The True Stories of Philip K. Dick

painting by G.K. Bellows

The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick (pdf) (excellent 1975 Rolling Stone article by Paul Williams)

Articles, Essays and Fiction - a collection of PKD related writings

via Ministry of Truth

Notebooks

Thornton Wilder, [Manuscript notebook containing dialogue for Merchant of Yonkers and notes on "other projects"] (YCAL MSS 108)

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities - Notebooks

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Mayfair, and the Deaths of Harry Nilsson, Mama Cass and Keith Moon
How to Embalm a Body (via)
Middle Eastern Contemporary Artists Booming
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Systems (via)
The Felt Toothbrush
Recommended piano books
Iain Banks talks to Writing Magazine

viddy:
This American Life - Judgement to the Wife (funny)
Zumba Cinco - Moça do Biquini Azul
São Paulo in 1943
Aldous Huxley's Deathbed (as related by his wife) (via)

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Middle East Cockroaches Invade U.S. During the Iraq War American military personnel have unknowingly been bringing back Middle Eastern cockroaches in their belongings and equipment. One such globe-trotting insect, the Turkestan cockroach, is now settled in the southwestern part of the U.S....

Texas bans nibbling fish pedicures The US state of Texas has banned fish pedicures over health and safety concerns, denying salon customers the opportunity to enjoy the sensation of hundreds of small fish nibbling away the dead skin from their feet.

Mutant fish develops a taste for human flesh in India The enormous goonch, a type of catfish, is said to have developed a taste for human flesh after feeding on corpses thrown into the river after funeral ceremonies. Locals rumours have held for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to targeting live bathers who swim in the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border.

also:
Hummus Wars
On-tap Inspiration Online (for writers)
Dr. Dymaxion's Atomic Condos (Bucky stuff)
Projector for your phone
"Calamities of Genius"
Forest Whitaker to direct and star in Satchmo biopic

viddy:
Lab Created Diamonds
First live webcast of a lion hunt
Heavy Metal Farmer
Staubli Robot Dance Show
Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die (via)

Kurt Vonnegut on how to write short stories

via

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Has anyone noticed that oil has dropped below $106 a barrel? Crude oil and gold led a decline in commodities in London as Hurricane Gustav spared the U.S. Gulf states the destruction caused by Katrina and Rita in 2005.

How books changed Mafia man's life For the first time in his life he started reading books, looking deeper into himself and searching for some answers. He set himself the challenge to read the entire prison library. "Prison was the greatest thing that happened to me, because it gave me time to look inside myself, the solitude that I needed to take a closer look at everything around me; to analyse myself."

Danish artists create life-size walking house With oil prices rocketing and mortgages plummeting, visionary Danish artist collective N55 has solved the joint problems of transport and housing by building a home that can walk. A new twist on the mobile home, although I have a feeling it wouldn't fly in this country unless it could do around 75mph. (via)

Dennis Hopper's life: a hell of a ride Hopper’s description sums up his career. He’s part of Hollywood history as the man who in 1969 made independent movie-making a serious business by directing and starring in Easy Rider alongside Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda. The result was a winning hand that’s kept him in the game ever since, even though he’s run low on chips. But somehow he’s never quite managed to establish himself as a big winner. For a good chunk of his 50-year acting career he has been sidelined by film studios, nervous about his reputation for drink, drugs and wild behaviour and for speaking his mind. I think he's done just fine, all in all.

Seven Eight Things To Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing 8. Write.

also:
Six Ways to Fix the CIA
People Who Lose Jobs Become Hermits
US army has laser guns in its sights
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Telescopes
Art games and not-games (really good ones, too)
EnglishScholar.com - A compendium of electronic resources

viddy:
Welcome to My Study 4 (prev)
The Prisoner: Video Exclusive - Building The Village
The World of Anathem (via)
The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube
Kurt Vonnegut documentary
UbuWeb - Christian Marclay

Ianthe and Richard Brautigan

photograph by Edmund Shea

This is a cropped (cropper unknown) image from the cover of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1969.

I saw Richard Brautigan speak at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, some time in October of 1981. I don't remember much about what he said, but I enjoyed his books and was happy to have had the chance to see him while I was passing through.

I remember the Q&A afterward quite clearly. I usually don't ask questions at lectures and readings, but I wanted to know something about his writing process. I asked him if he wrote more 'stream of consciousness' or if he did a lot of rewriting. Innocent enough question. He got rather bent out of shape about it, exclaiming that he was a professional and a craftsman and worked very hard at it. It got personal.

