Litwack.org » books

The queue

geoffrey — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:57:28 +0000

Anything I should add?

All – night – long

geoffrey — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:48:58 +0000

Ars Technica: New Orphaned Works Act would limit copyright liability: Huge, important story from last week and NO MENTIONS on the New York Times or any other major news outlet. Shameful. Anyway basically there are now House and Senate bills that would limit your exposure to litigation if you make a good-faith effort to determine the status of an orphaned copyright, fail, and republish it in some form yourself. So like Amazon and Google could put up full text of every single book they’ve scanned that’s in a grey area – and Amazon could actually sell these things on Kindle and deal with rights owners in a uniform way if they pop up and demand compensation. AWESOME. Link via Louis.
Matt Prager on the WGA strike (PDF LINK): Now this is interesting: Matt Prager asserts that spec screenplays which get bought and produced can never count as work-for-hire, and writes an essay about the consequences. You may not be interested in this, but it’s interesting. Via Lessig’s blog, where I went to check to see if he was involved in the 2008 version of the Orphaned Works Act – if he is, he’s not saying. (You know Prager works in Hollywood because his essay is set in American Typewriter.)
Engadget: Disney/WowWee Wall-E robot: I might just have to get these for my nieces and nephews.
Music: Kevie Kev, All Night Long (Waterbed). Old school Sugarhill classic. It’s long, really really long, six minutes long, and you have to be in the right mood, but girl, will you meet me at the waterbed tonight?
Movies: Guy Maddin – Brand Upon The Brain! The Rapidshare links still work…

Grand Mall

geoffrey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:54:17 +0000

So I’ve been living with my iPhone for about a week and it’s great, best thing ever. The most valuable information is about how to accomplish your goals, and so far I’ve figured out a store’s new location and checked a recipe while in a supermarket, those kinds of things. Very difficult to do with a Treo. Webclips are actually useful. My main complaint is: there needs to be a “mark all as read” button for email. And the battery life is so-so; you really have to charge up every night. If you’re thinking of getting one, word on the street is to hold out until late May, if you can.
Speaking of consumerism, recently I’ve been on a little bit of a rampage – robocopped a Billykirk weekend bag made by the AMISH and a Loopwheeler LW09 hoodie. Next up is a messenger bag that can accommodate a laptop – my ACR/Bagjack is OK but not ideal. Initially I was looking at the Timbuk2 Blogger – dorky but functional – but it turns out they’ve shifted their production to China, and although they claim to pay a fair wage to their workers, that’s obviously by local standards, and they don’t provide detail about hours worked, overtime compensation, etc. So now I’m thinking a Tom Bihn Imago, made in Seattle or Montana, would work. Have I become a big fluffy bunny liberal in regard to labor? Apparently yes.
To read: Flowers of Evil, The Echo Maker, The Way Some People Die. There are still a bunch of movies I want to see, #1 of which is Snow Angels; the trailer looks great. My Wii is rad; I’m taking Super Mario Galaxy one level at a time, and Zack and Wiki is next; I’ve heard great things. Then No More Heroes.
Also, prepare yourself for a post about No End In Sight, the Iraq documentary. It’s amazingly good; you owe it to yourself as a citizen to watch it. I think it’s better on video because I had to pause halfway through to digest this, like, incredible punch in the gut. Keep in mind that most of those interviewed are ex-Bush appointees.

Nice assemblage; not mine

Stay Free

geoffrey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:29:13 +0000

Two links

geoffrey — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:55:13 +0000

Booksthatmakeyoudumb figured out the correlation between the ten most popular books at colleges as listed on Facebook and the average SAT scores for students at those colleges, and the result: people reading Atlas Shrugged aren’t as good at taking standardized tests as people reading Lolita. Which might not be that damning, when you think about it. Also note the difference between “The Bible” and “The Holy Bible.”
Nathan Rabin’s Year of Flops: Rabin watched 104 films that failed to earn and sorted them into successes, fiascos and failures – the reviews are a little giddy, but the list itself is informationally dense. I’ve seen fifteen of the 104 and will probably now check out It’s All About Love. I always wondered what happened to Thomas Vinterberg.

