Boing Boing » Book

Believe it or not, a new biography of Robert Ripley

David Pescovitz — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:25:22 +0000

The old Ripley's Believe it or Not newspaper comic had a huge and lasting impact on me as a youngster. Neal Thompson has just published his new biography of Ripley, titled "A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It Or Not!” Judging by Megan Abbot's lengthy review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, it sounds like terrific read!

An intrepid, curious traveler, Ripley roamed not just to see renowned wonders and not just to drink and tomcat (though he would do both, vigorously, through his entire life), but to unearth the unusual, the hidden, the specific. His travel dispatches, laden with stereotypes of the day, reflect Ripley’s private obsessions — in particular, “the inexplicable things people did for their gods,” particularly if they appeared, to American eyes, grotesque, such as the man Ripley dubs the “Hanging Hindu,” an adherent dangling from a tree via a hook stuck in his back.
Ripley’s complicated relation to “the Other” is one Thompson explores in depth. He locates in Ripley a genuine desire to burrow into the cultures he explores and share the glories and mysteries of other places. But, in large part, the comic’s success hinged on Ripley’s expert skill not at penetration but at sensationalization.

"A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It Or Not!” (Amazon)

"Megan Abbott on A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It Or Not!” Ripley" (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Camille Rose Garcia's Snow White

David Pescovitz — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:04:43 +0000

At last night's opening for Camille Rose Garcia's breathtaking "Down The Rabbit Hole" painting exhibition at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, I bought a copy of Camille's illustrated edition of Snow White. This is not Disney's delightful Snow White story though, but rather the darker, creepier tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Camille's goth-inspired, phantasmagoric fine art bring the classic story to life once again. Snow White by the Brothers Grimm and Camille Rose Garcia (Amazon)

A train hopper's photos

David Pescovitz — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:30:38 +0000

When Mike Brodie was 17, he hopped his first train and instantly fell in love with the freedom of riding the rails, sans ticket. Shortly thereafter, in 2004, he came upon an old instant camera and quickly earned his nickname of The Polaroid Kidd. Eventually, he "upgraded" to a 1980s camera and 35 millimeter film but continued to ride the rails and document what he saw. The result is a raw, gritty, beautiful, and often inspiring collection of snapshots now compiled into a book, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity.

You can also see a selection of these photographs at Mike Brodie Photography. (via So Bad So Good, thanks Dave Gill!)

Mark Ryden: preview of new "Gay 90's" art book

David Pescovitz — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:31:42 +0000

Pop surrealism master Mark Ryden has just released a new book, compiling the exquisite paintings from his Gay 90's Olde Tyme Art Show that took place in 2010. The book was published by Rizzoli and designed by the talented Brad Keech of Pressure Printing/Porterhouse Fine Art Editions. More spreads from The Gay 90's below.

Mark Ryden: The Gay 90's

Inside Dan Brown's Inferno

David Pescovitz — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:59:05 +0000

Dan Brown's Inferno will be released on May 14, 2013. Teasers point to Florence, Italy and Dante Alighieri but until this great work of American literature is upon us, it is all speculation. Fueled by the possibility of what secrets lie inside those pages, The Daily Grail's Greg Taylor published an ebook where he explores the strange subjects Brown likely raises in the new novel. Over at TDG, Greg posted some bits from his book, Inside Dan Brown's Inferno:

The Lost Leonardo A number of art scholars believe that the Palazzo Vecchio (mentioned above) has hidden somewhere within it a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari. Da Vinci is, of course, intimately connected to Dan Brown's works, and so given the likely use of Palazzo Vecchio as a location, this is certainly a topic that could easily be used in Inferno.
There is further support for this possibility in the fact that, on the cover of the Italian cover for Inferno, instead of the coded letters CATROACCR, we find the letters CATROVACER. This seems to be a direct anagram of 'Cerca trova' ('Seek and you will find').* This phrase is directly related to the search for the 'lost Leonardo': an Italian expert in the analysis of art through technological analysis, Maurizio Seracini, has claimed that a mural by Giorgio Vasari within the Palazzo Vecchio, the Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana hides a clue to Leonardo da Vinci's lost work. In the upper part of Vasari's fresco, a Florentine soldier waves a green flag with the words "Cerca trova" scrawled upon it. So far, however, no-one has managed to find the lost painting.

"Secrets of the Inferno" (TDG)

"Inferno" by Dan Brown (Amazon)

"Inside Dan Brown's Inferno" by Greg Taylor (Amazon)

Bio-hackers, crime journalism, and socialstructing the future

Marina Gorbis — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:19:57 +0000

Boing Boing friend Marina Gorbis is executive director of Institute for the Future, a non-profit thinktank where I'm a researcher. Marina has just published a compelling, provocative, and grounded book about how technology is enabling individuals to connect with one another to follow their passions and get stuff done, outside of large corporations, governments, and the other institutions that typically rule our lives. Marina calls it "socialstructing." I call it making the future better than the present. The following is an excerpt from Marina's book, "The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World." - David Pescovitz

Putting the Social Back Into Our Economy
by Marina Gorbis

My mother never heard the term social capital, but she knew its value well. In the Soviet Union, where she lived and where I grew up, no one could survive without it, and she leveraged her social capital on a daily basis. It enabled her to provide a decent life for her family, even though she was a widow without much money, excluded from the privileged class of the Communist Party. We never worried about having enough food. My sister and I always wore fashionable clothes (at least by Soviet standards). We took music and dance lessons. We went to the symphony, attended good schools, and spent summers by the Black Sea. In short, we enjoyed a lifestyle that seemed well beyond our means.

How was my mother able to provide all these things on the meager salary of a physician in a government-run clinic in Odessa, Ukraine? Social connections were a powerful currency that flowed through her network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle. Even when no meat could be found in any store in the city, my mother was able to get it, along with a wealth of other hard-to-find foods, from the director of the supermarket who was the husband of a close colleague of hers. I was accepted into music school because my mother treated the director of the school in her off-hours. We were able to get Western medicines because a friend was the head of a large local pharmacy.

Our apartment was always filled with people my mother was counseling, diagnosing, treating, and prescribing medicines for. No money ever changed hands; that was too risky. She had lived through the era of Stalin’s purges, and the memory of his fabricated charges against Jewish doctors, who he claimed were trying to poison the Soviet leadership, was still vivid in her mind. She was too afraid to build a private underground medical practice. “With my luck, I would be the first to be caught,” she would say with a nervous laugh.

All those people who regularly visited us, or whose houses she visited to provide care, were my mom’s substitute for money, providing not only food, medicines, and clothes but also intangibles of information, services, and emotional support. When my mother died shortly after emigrating to the United States in 1990, the only material possessions she left me and my sister were her wedding ring, some books, and a few pieces of clothing. But she also left thousands of grateful friends and former patients whose lives she had touched.

