Tue Jan 06 2009 16:37Beautiful Soup 3.1.0.1:
It's out. All it does is fix a parser crash on boolean attributes like <td nowrap>. But that's a pretty bad crash, so you should probably upgrade.
(4) Tue Jan 06 2009 00:03Sharealike Thoughtcrime:
So I got an email which deals with a topic not explored on this weblog for some years: the minutiae of various Creative Commons licenses. Specifically, the chilling effect that my choice of a BY-NC-SA license for Thoughtcrime Experiments might have on authors who don't want their stories hacked into derivative works. I would like to hear the thoughts of random people who read this weblog entry.
I chose BY-NC-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments for three reasons: 1. that's the license Cory Doctorow uses, and it works out pretty well for him; 2. translations and adaptations to different media are prohibited under BY-NC-ND, and I want those to happen; 3. if you say it fast it sounds like "By NCSA", which makes whatever you're doing sound high-tech.
I also have a philosophical problem with BY-NC-ND which is that it doesn't enrich the commons beyond decriminalizing the act of copying. Imagine if it were suddenly okay to copy all those orphan works from the 20th (and by now the 21st) century. That'd be great news because large organizations could legally digitize all that stuff and we wouldn't lose it to Stanislaw Lem's paper-eating bacterium. But you still couldn't really interact with it until the copyright expired; it'd feel like it was behind glass. That's what BY-NC-ND feels like.
(Actually I'm being a bit hypocritical here because I originally put "Mallory" under BY-NC-ND, but I think I've talked myself out of that now, so I'll change it unless someone talks me back into it soon.)
So that's why I chose BY-ND-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments. I'm interested in hearing additional arguments pro or con. Also note that I'm okay with negotiating the license even on the level of individual stories, though BY-NC-ND really is the baseline (otherwise it gets really confusing).
Pragmatically, I think most of the hypothetical undesirable uses of your work take place in a copyright grey area anyway, and won't be deterred by your choice of ND instead of SA. But I understand that pragmatism is not the main driver of peoples' (including my) feelings about this.
(7) Mon Jan 05 2009 23:05The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of This Really Long Title:
I'm reading clusters of related books: Consciousness Explained, I Am A Strange Loop, now Origin of Consciousness Yada Yada. I knew about this book since it was name-checked in The Big U, and afterwards I think I gathered that the same concepts had been deployed in Snow Crash, both of which books I want to re-read now.
But my interest was seriously piqued when I read Richard Dawkins referring to Origin as (non-exact quote) "one of those books that is either complete brilliance or utter rubbish". There are many such books, but most of them have been classified by now, and usually as "utter rubbish." I was intrigued by this thirty-year-old book whose ideas never became mainstream but which could still stand up to someone like Dawkins. If there are any other such books lying around I would like to hear about them.
It's a fascinating book because even if it's totally wrong, it's an excellent work of science fiction. And reading these books in rapid succession it feels to me like the bicameral mind theory is compatible with, or even a special case of, Dennett's Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness. And what do you know, Dennett has written an essay about bicameral mind theory which ties it together with his own writing in about the way I expected.
Anyway, the cluster-reading continues, as I now need to read a bunch of books about game design for the upcoming big project. I've experimented in the past with choosing a next book that has some relationship to the book I just read, but it didn't work because I was trying to make a chain chain chain, chain of books. Clusters make more sense. For instance I was just going to read Rules of Play next, but also on my bookshelf are Dungeons & Desktops and Magister Ludi, both of which I think will be important to this project, so I've put the three books in a stack. A STACK, I tell you!
Mon Jan 05 2009 09:16Little-Appreciated Mother 3 Fact:
The relaxing hot spring song is just a slowed-down version of the Funky Monkey Dance.
Sun Jan 04 2009 14:22Manhattan Takes The Muppets:
At one point in November I had the idea to watch every stupid Christmas special ever created and write reviews. Yeah, you may have noticed a pattern to my terrible ideas. Fortunately this didn't happen, but I did go as far as recording a bunch of those specials on the PVR.
For me the only Christmas special is A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its existential crisis resolved by a Kierkegaardian leap to faith. Also because it was the only Christmas special I'd ever seen until a few months ago, when I saw some Rankin-Bass specials while playing with Maggie. I liked the animation but the stories were a mess. But my point is that all these specials were lying around on the PVR, and yesterday for some reason we watched a Muppets special called "Letters to Santa".
