Culture

Clayton Cramer is fairly unhappy with Amazon because they’re selling a book entitled Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers. It is an apology piece for pedophilia, and I feel pretty comfortable assuming it’s utterly vile. I also don’t think Amazon should stop selling it, because of their position as a huge bookstore. Cutting off the channels by which a book reaches its readers is not strictly speaking censorship, but it’s a kissing cousin. This will become less of an issue as the Internet becomes a better medium for transmitting information, but at the moment I think a bookstore the size of Amazon still has an obligation to sell books without discrimination, however justified that discrimination might be. ...

The Hugo Awards ceremony was last night, and Locus provides us with the winners. I’m surprised by the Best Novel; I enjoyed Hominids, but it was a very strong year for this category and I would have given The Scar the nod. Novel Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer Kiln People, David Brin The Scar, China Miéville The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson Novella ...

This morning, Warren Ellis said: It’s Wednesday. I want to see the world, please. Send me a photo from your futurephone or webcam. Send it to dadatag@aol.com, which is an email address I have created for the purpose (dadatag = easy to key in on a phone). I will show what I receive here. (This will even work for Sprint PCS phones.) Show me something. And people are. Start here (original), and work forwards. Pictures of the world. Sparse prose, tying it together. ...

The BBC just announced that it was going to put its archives online, for free. Danny O’Brien has the best post yet (original) on the announcement, with thoughts on what that might mean, and what the problems could be. I like the theory that it could be a Creative Commons project.

Morning quick-links, morning quick-links… possibly I should get a sidebar. Dunno. Anyhow, Asian Historical Architecture is 6500 pictures of, well, Asian historical architecture arranged in an easy to browse format. Check out, for example, the Patuxai in Laos.

Well, it’s not as good as the Walken original (original), but if you’re going to remix Fatboy Slim songs with stick figures, this is the way to go (original). I can no longer believe that Flash is evil.

CNN ran a nice story on Warren Zevon (original) the other day. The new CD comes out Tuesday; there’s a VH1 special airing 10 PM on Sunday, Eastern time. Set your TiVos.

Matrix: Revolutions trailer. Available now. The site is so hammered it isn’t worth trying, though. Ah. Bittorrent link here. That’s better.

Yeah, I’m pretty brainless today, so I’m just gonna steal something I said over at Mike’s LJ. You pretentious little punk. You Rebels make me sick, and the Imperials do too, so stop trying to involve me in your petty little wars. Listen. Your political arguments are obsolete, and you’re too calcified to realize it. We have achieved happiness, but because you’re running the Force meme, you haven’t noticed. The world is not what you think it is. The real fun — the real world — exists in the interstices between the planets. Starships are merely achingly slow vectors for meme infection. There is a very old AI in a sector you’ve never heard of; we think he’s playing a complex game of chess with himself using Star Destroyers as pieces, but we’re not completely sure. It doesn’t matter enough to find out. ...

Via Unqualified Offerings, it’s the first song off Zevon’s next album. In MP3 format, no less. And the whole album “available as a stream” on August 19th, which is tomorrow.