Our story was not unique. All around us, amid empty stores, low salaries, dismal productivity numbers, and fraying infrastructure, people seemed to live normal middle-class lives. An economist would have had a hard time explaining our lifestyle by analyzing economic statistics or walking around the stores and markets in Russia in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, visitors to the Soviet Union always marveled at the gap between what they saw in state stores— shelves empty or filled with things no one wanted—and what they saw in people’s homes: nice furnishings and tables filled with food.

What filled the gap? A vast informal economy driven by human relationships, dense networks of social connections through which people traded resources and created value. The Soviet people didn’t plot how they would build these networks. No one was teaching them how to maximize their connections the way social marketers eagerly teach us today. Their networks evolved naturally, out of necessity, that was the only way to survive. Today, all around the world, we are seeing a new kind of network or relationship-driven economics emerging, with individuals joining forces sometimes to fill the gaps left by existing institutions — corporations, governments, educational establishments—and sometimes creating new products, services, and knowledge that no institution is able to provide. Empowered by computing and communication technologies that have been steadily building village-like networks on a global scale, we are infusing more and more of our economic transactions with social connectedness.

The new technologies are inherently social and personal. They help us create communities around interests, identities, and common personal challenges. They allow us to gain direct access to a worldwide community of others. And they take anonymity out of our economic transactions. We can assess those we don’t know by checking their reputations as buyers and sellers on eBay or by following their Twitter streams. We can look up their friends on Facebook and watch their YouTube videos. We can easily get people’s advice on where to find the best shoemaker in Brazil, the best programmer in India, and the best apple farmer in our local community. We no longer have to rely on bankers or venture capitalists as the only sources of funding for our ideas. We can raise funds directly from individuals, most of whom we don’t even know, through websites like Grow VC and Kickstarter, which allow people to post descriptions of their projects and generate donations, investments, or loans.

We are moving away from the dominance of the depersonalized world of institutional production and creating a new economy around social connections and social rewards—a process I call socialstructing. Others have referred to this model of production as social, commons-based, or peer-to-peer. Not only is this new social economy bringing with it an unprecedented level of familiarity and connectedness to both our global and our local economic exchanges, but it is also changing every domain of our lives, from finance to education and health. It is rapidly ushering in a vast array of new opportunities for us to pursue our passions, create new types of businesses and charitable organizations, redefine the nature of work, and address a wide range of problems that the prevailing formal economy has neglected, if not caused.

Socialstructing is in fact enabling not only a new kind of global economy but a new kind of society, in which amplified individuals— individuals empowered with technologies and the collective intelligence of others in their social network—can take on many functions that previously only large organizations could perform, often more efficiently, at lower cost or no cost at all, and with much greater ease. Socialstructing is opening up a world of what my colleagues Jacques Vallée and Bob Johansen describe as the world of impossible futures, a world in which a large software firm can be displaced by weekend software hackers, and rapidly orchestrated social movements can bring down governments in a matter of weeks. The changes are exciting and unpredictable. They threaten many established institutions and offer a wealth of opportunities for individuals to empower themselves, find rich new connections, and tap into a fast-evolving set of new resources in everything from health care to education and science.

Much has been written about how technology distances us from the benefits of face-to-face communication and quality social time. I think those are important concerns. But while the quality of our face-to-face interactions is changing, the countervailing force of socialstructing is connecting us at levels never seen before, opening up new opportunities to create, learn, and share. Consider the following examples of amplified individual who are pioneering this transformation.

Opening Up Biology for the Masses

Eri Gentry always had a strong interest in health and well-being. She read health books and magazines as a teenager and moved on to academic papers on medicine in college. She got hooked on research into aging and life extension, and in the process, discovered the SENS Foundation, a brainchild of the noted British anti-aging researcher and scientist Aubrey de Grey. SENS was located close to where she lived in Arizona, so Eri started volunteering there, doing a variety of tasks, from talking to real estate brokers to helping get visas for overseas scientists visiting the lab. She was dismayed to learn how top-heavy many scientific efforts are and that too often scientists themselves are undervalued and underrewarded. She became a true advocate for scientists. “Such important research should be scientist-driven and have as little overhead as possible,”2 she says. Thus was born her desire to uplift scientists who are eager to do research, often for very little money, and at the same time to make science, particularly biology, more accessible to the masses.

While working at SENS, Eri and a biomedical researcher, John Schloendorn, started a nonprofit company called Livly to pursue research in immunotherapy treatments for cancer. Realizing that Arizona was not the best place for a start-up, the team decided to move to Silicon Valley. Eri looked into renting a biotech incubator space there, but the rents were exorbitant—more than $6,000 per person per month. Instead, she rented the cheapest house with a garage she could find in Mountain View, and she and John moved in.

The team soon turned their garage into a biotech lab. They acquired most of their equipment from biotech companies that were going out of business and were willing to get rid of their gear for pennies on the dollar. Eri and John would sometimes drive to Los Angeles to pick up equipment and attend a biotech conference on the way. Word about their lab spread quickly. Many people came by to visit, among them Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist famous for his early investment in Facebook. Thiel decided to invest in ImmunePath, a start-up created by Schloendorn that specializes in stem cell therapeutics for diseases of the immune system.

Eri took a different path. The community of people interested in doing biology research quickly outgrew her garage and started meeting in larger spaces, including the Institute for the Future (IFTF). BioCurious, as the group became known, evolved into many things: a physical space where people come to learn, share ideas, and collaborate on projects; a place for hackers to come together and apply their skills to biology; a community for interested amateurs to learn about and to participate in biology research. Today the members are a diverse group—scientists, philosophers, engineers, programmers, designers, amateurs and professionals, young and old. Eri sees BioCurious as a “space for people to innovate biology in a world where change is sorely needed.”

One of the projects developed by some of the members of the BioCurious community is an open PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine. A PCR machine is critical for DNA analysis and is a foundational tool for virtually all of modern molecular biology research. Traditional PCR machines cost between $4,000 and $10,000, but two of the BioCurious cofounders, Josh Perfetto and Tito Jankowski, developed a PCR machine that sells for around $600. Along with Mac Cowell, a cofounder of DIYbio.org, another nonprofit dedicated to engaging people in biology research, Josh created another project called Cofactor Bio that sells kits to enable people to do all kinds of genetic and biological testing on their own. You can, for example, specify which genes you want to test for, such as the gene associated with quick metabolization of caffeine or the gene associated with natural marathon-running abilities, and they will send you a kit to do the testing.

After a year of operating out of the garage, Eri and her co-conspirators turned to Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform where strangers can contribute money to underwrite projects in the arts, music, and science. With contributions ranging from $3 to $2,500 and over two hundred backers, BioCurious managed to raise enough money to start a community lab in Sunnyvale, California, where members have access to lab equipment and a community to help them pursue their research interests in biology.