Man, it was terrible. I've never seen anything so bad that involved Muppets. Kermit has been toned down into blandness, even though his negative traits were never really that negative. I don't even recognize Gonzo. On the plus side, its relentless demonization of the TSA provides valuable counterprogramming for today's youth. (Yet the USPS was lionized! I've never seen a television program play such favorites with government agencies.) A pleasant sense of vertigo arose from Jane Krakowski never revealing that she was actually her 30 Rock character doing a terrible Muppets/NBC holiday special while coked to the gills on Teamocil. And Sam the American Eagle is always good, but at this point the Muppets have a problem similar to the Simpsons, where there are so many bit players who have to come out and do their schtick that whatever you're trying to illustrate bogs down.
In this case, though, the main plot was so inane that the show was actually at its best when bogged down in schtick. But afterwards we re-watched the great Steve Martin scene from The Muppet Movie, to cleanse the palate. Now that's a celebrity cameo!
(5) Sat Jan 03 2009 08:55:
Wow, this is a busy vacation. Not only do/did I have the anthology, story revision, new story, and Beautiful Soup work, but I've embarked on a new project comparible in scope to The Future: A Retrospective, except cooler and higher-profile. I hope to have more details about that soon.
Alas, the day job returns on Monday, and the frenzy of writing will slow, but 2009 is looking a lot better for my fiction career than it seemed just a few days ago.
Unrelatedly, this entry prompted me and Sumana to Bookmooch about 15 books we're not gonna read/don't really need to keep, and I've put ten more in the equivalent of the proposed box.
Another way to stop the cycle of reading the books you suspect you won't enjoy enough to keep, is to choose your next book at random. But I've tried this in the past and it wasn't very satisfying. I did enjoy the brief experiment where you told me what books to read, and I'd actually like to re-open that experiment, so let me know which of these books I should read next. With the caveat that I need to finish The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and then I'm going to take advantage of my new bookshelf space and finally read Rules of Play, so it'll be a while before I get to your demands.
Wed Dec 31 2008 23:41:
Man, I can't get enough of that "2008" on the dates of these weblog entries!
(2) Wed Dec 31 2008 20:22Squeezing Out The Tube Of 2008:
I read 44 books in 2008, about half of what I read in 2007. Kind of depressing given I've got about 130 unread books, enough to keep me busy for the next three years at this rate. On the other hand, I wrote six short stories, compared to two in 2007.
A question, a conundrum if you will, about the quality issue. I've got a number of excellent books that I haven't read because I know I'm going to want to keep them. Instead I tend to read huge books that I know I'll discard after reading, to free up the maximum space on my bookshelf. A good strategy if I had infinite time, but I'll only live so long and I want to read books with a higher expected value. So I ask you, how do I force myself to read the books I think will be super good keepers in preference to the ones I just think might be good?
One idea I just thought of is to pick out the 30 books with the lowest expected values and hide them in a box. More room on the unread-book bookshelf = less pressure. And maybe one day I can just get rid of that box and not feel like I lost anything. Any other ideas?
(2) Tue Dec 30 2008 23:15:
Sumana has decided that the opposite of fanfic is "slamfic".
(6) Tue Dec 30 2008 09:54Best Of Weblogs 2008:
Keep looking back! This will probably be the last 2008 retrospective unless I decide to go through the books I read in 2008 or whatever. These are the syndication feeds I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2008.
Caution: may contain nepotism.
A Symbol A Day: only exists as an RSS feed. Every day there is a new symbol.
Back of the Cereal Box: essays on obscure pop culture topics. But they're the obscure topics my age cohort cares about, so bite me.
Also cordially invited to bite me is Twitter. If it takes longer for me to context-switch than to read something, I'm not going to read it. The only Twitter feed I read is Rachel Chalmers's, and she protects her updates, so I can't link to them.
At the opposite end of the attention spectrum are podcasts, which I don't really listen to except while cleaning the kitchen. For such a task I prefer the harsh cleaning power of Retronauts and The Children's Hour of Knowledge.
Friend weblogs: Kirk, because the RSS feed finally kind of works and because I met him this year. Evan finally started his own weblog and now only comments on 60% of my entries.
Susan McCarthy tells awesome stories about animal behavior, and sometimes about Soviet show trials.
