HiLoBrow.com has announced the launch of HiLo Books, an imprint dedicated to what they call Radium Age Science Fiction – because, after all, what the genre needs is more labels. By "Radium Age" they mean science fiction written between the years of 1904 and 1933, bounded on the one hand by the scientific romances of Jules Verne, Edgar Alan Poe, and H. G. Wells, and on the other (the upper?) hand by the Golden Age works of writers like Asimov and his contemporaries.

I have a problem with labels. Still, since HiLoBrow is effectively creating a brand I can understand why they’d want to find some label to distinguish it from everything it’s not.

The lineup of releases for 2012 is a pretty promising one – there’s Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; taken together, these show a united front of mainstream writers from the period who each experimented with speculative fiction.

If it all sounds a little bit like someone who’s desperate to be taken seriously, I expect that’s fine. A series like this exists in part to draw new readers into the scary, nerdy depths of science fiction in a way that seems comfortable, and even respectable .

What I can’t understand, though, is the books’ covers. They look like something out of the ranks of the worst of Amazon’s self-published novels. It’s especially confusing because the folks at HiLoBrow certainly know what good book covers look like, either for these same works or for their own. Their earlier Wage Slave’s Glossary has a handsome cover by Seth, and they’ve showcased a beautiful gallery of period book covers including this lovely one for With the Night Mail.

So there’s no question that they know that books can be beautiful. I don’t understand why they want to publish ones that are pretty much the opposite.

This led me to wonder whether these books aren’t the slapped together Amazonian things they resemble; and trying to answer that question led me right down the rabbit hole.

First, HiLoBooks has a distributor for its books. So there can’t be much doubt that there will be a warehouse of their books someplace – PGW also handles Archaia Studio Press, Nolo Press, Cricket Books, and plenty of other familiar independent and small press publishers. It sounds like we ought to be safe from some of the self-published horrors at Amazon (full disclosure: I’m also self-published, though I hope not horribly, at Amazon)

Second, HiLoBooks – according to their press release – will be an imprint of ‘Cursor, Richard Nash’s “publishing platform of the future”.’ Since a visit to the Cursor web site was completely uninformative I dug deeper, to find Nash’s talk at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum. In this talk (""Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships") Nash admits more than once that he’s speaking in very abstract terms. Those terms are in fact so abstract that at the end of the presentation I still had no idea what Cursor was supposed to be.

Technorati Tags: hilobooks, with the night mail, rudyard kipling, radium age, vintage, science fiction, reprint, cursor, publishing 3.0, author, publisher, business models

Sommer Leigh has written a pretty thorough description of the retro futurist genres that (mostly) end in the suffix "punk".

I’ve said before that I’m not all that crazy about labels of this kind, and it’s partly because apart from the first of these – cyberpunk – the punk suffix is completely meaningless.

In William Gibson’s Neuromancer
and in at least its first descendants, "punk" really did belong in the name. The technological marvels of these futures were not there to benefit people. They were there to cement the power of large corporations and organizations. The fact that a disenfranchised few on society’s fringes were able to subvert those technologies to their own ends is what made them punks, in the punk rock sense. They were standing on its head the mechanism of power and making something personal and subversive out of it.

But then the word became popular, and shortly afterward it became meaningless, as we see in all the labels that have followed.

Leigh touches on this in her description of steampunk, which is nice to see. Heck, it’s always nice to see people thinking about the meanings of the words they use.

Apart from my own crotchety observations, then, Sommer Leigh has come up with short form descriptions of what each of these labels gets stuck on which should be useful to anybody who wants to use them. (Did I say I was done being crotchety? Oh well. And get off my lawn, there, you kids!)

Consider it a field guide to spotting these words when they’re thrown around in the wild. There are some nice examples cited except, oddly, for the one label I rather like. That’s "Raygun Gothic". Why do I forgive that particular label? First off, there’s no meaningless suffix – what a relief! But despite that, if you take a good look at it "Raygun Gothic" doesn’t seem to mean much, either. It’s just such a… pretty phrase, I guess, and sort of evocative, so I find myself smiling at it even though it, too, seems to be playing on my lawn.

Technorati Tags: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, raygun gothic, gratuitous uses of the suffix “punk”, retro futurism, retro futuristic

It’s not that I don’t despise things like sexual harassment. In fact that’s one I especially dislike. Sexual harassment is the sort of thing that makes a thinking man angry. I mean, a few overgrown infants make the rest of us look pretty bad by association, just because we share the same kind of plumbing.

But as we’ve relied more and more on labelling behavior, and on laws to regulate it once it’s labelled, and on punishments for it once it’s regulated, we’ve lost some of the skills that people need just to deal with each other in groups. Skills that we actually used to have.