BioCurious and other DIY biology efforts come at an important time and serve a critical role in the evolution of biological research. Disciplines such as synthetic biology and genomics are truly transdisciplinary, that is, they require knowledge from multiple disciplines, including genetics, bioinformatics, chemistry, and biology. In most academic settings, these disciplines are highly specialized. Even in neuroscience departments, researchers might be highly specialized in biological, microbiological, cognitive, and other types of neuroscience. And people with different specializations find it difficult to talk to each other. Meanwhile, the stores of biological and genetic data we are accumulating are growing exponentially. To take advantage of this data and to speed up the rate of scientific discoveries, we need people from different disciplines to talk to each other in a similar language. Communities such as BioCurious provide a place for people to develop a common language and work together. At the same time, tools for doing self-diagnosis, self-tracking, and biological research are becoming increasingly available to individuals. BioCurious encourages and enables people to acquire the necessary knowledge and tools to do such research, to become experts on their own bodies, and to participate in broader research by contributing their own data to a large pool of community information. Eri’s goal is to engage more and more people in biological research—to bring biology to the masses.

Eri also helped shape Genomera, a platform for open-source clinical trials. Traditional clinical trials are lengthy and expensive and are done only by large R&D labs or government organizations. Genomera allows virtually anyone to run a clinical trial. Say you want to investigate whether drinking green tea affects your energy level or cuts down on your food cravings. You can propose a clinical trial to the Genomera community, and Genomera will help you recruit study participants, provide you with templates for running the study, and give you assistance with data analysis. Greg Biggers, the founder of Genomera, envisions it not only as a platform for conducting research but also as a social platform—a place where people can find others interested in similar issues, share research ideas, and help improve methodologies. Far from the way traditional clinical trials are conducted, where subjects never see each other, much less talk to each other, Genomera’s approach is to create a community of participant researchers who are socially connected.

Genomera and efforts like it play an important role in crowdsourcing health information and in enabling highly personalized treatment choices. People are increasingly tracking data about themselves, and genetic testing is becoming routine. Combine that with years of data from doctors and aggregate personal data across thousands, if not millions, of people, and it becomes possible to determine which nutritional supplements would be helpful given your individual profile and which foods, drugs, and treatments are most likely to work for you.

BioCurious, Genomera, and platforms for social production of science open up a much larger terrain for investigation. Right now R&D dollars and investments are directed to a narrow set of discoveries that can produce large monetary payoffs for pharmaceutical companies and R&D labs. However, there are many questions that need answers but may not have a huge monetary payoff even though they could make an extraordinary impact on individuals and society as a whole. Efforts like BioCurious and Genomera democratize what we investigate and who does the investigating. At the same time, they drastically reduce the costs of running clinical trials—that is, the costs of innovation. The cost of running a clinical trial with Genomera is close to zero. And here is another benefit of Genomera and open platforms like it: the data they collect is available to anyone to review, analyze, and add to.

There are now hundreds of community labs such as BioCurious and Genomera around the world. Think about the collective impact of their efforts on research!

Combating Global Organized Crime

In 2001 Paul Radu, a young Romanian journalist, got a press fellowship from the Alfred Friendly Foundation to work on an investigative team at the San Antonio Express-News. While at the newspaper, he embarked on an investigation of a transnational group involved in helping Americans adopt children from Eastern Europe, including Romania and Ukraine. His investigation specifically focused on Orson Mozes, the head of Adoption International Program, based in Montecito, California. Paul pored over court records and IRS filings, searched adoption forums, and conducted interviews in Eastern Europe and the United States. He uncovered numerous unsavory and sometimes illegal practices, including failure to disclose medical problems of adopted children, mistreatment of and threats against prospective parents who complained or asked too many questions, and separations of siblings without disclosure of that information to the adoptive parents.

Paul had completed the investigation and was ready to publish his exposé in September 2001, but his story was pushed aside by the events of 9/11. Few people were interested in adoption scams involving Eastern Europe. When the story finally appeared as a lead article in the San Antonio Express-News in October 2001, it didn’t garner much attention. Nevertheless the experience taught Paul the value of local information and sources, the importance of doing painstaking and often boring forensic reporting work, and the long life that archived online stories can have, with direct impact occurring possibly years after a story is published.

For seven years after its publication, Paul’s article on Mozes was posted and reposted on adoption bulletin boards and in discussion forums. Parents who were looking for children and those who had had direct experience with Mozes kept bringing Paul’s article back into the conversation. Finally, in 2008, Mozes was arrested for the crimes described in the 2001 article. It took a long time, but publication of the article disrupted Mozes’ ablity to do business as usual. “What’s more important is not that he was arrested,” says Paul, “but that for seven years he tried moving his business to Azerbaijan and to various places, and these people, these local journalists, would always find my story. Or some parent who was interested in adopting would find it. So then I realized that archived information has a lot of power. If it’s proper information, if it’s sourced correctly, if it’s put in a good form, if it’s backed by documents, then it can have impact for a very long time.”

Paul and his colleagues apply these lessons in a new journalism venture focused on creating a truly global investigative journalism platform. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is a virtual organization that brings together journalists with local knowledge and local connections from different parts of the world. Members of OCCRP collaborate online and in person to decide which investigations to launch. They allocate small amounts of money to groups of reporters, and sometimes citizen journalists, to conduct research in their locales. Working on shoestring budgets, these journalists interview people locally in their native language, go through bank records and company registrations, and collect reports from local media sources. That is, they do the same kind of work Paul was doing in Texas. They understand that organized crime is a global business representing millions of dollars in profits, with a huge network of people and assets.

Organized crime operations use familiar business structures— companies, banks, networks of employees—to conduct illegal activities. They thrive on exploiting jurisdictional boundaries— differences in regulatory, legal, accounting, and cultural norms— often setting up operations in areas where illegal activities can be well hidden from authorities. Unfortunately, because of these jurisdictional differences and constraints, it is often difficult or impossible for local authorities to uncover the whole network and see the larger picture. For example, during a drug bust in Argentina, the authorities might be happy to seize millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine and arrest a few people. However, the culprits are likely to be part of a much larger network that involves people in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. “The criminal enterprises of today represent a multibillion-dollar set of networks that prey on every aspect of global society, distorting markets, corrupting governments, and draining huge resources from both,” says Paul. “Criminal syndicates have unprecedented reach into the lives of ordinary people, and journalists need to do a better job of putting the transnational puzzle together and of presenting to the public the threat posed by such criminal enterprises.” This type of globally networked criminal activity can go unnoticed and unchallenged in today’s media environment. In many Eastern European countries and other parts of the world, oligarchs and corrupt officials own most of the media outlets. In the United States, drops in advertising revenues have led many mainstream media outlets to cut funding for serious investigative journalism. With slow economic growth and falling government revenues, there is also less money for regulatory authorities to conduct in-depth investigations.