Topic: video games. I unsubscribed from Gamasutra and subscribed to sister site GameSetWatch instead, because 1) when there's something I'd be interested in on Gamasutra, GSW usually links to it, 2) the columns are great, 3) they link to my weblog sometimes, and Gamasutra never did that.
I also subscribed to DS Fanboy and Nintendo Wii Fanboy and Tiny Cartridge so I wouldn't be wandering around in a haze with no knowledge of the games available for the game systems we got this year. I feel like I should get rid of one of those subscriptions, but if I had to choose I'd get rid of NWF, which would leave me without total platform coverage!
Finally, Auntie Pixelante is great all the time, like if Jake Berendes made video games about B&D.
(2) Mon Dec 29 2008 19:16Maraudering Beatnicks:
I put up a text dump from one of my favorite old PC games, Flightmare. Just because I felt like doing it. It was a fun game and its writing covers the spectrum of game humor: intentionally funny jokes and puns, over-the-top writing that you're not sure if it's supposed to be funny, and hilarious spelling errors.
(1) Mon Dec 29 2008 09:03Best of Bookmarks: November-December:
At this point we're close enough to the present that I could just write weblog entries about these, but I press on. Happy 2008!
One of the themes of this series is me confessing my failure to find something cool and asking for help. I would really like to read this paper on Soviet attempts to build an Internet.
A Digg-bait list of "bad" local TV ads, two of which (the first and fourth) are actually intentionally funny, and one of which (the third) at least makes sense once you know the local context. The guy in the third commercial has his own sketch-comedy sitcom on local TV which is really unbelievably bad, but even then he gets points for incorporating the employees of his furniture store into the sitcom.
I wanted a mashup of the Last Supper with Dogs Playing Poker. Then I saw that very thing and stopped wanting it. I can only conclude that that picture causes anhedonia.
(1) Sun Dec 28 2008 07:48Best of Bookmarks: September-October:
I didn't really post any links for September due to travel, so I've made up for it by explaining these best-of links in more detail than usual.
Internet Archived webpage of a defunct band whose CD I do have, Lawsuit. It's unclear to me whether the lyrics to "North Dakotachrome" suitably convey the pun-pocalypse that is the song, so maybe I'll do another Music Piracy Minute. I've felt for a while that with the right marketing, North Dakotachrome could have become a cultural touchstone for the presidential election. "Alaska politician, do you talk to anyone?"
Of the many things available for free on Hulu (within the US), one of the best is The Film Crew.
A long time ago I read something about the quantum state of Saturn's moon Hyperion that didn't make any sense. I thought it would remain a mystery forever, the kind of mystery where you think you might have hallucinated the mystery in the first place, but then I found this weblog entry explaining it.
Sat Dec 27 2008 17:08Beautiful Soup 3.1.0:
It's out. It's not useful unless you need to use Beautiful Soup with Python 3. But now I'm free to try my parser replacement experiments, which are at least more interesting than screwing around with bytestrings.
At some point somebody started a rap group called Robot Finds Kitten. Please, Crummy readers, find me the meta-kitten that is their Liars Paradox-riffic CD, "Rap Is Dead".
Target: Women: still awesome. Plus, in the most recent episode, Sarah Haskins moons everybody.
Unwinder's Tall Comics is great and usually includes some embedded fictional comic or other work.
Fri Dec 26 2008 20:51Beautiful Soup Progress Report #3:
OK, phase one is almost complete. There's just one test failure left in the generated Python 3 version, and I don't think it can be fixed; HTMLParser is just different between 2 and 3.
I haven't found a way in Python 2 code to indicate that a string should be converted into a byte string when the conversion script runs. In some cases I can stick .encode() onto the end and it works in both 2 and 3, but some of my tests have random binary data that's not in any particular encoding. And in some cases calling .encode() is just ugly. Kind of frustrating because about 40% of my test failures ultimately boiled down to marking such-and-such a string as a byte string. So I'd appreciate any ideas.
(1) Fri Dec 26 2008 20:44Per Se:
In an unprecedented splurge, Sumana and I are eating at Per Se on Sunday. Or as the domain name calls it, Perseny. Given what happened to Ed Levine when he ate at Per Se after comparing its cost on his weblog to Grey's Papaya (follow-up), I can only hope that I'll be presented with a genius dish based on Pac-Man, or a Beautiful Soup-themed soup. I'll take pictures.
