Topic: Posts

I’ve been blogging for a really long time. I figure, since 1999 or so in one form or another. My archives, due to a server shut down at the end of 2002 only go back that far, but there was about two years of blogging before that.

The thing about this is that, at this point blogging wasn’t hip and new media the way it is now, blogs weren’t the kind of things that people set up every time they thought they had a new project, few if any college professors had their classes blog, and small businesses weren’t told that having an active blog was the key to success. Hell, commenting systems weren’t quite ubiquitous, and contemporary features like trackbacks and RSS were very new if they existed at all. Hell, niche blogging--like KnitBlogs, or TechBlogs and so forth--didn’t really exist. In fact most blogging platforms didn’t even use dynamic page generation systems…

It was a different world.

I occasionally talk with my friend dave about this period of blogging. We were both online and had sites back then, but never quite made it as bloggers in the way that many other people that were blogging back then did. I was… 13 years old, and my spelling was even worse then; but I think we both had a lot of growing up to do. Also, neither of us were located in a place the real world that would have made it easier to “make it:” you’ll see when I get to the list that most of the original core of bloggers were located in L.A., New York, or San Francisco. But my goal isn’t to dwell on what could have been, but rather to try to make a list of the old timers.

So here’s the list, in no particular order:

1. Anil Dash
2. Jish
3. `Mathowie <http://www.metafilter.com>`_ (MeFi)
4. Kottke
5. Meg Hourihan
6. Heather Armstrong (Dooce)
7. Cam Barret
8. Brad Grahm
9. Jerwin
10. Derek Powazek
11. Heather Champ
12. John Halycon Styn
13. Matt Kingston
14. Amy/Domesticat
15. Ev Williams
16. UltraSparky
17. Chris/Uffish Thoughts
18. Choire Sicha
19. Jonno
20. Ernie/Little Yellow Different
21. Rebecca Blood
22. Noah Grey
23. Rachel James

What this list leaves out are sites like Slashdot and Boing Boing, the former should certainly count, the later is damn close if it doesn’t count. It also leaves out the Journaling tradition, which has been around for a lot longer than the ‘blog, and uses the same basic form. Indeed, many of the people listed above would probably be considered journal rather than blog types, but it doesn’t really matter.

So this leaves me with two questions for you, wise readers, who where the other 7-10 “original” bloggers? I can’t think of them, really. I think one would have had to start blogging before Janurary 2001, and preferably have started in the first half of 2000 at the latest.

Secondly--family, and dave are exempt from this contest--not that there are good prizes, but I’ve met one of these people in real life out of the blogging context, I’ll figure out something something for the first person to figure out which one it is….

Here’s a status report for you all:

• I’ve gone through the first four chapters of the novella incorporating the most of the changes that my first readers suggested. Woohoo! I also, fixed a recurring misspelling of a character’s name, and a couple of unclear moments. I think the ending is going to need a little clarifying perhaps for draft 3, but I don’t want to tinker with it too much for draft 2.
• I am almost half way done with the sleeve of this sweater. Blasted thing. That’s why I’ve not been posting much about knitting recently, it’s more of the same, and this is a loose end of an old project. I realize that most of you all who are reading this site are probably most interested in my knitting (welcome folks from ravelry!) but the truth is that most of the time, my knitting progress amounts to, “look here, I knit another inch on the same sweater!” and is as a result not nearly as sexy as it could be. I hope you don’t mind the musings about trends in science fiction or whatever else happens to be on my mind. Like….
• I think my taste buds are becoming habituated to the burn of horseradish. I put what I would have thought was an obscene amount of the stuff on a can of tuna-fish with mayo, and I could barely taste it. I fear that this might affect my overall quality of life. Sigh
• I’m slowly easing into work on the new novel project, and it’s starting to feel more like home. I always worry about using planning and the “marinating” process as a sort of “productive procrastination,” but the truth is that sometimes you just have to sit on ideas for a while, and I’m feeling better about the project now.
• Though I’m a long way away from actually starting a new project, I’ve been looking at the Celtic Charted Designs book for ideas, and not being compleatly successful. I have time, but I don’t want to accidentally finish all my projects and then be without a new project again. That’s an ugly state to be in.
• I think I have a sweater that I’m going to lengthen the sleeves a bit, so then it will fit, but still be to warm to wear below the Arctic Circle.
• I’m about to head out to a new knitting group, and I’ve packed my tote bag from knitting camp full of projects, that I’m sure I won’t get a chance to knit on, but it’s worth a start. I guess it’s time to put on pants for the day….

