SF Tidbits for 3/15/07
- ChapterFeeds offers the 1st chapter of Fugitives of Chaos by John C. Wright. (See also: SF Signal review.)
- ForeverGeek has a Geek Summer Movie Round-up.
- Collision Detection examines the mathematical proof why Vampires cannot exist.
- The final Harry Potter book will have a record breaking, back breaking first printing of 12 million copies.
- Abigail Nussbaum gives some serious thought to the the character of Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica.
- Fractal Pr0n: Geekend has a gllery of 3D Fractal images. What, am I the only one with a pair of 3D glasses lying around?
- The website for the Canadian sketch comedy show This Hour has 22 Minutes is running a poll in response to Halifax losing the bid for the Commonwealth Games. They are asking which other long dead and now irrelevant empire’s games should Halifax consider hosting? George Lucas’s Galactic Empire is currently in the lead, beating out the Roman, Ottoman, Byzantine and Aztec empires quite handily. [via Bloginhood]
- Speaking of Stars Wars (and when aren’t we?), here’s a set of speakers for the Star Wars enthusiast. [via Tim, our resident curmudgeon and self-proclaimed Star Wars enthusiast who will undoubtedly point his wife towards this post.]
- Alan Kistler has part two of his profile of Wonder Woman. Oddly, theres no mention of Wonder Woman’s Subaru…
- Henry Jenkins is seeing what happens when we apply genre theory to the challenges of understanding superhero comics.
- Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live. Bummer…there go my plans to be the #1 blog by the year 2018.
While I appreciate that Mr. Sterling’s view, I cannot agree with him. The article does not document his whole “rant”, but he really went off the deep end complaining about pervasive wireless access when it was upset that the bandwidth was taken from the tv broadcasters – huh? Okay, Mr. Sterling – thanks but I don’t agree…
It is easy to assume that everything you know and love about today will exist forever, when in fact that rarely happens. It’s hard to remember but back in 1990 this thing we call the web didn’t really exist. Blogs might in fact already be a passing fad. I’d daresay that I agree with him that mashups don’t have a long life.
However, it is probably dangerous to bet against opportunities for self-expression. 10 years ago, people who could (those with the technical skills) had web sites. Today many more people have them because they are easy to do – we just happen to call them blogs rather than sites. I assume to help us mentally distinguish between commercial / informational sites and the personal journal-like blogs. Frankly, I’d argue that sites like this one and many others (from bluesnews to engadget) that focus on news and other items, probably need another name. Myspace pages and this site share little in common.
When I first read Dave Winer’s newsletter back in the mid 90’s describing RSS and the potential, I did not get it. When JP and John decided to found SFSignal, I didn’t get it either (at the time I joked that the only use for the blog was a way for these two friends to chat with each other rather than use the phone.) I get it now – but I’m not naive enough to suggest it will last forever.