This is where organizations like OCCRP can fill the void. The OCCRP global network of journalists is able to weave together fine-grained hyperlocal knowledge into a high-resolution view of global crime and corruption. Such organizations will increasingly assume the role of de facto regulators and drive demand for greater levels of transparency in political and financial systems.

A case in point is an OCCRP investigation in 2010 that uncovered shady offshore business practices popular in Eastern Europe among corrupt politicians, criminal elements, and wealthy individuals eager to avoid paying taxes. Journalists from the United States, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, and several other countries came together to investigate one individual, a Romanian businessman named Laszlo Kiss, who was helping many such individuals set up companies in Cyprus, the Seychelles Islands, and Delaware. Among other things, the investigation made transparent how some of the key political figures in Romania were funneling government projects to offshore companies in which they had direct interests. Around one month after the report was released, Laszlo Kiss was arrested; nine months later, his associate Ian Taylor was forced to halt operations. As a result of the OCCRP investigation the New Zealand government shut down over one thousand companies belonging to the network. Not a small accomplishment for a handful of underpaid journalists! The reporters who worked on the project ultimately won the Daniel Pearl Global Investigative Journalism Award for their work.

The creation of archives, databases, and software tools is a big part of the OCCRP effort. Paul’s hope is to establish a global information resource that will make it easy for not just skilled investigative journalists but also citizen journalists and others to participate in disrupting global organized crime. As he puts it, “For many years organized crime has been successful in exporting crime all over the world. Ponzi schemes, trafficking in persons, value-added tax fraud, carbon credits fraud, credit card skimming, and many other crimes have been exported from country to country while law enforcement and citizens were not prepared to confront them because they didn’t have enough information. Investigative journalists and databases created by investigative journalism organizations may act in a preemptive way in order to stop the migration of crime. This can be done through the construction of databases where [information on] individuals, organizations involved in crime, and emerging crime models would be stored and indexed so that crime syndicates would not be able to conduct business as usual.”

Paul’s first lesson from Texas has proven invaluable: when information is properly archived, sourced, and indexed, it will have a lasting value in disrupting corruption.

image: "Barn raising in Lansing," circa 1900-1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock, the Boing Boing interview

David Pescovitz — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:55:52 +0000

Over twenty years, ten books, and multiple PBS documentaries bOING bOING pal and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has proven himself to be a provocative pattern seeker with a mastery at connecting the dots between popular culture, technology, and the complex underpinnings of modern society. Inspired by the likes of Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Robert Anton Wilson, and Neil Postman, Doug's message has always been about the empowerment of the individual. He is a quintessential happy mutant. Whether he's writing about social contagions, video games, advertising, religion, or the Occupy Movement, his focus is on how narrative can be used by Control to coerce, and as a tool of resistance. William S. Burroughs once wrote, "Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes." And therein lies the secret to undermining it. Doug's new book is Present Shock, about how everything is happening now. Right now. As Doug said, "It is kind of panicked, untethered sensation that comes with living a real-time, always-on existence without past or a future, origins or goals. Just the present."

BB: The book's title is a riff on Alvin Toffler's classic 1970 book "Future Shock." He used that phrase to describe the feeling of "too much change in too short a period of time." What is present shock?

Rushkoff: Present Shock is what happens when the future Toffler described finally arrives. It's the initial human reaction to living in a world where everything is happening now…

In one sense it's the first response to a digital media environment - or, more specifically, the digital temporal environment. While analog time (itself just one kind of representation) had a continuous, almost narrative quality as the second hand swept through one minute and into the next, digital time just sits there poised at 3:23, 3:24. We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day. But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.

In the other, bigger sense, though, it's about reaching the end of the millennium. We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot com boom, the long boom and all that. It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived. People stopped thinking about what their investments might be worth in the future, band began to consider what they were worth right now. And the market crashed. We came to realize the expansion was over - at least in the colonialist way we understood it. Obama told us we are the change we had been waiting for.

So between those two related shifts, we arrived in a present. Only instead of seizing this new "now," we tend to get disoriented. Instead of using digital technology to time shift our schedules to our real preferences, we respond to the insistent pings of our devices as if we were 911 operators or air traffic controllers. We chase the moment they offer, and forget that we are the ones in real time, and the devices (and the corporations behind them) are chasing us.

But "present shock" is also as simple as the botox addicts on Real Housewives of Orange County, desperate to lock in the moment when they were 29 years old. All succeed in doing is paralyzing their faces in a poor imitation of that moment, and making themselves unavailable to the social moment in which they are living. They can't register emotions on their faces, which is why they never believe one another. They are "overwinding" the present moment.

The book is broken up into five "symptoms" of present shock? Can you give an example of each?

Narrative collapse is what happens when we no longer have time to tell a traditional story. Whether it's remote controls or DVRS that allow us to break the trance of a story, or simply our inability to grasp a story when we no longer have linear time in which to tell it. In one way it's great thing, because it disables the kinds of stories that were used to pull us out of the moment, and fix our eyes on some future goal. We can't be fooled into destructive, ends-justify-the-means battles because we don't do things for the ends, anymore. It wreaks havoc on brand mythologies and origin stories, alike.

At first, the response was television like The Simpsons and MST3k, which seemed less about whatever story was being told, and more about the individual associations we make along the way, comparing a scene with some other moment in media. The satisfaction wasn't getting to the end, but making all those connections.

Then we see video games as an even more presentist response, giving the user a real-time experience of making choices instead of watching some character move through a story that already happened. We get "infinite" games, where we play not to win and end the play, but in order to keep the play going.

Digiphrenia is a digitally induced mental confusion. I've never had a problem with information overload. Where I think we run into trouble with digital technology is its ability to make copies. Human beings don't copy well - but I've got i don't know how many "instances" of myself functioning independently at any moment. My Twitter account, my email inbox, my Facebook profile (well, I surrendered that one), all act on my behalf, sometimes when I'm not even there. Especially when Zuckerberg decides to market something using my likeness, or that of someone who has chosen to "like" me.

The promise of digital technology was that it would give us more authority over our time. Remember those early conversations on the Well? We got to sound smarter than we were in real life, because we had all the time in the world to respond. They were asynchronous conversations, fully consonant with the asynchronous character of digital technology. When we strap this stuff to our bodies and respond to each vibration, we are turning them into something very different.

Digiphrenia is also simply mistaking digital clock time, and its seemingly generic quality, to the very contoured and specific qualities of human time. Biologically, psychologically, and culturally, we are guided by all sorts of cycles that make one time different from another. Emerging research (cited in the book) seems to indicate that we are collectively biased toward a different neurotransmitter during each week of the lunar cycle. No, it's not new age weirdness (though I bet most aboriginal cultures knew this - the early Jews certainly did). Digiphrenia is a disconnection and devaluing of these underlying rhythms for the illusion of chronologically equivalent pulses. We lose our coherence, because we're no longer in synch with our most basic biological clocks.

