Book title: Lives of the Great Bloggers
I am not sure that Lives of the Great Tweeps passes the suspension of disbelief test, however.
The literary production mentioned previously here has not only taken shape in the real world but has negotiated the supply chain issues successfully. And of course Annabel Scheme (broken link) makes for a good read. But it's not the San Francisco I remember....
Book name: Neptune's Illegitimate Daughter
Friday music! of a rather peculiar sort!
Perhaps science and technology has progressed to the point that we can settle the controversy about Loch Ness by simply creating an aquatic beast of our own and introducing it to the famous locale. We'll put whoever's responsible for this varmint in charge: 
I doubt that it can be much more disruptive to the ecology than the monster-hunting robots and other seekers already clogging up the loch looking for a (presumably rather annoyed) natural sea creature.
Suddenly thenMaybe Grendel could have been an enormous baboon larger than a man, his fangs and claws used to grab and carry off his prey, for some reason impervious to edged weapons but susceptible to Beowulf's might in their one and only fight, at the climax of which he has his arm and hand torn off. I could imagine that. Then Grendel's mother would be an even larger sort of baboon wreaking vengeance on the Danes on account of her loss then retreating to her marshy lair, where she too is confronted by the hero:
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
Lines 120---125
Quickly the one who haunted those waters,So perhaps an amphibious, part-human, part-baboon enormous monster race of super-mandrills or the like, able to wield a knife (line 1546) and adapted to live in frigid northern waters. I think that would make a pretty good spectacle, in a graphic novel format or in CGI video.
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch im
in her brutal grip; but his body, for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain-mail
save him on the outside. Her savage talons
failed to rip the web of his warshirt
Lines 1497--1505
I think the teal lady-silhouette ought to be worried about getting soiled.
What would you call a book about a struggle between a driven man and a huge homicidal cetacean, written in cute little 12x12 graphical icons?
I am thinking that if it were my project I might have gone for something like Hello Moby or Sailor Doom.
Posted via email from Poor Poor Thing
Book title: Ten Years of Silk, for a personal memoir of a voyage of personal discovery along the danger-filled roads of central Asia
Another Kickstarter project has caught my fancy, this time along literary lines. And the interesting thing about it is that it is already guaranteed (as near as anything in life is for certain) to come to fruition, though the precise form that will take shape is not settled at this time. Depending on the amount of money that will be raised by the deadline, the form of the physical book that Robin Sloan will write will take various forms. Already at the time time I write this it has passed the point of a routine print on demand volume, and with the remaining time and additional backers it could turn out to be something much niftier. It is an interesting model, not completely unique, I know, for a fiction writer to be engaging the audience during the act of writing itself, and not only on promotional tour only after the work has been put to bed. It is my guess that if it receives much more of a push from its backers it may cause some amount of commotion among those pondering the future of publishing itself.
I will spare you my further opining on complementarity between observer and phenomenon. It's really just a book.
The author has also written the very entertaining short story Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store featured recently and memorably. at Escape Pod, which I recommend to SF fans.
Update: Funded! Hundreds of percent over! And it seems as if the literary production is keeping pace as well, so it should all culminate in one fine-looking edition soon.
Update II:It is arrived and it is great.
David Pogue has published a new book called The World According to Twitter and my alter ego Grinning Skull has a grand total of three entries included. There is lots of amusing stuff between the covers by my multitudinous co-authors.
Here's a picture of the autographed copy that came in the mail today
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The most popular page on this blog, by far, is one which people are attracted to because of the image of the random dot colorblindness test by Shinobu Ishihara. The two volume publication containing those illustrations, which was printed originally in the 1950s, is rather difficult to find at the major retailers (you know who they are), but those who are truly interested can buy used copies on the Web.
If only brand new will do, there is this place too.
Hope this helps you all.
Debra Galant has noticed the prevalence of a certain body part on books meant to appeal to women:
Look at almost any representative of woman’s literature these days and you’ll see the female body beheaded and hacked into discrete parts. Sometimes the heads are hacked off at the neckline, sometimes lower. Sometimes, as with Alex Witchel’s book, you just get the legs.
In fact, you always get at least the legs. And unlike my children, who always lost the Barbie doll shoes, the art directors never lose the shoes. Oh no. High-heeled shoes are a must for this particular art form.
