The title says it all; Sir Arthur C Clarke, living legend of science fiction, turns 90 on 16th December 2007 – that’s this coming Sunday. The Astronomical Association of Sri Lanka (where Clarke has been resident for many years) have set up a special blog where you can leave a message for the man himself. [Via SpaceElevatorBlog]
So I likee my video games. A lot. Enough that I’ve had to mail them to another country to save myself. And I like stats. Graphs and numbers and stuff that make pretty lines are cool. Combining the two? Heaven.
Via the very funny gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun we see that Valve, creators of that wonderful trio of games in The Orange Box, have been watching you, and the stats are something fun to see. They’ve published info for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, including completion times, hours played, how often people died, etc. Probably the coolest feature is the ‘death map,’ a kind of infrared map showing areas where players have died. Thought you were the only one who fell off that cliff in the very beginning? Not according to the red dot in the picture above.
They’ve also got data on TeamFortress 2, including the tidbit that BLU have a slight edge over RED. Privacy issues aside (I guess some people object to being watched while they pathetically die over and over in the same place…), this is an interesting method for designing games and hopefully the data will be incorporated into how to make future games more fun.
Amazon’s Kindle ereader received a rather lukewarm reception. Although some of the concerns related to the high price of both the gadget and the ebooks ($299 for the Kindle plus prices for books not much cheaper than the hard copies they replaced), a lot of vitriol was directed towards the rather clunky design, which resembled something out of the 70s version of Battlestar Galactica.
Over at ‘Industrial Design Supersite’ Core77, they are having a competition to design sketches of e-readers that might live up to the kind of design standard mp3 players have led us to expect. The competition is open to both computer and hand-drawn designs and is open until Tuesday. If you are interested in an ebook revolution, maybe you should enter your own idea. If not, you can still check out some of the interesting sketches so far.
Having been doing FFF for a few months now, it seems the free fiction online quota works in bi-weekly cycles … after last week’s bumper crop, there’s a comparatively sparse selection this week.
But only comparatively – there’s got to be at least a week’s worth of reading among this little lot:
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A hefty selection of old-school material from Manybooks.net:
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Via Nick Mamatas, fiction editor for Clarkesworld:
… this month’s Clarkesworld theme is death and wrestling!
- Fiction: “The Buried Years” by Loreen Heneghan.
- Non-fiction: Steel Chair through the Looking Glass: The Fractured Fantasy World of Professional Wrestling by Jason R. Ridler.
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Subterranean Online keeps up its remorseless pace of output:
Now we’re on to the Winter 2008 issue, where the first few features are posted, including a brand new short story (actually, an excerpt from his novel, Black & White, by Lewis Shiner) and a column by SubPress favorite Joe R. Lansdale. In the coming weeks and months, look for new fiction by Michael Bishop, Rachel Swirsky, a novella by Thomas M. Disch, an audio of what just might be Charles Stross’ funniest story, and much more.
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And last but by no means least, the Friday Flash Fictioneers ride forth:
Neil Beynon is afraid of attics. Why? “Because“.
Gareth L Powell reminds us that, in space, no one can hear your stomach rumble: “The Long Walk Aft“.
(Both Neil and Gareth have stories in the current issue of Aphelion webzine, too, so go take a look – congratulations, guys.)
Martin McGrath is fully on board with the creepy themes this week … what’s that noise? “Scritch-Scritch“.
Shaun C Green takes a dark look at corporate control in “Terminator“.
And yours truly takes a look at a reaction to corporate control in “Father and Son“.
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That’s your lot for this week, ladies and gents. Don’t forget you can alert me to stories by you or anyone else and have them included here, as long as they’re free and legally available to read on the web. Just drop me a line.
Have a great weekend!
FreelancingBlog has collected some statistics that should be of interest to any aspiring writers, of fiction or otherwise. It’s kind of a mixed bag – some of them are quite heartening, like this one:
“Book sales account for 25-30 billion dollars in annual revenue?”
While others make you realise that there’s a lot more to getting published than simply bashing out a manuscript:
“Out of every 10,000 children’s books [written], 3 get published.”
As the post says, you’ve got to have guts and perseverance if you want to make it through.
Any writers among Futurismic’s readers who’d care to share their experiences? [Image by dbdbrobot]