Overwinding is trying to shove really big time scales into tiny little presentist moments. When I read Stewart Brand's The Long Now I was inspired by the idea of thinking of things in 10,000 year spans. But for me, that experience felt less like a long now than a short forever. It was just too big a scale, too big a sense of responsibility to throw onto each moment. At the very least, it was a hard argument to make in a presentist culture with no sense of long-term goals and impacts.

Overwinding is the effort to get long-term effects out of immediate actions. It's happening most clearly on the stock market, where people want to make money not by investing, but on the trade itself. They buy Facebook in the morning of the IPO and are disappointed when they haven't made a profit fifteen minutes later. It's the ultra-fast trading algorithms that make money by trading in your future.

Fractalnoia is when we try to make sense of things in the present moment, rather than having a cause-and-effect chain of events through which to understand how something happened. It's making sense of a static picture. Like CSI. Drawing connections and making equivalencies between things that are essentially unconnected and definitely not equivalent.

I took the term from fractals, of course, because so many of us seem to make the error of mistaking self-similarity for being exactly the same. We need to develop pattern recognition, which is a softer and less exact skill than finding true congruence. Fractalnoia is also the panic at trying to parse feedback. Our feedback cycles have gotten so tight in a presentist society that it's really hard to parse causes from effects. All we hear is the screech of the microphone in the speaker.

Finally, Apocalypto is our intolerance for living in an interminable present. We are so used to beginnings and endings, that many of us would rather imagine a zombie apocalypse or human-obsolescing singularity than try to carry on sustainably into the future.

When you started writing this book, you told me you thought it was your most important one. I've never heard you say that before. Do you still feel that way now that it's done? Why?

In some ways I feel like it's my last book. (Don't applaud - that's not polite.) It certainly brings me to the end of the journey I began with Cyberia in 1994 (a book that got canceled by its commissioning publisher because they thought the net would be "over" by the original 1993 publication date). I wrote that "time was speeding up" and that we were "on the event horizon of the strange attractor." It was heady and optimistic, but it was also Mondo and Boing Boing.

It didn't seem to me I was writing about something that was coming, but something that had arrived. This was it. The tools were in our cyberpunk hands, and we could create what we wanted, exchange it directly, build a peer-to-peer culture and economy, and liberate ourselves from centuries of time-is-money industrial corporatism. The digital age seemed to be the great release from the yuppie nightmare, and the ultimate generator of slack.

But then Wired got ahold of it, and all of sudden the digital age wasn't something with us, to celebrate; it was something on the horizon. Louis Rosetto wrote in the editorial to the first issue of Wired that we were facing a "Bengali Typhoon." Like it was this big wave that was about to happen and you better watch out. And you better read this magazine (and hire some digitally inspired futurists) to do some scenario planning so you don't' get wiped out.

And from then, digitally seemed less about transcending the industrial age economy, and more about preserving it. Internet companies were going to save the Nasdaq. And, sure enough, we used digital technology largely to make us into better consumers. And our applications - the way so many of them take our time instead of free it, make us work round the clock instead of when we want, or convince us that we have to tend to them night and day - they exacerbate the worst sorts of time-is-money principles of industrialism.

So when I started this book, I realized I had (at least for me) come upon the essence of our relative power in this situation: Time. We are witnessing yet another iteration of the age old interplay between Chronos, or clock time, and Kairos, which really means timing. Timing is the human part - the indefinable aspect of time. A kind of readiness. What's the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? 5:02? No, that's chronos. It's not a time on the clock. It's after he's had his drink but before he's opened the bills. Kairos.

And all my work has really been about this - from Playing the Future, which was about the breakdown of cause and effect narrative, to Nothing Sacred, which was about Jewish continuity as less of a thread to some historical past and more about the willingness to engage with fresh eyes today.

So this book is less about a particular thing, and more about the whole thing.

For years, you and I joked that you were like an "optimism engine," always able to find the brighter side of any negative situation. I'm not sure if you've become less optimistic, but you are certainly less positive about the present. Why?

Well, I'm still really hopeful. And I play the optimism game to this day - where I take an awful phenomenon and try to recast it in a positive frame. It's a bit harder now that I have a kid and I think about the world she'll inherit. But I'm still hopeful.

The only negative side of Present Shock is that we're mostly in shock rather than true presentism. But that's to be expected because this is brand new, and we have a good five hundred years to go before presentism becomes something else. These things last millennia. And there are some great example in the book of people and groups who are embracing presentist, steady-state models. From Occupy to time dollars, Makerbots to spiritually inspired social activism, we see the emergence of some terrifically, post-industrial post-narrative approaches to life. We are finally ready to look at less climactic, more sustainable solutions to the world's problems.

Contending with a society biased toward the present is just going to take some time.

One of the most soundbitey bits in the book is the statement "I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people than what people are choosing to do to one another through technology.” What does that mean?

I accept that technology has biases. Guns don't kill people, but they are much more biased toward killing people than pillows. Digital technology has biases, too, but I don't think they are biased toward taking our time, fracturing our awareness, and making us anxious. I think they are more biased toward doing the opposite. The thing that gets me anxious is not the email piling up in the inbox - it's the expectations of the people on the other end of those emails. It's the expectation that I'm supposed to respond in seconds or minutes. It's the boss who thinks a computer is a good enough reason to watch every one of his worker's keystrokes.

But you see, the only reason the boss thinks that is because he's back in the industrial age mentality of believing that he has bought your time. Digital technology should be giving the worker more choice of how he uses his time, not the boss more authority over that time.

Since at least 1998, and most recently in your Good post, you've ranted that "futurists suck." As you know, I'm a card-carrying futurist myself with Institute for the Future, an organization that you've expressed a desire to associate with more closely. So I need to ask, how do you define "futurist"?

Well, "why futurists suck" was a bad headline on an otherwise heartfelt little piece. I've gone and apologized for it on my blog. It's no excuse - particularly for me - but I was in a bit of present shock, myself, when I was going back and forth about it (typing on a smart phone during an NPR station break on publication day, correcting for a snafu that had delayed the piece) and I wasn't paying proper attention to how it was going to be framed.

The title actually came back from the past - a talk I gave at SXSW in 1997 (you were there!) called "Renaissance Now!" (satirically subtitled, "or why futurists suck"). It was meant as a humorous swipe against the long-boom-boosters I saw turning the internet from a real-time, p2p2, Maker phenomenon into the poster child for NASDAQ. It was aimed at a particular, digerati-style of consultants who I believed weren't genuinely looking to figure out what might happen; they were propagandizing the net as a market phenomenon in order to extend the lives of the corporations to whom they were consulting. Their purpose was not to usher in the digital age, but to perpetuate the industrial age by digital means.