A lot of bad behavior is more unfortunate than it is criminal. Once upon a time we’d have dealt with it through deflection… or by hauling the offender out behind the tobacconist’s and knocking out one of his teeth.

Case in point: stalking. Once upon a time some forms of stalking were not only permitted. They were necessary. I wouldn’t be here typing this if my grandfather hadn’t stalked my grandmother. And there wasn’t a creepy thing about it.

My grandfather – who, later in life, appeared in the terrifying photograph above – first saw my grandmother on the Vaudeville stage. She would have been about sixteen at the time, right about the time her photo below was taken.

This was the musical comedy act of Noodles and Elsie Fagan. My grandmother Blanche and her sister were each part of their parents’ act. Family legend has it that Grandmother even managed the act from the age of eleven because everyone agreed she was the most sensible one of the bunch.

So when Reuben Smith saw her on that stage she’d have been singing, lit romantically by the stage lights. And that did him in. The moment he saw her he decided that this was the girl for him.

But what to do? In that day and age you wouldn’t get anywhere by approaching a young woman and introducing yourself. You’d do more harm than good. An action that forward was an implied insult: by acting improperly, you’d be suggesting that she was improper and that, as they say, would be Game Over. Out behind the tobacconist’s for some quick dental surgery, bub.

One of the interesting things about what my grandfather did do was that it’s closely paralleled in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, in an episode set at about the same time. Lazarus Long, in that story, travels back in time to meet his own family. And he does just what my grandfather decided to do on the night he saw my grandmother on Vaudeville and followed her all the way from the stage door to her front door. In the dark of night. Stealthily, I bet.

Grandfather started to hang out in her neighborhood. He started shopping there; he ate his meals in the neighborhood restaurants; he hung out there long enough to make some friends, and once he was a fixture in the neighborhood, someone introduced him to my grandmother. The rest, if not history, is my history. And – probably because of the way things turned out – even that bit of stalking under the streetlights doesn’t seem sinister. It seems charming.

I’m fascinated by the fact that Heinlein had his character adopt the same strategy because it suggests that my grandfather wasn’t the only one. I really wonder if someone Heinlein knew in the 1920′s hadn’t told him a family story a lot like mine.

Chances are that if my grandfather tried this clever plan today he’d end up in jail, and as a result there would be no me to tell his story.

Now one reaction you might have to this tale is that in a repressed and rigid society people are forced to deceive and scheme in order to lead a normal life. I think that’s absolutely true. But after half a century in a less repressed and rigid society I haven’t noticed that people have given up deception and scheming. So, I say, phooey.

And when I think about those stiffer, more formal days I also think that when we hand over our personal relationships – even the unpleasant ones – to the law… well, we’re formalizing those things in a different, impersonal way. Society hasn’t abandoned its rules and manners. It’s just delegated them. How weird is that?

Technorati Tags: stalking, society, mating rituals, law, robert a. heinlein, time enough for love

Back in 1977 I moved from Southern California to a great, small beach town halfway up the coast. Wonderful place… but I’m not going to say where, exactly, for reasons that may become clear.

For the first little while that I lived there, every time someone local found out that I was new in town they would always tell me: "Don’t go to Happy Jack’s!" I’m serious. This happened every time.

The bar called Happy Jack’s, it turns out, was The Dive of Death.

The only thing that anyone ever said… specifically… about why I should not go to Happy Jack’s was, I kid you not, that they sold knives at the bar. Because people in the bar kept finding out that they really needed a knife, apparently. All of a sudden.

The fact that virtually everyone told me not to go in there was good enough for me. A few years earlier or later, and maybe I’d have made a beeline for Happy Jack’s. But just then, I decided to take their word for it.

And after awhile, well, I was a local. And without even thinking about it, when someone new showed up I’d tell them "Don’t go to Happy Jack’s". After a couple of years I started to wonder why I was telling them that. I’m not sure if it stopped me, though. This says something about the way people behave in groups. Most of the things you can say about how we behave in groups are not very good things. This could be an example.

So eventually I moved away and had adventures, and mostly I forgot all about Happy Jack’s. But years later I came back to spend the Christmas holidays in the old town. And I found myself walking down the street right past the open door of Happy Jack’s. I had never seen that door standing open in all the time I lived there.

It was quiet in there. They had a lot of Christmas decorations up. I’m pretty sure there were little Santas. And it looked like a peaceable, quiet sort of place to drop in for a drink.

It seemed to me that there’d been a change of management in the fifteen years I’d been away and I was sort of sad to see it tamed. If it had remained a little dangerous it would have been a lot more interesting. I didn’t go in.

I’m still not sure if that was a mistake. And I’m not sure that it wasn’t just force of habit, either.

