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Picowebzines as paying markets

We’ve already mentioned Thaumatrope here on Futurismic, but thanks to the ever-vigilant people at Tor.com we hear that Jetse de Vries – the man behind the forthcoming Shine anthology of optimist sf – is starting another Twitter-based webzine named Outshine, due to launch January 14th; check the Shine anthology blog for submission guidelines.

Two new venues for picofiction, both of them paying markets… is this a fad, or a sign of things to come? I don’t think anyone will deny that you can do amazing things with a short character limit, but hell knows it’ll be tricky to monetise a Twitter feed…

That said, at US$5 for up to 140 characters, Outshine is bloody close to paying SFWA professional rates per-word, and that’s not to be sniffed at!

Blog

Thermal memory data storage

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lavaWe’ve had magnetic memory, semiconductor memory, and memristors: now we have thermal memory with the attendent field of study phononics:

In the current study, Wang and Li take the field of phononics one step further and show the feasibility of a thermal memory that can store data with heat. The scientists predict that such a heat memory could be experimentally realized in the foreseeable future with rapidly advancing nanotechnology. Their work is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

It seems that just about anything can be turned into a computer or computer component.

[from Physorg][image from sah5515 on flickr]

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Clay Shirky on the very near future of magazines

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The pertinence of this to the genre fiction scene is inescapable… from an interview with Clay Shirky at The Guardian:

If you pick a magazine at random, it will not interest you. For people who care about quality, it’s easier to find it online. If it’s a highly qualified niche magazine, something aimed at surgeons or firefighters, it’s going online. There’s no reason those things should exist.

My bold. Your comments?

Blasphemous Geometries

Super Hero Fatigue – Why I am Tired of American Rubber

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries: the life-span of the Bush administration has seen an astonishing proliferation of super hero cinema.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

Jonathan McCalmont compares the rhetoric of American foreign and domestic policy with the thematic underpinnings of the super hero movie genre, and explains why he’ll be as glad to see the back of costumed crusaders as he will the back of Bush.

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With the Bush era rumbling to a long overdue end, some critics have turned their gin-shortened attentions to the question of which cultural artefact best incapsulates W’s period in office. One popular yardsticks are the ways in which the Presidency has been depicted through film and TV. The Clinton era, for example, has come to be seen as a period of intensely human and libidinous cinematic Presidents such as those of Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993) and Rob Reiner’s The American President (1995). In fact, were it not for films such as Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) asserting the President’s penchant for arse-kicking you could be forgiven for forgetting that while Clinton claimed to feel people’s pain, he was no slouch when it came to meting it out in the form of air strikes and deciding, for the first time, that the spread of WMDs was a military matter.

However, while the Bush era has been quick to provide us with Presidents who are either mentally unstable religious zealots (Battlestar Galactica) or bloodless pragmatists more eager to seek revenge than examine the facts (The Sum of all Fears [2002]), the enduring cinematic icon of the Bush era is undeniably the super hero. Continue reading Super Hero Fatigue – Why I am Tired of American Rubber →

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Gaza web-war: Jihadist hackers leave toxic e-graffiti; Israeli botnet recruiting volunteers

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row of computersThe current conflict in Palestine is highlighting the potential of the web to become a battlefront in wars both large and small. Internet Evolution reports that Jihadist hacker groups have been cracking and defacing websites all over the world, and that a website called “Help Israel Win” is offering a software download that adds your machine into a pro-Israel botnet, presumably to be deployed against Hamas-related targets in DDoS attacks. [image by Kevin Zollman]

Leaving the politics and ideology of the conflict in question entirely aside for the moment (there are plenty of other sites and threads where you can go and have that argument if you really want to*), it’s fascinating to see someone deploying a voluntary botnet… and it’s a sign of things to come, as it won’t take long for small globally-distributed pressure groups of all kinds to realise that the power of a linked network of computers can give them leverage against their targets. Remember the anti-vivisection hackers who sent a virus to MIT?

But it’s also sad to see that the internet – touted back in the glory days of the late nineties as the global village that would bring us all closer together – has become just another place for us to fight one another. Who’d have thought the lord of the flies would upload himself behind us? [story via SlashDot and Spiraltwist of the Whitechapel Massive]

[ * Seriously, I’m going to delete comments that are partisan to either side of the Gaza conflict, so don’t bother. Regardless of history, religion or politics, innocent people are dying in the dirt. Neither side can justify that. ]

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