Back, sorry

geoffrey — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:16:26 +0000

Luis: I still can’t believe it! Holy shit congrats again.
SimpleDB is built on Erlang!
Does anybody know of anything awesome in Scranton? No The Office jokes, please.
Prodigy of Mobb Deep’s My World Is Empty Without You is amazing. He claims his forefathers built pyramids on Mars – I missed you! H.N.I.C. 2 = most anticipated new album.
Via Louis I’ve become a huge fan of Ben Croshaw’s, uh, video game podcast or whatever you want to call it. The Peggle one is particularly funny.
You know what I bought that’s hippyish but I’m kind of in love with? This Sigg bottle. It holds about the same amount of water as a disposable plastic bottle, but it’s not disposable and has a pleasing form. It’s aluminum on the outside with some kind of non-leaching taste neutral liner inside. I’m unhappy about the plastic waste generated by water bottles AND pissed about their cost versus the tap, so this was a perfect little gift to myself.
There’s this fan-translated manga I’ve been reading that I like a lot – Historie, by Hitoshi Iwaaki – part fiction, part fact, it’s about the travels and development of Eumenes of Cardia, who would become Alexander the Great’s archivist. I’m a sucker for the ancient world.

Grrr

The big tech story today is the Amazon Kindle reveal in Newsweek

geoffrey — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:25:20 +0000

Here. The Kindle, if you’re not familiar, is Amazon’s eink book reader. Bits of information about the device have leaked out since it was first spotted on the FCC’s website last September, but now Steven Levy has the whole story. In brief:

$399, shipping this week. Very expensive, the price of an iPhone, which seems like an amount only nerds would pay.
Hardware: 10.3 ounces, six-inch black and white eink ~~touch~~screen, 30 hour battery, “200 books onboard” “more with a memory card” which I’m going to guess will be SD, EVDO for buying books from the device.
Software: Some form of DRM – sounds like one purchase = use on one device, web browser, an email address for the device, annotations on texts, search, Amazon’s store. It can apparently read Word documents and PDFs, but no news on txt or rtf.
Pricing: Classic (read: public domain) books are $1.99, bestsellers and new releases in hardback $9.99 with backlist books presumably somewhere in between. There are also periodicals: The NYT, The Atlantic, others. Weirdly you can subscribe to blogs but have to pay $0.99-$1.99/mo.

Two years ago I would have been really excited about this. Clearly the biggest deal is the wireless store and Amazon’s pricing, which, aside from the DRM and ripping you off on public domain stuff and RSS feeds seems reasonable, even thrifty. However, with the advent of high-DPI displays in mobile phones, I’m not sure that a single-purpose device like this will be successful at any price. The idea of DailyLit emailing you 1000 word segments of a novel to be read on a phone might terrify the old guard, but fuck the old guard.

Update: me and Tim O’Reilly are on the same track here.

Update 2: Here’s the product page on Amazon. It costs 10¢ to email things to the device – I think that’s to cover a payment to Sprint for data transfer on their network.

Update 3: More from Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Notably PDF is totally unsupported and it’s possible that Amazon’s .azw DRM format and .txt are the only natively readable file formats.

Update 4: Mark Pilgrim rips the Kindle a new port.

Dialogue in examples from Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One that will probably never be spoken aloud in earnest

geoffrey — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:51:49 +0000

On the existence of first-person data ((“The epistemological problem regarding phenomenological, first-person approaches of ‘data generation’ is that if inconsistencies in two individual ‘data sets’ should appear, there is no way to settle the conflict.” p. 591)): “This conscious experience of jealousy shows me how much I love my husband!” “No, this emotional state is not love at all, it is a neurotic, bourgeois fear of loss!”

How we might describe the feeling of happiness if we had a true understanding of the mechanical process which produces our subjectivity and therefore lacked Wittgenstein’s Subjektgebrauch aka “subject use”: “The emotional layer of the phenomenal self-model currently activated by the brain of this organism is in a close-to-optimal state.”

This may seem like exhausting wankery, but on the whole the book is wigging me out.

From The Possibility Of An Island

geoffrey — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:56:05 +0000

Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism.

Happy Bloomsday

geoffrey — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:33:50 +0000

I’ll get through it one of these days