But then there’s this: what if Happy Jack’s had never been a dangerous bar where they sold knives to people who suddenly needed them? What if the whole thing had been wrong… and I’d been perpetuating that when I chimed in to warn off the new folks in town?

I find that I prefer to believe that it was all true. But then, that’s what we usually prefer, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: happy jack’s, the dive of death

I love the idea of a reading slate, an e-reader, a tablet. I love books, after all, and no computer can match their portability or ease of use. And there’s that retro-futuristic quality about them – though honestly, even modern futurism likes the gadgets – that makes me feel right at home with an imaginary one in my hand.

The problem is that we should not want the ones that are here and coming to market. They’re loaded with problems for those of us who would like to use them. Their functions and their limitations are heavily skewed toward benefits to their manufacturers’ limited and incompatible retail schemes. So much so, in fact, that as sexy as you may think that iPad demo was, or as pleased as you are to see Neil Gaiman exulting over the Kindle, these gadgets are going to lead their buyers down a dark and twisty path that leads to that place where media go to die.

A book is a simple object, which is not to say it’s a limited one. It’s portable knowledge. It – importantly – is an object that can outlive both its author and its reader. All its contents are present at once, and one can skim it or hone in on a particular page as quickly as one’s eyes and fingers can move. It can be given to a friend; it can be loaned for a short time; it can be sold or traded. It can be borrowed from a library. It can be left on a dusty shelf for a couple of decades and then picked up and read again. Someday, long after its author wrote it, it will pass into the public domain and can then be reprinted for next to nothing.

E-books, like books, are portable knowledge. But they’re very bad at everything else in that list.

You don’t buy an e-Book: through a bizarre intellectual exercise, you license it. Depending on the nature of that license your rights may only extend to a single kind of device, or even to a single instance of that device. Even when the license itself is not so limiting the reality of the hardware and software may still limit the book’s use in the same way. Because if your book’s format and its Digital Rights Management scheme are not compatible with other devices then the reality is that you’ll only be able to read the book on a particular kind of device. Ever.

If that device wears out, you may not be able to buy a new compatible device: your entire library will be gone. If marketers someday tempt you to buy a newer kind of device you may have to leave all your books behind.

Remember cassette tapes? LPs? Eight tracks? HD-DVDs? These incompatible e-Books are that same story told again.

With this addition: e-Books are recorded in several incompatible formats and are copy protected with several incompatible kinds of DRM. Even where they adopt the same basic format – like EPUB – their DRM layers can prevent documents from being readable on competing devices. Those incompatible schemes may prevent you from accessing the books you’ve paid for when you buy a new reader or when your old one breaks down… and, as I said, all your books go with it.

But wait! There’s more!

That DRM scheme may very likely be centralized at the company you purchased your book from. That company might, as Amazon has, repossess your book if they see fit.

And servers go away, too, leaving your virtual shelves empty. This has already happened to me with computer software that suddenly became useless or uninstallable even though I’d "bought" it less than a year before.

If we look back at my list of things that books do well, we find that we can resell them. As far as I can tell, you can’t resell any e-Book.

This throws a wrench in the e-Readers’ attack on the textbook market, doesn’t it?

Because the only way students have been able to reduce their expenses for textbooks has been to sell them back at the end of their class. From what we’ve seen of e-Book pricing they’ll still need to get some of that money back in a digital age. But as things stand, they can’t.

And of course reselling books affects people besides students, too. Used bookstores (and libraries) have always been my best resources for trying out unfamiliar authors. If I like ‘em, I’ll buy their books new – all of them, if possible. But if I can’t try them out first I may never read them at all.

Can you lend an e-Book to a friend? No, except in a limited way with Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader. Publishers have to flag a book as lendable and the last word on that was that only about half of the books in the Nook’s bookstore could be lent. My guess would be that a very similar number of their books are in the public domain.

And how does this affect library lending? Well.

Libraries have other concerns, too. Librarians were the first to notice that unlike copyright, the DRM of digital books does not expire. (Unless the server does, of course). Even after its copyright has expired an e-Book will remain inaccessible except on a compatible device with a working license to access it.

Copyright expires. DRM is forever.

So the e-Book collector has a wide selection of ways in which all her books can disappear. The only way to bypass those is to remove the DRM from purchased e-Books… which is, of course, a violation of their license – possibly a violation of the law – and may not always be easy.

In order to protect our purchases, then, our only limited defense is to violate our licenses and, potentially, break the law. All of this in a world that’s shown us again and again that DRM almost never protects publishers.

I’m not entirely against DRM. I am in favor of copyright. I know that any barrier to pirating digital content does prevent larger numbers of people from copying it. But it doesn’t work all that well. In the case of books, it turns our collections into incompatible and temporary things that we don’t even really possess. And that just won’t work for me.

