Trip report: E-Fest 2006 at Brown

Rhode Island is fortunate to have one of the most active literary hypertext communities in the country, and this week they sponsored E-Fest which brought together theorists and artists for discussion and performance.

Only had time to get there for one panel yesterday, on "The Game of Fiction." Some interesting ideas from Lutz Hamel of URI on using evolutionary computation to generate both game moves and textual content.

The evening demos were spectacular. Jim Carpenter ran three machines, two reading spontaneously generated poetry, and the third reading and projecting the source code; it was weirdly effective, and the emergent intersections of the texts were delightful.

Scott Rettberg read and showed Implementation, a cut-up novel distributed on the web as label templates to be printed out, stuck on, and photographed in the world. Quite cool juxtapositions of text and location.

And Stuart Moulthrop showed some new fictions, including one using a neat "deep dive" interface that plays with access to the text along a time dimension using a SCUBA metaphor. And as an encore, he read a bit of Pax, one of my all-time favorite works, a dreamy, terrifying meditation on air travel, security, and terror. Or something.

Didn't have time to get back today for the real-time demos of Robert Coover's Cave, but the clip he showed of this room-sized 3-D writing/audio/image space was amazing; I hadn't seen it for several years, and the fluidity of motion, and abilities for writers to directly create and interact in the room now looked most impressive.

Nixon:China::Bush:Alternative energy?

Would that it were so, but this is the hopeful part of Richard Lugar's recent talk at the Brookings Institution. I don't usually read speeches by Republican leaders, but Tom Friedman's NYTimes (select, dammit) piece indicated a widening schism between Bush's Strangelovian inner circle, and those with a grip on reality. And reality just can't be ignored any more, says Lugar:

"In other words, by the time a sustained energy crisis fully motivates the market, we are likely to be well past the point where we can save ourselves. Our motivation will come too late, and the resulting investment will come too slowly to prevent the severe economic and security consequences of our oil dependence. This is the very essence of a problem requiring government action. " [Transcript (pdf)]

What can one think when leading Republicans start calling for the government to do something about energy, and even — incroyable— c-c-could he be possibly talking about Kyoto?

"[T]he United States must be open to multilateral forums that attempt to achieve global solutions to the problem of greenhouse gases. "

Hah. I smell MIDTERM ELECTIONS. The rank, fear-sweat of pork-addicted, Abramoff-lubed congresscritters tied to the anchor of an out-of-control White House. It smells like... victory.

Can it be true? More "Futurama?"

Post on Slashdot cites Billy West (voice of Fry) that 26 new episodes are planned.

Grinning ear to ear.

Amtrak chair: new pres from the airlines; adios x-country

In an interview mostly notable for its focus on killing long distance rail service (when you hear phrases like "re-evaluate,""scrub," and "nothing is off the table," you're being prepped for an announcement) there was this gem:

"David Laney also told reporters in an interview after a Senate hearing the board probably will not name a new Amtrak president before mid-May but could consider someone from the airline industry to replace David Gunn.

Gunn, an experienced rail executive, was fired last fall after not supporting key elements of the board's business reform plan, which is being driven by the Bush administration."

— Via Reuters

It's not enough that they axed David Gunn for trying to run the system right, now they want to replace him with someone from the airline industry? Oh, well, I guess an airline exec will know a thing or two about running a corporation floated by government subsidies, but other than that, where's the experience base? Is there some merger-downsized-CEO Bush contributor who needs a place to "retire?"

Or just someone with no political aspirations who can take on the job of killing Amtrak and finally removing the alternative to expensive (in the TCO, environmental sense), federally monitored transportation, and funnel that extra traffic back to his former industry.

Check out Jonathan Coulton, awesome geek musician

I'd seen him blogged on BoingBoing a couple times, but heck, there' s just so MUCH good stuff there you can't follow every link. Do yourself a favor: go download Coulton's Xmas-postcard-from-a-robot-ruled-asteroid "Chiron Beta Prime", and you'll be hooked.

