News You Can Bruise for 2006 December 14

(2) Thu Dec 14 2006 22:36 List of Fun:

• I got my Futurismic check today! (Plus T-shirt) I'm not yet a published fiction author but I am a paid fiction author.
• I thought of a publishing scheme that combines the street performer protocol with micropayments and the tradition of pulp magazines. I put up descriptions of stories with word counts. You send in payments at magazine rates (5-6 cents a word) and I reveal the appropriate number of words. If people think a story is boring they stop paying for it and it just cuts off in the middle.
• Recently I've noticed two comics that operate under similar constraints. If only there was some way to combine them...
• I got a copy of 1984's The Whole Earth Software Catalog, ostensibly for research for a 1980s steampunk story, but really because contemporaneous reviews of early personal computer software are SOLID GOLD. This is the tradition I like to deface in my Software and Game Roundups (been a while since the last one of those, actually).
• Diane Duane linked to my Star Trek slash pairing generator. This is vicariously exciting as Diane Duane wrote the best Trek-franchise novel among the far too many I read in grade school (that'd be Spock's World, which has the truest-to-life depictions I've seen of everyday life in the Federation).