So what’s the solution? Any solution?

Here’s the way I see it. The legal protections for books, pictures, films and music are registered with national governments. The enforcement of those protections is the responsibility of those governments. In the U.S., that means that copyrights are recorded at the Library of Congress.

I think that the copyright registries should evolve into databases of copyrighted works and that those databases should be the center of a single, cross-device form of DRM. The database exists for as long as the nation exists. When a copyright expires, the work becomes freely reproducible. (And you’d better reproduce it! ‘Cause someday that database won’t be there any more. Someday electricity may not be there any more.)

If a creator does not want that protection – if he or she is publishing under a different sort of license – then the work should not be registered or, even better, registered in a different way.

That covers DRM and copyright in a solution that’s as effective (or as ineffective) as what we have now, but still allows these published works to lapse into the public domain. In that respect, it’s better: because it’ll be easy enough to see if a work’s out of copyright. Just try to copy it, and see what happens.

Since all books would share the same protection there would be fewer barriers to encoding them in the same format. If that happens, then all e-Readers will be compatible… like VCRs, DVD players, CD Players, and Blu-Ray players. What a concept – to simply pick up a book, any book – and… read it! Could we adapt to such sweeping change?

If it hasn’t yet occurred to you, publishers have no incentive to adopt this kind of plan. It’s a solution that only consumers will (or should) want badly.

What about lending and resale? These aren’t insurmountable problems either, though again publishers have no incentive to resolve the problems. They want us to buy their new books. They’re not losing sleep about anything else.

But in software development we’ve commonly seen the use of license keys, dongles, and other methods that would work as well for e-Books as they do with computer programs (which is to say, they sort of work). Publishers would be no worse off if they adopted a standard form of registration that allowed a protected e-Book to be lent or sold by transferring a software key. And if the copyright database lists it as public domain… there would be no restriction at all.

This would benefit hardware makers. If their devices could read any published e-Book then their devices would be more valuable to users. A big barrier to the acceptance of their devices would be removed. But publishers, again, have no incentive. Unless they’re forced to adopt this kind of solution they simply won’t do it.

Add to that the problem of herding a whole bunch of cats toward a unified goal and what you have, I’m afraid, is the sorry state of digital books today.

We really want them: they get our attention, all right. We love the idea of them. But what they offer at the moment is a poor alternative to a shelf full of books.

What About the iPad?

Here’s an odd thing.

I hate devices that are only good for consuming media. That goes way back to the earliest game consoles, especially since they were mainly targeted at children. I would much, much rather see a child with a computer than a console because even if its potential is never tapped, a computer can be used to make things, not simply to consume what others have already made.

I guess the only reason I don’t hate televisions and music players is that I’ve known them all my life and I take their limits for granted.

The odd thing is that I don’t hate e-Readers. I just can’t figure it out.

It may be that it’s because – if they didn’t have all the problems I described above – they would enable me to do something that I already do and enjoy, but in a better way.

And that would also explain why I think the iPad is a lousy device. Because it wants to do things that I already do and enjoy, but in a worse way.

For starters, the e-ink screens of the e-Readers are easier to read for long periods and in different lighting conditions. LCD screens have color – which is great! – but they’ll be a lot harder on your eyes.

And yet that’s not really the thing. The problem is that the iPad is a computer. Just not a very good one. One that will only let you run software that’s come from Apple’s company store. It’s bad enough that it uses a unique OS, which limits your choices: but the manufacturer also decides what software you’ll be able to use. Like all Apple products, you can buy it… you just can’t own it. Apple always will.

This has obviously not been a problem for the iPhone. Heck, Marge, it’s a friggin phone. But the iPad tries to be a tablet computer that can be used like a computer – and those same limitations just aren’t acceptable in a device you use to work with.

Unless, of course, a big bunch of people just think it’s so cool that they buy them up by the truckload… which is actually what I think will happen. Because the main product of Apple Computer is not computers. It’s attitude. With some nice industrial design. And folks respond to that.

Enough With Captain Negative

Since I don’t think the iPad is a good device I’ve wondered what a similar good device would be.

The idea of a tablet computer is pretty cool. The upcoming HP Slate is interesting; the Gigabyte TouchNote T1028X, with its swivelling and folding screen, is both a small laptop and a tablet-like computer; and there are some interesting hybrid netbooks with detachable tablet screens, like the affordable Always Innovating Touch Book and the less affordable Lenovo IdeaPad U1.

Then there’s the dual e-ink/LCD screens of the enTourage eDGe, which (in spite of its reckless use of capital letters) may offer the best of both worlds. It’s a pretty slick idea that really does resemble those ancient slates that are the ancestors of our e-Readers and netbooks.