His overt defensiveness seemed to indicate some serious personality issues and arrive from an ongoing thought-stream where these sorts of questions were posed before, likely with deprecatory insinuations. Sad thing is, I agree with him, as I am all for taking pains, rewriting and craftsmanship. I certainly hit a sore spot and paid the price for it. One of my favorite writers slammed me and he had completely misconstrued my intentions. I don't like to admit it, but I never read anything by Richard Brautigan after that.

An Interview with Ianthe Brautigan
Brautigan Bibliography and Archive
for the thumb there's the Richard Brautigan wiki

via the always intriguing benhästen

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Zodiac Killer's Identity And Weapon Uncovered? "The identity of the Zodiac Killer is Jack Tarrance. He's my stepfather," says Dennis Kaufman. (via)

'Space Cube' could be world's smallest PC Measuring just 2 inches by 2 inches, the Space Cube is roughly the size of a large die. However, the cube is actually a tiny PC, developed by the Shimafuji Corporation in Japan.

Computer meltdowns in space: a short history New Scientist highlights a few of the more prominent – and messy – failures of the past.

also:
The World's Richest Dropouts
oddmusic links
Where to Find Great Dinosaur Pictures
A photo story of the first pig to fly (I have no idea what the backstory for this is. Anyone?) (via)

viddy:
Richard Alpert on LSD (on as about, not on as in under the influence)
Non-circular Gears & Uncommon Planetary Gears
Los Po-boy-citos "Entierro" (from my homies back in The Big Easy, y'all take care, now)

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. -- Ray Bradbury (via)

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The Internet's New Shortcut Now, professors Arvind Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington and Richard Yang of Yale say they have a better way to solve broadband providers' woes. Their algorithm, which they call P4P or "local file-sharing," tracks users' locations to find the shortest path across the Internet. The result, they say, should please both sides of the peer-to-peer debate: Users can download files about 20% faster than conventional file-sharing, while cutting the bandwidth requirements by more than a factor of five. Broadband providers are stoked... content providers, not so much, I'm sure.

Australian "hot rocks" offer 26,000 yrs of power Barely one percent of Australia's untapped geothermal energy could produce 26,000 years worth of clean electricity... (via)

Last work of surrealist Marcel Duchamp discovered The last ever art work created by the influential French surrealist Marcel Duchamp has been discovered in an apartment in in northeastern Spain.

Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter. Toffee Nugget: Few men dare ask the question "What is toffee, exactly?" All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane. (via)

also:
Advice for writers about research (via)
Who were the Neanderthals?
French Authorities Uncover a Bizarre Serial Killer's Trail

viddy:
Man Ray: "Home Movies"

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Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.

Making an Arguement for Misspelling Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether. Disagree. Lern too spel, dumas.

Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past.

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.

The couple who lived in a mall After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way -- they moved in.

Macbeth (1040-57) King of Scotland Macbeth lived during brutal times. He defeated Duncan I in 1040 and reigned for seventeen years. His story differs from Shakespeare's play written nearly six centuries later.

also:
How can I survive a night in the Alaskan wilderness?
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene (via)
List of problems solved by MacGyver (via)
The Olympics with MST3k If I hadn't recorded it, I'd think I'm losing my mind. (don't miss it, MSTies) (via)
Cthuugle The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine (via)
Musée Patamécanique (via)

viddy:
RIAA Lawsuit Victim Becomes Free Culture Activist
World's Largest Record Collection (it's for sale and quite a bargain at $3 million for 2.5 million records)
Jean-Luc Godard: YouTubed
Monty Python on Public TV in 1975

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Science close to unveiling invisible man Invisibilty devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

How to blow it It's the most winnable presidential election in American history - but the Democrats are old hands at losing. Michael Moore offers some helpful hints on how they might gift it all to the Republicans. (via)

Covert operation floats network-sniffing balloon Hidden in the back of a 22-foot moving truck, Hill and his team of about a dozen volunteers launched the balloon Friday morning, sending it 150 feet into the air for about 20 minutes to use special antennas and scanning software to scope out the Las Vegas skyline for unsecured wireless networks, an activity Hill calls "warballooning." Hackers have practiced wardriving for years, driving around in cars with computers and specialized software that sniffs for networks.