And then they necessarily went off in really dehumanizing directions, envisioning information's inevitable transcendence beyond humans in its own quest toward greater complexity. People were only valuable to the extent they could enable information's evolution. To me, this has the medium and the message reversed.

Writing Present Shock finally taught me what it was I was ranting about back in 1997 but not fully understanding. This really isn't about the future; it's about the now - in more ways than one.

As for real futurists - and science fiction writers - I love them. I'm probably one, myself. But futurism today means being truly grounded in the present, and then building possibilities from there. Those are the only possibilities that are bound by nothing but the human imagination.

Douglas Rushkoff will talk about Present Shock at San Francisco's City Lights Books on April 4 at 7pm and Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore on April 11 at 7pm.

James Herbert, esteemed British horror/SF author, RIP

David Pescovitz — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:29:58 +0000

Famed British horror/dystopian fiction author James Herbert has died at age 69. Herbert was the author of more than twenty scary, science fiction, and/or apocalyptic tales like the 1970s man-eating rodent classics The Rats and Lair, and also The Fog, about an insanity-inducing chemical weapon.

"James Herbert: Master of British horror fiction" (The Guardian)

James Herbert (Amazon)

Douglas Rushkoff's "Present Shock" in the NYT

David Pescovitz — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:49:53 +0000

Old-school bOING bOING pal Douglas Rushkoff has a new book out this week, Present Shock, and it received a rave review in the New York Times! Congrats, Doug! From Janet Maslin's NYT review:

The ancient Greeks learned about the hero’s journey from Homer’s narratives. We’ve gotten decades of Homer Simpson, who “remains in a suspended, infinite present,” while his audience moves from one satirical pop-culture reference to the next. Citing “Forrest Gump” as a film that failed to combat late-20th-century feelings of discontinuity and “Pulp Fiction” as one wild enough to usher in a new era, Mr. Rushkoff moves on to what came next: the video game open-ended structure that keeps TV drama in the eternal present. About “Game of Thrones” he says, “This is no longer considered bad writing.” Changes to news presentation are even more dramatic. This book describes the present shock of politicians who — thanks to the 24/7 coverage ushered in by “the CNN effect” that began in the 1980s — “cannot get on top of issues, much less get ahead of them.” He notes that both the political left (MSNBC, with its slogan “Lean Forward”) and right (conservatism devoted to reviving traditional values) share this goal: They’re trying to escape the present.

Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff (Amazon)

"Out of Time: The Sins of Immediacy" (NYT)

Book about big data, predictive behavior, and decision making

David Pescovitz — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:08:30 +0000

Kenneth Cukier was on NPR this morning talking about the new book he wrote with Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think." It sounds fascinating and relevant to research I'm doing at Institute for the Future on newfound applications of systems thinking in what we're calling the "coming age of networked matter." Here are some choice bits from the interview:

On how Target identifies pregnant customers
"The example comes from Charles Duhigg, who's a reporter at The New York Times, and he's the one who uncovered the story. What Target was doing was they were trying to find out what customers were likely to be pregnant or not. So what they were able to do was to look at all the different things that couples were buying prior to the pregnancy — such as vitamins at one point, unscented lotion at another point, lots of hand towels at another point — and with that, make a prediction, score the likelihood that this person was pregnant, so that they could then send coupons to the people involved... there might be a coupon for a stroller or for diapers ...
On how Google tracks the flu
"Google stores all of its searches. What they were able to do was go through the database of previous searches to identify what was the likely predictor that there was going to be a flu outbreak in certain regions of America. Now, keep in mind, we pay for the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to look at the United States and find out where flu outbreaks are taking place for the seasonal flu. But the difference is that it takes the CDC about two weeks to report the data. Google does it in real time simply on search queries."

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think" (Amazon)

The 'Big Data' Revolution: How Number Crunchers Can Predict Our Lives (NPR)

Software to predict crime scenes

Abbott & Costello's classic "who's on first?" routine wonderfully retold in a children's book

Mark Frauenfelder — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:12:29 +0000

TIME Magazine called Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine "the best comedy sketch of the twentieth century," and I find that hard to argue with. I loved listening to it as a kid, and when I hear it today it still brings a smile.

A couple of weeks ago I received a review copy of Who's on First? in the form of a children's book illustrated by John Martz. I left it on the kitchen table planning to read it later in the afternoon. My nine-year-old daughter Jane saw it when she got home from school and started reading it. She ran into my room and said, "This is great. Have you read it?" I explained that it was based on a comedy sketch performed by a couple of old-timey comedians, which didn't interest her. She loved the book, though, and read it to me that night before bed. Martz' version of the story, which stars a rabbit and a bear, has all the goofy humor of the original sketch. I'd love to see it done as an animated cartoon, using the voices of Lou and Bud.

Who's on First?

Finnegans Wake a bestseller in China

David Pescovitz — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:36:24 +0000

Finnegans Wake, just published in a new Chinese translation, has become a sleeper hit in China. In just one month, it's sold 8,000 copies and hit number 2 on a Shanghai bestseller list. According to Fudan University professor Dai Congrong, who spent 8 years working on the book, the things lost in translation "are mostly the (long) sentences, because Joyce's sentences are so different from common sentences," says "My translation is more clear than the original book." Wish I owned the Chinese rights to Joseph Campbell's "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake!"

"Undaunted Chinese lap up Finnegans Wake"

The Source Family, documentary about 1970s Los Angeles freak cult/commune

David Pescovitz — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:58:29 +0000

The Source Family, a magnificent documentary by my friend Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, will see nationwide distribution this spring, starting with a May 1 premier at the IFC Center in New York City. The film tells the story of Father Yod and his Source Family, a radical, utopian social experiment that emerged from the Los Angeles freak scene in the 1970s. Boing Boing is delighted to premier the trailer above. Far fucking out.

The Source Family’s outlandish lifestyle, popular celebrity hangout restaurant, rock band, and beautiful women made them the darlings of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip; but their outsider ideals, controversial spiritual leader Father Yod, along with his 13 wives, instigated local authorities. They fled to Hawaii, leading to their dramatic demise. Years later, family members surface and the rock band reforms, revealing how their time with Father Yod shaped their lives in the most unexpected ways. These personal accounts, along with interviews with outsiders, make up the interviews in the film. However, the story is largely cinematic, expressed through the use of the group’s extensive film and audio archive maintained by Isis Aquarian, one of Father's wives, Family documentarian, and a central character in the documentary (as well as being associate producer). The film’s soundtrack is composed entirely of original Source Family music produced from 1971-1975.

The film was inspired by The Source: The Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family, a fantastic 2007 book written by family members Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, edited by Jodi Wille, and published by our pals Process Media.

