Kooneiform

Following on the last post, the other night I heard Robin Hobb read at the University Bookstore, on her tour supporting her new book Renegade’s Magic.

I brought the recorder to try it out. I was about ten feet from the podium, and the bookstore is something of a big open space so there was a lot of ambient noise. For the introduction of Robin I had the recorder in my shirt pocket (I don’t have an external microphone yet) and for her reading I held the recorder in my lap pointing up. The PA system for the reading wasn’t very loud — kind of like a little louder than normal speaking voice. The final file was about half a gig of 44.1 khz WAV.

In Audacity I cut out a few spots of the WAV file and used the envelope tool and amplify effect to increase the volume on some points, and the envelope tool to decrease some loud spots, but other than that I didn’t do too much. I still haven’t figured out how much of that works.

I did cut up the file into two parts — so if you just want to hear the question and answer you can skip to that.

Robin Hobb introduction and reading:

Robin Hobb Q & A:

I was impressed by the reading, she seems really cool.

So I’m pysched lately because I’m starting a new thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. After much reading of reviews and gazing at EBay, Craigslist &c. I went out to (local) Streamline Audio (totally nice there) and got a digital field recorder! My choice after looking at the Zoom H-4 and H-2, Edirol r-09, m-Audio MicroTrack and a couple of others was the Marantz PMD620.

All of the super-portable recorders seem to have their pros and cons at this price level, but for me the Marantz has the features (good and basic) and the form factor (streamlined) I was looking for.

I took it out of the box and within seconds I was up and running; it’s really very easy to use, feels well-made and just solid. In the coming weeks I’m going to record some readings and talks, use Audacity to edit the files and then put the mp3s up here. In the farther future I want to experiment a little, possibly making some IF/audio games. OK!

It so happens that I’m horrible at keeping any kind of list or ledger. Grocery list? Forget it. Balance a checkbook? In my dreams. This hasn’t stopped me from endless iterations of trying to keep lists. The joke here is that I also have a pretty lousy memory.

Anyway, you know what they say, rage, rage, and all that. Sometimes I think my sallies at list-making will, one day, catapult me into a golden age of perfect recall, or at least a list for every occasion, where I’ll never again forget a date, name, the book I read last thursday, or the author of the book I’m reading now (which just happened the other day).

I’m trying to keep a couple of lists here, of games I’m playing and books I’m reading. I won’t even try to keep them totally up-to-date, but instead I’m hoping they’ll grow by gradual accretion to record a history of what I’ve played and read lately. Already I’m starting to circumvent these lists, playing games and reading books that I’m not playing now — the horror! We’ll see, for example, if Lost Pig is still up there next year, like my Playing Now figurehead.

I’ve been poking around lately to see the extent of the SF magazine world. This will get redundant I’m sure.

Here’s an oldish list of SF small press stuff and webzines at suddenlypress.com.

The SFWA list.

Yes, the Wikipedia entry.

Found “An Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model” (though I don’t know how open source figures into that, honestly).

That got sparked by Paolo Bacigalupi’s posts on the subject, which you can find through the article linked above.

A half-fluff piece at Speculations, good enough to skim.

Anyway, so the point of this post — here is what I think would be cool: a paying online SF magazine that included IF. Call it a monthly, 1-3 IF works a month, 2-3 short stories and serials, and a weekly column of something, say around 25k words total (let’s be generous and do .05 a word, so $1250, and IF gets a flat rate of $100. Annual budget is $18k — hahahaha).

Maybe the column rotates, first week is editorial, second is SF, third is IF, and fourth is craaaaaazy.

Notwithstanding I have no technical experience to get something like that running, I would like to read something like that. And hey, this is why I get to post it on this thing and not spray it across a forum somewhere.

The magazine gets funded by general donations, and throw in a tip jar for individual stories.

It would need a web-based interpreter, so people could read it anywhere — I wonder how well a web interpreter works on a mobile device.

