Miscellaneous

Called It

August Leave a Comment

Do you remember last year when I complained about the absolutely dismal coverage of Richard Flanagan’s speech (among other things), because I thought the Australian and Canadian markets had some things in common and maybe, just maybe, the things Flanagan was worried about might have implications for us here in Canada, and that maybe we should talk about what setting that kind of a precedent meant? You know, before it became so urgent that we might panic and do something stupid. Do you remember that? I remember that. Well, I fucking told you so. It’s still not too late to have the (public, reasoned, analytical) conversation we should have had a year ago, but it’s coming down to the wire. Any of you boys and girls in the press want to actually step the fuck up this time?

Dear Facebook

August 3 Comments

re: recent changes to Facebook Connect/Open Graph I am concerned that I had to ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ to letting Facebook and my friends on Facebook release my private information to third parties not of my choosing. This is a disturbing trend, and it’s clearly not in keeping with the spirit (nor perhaps the letter) of your agreement with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Frankly, it feels like Beacon all over again, with OpenID grafted on top of it. I will continue to tighten my privacy settings and scale back my use of Facebook until such time as you have default settings and policies/practices that treat my privacy with respect, rather than making me feel like you’d sell my information to anyone and everyone, and just hope I won’t notice. best, August C. Bourré

A Question

August 7 Comments

I’ve been running vestige.org for just a touch over a decade now, and one thing that I have always, always, always said, is that I didn’t want the site to be about making money. No advertising, no affiliate links, no donations or sponsored posts or any of that nonsense. What you do on your site is your business, but I didn’t want any of that here. Most of my current readership was not around back when I used to be vocal about this sort of thing, so it probably won’t matter to you folks, but I remember it quite clearly, and it matters to me. But. This site isn’t very expensive to maintain, if you define “not very expensive” in relation to some kind of objective measure, like the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto. The thing is, I don’t make the average income for… Continue Reading →

Doctorow’s Syndrome

August 1 Comment

The behaviour of those suffering from Doctorow’s Syndrome is characterized by the obsessive need to share information—regardless of the value of that information or the utility of sharing it—for the purpose of asserting their moral superiority. Though rarely contagious, frequent exposure to patients suffering from Doctorow’s Syndrome may result in a reaction known as The Hobbes Effect. Treatment consists of regular aural or written applications of the phrase, “shut the fuck up already, Cory.”

What’s Wrong With Iron Council

August Leave a Comment

This is not a post about the Bechdel test, nor The Frank Miller test (dramatised here), aka the How To Tell If A Male Science Fiction Writer Is Obsessed With Whores Test. This post is not actually about gender representations at all. It does, weirdly, come from my having just read a post that is kind of, sort of, about those things. You see, a while back I wrote about China Miéville’s novel, Iron Council, and I had some trouble explaining exactly what was wrong with it, stylistically speaking. What I wrote was: Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made… Continue Reading →

Goings On

August Leave a Comment

My eyelids are heavy and my hands are cold for no apparent reason because I left the window open and this is a basement apartment wherein the heating is controlled by someone in an apartment the heat rises to rather than from, so what we have here is just a “hey, I’m alive” post for those of you that don’t follow my ramblings on Twitter. There will be no e-books post this weekend, because apparently there’s some holiday called “Easter” coming up, and I’m going to be out of town visiting family, which is the sort of thing I do on holidays. Not having a laptop or other portable computing solution makes posting while out of town a touch difficult. On a related note, there won’t be any post on the Jeff Rubin book for a while either; I’m taking extra care reading it because I think it will help… Continue Reading →

It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law

August 4 Comments

If there’s anything folks love to do on the Internet, it’s talk and argue, argue and talk. Anyone who spends enough time online will, whether they know it or not, eventually run into Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. There are numerous variations and corollaries, and after eleven years of talking about books and with Book People, both in person and online (including an absolutely epic party last night, thrown by the one and only Julie Wilson), I’ve come up with a corollary of my own*. I hereby present you with August’s Corollary to Godwin’s Law: As an English-language literary discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving William Shakespeare, James Joyce, or Ulysses approaches 1. *What finally tipped the scales for formulating the Corollary was Perdita Felicien’s appearance on Canada Reads.

God Bless You, Charlie Stross

August Leave a Comment

Last June I followed all of the BookCampToronto posts on Twitter, and read as many of the follow-ups and round-ups and blog posts dissecting it afterward as I could. Most of them focused on e-books and social media and various technologies (though I’m sure there were other things discussed at the “uncoference”—is it okay that I don’t like terms like “unconference?” ’cause I really don’t), which are still the hot topics in the publishing industry. Ever since then I’ve wanted to collect all my thoughts and opinions about e-books into a single coherent post. The problem is that even after almost ten months of turning them over in my head, I’m still not sure I really know what all my thoughts and opinions are. Clearly it’s time to start writing. I’m going to try to have something for you by the end of next week, but there’s been so much… Continue Reading →

It’s Just A Blog

August Leave a Comment

You can ignore the rest of this post, because the bits that I’m about to quote are the only bits that are relevant to what I want to talk about. Adam Greenfield writes: The reason people keep blogs – let me be more straightforward: the reason I keep a blog – is to express opinions. Precisely to not, always, have to be consistent or sensible or bound by a duty to the truth. To not, always, have to be responsible. To not, always, answer to the same standards I’d expect of (say) a writer for the New York Times or the Guardian. To be full of shit, if I feel like it. And, what’s more (and this goes to the bozo who whined about my ostensible tone of “world-weary superiority”), to be full of shit in whatever style I feel like adopting. This is nearly identical to something I wrote… Continue Reading →

The Plan

August 4 Comments

Every year I make a plan, post it here, and every year I fail to follow through. The plan isn’t really a plan, it’s just a list of books that I’ve recently acquired or rediscovered on my shelves and hope to read some time before the end of the year. I think I made my very first “plan” post more than six years ago, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that one or more of those books still haven’t been read. It’ll happen eventually. So without further ado, here, in no particular order, is this year’s list (not including Wild Geese, which I’m currently reading, and the remaining Robertson Davies novels that I didn’t get a chance to finish writing about): Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles, illustrated by Marlena Zuber The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad What Boys Like, by Amy Jones Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall… Continue Reading →