a couple of things have come across my proverbial desk¹ this week regarding cyberpunk, and so I’ve been milling over the punk part of “cyberpunk” in an attempt to understand where the genre and ideas have gone in the last say…. 10 years.

The thing is that the geeks turned out to be yuppies, not punks, and I think the internet is largely shapped by this. Even the quasi-legal spheres of the interent (eg. bit torrent), are pretty yuppie and not very punky. Not that I’m a punk, really, but I think about these things.

Anyway, all this to say that I’ve found some interesting contemporary punky SF, which has caused me to think about these things again.

• 365 Tomorrows
• The Voice of Free Planet X

Good (not so) clean fun!

Wonder what this “Station Keeping” thing that I keep talking about is? Wonder no longer. Here’s a description of the project that I wrote in an email that I"m kind of fond off.

Station Keeping. Basically what I’m trying to do is create a framework for an ongoing science fiction serial story, to be posted as part of a blog at TealArt (tealart.com but more specifically, tealart.com/hanm.) It’s set in a distant future, on a space station, in the middle of a hot political situation, but mostly focuses on a diverse group of characters as history happens around them, and there’ll be little adventures with cyberpunk themes, post-colonial themes, and whatever strikes our fancy, I guess… It’s not a novel, or a specific long-form book, just fun little glimpses and adventures in another world built around common characters, themes, situations, and dynamics.

In part my goal is to have fun writing science fiction in a more casual situation, and in part it’s experiment with using blogging as a medium for Sci-Fi and story telling; but more practically, it’s also a way for writers to experiment in a safe space (in part because the entries are short: 1k at the very top, more like 600-700), and it presents a structured way to form a writing community that I think could be really helpful to the group process.

The great thing is that we’re accepting submissions. If you want to write an episode, or if you want to join the writing team, you can. It’s great practice, and I think we have a cool community, so please contact me if you’re at all interested.

danah boyd wrote an article that’s been circulating recently, thanks to one of Cory Doctorow’s boingboing.net posts, about the way that the difference between myspace and facebook mirror class divides in America. It’s an interesting piece, and I think that it’s pretty good. I could quibble if I, like danah, had more time to come to the right words, but I think it’s more important to just list out some thoughts. I apologize for the rough shape of those thoughts.

Like Cory I’m a big admirer of danah boyd’s work, and while I’ve been watching and do enjoy her work on social networking sites on the the internet, I have to say that I’ve had some mixed personal feelings about On the one hand she’s completely right: the age divide between My-Space and Face-book is class reinforced/based; but at the same time, I think the picture is way more complicated, but this is a situation where I’d love to play with the numbers. Read the article for yourself and see what you think. Here are my thoughts:

• I think it’s important to acknowledge the way that the marketing departments of face-book and my-space and the structure of the sites affect the membership. There’s something about being on campus and having a website that reflects and supports that connection that FB is built around. I have a crap ton of face-book friends (600?) but I’d say that the vast vast majority of people who I’ve at least had a conversation with or a class, or something. There are exceptions, of course. I have far fewer contacts on my-space, and while a certain number of them are people I know in real life, I think of MS as being for really random people I don’t know and FB as being for people I know. Mind you I have variations on the same profile, but that’s a testament to laziness.

  Back to my original point, which is that Facebook as a company has been able to be successful, interestingly by being exclusive, and limiting its membership in various ways. Interestingly the knitting social networking site ravelry.com is doing the same thing, intentionally or not. And I think the implications of this practice have a constructive effect on the community.

• I think this officially makes me no longer a participant of “youth culture,” because my main thought about MS is “g-d it’s ugly, and poorly organized.” I think though, that the lack of structure on MySpace makes it easier to to “see” the “subalteran,” where FBs conformity and universality on college campus' makes it hard to see these variations.

  On a technical note, as a college facebook member from before the HS networks were added, I’m not sure that college students got the opportunity to invite/seed HS networks, and I know that I can’t access my the network for my HS.

• As I read this, I thought about the way that outside of fiction cyberpunk has never really happened, because the punks have never gotten in (a large way) to the internet/cyberspace, in the way that a cyberpunk movement would expect/need. I’m not sure where this train of thought ends, but I think looking at the subalteran in virtual space, and drawing conclusions about these groups, is a hard project.

• I’d be interested in seeing what kind of analysis in a similar vein could be made of LiveJournal. I’ve always seen LJ as a sort of microcosm of the internet, but I think in terms of “places for sub-culture,” that’s an interesting way to look at these issues.

What are your thoughts?

Microsoft’s anti-virtualization stance: forget DRM, think Apple:

Microsoft and its advocates have been able to say: “with a PC, you get the most choice of software and peripherals.” Now a case could be made that the most choice is to be found on a Mac or Linux box virtualizing Windows on the side. The big impediment to this world is the cost of Windows, but an OEM price on the low-end of Windows could eliminate that impediment quickly.

Until Steve Jobs allows the virtualization of the Mac OS, which will happen precisely never, Microsoft’s commodity cash cow could find itself virtualized into the corner.

(from Ars Technica.)

While there are always a few programs that one might want from the platform you don’t have, I’ve found that the number of PC programs that I wish I could run but can’t has waned in the past three years (since i made the switch). So yeah, I think its fair that MS has something to be afraid of.

Having said that, when I go up to an intel mac, I can’t really see wanting to run windows in VM, ubuntu maybe (but all of the cool linux-y goodness is something that you more or less get in OS X anyway, so whatever).

Beacause I’m always behind on my blog reading, I didn’t catch wind of danah’s post-publication reflection. Fascinating.

I have to say that in addition to being interested in what she has to say about the world, I think her position as an academic is incredibly interesting: she’s near the bottom of the pecking order, and yet, she writes a (great) little essay and 90k people read it in the first couple of days. I’m sure there are full professors in this world whose work hasn’t been read by that many people in their careers. Not to degrade the value of that work, at all, just to say, that academic work != to wide distribution in most cases, and similarly not to condemn danah for being popular, I just think it’s fascinating.

from the mailbag:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated “Research Methods In Psychology” by John J Shaughnessy have also purchased “Basics of Singing” by Jan Schmidt. For this reason, you might like to know that “Basics of Singing” is now available. You can order your copy for just $60.95 by following the link below.

Ok…. um, maybe this artificial intelligence stuff is further away than I initially thought…

How long did you think I could go without a blog post about the state of the blog. Who do you think I am?

Just as an aside I’m enjoying my job, but there’s a lot of work. On the upside I’m generally feeling pretty productive in my working and non working life, and I get to listen to podcasts, so I’ve been learning lots, on top getting things done in work and outside of work.

I think I must work better when my time is crunched. I wish it were slightly less crunched, but that’s the way life is. Once I get a little more caught up and settled in, I should be able to squeeze a little bit more out of my self. Here’s hoping.

Thanks for reading. I hope to have a little content for you today. Particular thanks to Sheri for commenting, it’s great to get such good comments from such great folk.

while it’s not the best lolcat around, granted, I like the juxtaposition. Also that’s my cat, Montana, making her blog debut. that gets me thinking…