One of the ideas that I’m playing around with in the new project is an “exodus from Earth,” where our people will be through the course of the long¹ story, will be leaving earth and our solar system for more hospitable places.

This ties in with some of the ideas that I was playing with in the last post, in that I think this presents an interesting perspective to talk about some cool issues, even if I don’t think it’s particularly likely that there’s going to be a human exodus from our solar system in the next 500 years.

Also, I think it creates a space where I can take a couple of core cyberpunk ideas and get away writing a lot of very cyberpunk-ish things that if I were writing them straight on, I don’t think I could get away with. If I was writing a story set in the present/near future that had the sort of bleak settings and hypertechnologized environments, I don’t think it would fly, but in the context of an exodus from this solar system? It makes more sense. At least to me, and I’m the one who matters at this point.

That’s all for now. I should point out that I’ve finally made the transition to life as an IMAP mail user, and will hopefully now be less tethered to my specific instance of computer. We shall see…

Cheers, sam

I had a scene in the novella set in Casablanca a hundred years after they built a dome over the city.

I have to admit that the decision to put a scene there, was mostly random, mostly because I didn’t want to put it in Paris or Oslo, or some other European city. But as I’ve been thinking about it, it’s an interesting idea, to suggest that Northern Africa, might be the home of the next wave of cosmopolitan meccas. I particularly like the way that, particularly in a cyberpunk context, it creates a parallel with the “middle ages.”

I read a forum post somewhere on the internet (that I can’t find anymore) that attacked the people who say “cyberpunk is dead,” by saying that “cyberpunk represented for them what could have been, and what might yet be,” which frankly I think is a load of nostalgic hooey. We can’t write stories today that are cyberpunk in the way that people could write stories 20 years ago that were cyberpunk. The cyberpunk “moment” if you will, has passed.

But it’s not dead. There are to my mind two distinct flavors of cyberpunk that live on. The sort of theoretical decedents that say that there’s an underbelly to technological progress, that explores the possibility of subculture in the bright and shiny future. And then there’s the aesthetic side that thinks that DNIs are freekin’ amazing and psychedelic virtual realities are cool and so forth.

And before you say, “but tycho, who in their right mind would take as the starting point of a sub-genre, all of the fluff and none of the meat of a preceding field?” And it’s not as absurd as you’d think. Steampunk is basically all aesthetic and no real meat from anywhere else, and frankly it’s pretty damn awesome. The lesson is that we make our (theoretical) meat pretty much regardless of the setting, so if you have cyberpunks in North Africa, working on an internet that doesn’t exist and will never exist, it works (or can), if you play your cards right. Which is always the case, no matter how failed (or not) your premise is.

What I think is more interesting from my own persecutive, is that despite how ardently theoretical I tend to be, I think I fall into the aesthetic camp, rather than the theoretical one. Contemporary theoretical cyberpunk tends to be much more moment specific, more grounded in current existence, current theoretical issues, and less involved in the issues that surround technological development and the culture-technology relationship.

The other factor in my own work is that I see science fiction, even futuristic science fiction as being a historical project. I’m interested in North Africa as a cosmopolitan center in my futuristic stories, because of its history as such, not particularly because I think that it’s likely to come to pass.

I think it’s incredible that Cory Doctorow and I can agree that futurism has virtually no place in science fiction for such completely different reasons.

Tomorrow is a writing day.

Note to self: I’m taking the GRE on 12 November 2007 at noon in west county.

Feh.

So, I should have explained the title of the last entry: the new (and green) thin is the sweater that I wore today, the old thing was the stack of articles that I wrote, what is in my estimation an entirely predictable paper with. Moving on…

After a day of wearing this sweater (and in fairness it wasn’t quite cool enough, particularly at midday, but it was close) I’ve realized that I want to work on trying to make V-necks work again. It’s a shape that works good on me, and I’m feeling particularly neck sensitive, but I think that sweater needs a little bit of time to wear in and soften up. Because it’s that itchy, mostly, It just doesn’t have the worn in feeling that’s so nice.

