kaolinfire

Apex Magazine seeks Poetry Editor: by Jason Sizemore http://bit.ly/3Mbho5

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Pay what you want--a discussion, history, thoughts, ... It's a thing. It's been done a lot. Does anyone know a good list of who's down it and how they've done by it?

Of course, Radiohead, famously. And recently World of Goo did very well by it and publicized all their numbers (very cool). Real-world restaurants seem to be running with it, and bars as well! And cab drivers, even. :) Lotus (the band) toured that way. Though Pay what you want online is a music service that charges a minimum of fifty cents a track--that's not very "what you want". A hotel. Here's a one-off font that starts at $15/yr min (I think that misses the point?) And Eidos is offering Championship Manager 2010 for just a penny (plus 2 pound fifty transaction fee--haven't they heard of micropayments???).

Digging deeper, Paste Magazine beat us to the "magazine" punch. Faber did it for an ebook (or more?).

GUD Magazine is trying it as a sale...

It's a crowded market of want, but really, how wrong can you go paying as little as a penny?

The question's not entirely rhetorical, as we haven't had hordes knocking our doors down to get their penny PDFs. Exposure, sure... and we've not sold "nothing" from it in the day or two it's run so far--people almost seem embarrassed to not pay a "fair" amount, but we'd rather they paid less than that and got a copy (or a copy of all five, for that matter).

Update: not hordes knocking down the door, but it's still our best sale by a wide margin. I'm very hopeful it will continue to improve. If you can spread the news, I'd really, really, really appreciated it. :) If you haven't already. ;)

Pay what you want for GUD Magazine

Do you read it? Write it? Even know what it is? ;) twitfic aka twiction aka twisters aka #vss (very short stories) aka, erm... well... I lose track. ;)

Hmm. So twitter-sized fiction is one of the things that hooked me about twitter, back when I was doing my best not to use it. There are a handful of paying markets--of course they don't pay _handsomely_, but consider you're putting together a story that might be 20 words long.

Well, if you're twitfic-curious at all, I started a forum. And we won't talk about the hells I went through snapping that domain up. ;)

I've been keeping track of my twitter-pubs in a separate sidebar on my website. My latest went up on Tweet the Meat today. $1 richer, hey ;)

Right. So. If you're curious. Market info, discussions, and workshopping. :)

I was just daydreaming earlier about teaching a 5yo about lipid bilayers by way of making a pbj.

Sorry, where was I, you asked? Oh, I was having a "teaching moment".

Thanks to (@jdfreivald for the term).

The creator of feedbooks had a quick challenge for a cover for Cory Doctorow's latest, "Makers". There were five entries. I'd _really_ appreciate a vote. Not that there's any prize whatsoever beyond my cover being used, but hey. =)

Voting here: twtpoll

Mine's the bit.ly one in the choices {{ the last choice in the poll }} :)

My image below for help convincing: ;)



The other images don't want to be hotlinked, apparently. =/

Just in time for the holiday...

"Don't click on yourself!" monster: You're the Sarita virus from The Infinite Monkeys Protocol by Lavie Tidhar from Issue 0. Your creator is a bit of a mystery, but your namesake, Sarita, has looked after you until you were ready to go out into the world and explore places she's never been. You're infecting, mutating, reproducing.... What GUD Monster are you? Find out at GUD Magazine!

holy crap, chrome. admittedly, I'm on the beta branch. and I blame windows as much as anything. but crap.

read my mini-reviews of/pimpage for: Shock Totem, Weird Tales, and Bust Down the Door and Eat all the Chickens And share your favorites! Support your 'Zines! =)

I think I'm done playing for the week. So much work to do. But:




http://strangehorizons.com/2009/20090119/fire-p.shtml for the text :)

p.s. http://www.xtranormal.com/ -- VERY COOL!

It's been a while since I did art for art's sake. I was inspired by a piece on DeviantArt that a friend showed me--I didn't quite like it, but it had an idea going that I wanted to riff off of. Of course, I am _not_ skilled in the manipulation of visual images, my many accidents to the contrary... nor am I really good at _actually_ visualizing. More--feelings, ideas. So what I wound up with has next to no relation to what I wanted, though I do like it, and I can trace the path. ((of all things, I looked up a few tutorials for how to draw clouds, none of which told me anything new, none of which I could actually duplicate--at least, not with my mindset as it was).

Not sure if I can hotlink from deviantart... probably not? Hmm. Looks ok...

I took a shower in the lawn last night.

I am _not_ Mr. Fix-it, but I try. So every problem is an opportunity, right? I knew nothing about sprinkler heads, but one in the corner was just "burbling" instead of "spraying". The lawn had grown very densely around it, practically locking it in. I dug the lawn out around it, and tested--the head shot up in the air and I had a geyser.