The Source Family: A Documentary

Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors, RIP

David Pescovitz — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:31:44 +0000

Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors (1965), has died. The novel -- which in 1979 led to the classic cult film of the same name -- was inspired by Yurick's experiences working in the New York City Department of Welfare.

“Some of the children of these families were what was then called juvenile delinquents,” Mr. Yurick wrote in an introduction to an edition of “The Warriors” published in 2003. “Many of them belonged to fighting gangs. Some of these gangs numbered in the hundreds; they were veritable armies. This social phenomenon was viewed, on the one hand, as the invasion of the barbarians, only this time they came from the inside rather than from the outside.”

"Sol Yurick, Author of ‘The Warriors,’ Dies at 87" (NYT, thanks Gil Kaufman!)

Picnic, Lightning

Jason Weisberger — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:29:33 +0000

I was killing time in a used bookstore last week and ran across a copy of Billy Collins' Picnic, Lightning that became an instant purchase.

Collins' poetry presents images so strong I can only describe them as photography. As that photographer, Collins is a member of your family, your best friend, sharing everyday moments and feelings so vividly they become your memories as well.

The title poem is a clever examination of two words from Nabakov's Lolita and packed with Collins' charming wit. My favorite, however, is This Much I Do Remember, a simple story of a memory being made.

Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins

Rereading my childhood: The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death

Jason Weisberger — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:13:41 +0000

When I was finishing grade school the works of Daniel Pinkwater delighted me. I read his stories over and over and The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death is a life long favorite.

Reminiscing with an old friend last night brought tears to my eyes. It is amazing how this tale of youth and discovery holds me. Walter's terrible boredom at Ghengis Khan High? Sneaking out to see classic films with Winston Bongo? Beers at Beanbenders? I still want to do these things! My imagination is permanently warped in the most wonderful ways.

I just ordered a copy, the same edition I had as a kid. Next up will be Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars.

The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Pinkwater

30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius

Jason Weisberger — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:54:02 +0000

I had a lot of time on my hands this holiday season and decided to get an arduino kit (I have solar panels I want to aim for max efficiency during the day, on a VW van.) A lot of intro titles seemed interesting but Simon Monk's 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius grabbed my attention. Good title!

Sadly, this is no guide to building shark-mountable lasers. There are however a lot of simple, short projects that help you understand building with an arduino controller. Monk uses very clear pictures and schematics to show what needs doing. His text is precise and understandable. The steps are easy to follow and the thing you should learn from an exercise is blatantly obvious. Most importantly these projects are fun! I'm not just making an LED blink or a speaker chirp when I work with this book. Projects like the temperature monitor and computer controlled fan are giving me the foundation I need to aim my solar panels. The results and functions are easy to apply to the types of things I want to do with an arduino.

Lasers would have been nice.

30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius by Simon Monk

eBook review: Cornbread

Jason Weisberger — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:00:12 +0000

Sean Hammer's Cornbread is a dark kindle single that made me laugh.

With an empty life and nothing to look forward to ever, Jenny's sole pride is the cornbread she feeds her husband once-a-week. When Jenny messes up the recipe, everything changes.

Well paced, Cornbread went by just a little too quickly.

Cornbread by Sean Hammer

Wool 6 & 7

Jason Weisberger — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:16:35 +0000

If the only new author I'd been introduced to in 2012 was Hugh Howey, then 2012 would have been a fantastic year. His series Wool is the best set of kindle shorts I've read, bar none.

To avoid spoilers, Wool is a tale of discovery that shines through the open holes in its backstory. Howey takes advantage of the short form to create an amazing and full world, skillfully letting you imagine huge swaths of history. Parts 6 & 7 represent a prequel trilogy, First Shift and Second Shift tell part of the story, the beginning.

Trapped, Iron Druid book five

Jason Weisberger — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:07:56 +0000

Trapped is the fifth novel in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles. A Harry Dresden-esque story of Atticus, the last remaining druid.

Atticus largely spends his time hanging out, loving the earth and being all druid-y. This is how he has stayed alive when all the other druids were killed off! The series, however, shows how events unfold to lead Atticus in bringing the magic back and training an apprentice, a hot one. In book five it appears Granuaile, said apprentice, is ready to be sworn in or, conveniently "bound," when everything goes awry.

I really enjoy these books. They are clever, fast paced and a good escape. Hounded is the first in the series.

Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, book five) by Kevin Hearne

Vigilante Wars

Jason Weisberger — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:43:32 +0000

San Francisco is certainly a quirky place and Cecelia Holland's Vigilante Wars sheds a lot of light on how we got there! The inner-workings and many of the social mores that today are common-place were founded in some crazy times.

Holland recounts the lawlessness, mob rule and colorful characters that the 1849 Gold Rush brought to San Francisco. Tales of gangs like "the Hounds" wandering the streets, the massive in-flux of wealth seekers and the poverty that followed. You can easily see how today's San Francisco evolved.

Vigilante Wars by Cecelia Holland

Cold Days, a novel of the Dresden files

Jason Weisberger — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:35:17 +0000

I am addicted to Jim Butcher's tales of Harry Dresden, Chicago's wizard PI. With the film noir touches, the old VW bug and a Fu dog of his very own, how could I not love Harry Dresden?

Cold Days is the latest installment in Butcher's series about the politics and antics of the magical realm and how they cross over into ours. The entire quirky cast is back and Harry isn't even dead! I'll hold off on other spoilers and suffice to say I loved it.

Cold Days, a novel of the Dresden files by Jim Butcher

The First Light of Evening

Jason Weisberger — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:48:04 +0000

Mark Ernest Pothier's The First Light of Evening explores the life of Jim, who would rather not have it explored. Marriage over and retired Jim has spent the last few years reading all the books he said he would, and then his daughter sets him up on a date.

An elegantly written Kindle Single, Pothier makes every word count without creating the rushed or crammed feeling the format can often take. I'll be looking for additional works by this author!

The First Light of Evening by Mark Ernest Pothier

Tim Ferriss's new book about learning

David Pescovitz — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:02:51 +0000

Mark and I are both big fans of Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. Many things that Tim says about fitness, diet, work, and life-hacking have really resonated with me over the years. But beyond the subjects Tim writes about, it's his approach to learning that truly inspires me whenever we see each other or I read his stuff. Like many people I know (including me), Tim is a novelty addict. He's curious about most everything and when he wants to know something, or know how to do something -- like cook, salsa dance, kick-box, speak Japanese, or hold your breath for crazy lengths of time -- he seeks out the experts and immerses himself utterly and completely in the subject matter. That's why I'm excited to read Tim's new book The 4-Hour Chef, due out in a few weeks. I'm sure it has lots of great information about how to cook, but according to Tim it's really a book about how to learn anything. That's perfect because there's a lot I've got to learn. Listen for Tim on a coming episode of our Gweek podcast. Congrats, Tim!

"The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life" (Amazon)

New kids book from creators of Yo Gabba Gabba!