As my Christmas present to the Internet I'm soliciting submissions for a new speculative fiction anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. Sumana will read slush, I'll select and edit the stories, and we'll publish online under a Creative Commons license.
If you're a spec-fic writer, and there's some story that people you've shown it to have liked, but that you've been unable to find a publisher for, send it to me. If I like the story enough to spend $200 on it, I'll buy it for $200. I hope to buy five stories. Details at the anthology page. Rationale follows.
I've been in a writing group for over a year, and read about thirty stories and a novel because of it. I've mentioned before that half the stories are "a rewrite away from publication quality". What does that mean, really? It means I could easily imagine reading those fifteen stories in a magazine or anthology. But of those fifteen stories, there are only two I want to buy for three cents a word and publish myself.[0] It's different when it's your own money.
Thoughtcrime Experiments is an an experiment with my own money. How hard is it to find five stories that I really want to buy? Given those stories, how hard is it to put together an anthology people will want to read? At the tor.com holiday meetup I cornered Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Joseph Adams, and asked them whether my plan was feasible.
My takeaway from those conversations is that the toughest part of putting together an anthology is A) getting some "name" writers to promise to contribute stories to anchor the anthology[1], and B) getting a publishing deal.[2] Well, I don't need either of those to consider this project a success, so let's do this. Send your best unpublished story to thoughtcrime.experiments@gmail.com. I'll start promoting this anthology more in the new year, when people come back from vacation and start paying attention again, but it's open for submissions now.
I'm also going to try to write a story for John's current anthology, "Federations", and a pro market wants me to do a rewrite on a different story (yes!). So, busy vacation.
[0] I think one of those stories has sold, as has the novel.
[1] At VPXI Elizabeth Bear told the story of how she broke into the relatively-big time by filling in for a name writer who'd flaked out on an anthology promise. And then eventually found herself being the name writer and flaking out on anthology promises of her own, leaving room for other up-and-coming writers.
[2] Anthology creation, at least the way John does it, seems like you nail down the name contributors, pitch the book to a publisher using the name writers as collateral, put everything together, send out the checks, and submit the manuscript. For some reason I always imagined someone at the publisher coming up with the anthology idea and gathering the stories. But it's more like a novel that you subcontract out.
Wed Dec 24 2008 23:45Christmas Chiptunes:
This year everyone is a-twitter (and a-Twitter) about 8-Bit Jesus, the excellent album of Christmas carols done in the style of NES games, an album that has doubled in size since the last time I looked at its webpage. But if you can't bear to listen to music not synthesized by a 6502, it's not your only option.
A few years ago the twittering was about The 8bits of Christmas (that really does seem to be the best way to link to it; scroll down to "8bp038"). And this guy puts out a Christmas album every year. There's also this "8 Bit XMAS 2008" which actually comes on an NES cart. If you ask me the first two albums I linked to are the best, but nobody asks me these things.
Sumana listened to some of the music and said, "You won Christmas!"
In 1961, he introduced Silly Putty to thousands of excited Soviets in Gorky Park. "They went absolutely nuts when they saw it," said Peter.
Wed Dec 24 2008 17:38Beautiful Soup Progress #2:
Another glorious vacation day squandered porting Beautiful Soup to Python 3 for you ungrateful sods! I have a script that runs 2to3-3.0 on the core codebase and applies a little patch of my own, and I've used it to fix almost all of the Unicode problems. We've still got some kind of problem with the search mechanism, and some problems with HTMLParser (?) differences involving how HTML entities and self-closing tags are handled between Python 2 and Python 3. I'm down to 15 failing tests in the converted code, without breaking any tests in the Python 2 version.
I think a couple people were confused by my earlier statement that you'd be able to "write a plugin for lxml [or] lib5html." I'm talking about using another parser to drive Beautiful Soup tree generation. Turning events generated by some other parser into a generic set of "start tag", "end tag" type events. Thus giving you an alternative to the okay-for-2004-but-not-for-2008 Beautiful Soup rules about parsing bad HTML, and eventually getting rid of those rules altogether, because I don't want to be in that business.
This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Monday, December 22 2008, 09:23:44 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Tuesday, January 06 2009, 21:35:12 Nowhere Standard Time.
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Tue Jan 06 2009 16:37 Beautiful Soup 3.1.0.1:
It's out. All it does is fix a parser crash on boolean attributes like 
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