08 Feb 10
Back around the time of Issue 03, we launched the Small Business Advertising Program to create affordable ad space for indie companies in the print version of Coilhouse. By the time Issue 04 rolled around, the number of advertisers had grown significantly – by this time, we had record labels, jewelry and clothing designers, sculptors, other magazines, web hosts, toy makers and graphic designers advertising in our pages. Click here to see them all. With editorial duties taking up more and more of our time as the weeks go by, the moment has come for us to seek help with the advertising side of running the magazine. We’re looking to hire an Ad Manager for our Small Business Advertising Program, starting with Coilhouse Magazine #05… and possibly subsequent issues.
Full details after the jump!
Read the rest of Coilhouse is Hiring! Apply Here.
Post tags: Coilhouse
jwz - 08 Feb 10
Check the appropriate box. Do you or your organization directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina or any political division thereof?
[ ] YES [ ] NOIf yes, please outline the fundamental beliefs. If applicable, attach a copy of the bylaws or minutes of meetings from the last year.
Open The Future - 08 Feb 10
For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.
My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.
By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.
The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.
John Robb - 08 Feb 10
A gifting economy is different from a barter or market economy in that valuable items are given away to those that need them, without any quid pro quo, exchange, or payment. Gifting economics (lots of great papers on this topic) were/are the economic heartbeat of hunter-gatherer tribal cultures, the social organization where we spent 99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens. Barter was, in contrast, a mechanism for economic interactions between tribes.
This gifting economic system wasn't based on pure altruism. It did have an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the system over the longer term. On the positive side, there was an intangible increase in the social status (using personal or societal metrics) of a tribal member that gifted an item. On the negative, a failure to offer hospitality or gifts to those in need was considered a mortal slight that could incite violence or expulsion from the tribe.
There were also a considerable number of drivers for gifting at the tribal level. Here are some:
Scalability
It's pretty clear that the societal drivers of tribal gifting economics and the mechanisms of enforcement didn't survive the transition to a global social system composed of billions of members. Simply, the connections between any two individuals (outside of immediate familial relationships) are too abstract for these drivers and enforcement mechanisms to be relevant. As a result, market based mechanisms for economic interaction have gained dominance.
However, the ongoing shift of the global market-based economy from a trade in rival goods (tangible items that invoke zero sum economics) to digital non-rival goods (items that can be copied at no expense or diminishment, endlessly) provides a window of opportunity. It may be possible to revive gifting economics for non-rival goods to amazing beneficial effect. Some ideas on how this could scale:
Jean Snow - 08 Feb 10
So what’s the latest on SNOW? I guess two new developments art that I added a dedicated Twitter feed, and also created a Facebook fan page. The Twitter feed is mostly just automated with new articles from the site — because some people actually prefer that over RSS feeds these days — but I do keep an eye on it, and will reply to questions and comments. The Facebook page is just another way of putting the site out there, and should be a good way of informing members of SNOW-related events as they happen.
Regular content updates have also continued over the past week, with a few new guest columns and my regular news items. Here’s a list of what you may have missed over the past few days.
Matt Fraction’s.
Charlie Stross, Brian Flemming, and David Brin all leap to mind.
I know you read Stross… here are URLs for Flemming and Brin in case the same isn’t the case:
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/
http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/
William Gibson’s blog.
You’ve already surrounded yourself with your fellow-travellers and associated persons. There’s a whole blogroll of them on the right.
(leaving out ones already mentioned) John Rogers, Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton
Joshua Ellis and Patton Oswalt seem like pretty obvious choices.
Gibson, Oswalt, Wheaton, Sterling, Gauger & Brownlee, and the Coilhouse group.
William Gibson, Neil Gaimen and David Byrne; odd as that probably sounds.
Patton’s myspace? Are suggesting that web rings are making a come back? Really?
Gibson, Stross, Coilhouse, Victoria Lane, Wolven (wolven.livejournal.com), Steve Aylett (over on myspace), carpe_jugulum and Lupa from over on lj.
But then again, the sort of informational axis I’d be looking for re: “fellow travelers” is a bit of an odd cross section.
Fraction’s, sure.
But I shudder to think when the next blog gets added out of BMEland and suddenly my morning dose of Warren becomes ‘Hmm. I didn’t think you could do that to keloid tissue, let alone on a penis!’.
