Various and Sundry, 4/2/07
Posted on April 2, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 5 Comments
An April Fool’s Sunset. In real life, it was even prettier than this.
And now, a couple of linky bits, all of which are at least tangentially related to me, because I’m a rampant egotist like that:
* Because I was avoiding being online yesterday, I didn’t link to the April Fool’s Day SFWA candidacies, in which Jeff VanderMeer, Jay Lake and others announced their own write-in campaigns. Andrew Wheeler has a good collection of all the usurpers over at his SFBC BookBlogger site.
* Simon Owens of Bloggasm looks at the Creative Commons releases of Move Under Ground and Blindsight by Nick Mamatas and Peter Watts, respectively, and how they’ve affected the lives of those books and their authors. Oddly to me, Owens doesn’t note Blindsight’s Hugo nomination; to my mind it’s pretty clear that Watts releasing the book under CC (and the subsequent pimping at Boing Boing, here and other places online) pushed the book into Hugo consideration status.
* Over at the Hugo-nominated Drink Tank fanzine, the equally Hugo-nominated Chris Garcia handicaps the Hugo slate this year (pdf link). How’s that for recursive?
* If you ever wanted to know how much money Tobias Buckell makes, he’s spilling the beans today. Going freelance has been good for him, apparently. I could have told him that (and I did, now that I think about it).
This is the first time I have ever been a daily reader of a blog – I have read only a few friends’ blogs on a very erratic basis.
As I have flicked over to blogs John has referenced or simply clicked on the readers’ names on their posts to see what was there I have become amazed at the number of blogs there are and the quality. The stereotype is that bloggers are either geekish dorks who can’t spell or one-topic monomaniacs (redundancy alert!). But John’s readers appear to be a particularly bright, funny, and talented set of bloggers – or at least the ones that post.
When I retire at the end of the year maybe I will have time to be creative,
I could have told him that (and I did, now that I think about it).
Yeah, you were one of the first to tell me it was going to ‘be OK.’ :-)
Re: Hugos
Nippon 2007 has a link (swiped from Neil Gaiman) that Pan’s Labyrinth has been put on the final Best Dramatic Presentation ballot due to an error.
Now, I think Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are as cute as anybody (with the possible exception of the Whatever proprietor) but Pan’s Labyrinth is a more deserving nominee than Dead Man’s Chest, in my opinion.
I find it somewhat odd that the entry on the CC releases of Blindsight and Move Under Ground didn’t mention the Baen Free Library.
Those aren’t released under CC, unless Baen has changed that recently.