Live! straight from the…

The first time I saw the design for the Central Library, man, it was ugly.

I eventually came around. By the time of opening day, when I volunteered and got a half hour of crowd-free blissful wandering through all the floors, practically alone, I was hooked.

I go to the library all the time, so this was my natural spot for my IFComp in Public (IFCP) day.

However I got a little too ambitious, and in attempting to sandbox an IF playing account on the ubuntu set up on my old laptop I spent way more time installing, compiling, and configuring then actually playing any IF. The sandbox is on the right.

And I still can’t get Gargoyle to compile.

Anyway, I’ll work on this for the next IFCP day (November 10th). Meanwhile I’m up here on the top floor. It’s about 4 o’clock and the light is starting to come in over the sound, you can just see it down Spring street. There’s the library hum, every so often someone coughs or drops a book. Hey, that just happened. Different footsteps, shuffling feet, heavy feet, squeaking feet. A lot of tourists. Sometimes the floor shakes when someone walks by. The area I’m in is elevated, must be some kind of floating riser.

the game I am kind of playing right now is pretty good, Lord Bellwater’s Secret, at least so far.

It has a nice way of opening the game even though it’s infodumping all over myself.

About this IFCP thing. Of course I’ve been having mixed feelings about the whole deal. The whole public/private line. Nevertheless it is pretty fun. I may have a strange sense of fun, I don’t know. I may end up doing this more often just for the hell of it. It does fit with the library so well, everyone here as I type this, doing their own thing in this public square/private headspace. I do quite like the idea of sandboxing an IF account and putting it on a desk with the sign, and just seeing what happens.

Interesting thing with the new IFDB announced by Mike Roberts — you can almost get a good survey of the active users on RAIF by watching the registered users count go up on IFDB. During the early beta it was steady at about 12 users — after Mike announced it shot up to about 50. These are the most active people on RAIF, say, about 40 people. The count slowly has climbed, currently it’s at 83, so another 30 people or so have trickled in over the last few days. Maybe these are people who don’t read RAIF every day. So we have about 70 active on a day to day basis. What percentage of the active RAIF users is this? Or of RAIF lurkers for that matter?

Oh well, got to do what we can before the sun burns out.

Courtesy of the fine stylings of Renga in Blue, I give you:

The B-Game Competition!

If you don’t have a sense of humor, don’t click that link! Maybe not work safe.

Every so often, when I’m a hater on MS Word or kind of blah about OpenOffice Writer, or not down with le SciTE I do a search for what writing software is on the market. Usually I’m a little disappointed at the end. One time I found Liquid Story Binder, which is good, but for me LSB is just too much. Maybe at some point I’ll go back to it.

Imagine my surprise tonight when I found PageFour, courtesy of literatureandlatte.com. I’ve only just played around with it a little bit so far and it looks really close to what I’ve wanted, for like, forever. Clean, simple, organized. Get a free demo on the PageFour download.

Picked up my copy of Second Person today. It looks really good!

And to top it all off, I got the Ubuntu book Ubuntu Linux for non-geeks. Maybe I’ll print myself a ‘non-geek’ sticker. The upshot of the story is that I’m writing this post from my new Ubuntu gnome desktop! Ubuntu 6.06 installed flawlessly on my (1999) 600x. Everything works. My wireless card even works better than it did under Windows 2000. Go figure.

Anyway, I’m not planning at the moment to use this system for IF, but I do have a notion to get a mush server running….the thrills never stop.

So I was reading a thread at MudLab and Tyche had posted a list of Ruby resources. Now I’ve never really coded anything but, as I was curious about Ruby, I checked some of the links out and ten freakin hours later I wrote my first Ruby program!
This is an exercise from the really cool Learn To Program by Chris Pine, I highly recommend that site. Great job Chris! In my post all-nighter vibe I post the code with no shame:


# declare variables and arrays