Controller praised for texting pilot down safely Five people on a flight from Kerry to Jersey received mobile phone text instructions from a quick-thinking air traffic controller when he guided them in to a safe landing at Cork. (via)

What's the big deal? It's the little things Again and again, American history has turned on the dime of such tiny things. The Watergate conspiracy might have unraveled no matter what, but it was a strip of tape on a Watergate building office door that alerted a security guard that burglars were about. Jimmy Carter's presidency might have crashed and burned anyway, but it was a crashing and burning helicopter in the sands of Iran during a failed rescue of American hostages that may have sealed his loss in 1980... The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world... (via)

Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself? The idea that music can transform reality predates by many millennia the category "music" as we know it. Before art was understood as a phenomenon in itself apart from its ritual application (a relatively recent and culturally specific development), what we now call music was indistinguishable from magic. (via)

Vin Mariani A good 20 years before the original cocaine-infused Coca-Cola taught the world to grind its teeth and give ineffectual bathroom-stall handjobs in per•fect har•mo•ny, there was another drink of choice among those wishing to feel invigorated and overconfident for no good reason. It was called “coca wine” and it was loved not only by self-important blowhards wearing too much jewelry but by Kings and Popes and…

also:
Two Great Stories - BOTH TRUE - and worth reading!
I don’t care about fonts (via)
Penniless author sells shares in next novel (good idea) (via)
Athlete-bloggers at the Beijing Olympics
The Hardest Places in the World to Find a Bathroom
A Look at the Secret Service, and More from CRS

viddy:
Lecture on Marcus Auprelius (via)
Reggie Watts - F*$K,S#%T,STACK (NSFW) (via)
daedelus on the monome

Alan Moore's Advice for Young Artists

Watch the whole interview here

via Pyr-o-mania

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How CAPTCHA got trashed CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. More good news.

2008 State of the Future report proposes 15 global challenges Even more good news.

How to Write With Style From one of the best. (via)

also:
Stefano De Luigi - Photo Essay: Blindness (via)
Something to Read: The Book Bike A most unusual bicycle that travels around Chicago on the weekends giving away books. (via)
This is Sand Big Time time devourer. (via)
CISMA Brazilian director, Denis Kamioka, aka CISMA, has his portfolio online. The Nike football ad is awesome. Polamalu rocks it. (via)

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting….In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. — Marshall McLuhan, from Understanding Media (via)

Iain Banks - The Write Place

This is gold. I love this kind of stuff.

Iain Banks give us a tour of his study, "where the writing gets done."

TheBookShow
via Iain Banks.net

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The Twisted Journey Of 'Napoleon's Privates' "Whenever someone implies that history is boring, I bring up Napoleon's penis..." (via)

10 Badasses From the Pages of History A few surprises in there. A few that I never heard of.

Studs Terkel interviews Frank Zappa In August of 1968, Chicago's WFMT-FM broadcast of Studs Terkel's Wax Museum featuring composer, guitarist and full-time anarchist Frank Zappa. (via)

How Hunter S. Thompson beat back his writer’s block Writers sometimes suffer bouts of major paralysis. They want to write, are desperate to get down something great, but it’s just not coming easily, in fact not at all. (via)

Richard K. Morgan blogging on Amazon US (via)

Baseball diamonds: the lefthander's best friend "Ninety percent of the human population is right-handed, but in baseball 25 percent of the players, both pitchers, and hitters, are left-handed..." There are a number of purely physical reasons why the game favors lefties. Mechanical engineer David A. Peters breaks it down for us.

Pothead Ph.D. I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana. Not a cautionary tale. Forget all the cliches and misinformation, this guy pretty much nails it. (via)

Japanese etiquette on entering a home or room, take off your shoes A quick primer, with video, for us gaijin barbarians.

also: World Conflicts Today (via); Richard Tomlinson v. MI6 The whereabouts of Richard Tomlinson is unknown, and whether he is alive or dead. (via); The Memory Hole is back!

lagniappe: Down for everyone or just me? (via)

Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Manuscript

The entire manuscript, handwritten:













one of the pages:


















That must have been a nightmare to transcribe. He writes some serious doorstops. Excellent ones, at that.

Neal Stephenson

ht: Cynical-C (I've been on Stephenson's site a dozen times and always missed these photos.)

Writers' rooms

Margaret Forster:
"The minute I walk into this room of my own, I swear I become a different person."

Writers' Rooms
via Coudal Partners

Writers' rooms: Roald Dahl

Quentin Blake:

I didn't go into the shed very often, because the whole point of it as far as Roald was concerned was that it was private, a sanctuary where he could work where no one interrupted him. The whole of the inside was organised as a place for writing: so the old wing-back chair had part of the back burrowed out to make it more comfortable; he had a sleeping bag that he put his legs in when it was cold and a footstool to rest them on; he had a very characteristic Roald arrangement for a writing table with a bar across the arms of the chair and a cardboard tube that altered the angle of the board on which he wrote. As he didn't want to move from his chair everything was within reach.