That’s a bit like Microsoft’s Courier project except that the eDGe uses one LCD and one e-ink screen instead of Courier’s two facing LCDs.

Some of these devices may share the problem of using an unusual OS. But they’re free of the problem of the company store.

The thing is, it’s a jungle out there. Almost any decision you make until the file format and DRM problems are resolved is going to cause you trouble down the line. Almost any book purchase you make will turn out to be a temporary license… a rental… either through intent, or simply through the passage of time.

We’re so used to format wars and incompatibilities in music and video that we may not even stop to think what an unacceptable thing it is – in any media, really, but how much more so when it comes to the book?

Technorati Tags: e-reader, ipad, slate, tablet, epub, mobi, reading, books, digital, kindle, reader, device, hardware, software, formats, copyright, drm, digital rights management, apple, amazon, nook, barnes & noble, netbook, entourage edge, microsoft courier

EA had started out as a company that went out of its way to honor its creators. It practically rolled in its creators. Creator photos and bios appeared inside every one of its unique, album-shaped packages. EA was near and dear to the hearts of the gaming public and of developers, to boot, who in those days were practically two sides of the same coin.

There was a time when a couple of people could walk into EA and walk out with a contract. I know. It happened to us. Of course when we got back to the hotel we realized that the contract they’d given us was a work-for-hire contract and Job One was to tear that puppy up and tell them to try again.

Because EA was changing, and in fact had changed, by the early 1990s. They were doing less and less internal development. They were doing more and more producing of titles that were developed at the little startups who still thought they might survive in what was rapidly becoming a very big business.

And as a result, the people at EA were changing. You didn’t see as many people who had actually made games. You saw more and more who had only worked in game production, which isn’t the same thing. So while we didn’t know it, this was the beginning of that trend in which game testers would by stages be promoted to game producers, ensuring that no one who oversaw game projects would have any experience in making the things. And that the people who would give you valuable feedback on a game’s design had never designed a game. But they thought they had: they were Electronic Arts, weren’t they? And they never realized that they weren’t the same Electronic Arts that had done the wonderful things they thought they’d done.

None of this was really obvious at the time. There was just this puzzling state in which it was clear that something was different.

In the course of hammering out a real contract we needed to write documentation that described what the project was and how we’d overcome its challenges. Perfectly reasonable if you wanted the company’s money, which we did. I worked on the design documents, and Mike worked on the technical documents, and everything – we thought – was going pretty smoothly.

We’d been working on our game (The Labyrinth of Time) for about a year already, so we had a pretty good idea what it was, how it worked, and what we still needed to do. I’d created a complete game design document already. That included several sections of the game that could be deleted, if necessary, and the steps we’d need to take to patch the holes those sections left.

Then the most important of the technical documents came back from its reviewer. Well, okay: what did we need to add, or do differently? He didn’t know. He hadn’t read it. His complete review was: "It feels light. There’s not enough there."

Mike wasn’t sure what to do about that – especially since what he was writing about already existed, and, well, he’d documented it. So since this was a matter of presentation, he asked for my advice.

We looked over the document. We increased the font size. We increased the spacing between the lines. We added one paragraph. We printed it out on thicker paper. The new document spanned more pages and each of those pages weighed more than the old ones had.

When the technical director got the new version, he said "Yes, this looks much more complete."

I don’t think we acted dishonestly. The document had been rejected, unread, on the grounds that it "felt light". So to fix the problem we made the document heavier. Everyone wins!

But the story didn’t end there. The document was kicked back again because of one required section in which we had to describe the problems we had not anticipated, and then explain how we would overcome those problems.

Let’s review that, shall we?

We had to describe the problems we had not anticipated. The problems that, by definition, we did not know were there. And then explain how we would solve those problems. Of which we were – again, by definition – completely ignorant.

I’m not sure how we described the things we did not know about, but our plan for overcoming those obstacles was:

We will crush our enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentation of their women.

Problem solved: that version of the document was accepted.

Technorati Tags: game development, labyrinth of time, electronic arts, adventure games, michal todorovic, bradley w. schenck, history, adventures in corporate logic

In every decade since the 1970′s I’ve told myself that the 1970′s did not count. I was a teenager then. As far as I’m concerned that decade was pretty much a warm-up exercise. So if you’ll agree with me about that – that what happened in the 70′s stays in the 70′s – I’ll tell you a story.

A friend of mine and I were wandering down the street – Fourth Street, that was, in Long Beach, California, where I grew up. I’ve mentioned that this was the 1970′s so it practically goes without saying that we were stoned. Because that’s what my 1970′s were like.

