News You Can Bruise for 2011 September 13

Tue Sep 13 2011 13:56 Indefinite Period of Kickstarter: There are still four unfinalized projects from my Month of Kickstarter project, so I won't be posting an analysis for a few days. I will say that it doesn't look good for three of those four projects, including one ("London in the 1980s") for which I'm still the only backer.

But in the month and a half since MoK I've still been checking that damn "recent projects" page every day and putting money towards projects. I haven't been doing two projects every day, or posting about it, but I did recently pass 100 projects backed (not counting the five that have been cancelled), so I thought it was time for an update.

One thing I did learn from MoK is that my linking to a Kickstarter project doesn't do a whole lot for its success, but I'm always happy to do what I can. So here's a few of the projects I've backed recently that I think you'd be interested in:

• "Demi-Monde: an erotic science fiction novel-in-stories": stories by Mary Anne Mohanraj, in the universe of "Jump Space", the story of hers we published in Thoughtcrime Experiments.
• "The International Space Station for you", a very very expensive project to put a hyperspectral imager on the ISS.
• "Divided Republic: A Boardgame About the Election of 1860". Most board games rocket up the Kickstarter charts, but sometimes one kind of gets stuck. I really want to play this game against Pat, so unstick this sucker.
• Jason Scott's got another Kickstarter project coming up, but it's not up yet, so no link. (Update: Here it is!)

In other news, recently I was contacted by Larry Hastings, who wanted to start a Python podcast called "Radio Free Python". He searched the proverbial net to see if anyone had used that phrase before, and it turned out I had, in the examples for a presentation I gave at PyCon in 2003.

Displaying a cravenness some might consider unseemly, Larry offered to pay me a nominal fee for free-and-clear use of the name. Since "Radio Free Python" was a random phrase I came up with eight years ago to populate a sample HTML page, I rejected his money as syntactically invalid, and said he should back a Kickstarter project instead, telling me which one he backed. Well, he backed two: "Carnival - A deck and dice game." and the not-as-expensive-as-putting-a-hyperspectral-sensor-on-the-ISS "InTanj - A new software development methodology".

And the story has a happy ending, as the real-life Radio Free Python is up and running.

That's it for this edition of Indefinite Period of Kickstarter. As always, you can check out the Kickstarter projects I've backed, and the projects I'm interested in but probably won't back unless there's a chance I can push them over the edge.