Wow, borderline tricky, It’s the originator’s but you will always find your fellow bloggers, associates, fellow travelers and even readers to belong to your group or otherwise they wouldn’t even be viewing and/or commenting. So it may even be a community therefore communistic (if that’s even a concept) and belong to the group as a whole. Geez, I guess I stick with the originator.
Several of those mentioned earlier, and, oddly enough, Rudy Rucker.
For me, I’ve always found this blog and The Reverse Cowgirl seem to go hand in hand together.
My Blogroll [excerpts]
* Boing Boing
* information aesthetics
* Wired
o Wired Top Stories
* WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Gre
* Warren Ellis
* Beyond the Beyond
* Cool Tools
* Neil Gaiman’s Journal
* we make money not art
* ModBlog
* The Woodring Monitor
* viridiandesign
* Bathsheba Grossman
* Steve Haworth
* Charlie’s Diary
* David Byrne Journal
* Paleo-Future
* Beyond the Beyond
Bill Hicks’ blog. If he weren’t dead.
Some of those artist types: Paul Pope, James Jean, Becky Cloonan
+ ZeFrank
warren, you would be with my edge seekers: metacool (diego rodriguez), supertouch (jamie o’shea), josh spear, and jockohomo (jim alex)
There really isn’t anyone out there i read who’s in the same category. As far as writers go, it’s you, Steven Brust, and Malcolm Gladwell.
So..regardless of the suggestions above; my question back to you is: are you suggesting a meta-blog App…?
Something like a bloglines, or like your (and other prominent blogs) blogroll?
The intorweb is a daunting place for getting a decent coverage of what people are talking about (yours, by the by, is an excellent train junction, of thought trajectories) and a meta-blog, or perhaps roving gangBlogs (or ClanBlogs, whathaveyou) that we net-lurkers can leap onto like remoras on a Great White, or hapless primitives on a mammoth, might streamline things up a bit…
I usually read you and JWZ in the same round.
Yahtzee Croshaw
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation
He talks like you but not on the same subjects
Craphound and Open the Future come to mind.
Simon Reynold’s blissblog, Kieron Gillen’s workblog, Technoccult.net, the Reverse Cowgirl.
Bruce Sterling
I’ll sewcond the Gaiman, ZeFrank and Matt Fraction nominations… also, Stephen Fry. I’d stay away from the “official” blogs, like Wired…
I know several people have mentioned Matt Fraction’s Blog and someone has probably mentioned William Gibson and or Bruce Sterling however has anyone mentioned Heidi MacDonald and her Stately Beat Manor? I usually check for new here before there or there before here sort of softens the blow in absorption of events.
The question’s ambiguous, but I made the assumption that you meant “people I would think you would consider to be traveling with you;” that said, I only posted people you know or know of. There are plenty of other people out there treading the territory you’re treading, in terms of finding and making some kind of Better Now, rather than Opining a mythical and supposedly dead Future, through art, writing, or just linking
http://www.zerosociety.com/
a3rdwayproject
http://www.digital-guerrilla.com/
mech_angel
For starters, but in terms of what I think when “Who’s Warren Know?” It’s the previous comment.
even better world blogs
i agree with the person who said jockohomo’s blog. he’s aweseome. and wil wheaton, too. in fact everyone’s already said the people that came to my mind, but i thought i’d just add my “hear, hear!” to their lists.
Blogs I’d put together in one lump (i.e. not coffee, music, or drug related feeds):
You, Ectoplasmosis, Coilhouse, Beyond the Beyond.
Thanks for the DoseNation tip, too.
Gibson, Sterling, Gaiman, Fraction, Wired, all seconded.
Stross, Coilhouse, Colleen Doran, The Pulse, Technoccult, (just for bring the strange news to the table), Bruce Sterling
Comic Industry/Genre Publishing news and Oddments concerning the Future, The Crinkly Edges of the Present (Current Affairs/Music) and the neglected Past.
this one, Neil G, Wil W, Lazy Geisha, Girl With A One Track Mind, Stephen fry
Hmn, trying to think of some outliers.
10 Zen Monkeys.
The Reverse Cowgirl and maybe Violet Blue.
Neil Gaiman’s blog and Ectoplasmosis.