Image credits: Bartleby, Vintage Victorian
When you're out in public reading something you perhaps would rather not be associated with, it might come in handy if you could slap a paper jacket around you reading material to camouflage what you are doing. Maybe you're a writer or undercover investigator and want to disguise the notebook you are using to write down people's words or actions. Or maybe you just like the way books look on your coffee table, but haven't seen something sufficiently eye-catching to fit your decor. I propose a line of almost-real book covers that look nearly convincing enough to pass as the real thing.
How about Sappho's Guide to Grilling on a Budget?
IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE
Classy, huh? Simply get it printed out on legal-size paper (or maybe A3), trim as needed, and fold it around your book.
Oh, and by the way, it's chicken (courtesy freeimages.co.uk).
In the same series:
One of my photos on Flickr is included in the 4th edition of the Schmap New York Guide. Look for the listing for Strand Books to show up (in the little widget shown here) or in the list (using the direct link) - my offering shows a few dozen inches of the 18 miles of shelves.
I was captured by the analogy between travel in outer space and travel in the mind through books.
On my latest trip there, incidentally, I didn't buy any books from the section depicted, opting instead for some history, finance, and humor. It would be hard for me to imagine spending any length of time in there, however, and emerging empty-handed.
I haven't gotten into the Twitter phenomenon because I have not yet figured out why I should care to follow the rambling stream-of-consciousness of someone else, or why anybody would care to follow mine. Then I started to think of someone else has been accused of producing a chaotic flow of images and words - James Joyce - who created a masterpiece of self-absorption in his monumental book Ulysses. Fans of that work yearly commemorate the events depicted there with Bloomsday readings. In a way, blogs and static web content stand in relation to micro-blogs in the same way that traditional short stories and novels stood in relation to Modernist writing. What could be a better subject to take advantage of these ideas than Ulysses in an updated presentation using the wonder of Web 2.0?
Picture this: each of the major characters and a goodly number of the minor ones would be assigned Twitter accounts and those interested in the re-enactment would add them as friends. Early in the morning of June 16th the readers would receive the opening tweets from Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Telemachus episode. Besides their dialogue, they could send out a few links to geotagged images or sound pieces on the Web to further ground the experience. Then they'd follow Stephen and, later, Leopold Bloom around Dublin through their obsessive little observations throughout the day and into the night. Gerty MacDowell would play the key role in Nausikaa (though perhaps not the late Paddy Dignam) and the anonymous narrator of the Cyclops episode too. And of course at the end, Molly Bloom would take charge in the Penelope chapter. Everything would be in real-time and first-person as it should be, and the transcript of the day's worth of transmissions would constitute a record of the event as well.
Those who are not playing parts in the story (the "readers") probably ought to refrain from stepping on the action by sending messages of their own or everything could fall apart. And of course there would be the risk of Twitter's servers possibly not being able to keep up with the heavy load, which would add to the excitement, I think.
If one could pull this off, perhaps the next challenge would be to adapt Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to the Twitter format, taking the form of messages sent over ten years.
According to Statcounter, over the last several weeks there has been a shift in the nature of search terms used to land on items on my old blog . 
As you can see from the results from the last 100 searches as of today, over 80% of all search queries are one variation or another on Harry Potter Cliff Notes. Over 60% of my visitors are from the U.S. Yesterday, we tried to see the new film, but it was sold out at the one theater we tried to get into. I expect it will still be possible to go see it in a couple weeks anyhow.
An item about the demise of the four-legged chick (an actual bird, as in chicken, that is) reminded me of the issue of problematic biblical verses (see item b on the list) and revived this idea I had of a handheld device which would help in the sometimes difficult task of defending Scripture. You would type in "four-footed fowl" on the little keyboard, and it would search the Web wirelessly to demonstrate the existence, non-existence, or scholarly thought on the concept, so that you could use that as ammo in your debate.
Better yet, if one is fighting with someone else who is citing chapter and verse, you could input the reference into the program and it would search its own concordance of Scripture to give you the diametrically opposed argument out of the Bible. This would eliminate the tedium of having to actually listen to the argument and recall to mind the contradictory position yourself. I would want to make sure that it also had indexes for other works (The Origin of Species, the Qu'ran, the Book of Mormon) so that it would have the widest possible impact.
I've looked, very briefly, and have not found existing software with this precise functionality for Palm or Windows. I would call it iZealot and make sure that I trademarked it before Apple thinks of the idea.
So is Douglas good and Lincoln evil, or is it the other way around? IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE
