Trying to catch up with info my friends find.

SF for politicos

Amy recommends this NYT article I missed on what science fiction should be read by what American politicians.

RAH!

From someone else on LJ I find I also missed this - The entire Robert Heinlein library will be placed online. (The original newspaper article is in a paid archive.) Just the other day I was saying I was still willing to pay $100 or more to have everything he wrote plus most of the commentary by others on a DVD set. Here is most of his writing, more later, but this setup and format is both more expensive and less useful to me. Exploring the archives I found a book, unfortunately OOP, that contains at least two RAH stories I haven't read. Of course, these would be stories he considered very poor.

This reminds me... Whatever happened to my not very good book The Counterfeit Heinlein? Did I loan it out or is it in my Dad's attic?

SFWA vs. ebooks vs. piracy

Writers associations are having trouble with stopping electronic piracy. Much acrimony. SF writers felt it first because many of their readers are already going ebook. From the comments a quick survey showed 100% of desired books are available pirated and only 35% were available legit and all the legits were more expensive than paperback. SFWA's real argument is with Scribd and making a fool of themselves with Cory and some others who want their works available free.

Also the MWA has a problem with deciding what is self-publishing.

Also Trademark trumps free speech. This involves politics because an "electoral college association" is shutting down clothing apparel that criticizes the American electoral college system. Read it and see if you might have "good reasons to oppose all three kinds of so-called intellectual property (trademark, patent, and copyright.)"

Live Journal vs. Facebook

I don't use LJ so I only rarely check up on what my friends and friends of friends are doing. Blogger is more a solitary thing, LiveJournal a community. Facebook is LiveJournal for people who don't write.

Other stuff

Charles Stross doesn't like Kindle.

Thinkfree or google docs? Some bloggers I hang out with use google doc shared spreadsheets. Too bad, I found whenever I tried to look at it or post anything in the shared spreadsheet the spreadsheet went dark. I can only look at the spreadsheet in print preview mode. So GDocs is still buggy.

Three nerds turn a nativity scene into a LARP battle; sacrilege ensues. IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR. From Boing Boing.