mastodon 4.7.3Dave Collier-Brown, once of the late, lamented Sun Microsystems
Systems programmer and (published) author
Nom de Guerre: DCB
Pronouns: he/they
#WritersCoffeeClub 7 Apr Do you combine poetic fragments and prose paragraphs in your work?
Hmmn, I wonder if I can quote Vogon Poetry in an otherwise non-fiction book?
Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me, (with big yawning)
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee
RE: @chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
This looks a lot like Oxide, but in China and for batteries.
Maybe a candidate for Oxide and Friends???
#WritersCoffeeClub March 13. Talk about an experience when you consulted an expert for a piece of writing.
This week!
I reached out to my nephew, who did his degree in Science Communication, and he helped me finish the translation from Nerd to English of the sample chapter for a book pitch.
I'm engaging him for my current book.
ting.
#PennedPossibilities 975.1 — Author/Artist POV: Sometimes we end up In the Zone. Do you work until you drop? Or to a stopping point? Can you do anything but sleep afterwards?
I'm a computer nerd, so flow state is important to me when I'm doing anything non-routine, meaning writing. So I do get called to stop and come to supper (:-))
I get the biggest kick out of flow. So if I'm out of it, I do something routine to warm up, and see if I have something new waiting to grab my hands and start typing.
#WritersCoffeeClub 6-April Do the plots or characters in your work converge towards a single point?
The themes and/or threads in my non-fiction *better* converge before the end (:-))
#writersCoffeeClub 14 Mar 'Do you think readers want new experiences in structure or narrative, or do they prefer what's familiar?'
There is a narrative structure to my non-fiction, but it's exceedingly simple. I don't think anyone would notice if it changed.
(copied from a private board)
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said "Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate" (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-tech-companies-regulations).
IMHO, he's right. The sorta-free ad-supported model prevents authors and publishers from being paid if someone posts their work without payment.
A publisher should be able to be paid a widely-agreed-upon rate or rates when someone reads their work, based on how much they read. This is typically called micropayments. At the time the web was invented there was a chicken-or-egg problem, so no-one made a serious try to implement "HTTP 402, Payment Required" .
I used to work in advertising, and thirty-some years later, noticed that the same software that does a 4-cents-per-thousands sale of ads can do a 7-cents-per-page sale of pages. As Stewart Brand said, "Information wants to be free, but also wants to be expensive". (paraphrased, see https://joshgans.medium.com/information-wants-to-be-free-the-history-of-that-quote-30e2a0511d19)
IMHO, if I as a reader spend 21 cents reading from one of your books, you and the author should both benefit. I really want that: my first book was pirated, and my next one will be too.
Back in 2024, after I retired from advertising, I wrote a description of how this can be done. And done today, by re-purposing the existing, and rather considerable, infrastructure that supports ads. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2024/12/01/doing-it-righter/ for how.
I've written a performance book, "Performance for the Desperate" forthcoming from No Starch Press.
I'd like to reproduce the contents of Figure 4 (below) from "The Flame Graph" at https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927299.2927301#F4
Regrettably, the" new" permissions page appears to be the "not-yet-implemented" permission page (:-))
I can't even ask for permission to use one of my *own* diagrams, from "You Don't Know Jack about Bandwidth", https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3674953. Fortunately I have my original drawings.
May I use this diagram, and cite you?
Ha!
Check My Ads has a lovely cover this month.
https://api.neonemails.com/emails/tracking/click-link/vw_NWJH43GYz520qqkfSVS32CeopPkoe4cejFdimIA4=/0GYTsxNVv6WPj152vMOBoXGcj_gM7Yht40sxkTrgHpY=
Note the URL (;-))