Amongst my travels yesterday and today, I’ve been giving some thought to my novel project that I’ve started and taken a short break from to spend some time on other projects. I really only wrote a preliminary 400 words just to see how it felt, so maybe I’m still letting the ideas stew, and my little start was more of a dry run.

The last project I kept pretty much under wraps the whole time because of the nature of the story (I’m sticking to that explanation at any rate.) and because I was more worried that the conceptual issues were too connected to the plot. This time I think I can talk about the conceptual ideas without giving away the plot. It’s still connected, there’s just more of it (it being a longer piece) so I can talk about isolated moments without giving it all away. So I’m going to be blogging about this in the future, I think.

Anyway, this entry has been lingering for more than a day now, so I’m going to let it go, but be well and be warm. It’s finally cold season. Yippie!

Cheers

I’m wearing my most recent new sweater today, it being finally, almost cold enough for sweaters since I finished it.

That’s not strictly true. This summer I worked in a film and media archive doing some cataloging and digitization stuff, and it I damn near froze my ass off. It was 90 outside, and I walked out of the house wearing sweaters sometimes.

Anyway, so I’m wearing one of my sweaters and I quite like it. I’m not sure that it’s one of those perfect sweaters that I’ll live in day in and day out, but I think I do like it a good piece. Shetland is such amazing yarn.

Sorry, no pictures.

In red sweater news, I’ve picked up the stitches around the armhole for the second sleeve (!) and I’m just knitting the very end of the ribbing on the first sleeve. It’s good stuff. It’s also all I want to work on now, and I have emails to read, writing to revise, and a research project with a prof to work on this afternoon. Sigh.

I also wrote a paper last night/this morning that I feel is… not as good as what I could have done, it feels too much like the kind of stuff I was doing a year ago, and while I think it was good for me to get in touch with that again, as it serves as a good foundation for the work I want to do in the future, at the same time… Ugg.

(Note: theBoy is studying microbiology, and a local research institution.)

tycho: I really enjoy being a social scientist, I mean I’m not going to cure plague or anything, but by god, I’ll make sure there’s something worth curing.

So, I’m making this red sweater. I’ve talked about it before.

Ok. I’m nearing the close of the first sleeve and I have not yet used all of the first half of my yarn supply. That’s right. I think there will be some trading at some point of the darker color, which I’m pretty unlikely to use ever again in my life. Probably, who knows.

I’m beginning to think through my next sweater project, which is a long way off, because, including sweaters that need sleeves, I have like four sweaters in progress. Five if you count the interminable fingering weight sweater knit at 12 stitches to the inch.

So maybe it’s more like five sweaters. Sigh. I think I’d like to have the grey sweater plus only one more on sleeves before I start another sweater¹. For the past three years I’ve always started a sweater during thanksgiving week and finished it before christmas, and I’d like to do that again, but I might go for just finishing a couple of sweaters. I might be able to get all of all my sleeves that I want to get done by then, but the other project is too long. Sigh.

In other news, I did some practice GRE work. The computer screwed up, so I don’t have a good sense of my math section score, and because of computer screwing up (it meant my practice today was shorter, and didn’t mimic real test situations enough…) I don’t have a statistically accurate view of the verbal section, but I’m pretty pleased with how I did on this section.

What this tells me is that I can do really damn good on this test, my actual score is/will be an issue of endurance rather than anything intrinsic. Back to practicing.

So I was totally going to post this morning with a list of all the things I had to do: math problems, look for articles on identity in spoken communication, read an ethnography of a nursing home, write emails to professors, beat up some incredibly awkwardly written windows software, and of course writing and knitting. Sort of makes me nervous just thinking about it.

Anyway, so I was going to post that list, and then I was going to say, “sorry, I don’t have anything more… inspiring at the moment, but I have to run, and I don’t know how much time I’m going to get with the internet today…”

And while I still don’t have very much to report to you all. The knitting is going well, I’m glad to have a schedule, even a loose one again, so with luck I’ll be able to get some good writing done. I need to figure out a good way to jump start things. But that’s not why I’m writing this post.

I got an email from someone I went to knit camp with pictures of Meg, my shawl…

I’m a fan. Thanks Stephanie (sorry I don’t have a link. Eek)!

Anyway, I’ll see if something more inspiring comes up.

Cheers!