I've always been fascinated with people's private workspaces, whether they be writers, artists, craftsmen or even programmers, technicians or scientists. I have had the chance to hang in the home laboratory of a botanist and stayed in a large house that doubled as a bustling art restoration operation, a dozen or more pre-20th century paintings laying about in various states of completion. I've been wowed by the workshops of metallurgists, armorers, woodworkers and the uncounted studios of painters, filmmakers, photographers, writers, designers, sculptors and musicians. There is a palpable 'spirit' to these spaces that I find energizing.

I am sometimes embarrassed by the clutter and disarray of my own workspace, but when I apologize to visitors, they often, to my continual surprise, say they like it and feel comfortable there. People have been known to settle into The Lab for hours. I'm a little bit more obliging about letting people in than some.

via

Sunday Excursions

Sunday is a day that I like to break routine and explore something new or tackle some backburner project or just chill and hang with some friends. Some days we fish, some days we mend nets, and some days we just goof off.

With this in mind, Uncertain Times is going to disengage from the cycle and go a little off-topic with Sunday Excursions.

Item: Scamorama

Most of you are probably familiar with those emails with the subject line "Request for Assistance" etc. etc., offering a cut of a large sum of money in exchange for help with transferring funds so that they can drain your bank account, or worse.

Yes, it's the Nigerian Scammers, aka: 419ers or The Lads from Lagos. These scumbags practice what is known in legalese as Advance Fee Fraud, a variation of the Spanish Prisoner con.

Although they are popularly known as 'Nigerian', 419ers operate from a number of different countries. They did, however, originate there and remain predominantly Nigerian.

Most of us ignore and delete, but many have been victimized by these folks. (as well as by their own greed and stupidity) Many have lost money, but some have been kidnapped and held for ransom and some have even been murdered. (despite editorial complaints, for our purposes, Wikipedia has an adequate entry on AFF.)

But now, the cool part. Enter Scamorama.

Scamorama is a website devoted to scam-baiting. The object is to string the scammers along for as long as possible (sometimes for months) and eventually lay some sort of smackdown on them. Some actually get the scammers to send them something; a copy of a photo id, a picture of the scammer in lingerie, money, even gold.


But what's really priceless, in my opinion, is the interplay. Some of the entries are hilarious. In fact, many are so well contrived that scam-baiting has practically become a literary genre unto itself.

Many scam-baiters pose themselves as fictional, pop-cultural or historical characters such as, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Mr. T, Joseph Stalin, and my favorite, the Miskatonic University Tales, chronicling the exploits of Thomas Mallory, a living human head in a jar!

Although many of the entries aren't quite as humorous and some are so long that it's impossible to slog through after awhile, some are so funny that I'd advise not drinking milk while reading them.

Score one for the good guys.

Late note: I've been following Scamorama since 2003, but I've only recently found 419 Eater. How I missed this, I have no idea. Although I don't think their scam-o-grams are quite as funny as Scamorama's, they're pretty crafty. So much so, that in one case, a 419er was actually convinced to provide some pretty elaborate wood-carvings. I was hepped to this after scanning Wikipedia and the Boing Boing archives. Scamorama also has blivets of links to advance fee fraud and scam-baiting sites both funny and serious as well as a number of odd nuggets worth a peek.

Item: Suppressed Transmissions

I haven't played a pencil and paper role-playing game for quite a while, but I still keep an eye on the industry and a few of the publishers, designers and writers; in particular, one Kenneth Hite.

I first became aware of Mr. Hite via his Suppressed Transmission column in Pyramid, an online RPG journal published by Steve Jackson Games. A friend of mine suggested that I should check him out. I sneaked a peek on a friend's account and I was impressed enough to subscribe. (SJG has also released two volumes of ST in print.)

The Suppressed Transmission series covers a wide range of themes and genres related to gaming, but it is built on four pillars: Conspiracy, Secret History, Horror and Alternate History. Within this framework each column addresses a particular subject, magnifies it through various historical, fictional or gaming-oriented lenses and then focuses it into an informative and entertaining transmission of ideas and inspiration. Topics include Shakespeare, Antarctic Space Nazis, The Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon, Emperor Norton, The Knights Templar, Route 66, and many others.

As an erstwhile gamer, I know that the Suppressed Transmissions are an invaluable resource for game-masters and designers. (to paraphrase Mr. Hite: If you can't get any inspiration from this, you might as well go back to drawing 10 foot wide corridors on graph paper.) However, as a writer, Hite's work is a very helpful source of insights and ideas. His erudition, perspective and wit is refreshing and inspiring.

The Suppressed Transmission collections would be a good score for any aspiring writer. Check 'em out.