Coulton is more than just an sfnal bard (although "The Future Soon" nails adolescent cyborg fantasies, and "Skullcrusher Mountain" makes Dr. Moreau look like an intern.) But what's equally amazing is his range -- "Ikea," an anthem capturing the lingonberry essence of the franchise, a lounge version of "Baby Got Back," which channels James Taylor, and the raunchy power-rock "Mandelbrot Set," which contains perhaps the best non-mathematical description of that enigmatic 2.5d space. You'll know it when you hear it.

Suck down a whole mess of free mp3s from his "Thing a week" feed, and then you can buy the rest, DRM-less, from his site. Thanks, Ron for your persistence in spreading the JC meme!

Miss Deaf Texas killed by train; SMS gets blame

Less responsible media outlets (like, say, CNN) trumpet "while she was text messaging," but the local paper has it "minutes later," which is less likely to get national air. Blame the victim and the new technology, not any inherently unsafe rights-of-way. One has to wonder if there's a Railroad industry "Go Team" that just sits around, waiting to pounce on AP stringers with a bag of pre-spun bullshit.

Via the Austin American-Statesman.

Unbearably cute/precocious Jack-ism

Our brilliant six-year-old, like many kindergartners, brings a stuffed "cuddle toy" to school for those rare occasions when he can still be coaxed into a nap. We were hustling to get home on Friday and forgot "Tigery" (whose species can be taken as read) in Jack's cubby. The following conversation ensued at bedtime:

"But he'll be all alone in the school all weekend."
"Well, I'm sure there are probably a few other stuffed animals there — don't you think when there are no people around that they'll all play together?"

That seemed to satisfy him briefly, then...

"But he'll get hungry!"
"Oh, I don't think so. What about all that milk they keep in the refrigerator?"
"But," wailed Jack, "Tigery is lactose-intolerant!"

Cramer googling yields SmartFilter censor's idea of fun

You may have been following BoingBoing's stand against being categorized as porn and censored by web-filtering company Secure Computing, but ace writer and blogger Kathryn Cramer has taken it to a whole new level.

Googling their spokescensor turned up what would appear to be rather interesting kinks. If he hasn't been the victim of an elaborate prank wish list, he's due for some fun in the mail...

Sez Kathryn...
I bought a book this morning for Secure Computing's SmartFilter censor Tomo Foote-Lennox and videotaped the experience. I was Googling his name to see if my posts mentioning him had been indexed by Google, and I made an interesting discovery. I noticed that there was a link to a review he'd posted on Amazon and I decided to learn a little more about his tastes, which are apparently very interesting. As it turned out, he'd only ever reviewed that one item.

But he did have a Wish List, which I did have a look at. While it contained only two items...

Read more at Secure Computing: Fullfuling a Wish for the Censor

Fight AOL's two-tiered Internet

STOP AOL's Email Tax A groundswell of organizations is gathering to oppose AOL's plan to create a fee-for-delivery e-mail system. While their justification is to relieve spam, the actual impact would be to provide a higher class of service to large mailers willing to pay, while freezing out non-profits and small groups.

This is a misguided attempt to monetize their customer base, and it is just repugnant. I've been an AOL member and supporter for a very long time -- my screen name is "McDaid," with no letters or numbers, which should tell you something -- and I've never considered canceling my service. Until now.

New video proves Bush knew about levee risk and lied

Lied, lied, lied. Video from August 28 shows Bush being warned. On "Good Morning America," on September 1, he said ''I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.'' (Via NYTimes Select) If I were a White House spinmeister, I'd keep harping on the difference between "overtopping" and "breaching." I'd also start floating my résumé.

"A newly leaked video recording of high-level government deliberations the day before Hurricane Katrina hit shows disaster officials emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and a grim-faced Bush personally assuring state leaders that his administration was "fully prepared" to help."    — Via the Washington Post

Sometimes, it just depends on what the meaning of "total incompetence" is.

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