So I ran (drove) down to the hardware store (Lowe's), and with a little help figured out the part that shot out was not all of the thing that I needed to replace (made sense, just hadn't thought to dig for more--but I _had_ figured out it didn't really "go back in" reasonably). Got a new sprinkler head thinger (I've already forgotten the name, hah). Got home, unscrewed the old one, and turns out the old one was a "slim" design. So I needed to dig more dirt out to get the new one in.

This led to a progression of digging dirt out, digging more dirt out, trying to even find where the tube was that I was supposed to screw the new part into. (muddy, rocky morass) Would turn the sprinklers on to clear it some, then dig some more, turn them on, etc. finally got it "mostly" clear but still couldn't keep rocks, silt, etc, from falling back into the tube.

So turned the sprinklers on and screwed the thing in "against the flow".

Wet, wet, cold kaolin. But it worked. :)

For those of you who like memory games, but want a little switch-up. MSG brings the hustle. :)

Play at Kongregate. Two Ten thumbs up from indomitable_one :)

rage against darkness / or revel in its edges / endings come too soon

Earth is not the center of the universe; but it is a center. It is where we come from. And intelligence, which is not ours though we claim it. Like gravity, awareness leaks unseen. Some meta-awareness calls it heaven, imagines we are souls born from this other place. It seeds, patiently, over millennia. Our cancers are aware, fight for control, but our bodies are not ready. Testing, further evolution. They will break through and become us. Live us. And when our universe nears its end, they/we will step through to the next.

If you're not following me or GUD on Twitter--you're missing out on a twitter contest to win a Kindle. Just so's ya know :)

Details: http://tr.im/xCAt

There are struggles inherent in the coming together of two sentient species. Why do we always seem to flub the hard choices? Choose your adventure through Tina Connolly's "Hard Choices".

http://www.gudmagazine.com/games/hard-choices-by-tina-connolly/

It's a very short story; you can't "win", but there's four badges and a scoring system. :)

I read the story at Brain Harvest and had to turn it into a proper "page-turner". I hope you enjoy it. :) Feedback welcome, of course, if not for this one then perhaps "the next" (when I've got a longer story?)

I'd forgotten I had this thought. I really need some sort of waterproof whiteboard.

Was down in a fun rabbit-hole with controlling computers by thought and what would be reasonably doable these days when I started "thinking" keystrokes, seeing how that worked out, letter by letter. Ideally, of course, whole words would be transcribable. But keystrokes... my fingers know the keyboard better than I do. They know what character I want to hit without me thinking "a b c d e". Then I got to "{" and ... curly bracket ... open curly bracket ... open block ... I can type that twenty times in the time it takes to "think" it.

There's certainly an idea I'm having when I know that's the character I want, and that idea is obviously faster than the muscle-time it takes to hit it (something has to instigate those muscles' movement, yes?) .. but I don't seem to be able to make myself aware of what that "idea" is, or at least I can't seem to make it "loud" enough to hear it with my mental ear.

Makes me really, really want a nice "squid" to play around with. See what I can make it learn.

Also thinking--human is the optimum shape for general purpose robots because that's what we've built our world for, and that's a de facto standard. But what if there were a smaller standard defined and accepted by a consortium? Then a secondary market builds in providing extensions/skeletons/etc to the smaller form. "Human" just being another suit that this general-purpose robot can control. At some level just re-pluggable brains.

I'd imagine the skeletons might have secondary brains (reflex centers) for their particular skills... (walking, etc).

The future becomes very different very quickly. No?

Wanted to pick your brains on ebook platforms right quick. Or make a note to myself. Or both.

Wouldn't it be nifty if every ebook platform had a basic dictionary that integrated with its books? And that publishers were required (or incentivized--come on, is there a better word for this that has just been obliterated by marketspeak?) to provide definitions (and pronunciations) for any word that wasn't in the basic dictionary?

Just thinking of how many words I learned "from context" that weren't quite right. And how many words I learned and never looked up proper pronunciation for. But you know, if it had just been "press this word for definition and pronunciation" then...

Are there any platforms that even support per-item dictionaries that are then glommed into a platform-style dictionary?

I think there was something else I wanted to say. No idea what it might have been, though. Have been posting a lot of nonsense to twitter. Have been getting more twit-fiction published (I hate the terms: twisters, hint fiction... ok with twiction, prefer twit-fiction; personal preferences. eh.). Have a zombie poem due out "soon" (need to sign contract for). Life. Stuff.

I did a flash collab with a friend ("Piecework Re-Imagining of the Sea" with Deborah Rosenblum), and entered into the Fantasy "10 sentences" micro-contest. We made the editors-selected shortlist, and now it's up to the readers--I'd really appreciate any help you could muster over there voting for me (or against me, I know how you folks can be ;) ). 10 pieces are posted. You can vote for up to three. Top three have the option of being published by Podcastle as well.

Stories are posted here:
http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=3436

Voting here:
http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=3859d271-cc09-4dfe-80de-fe16853ec8ba

And many congratz to southernweirdo who's also in the running (T.J. McIntyre).