So there we were, wandering down Fourth Street, feeling that all was pretty well with the world. More than well, really. We walked past a storefront that we’d never noticed before and there was something so odd about it that we stopped for a better look.

It was a small, narrow storefront: just two windows framing a doorway. There were heavy curtains behind the windows and behind the door. The only clue to what was inside was gold lettering painted on the glass:

WESTERN INSTITUTE OF MUCHNESS

(which I think you’ll agree was not much of a clue) and, pinned to the curtain of the door, a page from Alice in Wonderland. The Tea Party. With the text:

`They were learning to draw,’ the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; `and they drew all manner of things–everything that begins with an M–’

`Why with an M?’ said Alice.

`Why not?’ said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: `–that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness– you know you say things are "much of a muchness"–did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?’

`Really, now you ask me,’ said Alice, very much confused, `I don’t think–’

`Then you shouldn’t talk,’ said the Hatter.

Okay. Now even today, entirely unstoned, I might be pretty fascinated by the Western Institute of Muchness. In fact I’m sure I would be. But for Mike and me, in our particular frame of mind, this was just about the coolest and funniest thing we’d ever seen. So we knocked on the door.

And waited. I think we had to knock again before we heard soft footsteps approaching from behind the curtain. And out of the mail slot in the door, two business cards popped out and landed on the ground. They were plain white cards and the only thing printed on them was this:

SPINACH STAY AWAY FROM MY DOOR

And that was it. There was no further reply from the Institute. You just couldn’t get a rise out of it. And oh, how we tried.

I kept my card for years. I don’t know when I lost it, or noticed that it had fallen apart, or when maybe the Dormouse came in the night and took it away. I sure don’t know.

I just know this: the world was richer for having the Western Institute of Muchness in it. And I like to think that it’s still out there, someplace, appearing mysteriously in an abandoned storefront on some street in some city in the world… waiting for someone to notice it. And then winking out of existence just as oddly and as suddenly as it had appeared.

Because that’s the way it should be.

Technorati Tags: western institute of muchness, alice in wonderland, altered states of consciousness

Researchers at MIT seem to have cracked that nut in a way they hope will turn each of our homes into its own power station – and filling station – with a process that can cheaply and effectively store electricity from solar (or other) sources using common carbon-free materials at room temperature.

Storing and transmitting energy is a lot more difficult than you’d suppose. There are inevitable losses as energy passes through power lines. That’s why the extensive wind farms being built these days provide regional, not national, power. In fact, about a gazillion years ago when I worked at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on California’s central coast, that plant was linked to an underground hydroelectric plant. In off hours the nuclear plant’s energy was used to pump the subterrainean reservoir uphill so that in peak times the water could rush downhill and power turbines that supplemented the nuclear plant’s output. Very clever, really, but there were still substantial losses in energy because of friction.

And storing solar power for later use at night is one of the problems that continue to face the solar power industry.

This new process developed at MIT – due in part to the funding of a ten million dollar grant from the Chesonis Foundation – is a very simple technique that uses electrical current to separate oxygen and hydrogen in gaseous form, later to be recombined to produce power or charge fuel cells. The result could be the near complete decentralization of power. Each home would become its own solar power plant and filling station for the fuel cells we’ll need to power our electric cars. It’s the sort of energy system you’d expect to need in outer space – but you’d be using it at home.

In practice, I’d expect that homes would remain on the grid but that demand from the central power stations would drop tremendously as these homes began to generate their own power. In fact the excess power could even be sold back to the utilities. This process is intended to make solar power more effective but it only requires an electrical current to work – so it could be used with any electric sources, including wind farms, which also have a greater or lesser output depending on the conditions outside.

And couldn’t this same process be used in a centralized way to produce the still-expensive hydrogen fuel cells that remain a barrier to fully electric cars?

Technorati Tags: solar power, alternative energy, fuel cell, photovoltaic, wind farm, carbon free, carbon footprint, electric cars

In fact (especially over the past two years) Cafepress has been nickel and diming away at its shopkeeper/designers in what’s probably been meant as an effort to maximize profits. Often, by the looks of it, this to make the company’s balance sheets continue to escalate quarter by quarter in a way that will be sweet music to to the ears of investors in the event of a probable IPO. Anyone who’s chased that particular dragon knows that once you start it becomes more and more difficult to pull off the same scale of growth in each quarter. It only gets harder if you do go public.

From the shopkeepers’ perspective, though, it looks as though the company is finding every way it can to monetize not the customers who buy all this merchandise, but the shopkeepers who create it. That impression was reinforced a few months ago when very large Cafepress stores (those with more than 500 sections) were abolished, though existing shops were grandfathered in. Shopkeepers who wanted to bloat their ventures with more merchandise than that were going to have to establish additional premium shops, for additional monthly fees.

