Month: October 2004

Pirates & Emperors. Enjoy. I did.

In an interesting display of troll-bait, one of the more regular posters to the comment sections complains that the site is a bit incoherent, noting that I seem to jump from topic to topic without rhyme or reason.

First, I suppose I know how Peter felt when he first heard of John Byrne’s reaction to his column.

Second– yes, this blog covers a lot of ground. So do I.

I have a patent pending. I co-hosted a radio show when I was in high school. I write science fiction. I’m a superb hypnotist. I’ve lectured at universities, trade shows, and conventions. I took art lessons from John Buscema. I’m a reverend in the Church of the SubGenius. I was an original plantiff in ACLU vs. Reno. I play guitar and can fake my way on the piano. The last business I incorporated sold for $85.6 million. I’ve presented papers at the same conference as Camille Paglia. I wrote some of the first e-publishing contracts ever, language of which are still the standard today. I’ve professionally retouched pictures for adult magazines. My family owned horses that ran in the Kentucky Derby. The New York Observer called me “a young Turk of publishing”. Crain’s NY Business called me a “Silicon Alley Veteran”. I have returned verbal fire to Harlan Ellison comparing out respective heights and lived. I pitched for the DC Comics softball team. I’m a registered Republican. I conducted the first retail transaction done completely over the Internet. I’m working on the revival of some beloved comics characters from the 80s. I’ve met thousands of interesting people and had many good times and shared many weird stories with them. And this week, I’m revising leases, writing a new blog for a web company, designing websites, coloring comic book pages, collecting items for a non-fiction book, indexing a fictional encyclopedia, cataloging items for auction, and building a better mousepad.

The only constant thing in the above list is about 6’6 and has a beard. I’ve led, and continue to lead, an eclectic life. Deal.

And remind me at some point to go into detail on those items above. There are some tales to tell.

The Del Close Chronicles

“Every interpersonal situation has a solution in which everyone wins.”

I spend a lot of time griping about having missed out on being an Internet millionaire a few times now. But I think I’m going to try and stop– I just got an email from a man named Pete Best.

So, where were you last Saturday…?

“There are only two problems in life:
(1) You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it;
and/or
(2) You don’t know what you want.” –Steven Snyder

For all the folks who were asking, this is what I’ve been told:

The good news is that his speech and word comprehension are WAY up. It really is amazing the difference a couple of weeks made– he’s not stuttering or searching for words anymore–his speech is pretty much back to normal. (Mixed blessings.) Andrew had about 50% of the tumor removed in surgery. Since it grew an additional 60% in the 2 weeks before the surgery, the remaining tumor is about 80% of the original. Unfortunately, they took some brain cells Andrew would have preferred to keep. They also put radioactive slivers into the remnants of the tumr, which will either cure him or turn him into a super-villian. He’s out of the hospital (for a while now, actually) and back at his dad’s place.

The bad news is that Andrew can’t read.

Yup. It sucks.

Andrew wanted me to tell everybody that he’s basically okay (relatively speaking) and appreciates the support. But when he doesn’t e-mail anyone, he’s not ignoring you, he just can’t read at the moment (or
write either, I suppose), and that until further notice, his e-mail address is functionally useless.

So skip the get-well cards with the Borders gift certificates in them. (Guess he’s watching the dubbed Japanimation rather than the subtitled stuff these days.) In the meantime, pick up the phone if you want to talk to Andrew, ’cause God only knows, he can’t read your letters.

I’m going to be posting a lot more stuff on here, intentions being to get the things out of my head so I can go off and do some productive work– and so this stuff will instead live on the Internet and come back to haunt and embarass me years down the line.

Expect a flurry of posts in the next few days, including some interesting comic book-related gossip.

* And you thought this was going to be a post about shrillness in political dialogue? Hah! For that, go here.

it’s all one thing: making money from art

“This book is Dedicated to Mobil.”

Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment

Brewster Kahle at Web 2.0
“I’m probably best known for being part of Web 1.0.”

“I’m going to argue that Universal Access to All Knowledge is possible.”

Altavista said, let’s just index the whole web. Jeff Bezos said, let’s just sell all books. People who focus on doing it all are being pretty successful in the business world.

Texts: how much is there? Library of Congress = 26 terabytes. $60,000 of storage. Price of a house — or, around here, a garage. Costs about $10 a book to scan a book. $260 million. [I’ll need to doublecheck these numbers!]

Question of copyright. What do we do with the out of print but still under copyright stuff? the orphans? — most of the 20th century. 8 million books. We’re not allowed to digitize them. We filed a lawsuit. Kahle v. Ashcroft — to try to allow us to bring out of print but under copyright works onto the night. To do this in the not-for-profit sphere.

It turns out you can print and bind a book for a buck. That’s cheap — cheaper than a library, Harvard says it costs them $2 to lend a book. Bookmobile project. The idea of going book to book — book, scan it, put it on the net, download it, print it, bind it: book to book.

Let’s go to audio. 2-3 million disks that have ever been sold. It’s a very litigated area. Lots of people aren’t served terribly well by the publishing industry. Bands that want to circulate their concert recordings: Grateful Dead. Community-based thing. Folk music, “fringe” areas. Non profit record labels. To people publishing under Creative Commons licenses, we are offering unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free. If you want to give stuff away, there’s institutional support to help make it happen.

Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable. Copyright issues. Educational films. Mostly being used by others to build new films. Genre of Lego movies.

Television. Recording 20 channels of TV 24 hours a day. Around a petabyte of this stuff. Making it available is still problematic.

Software: copyright office allowing them to archive it.

The Web archive. [He’s showing the original Yahoo home page.’] Kind of looks like Google today. Pets.com.

Preservation and access: the idea is to not have one copy on top of the san andreas faultline. Copies in Alexandria and Amsterdam.

Will we do it? Lots of business opportunities, already spun off four little companies. This is interesting, it requires govt, non-profits and for-profits to work together. Make something we’re really proud of to pass on to the next generation.