Just a quick note that I am catching up fast this week on Shadow Unit. I have read all the short bites and am working my way through the 8 episodes.
This is because the “season finale” is coming next week and I have read that this will be a multi media, interactive, enjoy-it-live-on-the-site-and-forums kind of thing.

It is actually a blast to read, so I figure I’d give it another plug - I’d love to discuss it with some of you :D

From Elizabeth Bear:

If you have been waiting to catch up/start reading Shadow Unit until the season is over, may I respectfully suggest that it is now approximately one week until the first season finale extravaganza begins. And, um. It’s the sort of thing that is going to be much more wonderful chaotic fun to participate in real-time than to read about later.

Trust me on this.

Shadow Unit, for those of you joining us in progress, is a web serial/hyperfiction written by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Amanda Downum, Sarah Monette, and, er, me. It’s modeled on a television show format, complete with episodic and season-long plotlines, burgeoning mysteries, and an ensemble cast of unrealistically sexy smart people attempting to save the world from the worst monsters imaginable… unless they die trying. It’s sort of what would happen if Millennium, The X-Files, and Criminal Minds had a love child, though I have to admit we have yet to have an episode with an industrial microwave. But surely, it’s only a matter of time.

Current site content comprises seven novelettes or novellas, a whole bunch of vignettes, artwork, a message board with thriving discussion threads and an awesome community (and a fine obsession with food!), a plethora of fairly lightly concealed Easter Eggs, and interactive character blogs.

Additional toys will be provided over the hiatus, and the current plan is to offer first-season community members a particularly nice toy in the fairly near future.

All content is free, unless you are moved to donate (We are currently using the Public Radio Guiltware model), and while we are exploring traditional publication options, there is no way on Earth that all the web content is going to make it into dead tree form. There’s just too much of it. So, you know. Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor.

Another site I read regularly, Stainless Steel Droppings (yes, a stainless steel rat reference) has recently had a “book week”.

And one of the articles was pointing at an incredible set of book-made-art, the work of artists Sue Blackwell and Brian Dettmer. And it really is stunning.

It’s a great article, with many quotes and links and lots more images, go check it out

You’re an old or new friend and you come here now and then? Come on then, delurk! I want to get back in touch

It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it?—that the animals learn to speak, and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas; rats, too. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.

I seem to read online more, lately. Here’s short speculative story that takes a great premise and follows from it, based on the author’s ideas of human nature. Now this one is right up my alley, around science fiction and myth, and with a dash of my favorite mythical topic at that, the trickster idea (i own the anthology this is from).

It is also a story that really made me sad - because i totally bought into where she went. I fear people would be like that… It really made me pause.

It is a delightful story available for free - Enjoy! http://www.kijjohnson.com/evolution.html

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.censorship?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and 30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio.

More about No Game

This coming week is catch up week, where I add things to the site that have been on my pile for too long - that is mostly traditional content which has been on this site.
Mostly this is a cleanup to prepare for a new spin off blog which will be more about my professional side, technology, web - get all that todo list down so I feel I have the energy and space to do it.

* games I watch (mostly indie at the moment)
* games reviews I earmarked in 2008 but never got around to put the link/quote in (have started adding some backdated, check the games sections)
* why i am off A list games at the moment (i.e. how great games like Oblivion, Bioshock and more just dont make me want to play more super realistic games) and a reflection as to what makes me tick in a game
* a new round of the 2 line movie reviews catchup
* a new round of the 2 line book review catchup
* great software, fiction, arts and photo sites

Of course it would be cool if some of my 30 readers would tell me if they even care about any of these anymore - have you missed it? Like the new stuff, hate the new stuff? Want the photo and art stuff to stay here or go back to the spinoff blog? Now clearly I write most of it for myself, to remember what I read, wanted etc. but now that I have 30 regular readers I start to care… how weird is that?

Today I chose a poem by Terry Windling, The Night Journey

I’m too lazy to triple check my facts tonight, so here it is from personal memory.
Now Terry Windling is an artist of multiple talents. First she writes, and she wrote one of my favorite books, The Wood Wife. She also writes poetry (obviously!), short stories and non fiction in blogs and magazines, drawing on her extensive knowledge of myth, folk lore and all related arts. She is also a visual artist. Then she is an editor of many successful anthologies, and last - but not least, to me, since this one influences me every week , via the Endicott studio, magazine and blog she also constantly finds delightful art around myth and folk lore, and writes fascinating reflections around all mythical topics. I have mentioned Endicott more than once on this blog so I will not bore my few readers away by going on.

This poem is very much a bit of an enumeration poem, but very musical and evocative… makes it hard to pick an bit out of… besides the page states not to reproduce it without permission in any form. So just go there, I’m too chicken to ask for permission to reproduce an excerpt. But I have had the poem bookmarked a while and it makes me want to go in a forest take pictures, or even draw…

The Night Journey

http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofhs/cofinvoc.html

This is another one that will challenge and sometimes make your brain hurt.

Over the last several decades, new research has changed science’s picture of how we succeed or fail to seek the truth.  The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning.  Microeconomics, through the power of statistics, has shown that many facets of society don’t work the way we thought.
Overcoming Bias aims to bring the implications home.

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