This month’s brouhaha is all about the Cafepress volume bonus, a plan through which those shops with a high sales volume are rewarded by incremental bonuses: the more you sell, the larger your bonus. The volume sales bonus has often been named by CP shopkeepers as the reason they would stay with Cafepress rather than moving to a competitor.

Back in 2002, when I started my first Cafepress shop, it was understood that this bonus was a reward for the promotion a shopkeeper did to increase sales at his or her shop. And as little as I think of the company’s maneuvers over the past couple of years I think that the new program is better suited to that end. Not that I don’t think it’s seriously flawed – but the flaws I see are of another kind entirely.

Here’s the program change, as described by Cafepress:

Sales originated from shops will earn larger bonuses at lower thresholds

Sales originating from the Marketplace will no longer qualify for a Volume Bonus – you will continue to receive your mark-up as your commission

Shopkeepers will no longer pay the 20% fees on affiliate-driven sales – CafePress will pay this fee

The “Sales Source” is being redefined: Credit for a sale will now be based on where the item is added to the cart

The Volume Bonus program will be renamed Shop Performance Bonus

(the whole official description is here, including the tiers and percentages of both the old and new programs.)

The most apparent difference is that CP Marketplace sales are now excluded from the volume bonus (now renamed, in that way that seems more significant to people sitting around a conference table than it does to anyone not sitting around a conference table).

The CP Marketplace is a common ground where merchandise from all participating shopkeepers appears together, outside their own shops, arranged by search relevance or by other factors. The Marketplace is promoted by Cafepress through Google Adwords and other means. While the Marketplace was originally pretty much a joke many newer shopkeepers believe that it’s their bread and butter, based on some combination of reality, CP hype, and a malfunctioning sales report system that has for the past year and a half reported most sales as originating from the Marketplace even though they very often, demonstrably, did not.

That malfunctioning reporting system is the first big danger sign. If marketplace sales are excluded from this program, and CP itself can’t adequately track what is and is not a Marketplace sale – weighted toward “Marketplace” – then it’s clear that the system can’t work fairly, and that where it’s wrong, the errors will favor Cafepress. We’re told that the new system does work correctly. It’s impossible at this point to simply take that for granted, but what the heck; for the sake of argument, suppose that it does.

If everything works properly this revised system will not only better meet its goals (rewarding shopkeepers for their own promotion of their own shops at Cafepress), it’ll also offer larger bonuses, at lower sales volumes, for qualifying sales. It astonishes me to say this, but I think that this is a change in which benefits all parties, except for those who were collecting bonuses on what were truly Marketplace sales – sales that did not result from a shopkeeper’s own promotion, and should not have been rewarded under the volume bonus plan.

People who came in under the old program, and who have been making bonuses based on those sales (or, given the reporting system’s problems, on sales that appeared to come from the Marketplace) are quite upset (login required). Nobody likes to suddenly make less money from the same level of sales. And as the executives at Cafepress look out across the moat and see all those bobbing torches, they have only themselves to blame for telling their shopkeepers that the Marketplace was the source of all good things. There’s some backpedaling going on at the moment, of course, but for the past three years or so the company has been touting the marketplace, and ignoring individual shops, and now they’re paying a price for their hype.

(Fascinating historical note: in the first or second major revamp of their Marketplace, Cafepress redesigned it so that nowhere on their site was there a single link to any shop. I doubt that this was intentional – they were simply so focussed on the wonderful thing they believed they were building that they never noticed that there were no links to individual shops anywhere on their site. To my mind, this is the story of everything they’ve been doing since.)

This week, as they announce that they’re removing Marketplace sales from their volume bonus program, they’ve remembered that shops exist, and they want to be sure we all understand how important it is for us to promote our individual shops. If their latest generations of shopkeepers are upset and confused by this then Cafepress has only itself to blame. It’s a situation they’ve painstakingly created over the past three years.

Interestingly, this is also not the first time the volume bonus program has been changed. The last time was almost exactly five years ago. Changes were made to which products were eligible for the bonus (there were additions) while the amount of the bonus was reduced. In addition CP tried to apply a 5% transaction fee to every sale. They eventually reversed themselves on that single point. There’s a transcript of a 2003 chat with CP founder Maheesh Jain in which he defends this program with the theme “you will make more money once we’ve reduced the amount of money you’ll make”. It’s not a coincidence that any faith I had in the company disappeared on that date, which is immortal in the annals of Doublespeak.