David Pescovitz — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:14:52 +0000

Six years ago, a group of hyper-creative old-school punks from Orange County unleashed the psychedelic kids insanity of Yo Gabba Gabba! on the world. The moment that Boing Boing first discovered the show pilot before it was even picked up for TV, the surreal antics of DJ Lance and his mutant pals infiltrated my home. My son is almost 7 and (temporarily) a bit old for the show, but my 3-year-old daughter has become a passionate fan. To her mind, the show depicts some sort of classroom and DJ Lance is the "teacher." I only wish I attended a pre-school where Brobee was a classmate!

Now, for children who have just outgrown Yo Gabba Gabba!, the show's creators have created a new alternate (and equally-strange/fun) narrative in the form of a book titled The Goon Holler Guidebook. Penned by YGG! art director Parker Jacobs, the slim hardback is a guide to a magical place called Goon Holler that is filled with mischief, jokes, comics, and, yes, ukulele. The first character you'll meet is Tooba, a Bigfoot (yay!), who stumbled through a waterfall portal into Goon Holler where he meets a wizard, an alien, and, of course the goons. You can imagine the rest, or at least your kids can.

The Goon Holler Guidebook (Amazon)

eBook review: Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles

Jason Weisberger — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:47:35 +0000

Blue Skies is a great start to Matthew Mather's Atopia Chronicles. In just a few pages he introduces you to believable future and a character I immediately identified with.

Olympia is an advertising exec run out of steam, but she can't admit it. She is past the edge of a nervous breakdown and needs to find some control. She doesn't like to use drugs but agrees to test a new technology, nanobots embed 'smaticles' into her nervous system and give complete control over the reality she perceives -- bots aren't drugs! With the help of her new poly-synthetic sensory interface, or "pssi," Olympia learns one of those "be careful what you wish for" lessons.

Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles Book 1, by Matthew Mather

or consider the entire collection:

The Complete Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather

eBook Review: Warm Moonlight

Jason Weisberger — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 14:26:30 +0000

Warm Moonlight is the second Kindle Single I've read by Joseph Wurtenbaugh. I really like his style!

Warm Moonlight reveals a former 20's gun moll turned grandmother, sharing a supernatural story of their family past with her granddaughter. While the story isn't the most original and you've heard it before, Wurtenbaugh does a wonderful job of drawing you in. Do not, however, expect a repeat of Old Soul, which was told from the pov of a microscopic parasite/symbiote, this story is very different.

Joseph Wurtenbaugh's Warm Moonlight

The Black Forest: the darker side of Pittsburgh's underground art scene

Dean Putney — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 19:02:01 +0000

Unicorn Mountain is a collective of Pittsburgh artists that publishes anthologies of local art, comics, music and literature. Their third anthology, The Black Forest, takes a different tack from their previous collections by exploring much darker, stranger themes. My friend Tara Helfer did the layout and supplementary illustrations for The Black Forest and sent me a copy to check out.

The collection covers a broad range of styles, and is packed with more than twenty different artists' work. Some parts are creepy and scribbly. Others are intricate and mysterious. I've picked some samples of a few of my favorites here.

Adventures With Lesser Known Creatures by Jen Cooney tells the tales of several mythical woodland creatures. It focuses on Eastern US and Canadian creatures, starting with the familiar Sasquatch, but also digs into Bukwas, Albatwitches and the Little People of the Adirondacks with illustrations for each.

Clan of the Cave Mouse by Andrew Davis is one of several comics in The Black Forest. Rosko here, who may be a toy along with the rest of the characters, is mangled and thrown in the sewer. There he's adopted and patched up by sewer rats.

Antelope Eater by Juliacks is a short comic about a boy named Andrew Yak who begrudgingly takes care of his bedridden mother. It's probably the creepiest portion of the book, telling a very strange story with dark, swirly, cutting illustrations.

Lastly, much less macabre than the rest of the book, artists Mike Budai and Brian Holderman made two pinball machines titled Freak Out and Luther's Vendetta, which were shown at the Andy Warhol Museum a few years ago as part of a joint project between Unicorn Mountain and the Professional Amateur Pinball Association. Their hope was to inspire pinball makers to use more original art in their machines instead of boring licensed movie skins.

The Black Forest by Unicorn Mountain Thanks, Tara!

Team Human: a high-school vampire novel doesn't suck (it rocks)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:38:17 +0000

Team Human is a new young adult novel from Justine Larbalastier and Sarah Rees Brennan, about an ancient vampire who enrolls at a small town high school, where a beautiful young girl falls in love with him.

No, it's not that novel. Far from it, in fact. Team Human is an incredibly fresh and original -- and absolutely charming -- take on vampire fiction. Larbalestier and Brennan have a wickedly sarcastic turn of phrase (as fans of Larbalestier's earlier books can attest), and their protagonist, Mel -- a high-school senior whose best friend is besotted with the vampire -- is one of those iconic, absolutely likable but flawed YA protagonists that you find in the genre's best books.

Mel's best friend is Cathy, and where Mel is flamboyant and outgoing, Cathy is serious and studious and shy. They live in the small town of New Whitby, the birthplace of America's compact with vampires and the origin of the social contract that sees humans and vampires living side by side in a civilized (if not entirely comfortable) fashion. From the start, Cathy falls hard for Francis, an ancient, charming vampire in the body of a teenager, who is attending high school for mysterious reasons of his own (though Mel has her suspicions).

Mel is afraid that her intense relationship with her best friend is endangered by this, but what she really fears is that Cathy might be contemplating vampirism herself. This is a dangerous process for humans -- accepting an offer of "transition" from a vampire means a small but real risk of death or worse. About ten percent of humans don't make the transition and don't die either, becoming mindless, agonized zombies who are locked away until they rot.

And if you do survive the transition to immortal, super-strong, super-fast, super-keen vampirism, it's still not what Mel wants for Cathy. For one thing, vampires can neither cry nor laugh, thanks to some principle of conservation of emotion that flattens out the affect of immortals -- forever.

The story's on rails from page one, ripping along in a suspenseful, funny blur. This is the vampire-human supernatural romance you want the world to fall in love with: filled with kick-ass girls and boys, complicated vampires, and an internally consistent set of fantasy rules that makes the whole thing that much smarter.

Here's a sample chapter.

Team Human

eBook review: the Renewal

Jason Weisberger — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 15:19:33 +0000

The Renewal by JF Perkins is a post-apocalyptic tale of rebuilding American society. It is intentionally short and sets the stage for future installments. I was interested enough that I'll be reading the second.

China and the U.S. apparently let the nukes fly and absolutely nothing good comes of it; society has collapsed. 30-40 years later a young reclamation engineer is sent out on his first mission: survey some former housing with the idea of securing more arable land. He finds something else entirely.

The Renewal by JF Perkins