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Population: One

Gardening

Blogroll pruning doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it just means I can’t keep up with too many blogs. (It’s harder when you aren’t using something that pings weblogs.com, too, since then I don’t see the convenient “new!” flag. Sad but true.) It’s really no comment on quality; I dropped SCOTUSBlog which is an excellent weblog but I just don’t click through to it. Says more about me, I suspect.

Reload reformat reboot

As you have no doubt noticed, I’ve done a bit of a redesign, mostly based on this skin. I added the sidebar. Realizing that if I painstakingly redid each template before relaunching, I’d be here till April, I took a deep breath and jumped in and kicked it off, so things are gonna be a bit rough for a while.

Woohoo

This is the obligatory “wow, look at all that darned snow” entry. You’ve been warned. My driveway is snowed in so I can’t go anywhere so I have nothing better to do than to take pictures of the white stuff on the ground. I am comforted in the knowledge that various and sundry back in California will go “Wow, it must really suck to live out there.” Ha! I have a fireplace and a roaring fire going. Shows what they know.

Stiff upper lip, and all that. Thumbnails follow, they link to bigger pictures, you know the drill.

Dust in the wind

Daniel Keys Moran is sharing his current novel in progress, The Sheriff of Shokes, on his forums. (If that link fails, try this.) You’ll have to register to read it. The Sheriff of Shokes is not set in the Continuing Time, but it is related. DKM explained this once.

Who is this Moran person? He wrote four pretty good novels back in the late 80s and early 90s. You can get them today via QuietVision, and I recommend them. He’s one of the most graceful writers I’ve ever read, blessed and cursed with epic wit. Occasionally it gets in the way, but he’s just so much fun to read.

His setting is the Continuing Time, which is a vast interconnected timeline covering about ten millennia. He says it’s very detailed and that he has notes of gargantuan proportions that explain everything. Thirty-odd books, planned out and in some cases partially written.

Alas, he more or less ground to a halt as far as publishing anything goes back in 1994. In a chronology he sent out then, there are something like 30 Continuing Time novels, and we’re never going to get to see them, which is pretty sad. He’s passionate enough about his work to make me want to see the entire series, but not passionate enough to get the damned things done. Now that print on demand is a reality, there’s no “my publisher sucks” to fall back on. And he married his old editor, so he’s got someone who can edit books handy. No excuse for not giving us a book every couple of years.

Still. It’s worth buying and reading that which we do have.

Pod people

CafePress has pre-announced their CD and book print on demand services. They’re hoping to get ‘em online in March. Man, that’s like less than a month away.

The prelim specs for books are pretty decent. They’re gonna be taking PDF files. They’ll probably support a range of sizes for both perfect bound and saddle stitched. Hopefully they’ll support standard book rack paperback sizes.

They’ll be doing data CDs shortly after launch.

The Panopticon

Worth noting: the BBC put out a call for people at the anti-war protests to send their digital snapshots to the BBC. Many responded. The BBC didn’t put up the raw results, which is perhaps a good thing, but I wish they’d filtered it a little less — we wind up with ten pictures. Still, it’s wild to see a major news publication doing this kind of thing.