Looking back at the bullet points for the current changes, the bizarre standout is the change to affiliate sales commissions. There’s no apparent connection between that item and anything else on the list. It has nothing whatever to do with the volume bonus program. It stands there, all alone, like the echoing non sequitur of a Tourette’s patient. In some way the corporate mind believes that this change is related to the rest. I can’t imagine how. It ought to be welcome news to shopkeepers, who’ll now retain that 20% they formerly handed over to affiliates who have (possibly) been responsible for some sales. Provided the affiliate sale was made someplace other than the Marketplace, it will also qualify for the new volume bonus. But I’m still scratching my head over this one and wondering how, in some nest of writhing features, it’s related to the other changes. Without going into specifics I’ll say that this one change is also primed to reward behavior that CP has traditionally defined as an abuse of their system.

So, okay. It’s always amusing to watch this company operate, but in this case I think that – provided that they have in fact fixed their sales reporting system – these changes do a better job of rewarding the behavior the system was meant to reward, while not rewarding sales that occurred through the Marketplace – which the old system predates, and wasn’t meant to apply to. I’ve got no problem with that, myself.

Here’s the thing I think is troubling.

Cafepress will now make more money from Marketplace sales than from shop sales. Look at it the other way around: Cafepress will now make less money from shop sales than it will from Marketplace sales.

Cafepress is now competing with its shopkeepers for sales of the exact same merchandise. Whereas they’ve shown before that they believe their marketplace is the bees knees, and they’ve touted it above individual shops – even to the point, once, of making those shops invisible from their main site – they now have a financial advantage in driving Marketplace sales at the expense of individual shop sales. In extreme cases, the difference is 25% of the retail value of the items sold. In a company that seems to be trying, quarter-by-quarter, to increase its profitability by all possible means… and which controls all aspects of distribution and display on the web…

That’s the thing that bothers me.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, cafepress, t-shirts, merchandise, e-commerce, zazzle, printfection

On a good day, or in a good week, I can watch the traffic there snowball into a regular avalanche as those folks who’ve found me through the banners post about it in forums, at their blogs, and so on. Some of those sites are very popular – or a popular blogger may find one of those first generation posts, and it can build from there. Well. Sometimes. It’s not like that’s every day, or every week. But here are some highlights:

io9 Blog | Boing Boing Gadgets | AMCTV’s Sci Fi Scanner | Schlock Mercenary | Pharyngula | Livejournal’s Anachrotech Group | Steampunk Librarian

One thing that’s surprised me about some of my recent linkage, though, is the number of people who’ve described my work as Steampunk. Because although I’m not one to snap on my brass goggles and to holster my Aetheric Odds Equalizer before I go out, I’m pretty well aware that Steampunk is all about the retro future of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, which means it’s not really what I do. Mind you, I like the style well enough, and I have a couple of things in the Idea Closet that would certainly be steamy, but they’re digressions, for me. My Future That Never Was is really all about the 1920s and 1930s and our ideas, back then, of what Tomorrow might bring.

The inestimable Molly Porkshanks has brought another word to my attention – dieselpunk.
Now that, with its allusion to early twentieth century technology, sounds nearer the mark; but even there it’s much more evocative of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow than it is of what I’m up to. My rockets and robots aren’t diesel powered and my retro future isn’t, either.

And, frankly, although I was all over the genre of “Cyberpunk” as soon as Neuromancer hit the shelves, the subsequent *punks have sort of made my eyes glaze over. There’s clockpunk, for example, and biopunk, dieselpunk, and even – I guess predictably – postcyberpunk.

There’s not a lot of punk in any of them, of course. The “punk” suffix has lost its meaning. At one game company where I worked, the owners’ pet project was a supposedly cyberpunk game in which they’d forgotten to put the punk in. It wasn’t anything more than a sort of direct-to-video science fiction idea. The word had lost its meaning.

So the names, styles, and labels aren’t really my own cup of tea. I’m always pleased when people like what I do and with a name like mine, you’ll understand that I long ago decided not to bother very much about names and their derivatives. So if people who like steampunk or dieselpunk also like what I do, I’m thrilled; and even if they attach a favorite label – rightly or wrongly – to it, I don’t suppose I mind very much, even if I’m not quite sure why they do it, and even though I suspect that they’re watering down their own terminology when they do it. So what the heck; I’m even using dieselpunk, at least, in tags on my web sites.

Now on the other hand, I’ve recently been reading Patrick O’Brian’s excellent seafaring novels about the Napoleonic period and I have this idea that something along those lines with sky pirates and fleets of airships would just be the bee’s knees. So, somebody, go write them!
Odds are they’ll be something like Steampunk, or maybe Sailpunk. And I’ll certainly read them, even though what I’m up to is something else.

Technorati Tags: steampunk, dieselpunk, retropolis transit authority, retro future, retrofuturistic, sci fi, science fiction