Neil Gaiman
Ben Templesmith
Brian Wood
Katie West
Of the blogs I read, those are the blogs I consider to be associated with you. Maybe some of the comic book newsblogs. I’d like to see you recommend blogs you enjoy that are written by people you consider to be associated with you.
vote++ for Wheaton, Gaiman, Gibson
Funny how small the internet actually is, not a site here I don’t already read (at least occasionally).
The only blog I can think of not already mentioned is Jamie Zawinski’s lj on jwz.livejournal.com .
Wheaton, Gaiman, Peter David, boing boing, stephen fry….and for some reason…Poppy z brite
Among blogs i frequent Violet Blue occupies a similar headspace.
Technoccult
ectomo
boingboing
brassgoggles
Every day I look at you and jwz to get my sometimes-disturbing-often-funny glimpses of the future.
For me, it would have to be neil gaiman and ben templesmith. there is also the friend who introduced me to warren ellis comics, this is his address.
http://ocean-friction.livejournal.com/
I read Neil Gaiman’s blog & How To Avoid The Bummer Life, after you, of course
When I was in college my boyfriend and I used to joke about throwing a dinner party for our favorite bastards. This doesn’t relate directly to blogs, but these were the people we would have invited to dinner with you:
Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson.
This was several years ago, when I was still in love with The Diamond Age and hadn’t yet thrown The Confusion against a wall screaming “Editor! For god’s sweet sake, hire an EDITOR!” These days I would delete Stephenson and add Joss Whedon, because he’s wonderful and because it would be an opportunity to watch the two of you throw poo at each other for an entire meal.
Feel like coming to dinner?
Sorry. A request for other blogs? Have things become so desperate that market research is so blatant. The monkeys are still in the cages? Right?
Suicide Girls (mostly Corddry) & Patton
On a similar vein of lack-of-predictability, I’d say maybe -in LJ: khem_kaigan, greygirlbeast, owl_clan, lupabitch, edwarddain; in blogspot, the late RAWilson… Others that read at least just as often are not so far down in the “unclassifiable” wing of blogland. I also leave out a few in Spanish.
publication designer Roger Black. only for similar tone in fed up and stabbing criticism/praise/hope of the newspaper and magazine industry.
rogerblack.com
I try to keep things diverse, and if I were going for similarity, it wouldn’t be in the links themselves but the impetus of the people behind them…
Warren Ellis
James Kottke
Pixelsurgeon
Most likely wouldn’t see this as a blogging triumvirate, but it’s mine.
Many of the above, and:
No Fear of the Future (@blogspot)
BLDGBLOG
Ballardian
Wired’s Threat Level (which should still be called 27B Stroke 6)
WFMU, Riot Clit Shave, Julian Cope, Wooster Collective, We Make Money Not Art, GPod of the Grey Lodge, Rudy Rucker, those porn blogs i don’t read very often because i don’t like fixating on being made of meat and neurons, Simon Reynolds, The Savage Critic, Ectoplasmosis, and Boing Boing, i reckon … maybe Daily Grail, as a handful of the same links pop up there.
honestly i don’t know, but must confess that you’re in my polymaths & eccentrics feed, not the comics one.
Neil Gaiman
Ben Templesmith
Matt Fraction
Kieron Gillen
Ashley Wood
I second BLDGBLOG (http://bldgblog.blogspot.com)
- architecture, geography, urban planning extrapolated into fantasies of reinforced concrete, earth, and the stuff of the future. Always a good read.
I vehemently disagree about Wheaton’s blog being the same headspace. That’s like putting Hunter S. Thompson beside Bob Denver. I understand some of your readers cross genres but that doesn’t mean you should.
Boing Boing is the most obvious fit. Gaiman, not quite, he’s in his thing. Gibson, yes, though I don’t read his blog regularly.
Does Garth Ennis blog?
FYI I’m here for your different take on our world today and our near future. And I’m liking some of your musical takes, too.
Wouldn’t many of the links to other’s sites and photojournals that you already have on this page make for a good inclusion? As well as some of the people named above that somehow get mentioned but often times don’t seem linked beyond those mentions. I also don’t understand the concept – is it somehow a larger, more meaningfully connected community of personal sites that somehow is more substantial than simple links to the pages?
Technoccult, Dr. Menlo, Projectionist, Ariana Osborne’s blog, Zoe Ebb’s…
boing boing
laughing squid
sterling’s beyond the beyond
Fraction, Oswalt, Gaiman, Brubaker, Wheton, Gibson, Wood, West, Templesmith…