Matt O’ Rama

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FRIENDS: I’ve been doing a lot of research about so-called Friend Of A Friend systems lately. The main ones; Friendster, Live Journal (a sort of hybrid weblog/FOAF from what I can see), and the one that has spawned the most talk recently, Orkut, all seem to have a lot of problems and don’t seem to work that well. The have huge amounts of users though, which means the idea is one that people like. These sites are one of those internet things I just don’t see myself getting into. I was never much into chat rooms or instant messaging (even though before I’d heard of ICQ I was thinking over how to implement instant messaging. If I hadn’t seen an early beta of ICQ I probably would have written my own client and might have ended up inventing IM). I’m not social, so these types of applications just don’t appeal to me (no matter how much grief I get from people for having been on the internet for so long and not being a chat room or MUD user).

The reason for all my research is that I have an idea for a social network system based on finding knowledgeable people. It used to be that if you had pretty much any question you could ask on an appropriate Usenet newsgroup and somebody would know the answer. That’s a lot less true now. It’s pretty much all Google now. I very rarely ask questions on newsgroups because A) there’s too much crap and B) I can probably find it with Google. But sometimes you can’t find a good answer, only a question. That’s what got me thinking about using social networks to be able to find people with an answer. It’s partially based on the main idea of Global Frequency and the reputation system of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. If that means anything to you. I hope to have time to work out at least a beta that I can get other people to help me work on. It’s going to be more than just a website and even if I don’t have time to code it myself, I’m going to detail the spec and see if I can’t get some people to work on it. It’s a good idea I think. Of course being that I know only a bit about the FOAF/social network “scene” this could be another instance of me “inventing” something which has already been thought of and implemented outside of my sphere of interest. I haven’t found anything like it yet though. If you’re a venture capitalist and want to hear more in exchange for money, please feel free to email me. :)

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THINKING: Thanks to Warren for this: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. I just printed this out and put it up on the wall next to my computer. If you’re at all interested in creativity, this is something you have to read. Finding new ways of pushing yourself creatively is not just something that artists should do. Everyone should endevour at all times to be as creative as possible. Most people abandon creativity when they “grow up,” get jobs, have kids, etc. This is the time when you should be running forward, not standing still. I encourage you to print this out, tape it up somewhere and read at least part of it every day. Challenge yourself. Don’t just get by. Do something new. Your mind should be racing at all times. People ask writers “where do you get your ideas” all the time. You should be having so many ideas all day long that you have to stop and write them down as they pour out of your head. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are a story to write, an image to paint, a special scrapbook page to make, a comic book to publish, a new path to ride your bike, a new way to do some process you’ve been doing at work for years, whatever. Make 2004 The Year Of The Idea. Grow.

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FUTURE: Welcome to the future ladies and gents. Scientists in Denmark have developed genetically modified flowers that change color in the presence of land-mines.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

It’ll be things like this that define the future. There are already people working on projects like plants that eat toxic waste and cotton with built in resistance to wrinkles. Something like wrinkle resistant cotton doesn’t seem like much but it’s like when I read about screen-savers on cell phones. You know you have a handle on a piece of technology when you start doing small, seemingly pointless things with it. A screen saver on a cell phone is pretty pointless but the idea that you have a phone with the screen and processor enough to even do that is big.

Building plants in a lab to solve very difficult problems like land-mine detection is a sign that we’ve entered a new period in history. We’re building living things to help us achieve our goals. Next up is engineering improvements in ourselves. I can’t wait.

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BOOKS: I’ve decided to combine my personal pledge to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf with this ‘50 Book Challenge‘ from Reality Fuel. Since I’m confident that I could never remember how many books I read at the end of the year I’ve added a new box to the weblog as a running list of all the books I read this year. There’s a seperate list for audiobooks and I’m not going to include most comics or graphic novels (too short) or computer books (usually don’t read the whole thing straight through) or books I just skim through (The Dictionary of Troublesome Words). I’m also going to try to do weblog entries for all of them, as per the 50 Book Challenge. Good luck to me. If you’re going to do your own list, please put your URL in the comments so I can check it out. There’s no better way to find new books to read than from other readers.

Link courtesy of Bookslut.

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WRITING: This editorial in The Guardian could really help me with a semi romantic comedy script I’m writing so I don’t want to lose the link.

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FUTURE Thanks to one of the free gifts I recieved after becoming a subscriber to Salon.com, I’m again a subscriber to Wired magazine after a few years absence. I stopped subscribing when they were purchased by Conde Nast and became more of a high fashion magazine than a high tech one. Now, they seem to be back to their old form, minus the odd color choices they used to make for page layouts and a few hundred pages. I’m glad they’re back in the “future ideas” and gadgets business though, as recently I’ve found myself sorely in need of a connection to the future.

Albuquerque (and New Mexico in general, really) is not, to put in mildly, a forward looking place. Almost everything about it points to the past. The dominant style of architecture here is based on the millenia old adobe style invented by the local indian tribes. People here don’t even try to do anything new with adobe, they either use it to build houses that any tribe member from 3000 years ago would be at home in or, even worse, they use modern materials to copy the look of the 3000 adobe home. Architecture is, of course, an asthetic choice that each person has to make on their own but here it always strikes me as another symptom of this city’s absorption with the past.

I grew up outside San Diego and even though I was born in Boise, Idaho I will always think of myself as a Californian. Even when I was a kid growing up in what amounts to a small town in Southern California I knew things were happening. People were doing stuff that meant something, things that were going forward. I miss that. In Albuquerque I feel like I’m looking in the window on the future, not really participating in it. No matter how much I read or do I’m still outside looking in. We’re hoping to move back to California next year and I cannot imagine how freeing it will be to my mind and personality to be back where people are concerned with moving forward. Here I can’t help but feel that if I let up on the mental accelerator pedal for even a minute I’ll slip and be living in an adobe looking house reading basically the same stories in the newspaper every week. Being in a place where I could do more than read about the future is immensely important to me.

So I figure that the subscription to Wired is either going to be one of my lifelines to people who are moving the culture forward and I’ll treasure it, or it’s going to kill me. There are two conferences advertised that I would give non-pointy teeth to attend but I have little actual hope of being able to go to. Both the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and Wired’s own NEXTFEST are I’m sure going to be filled with the people and ideas that would get my mind whiring for months afterward. If I were published I could probably tell myself that attending would be great for my work but since I have yet to make money from writing, that would just be an excuse to spend money I dont have on two great vacations. From Albuquerque, a trip to either conference would be a short, expensive plane ride or long, cheap drive away, on top of the fees for attending. So I’m left with once again looking in the window and reading about the conferences as opposed to attending. This is what I meant by killing me. At least if I didn’t know about the conferences I wouldn’t long to go so much.

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COMICS: I’ve got a bunch of tradepaperbacks and graphic novels up on Ebay at the moment in an effort to both clean house and raise some money to fund my comics publishing goals. I have a bunch of different kinds of stuff up there; from Metabarons to X-Men to Powers to Batman.

Click Here To Check It Out. Thanks!

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BOOKS: My quest to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf had an important milestone yesterday, I actually passed up borrowing a new book I want to read from the Library in favor of reading something from The Shelf. I found the book The Watch by Dennis Danvers and I actually left it on the shelf and on my Books list on my Visor. I can’t remember where I saw the book or what made me put it on the list but it looks interesting. Sort of a time-travel anarchy story.

I also finished The First Five Pages from the library and decided that buying The Dictionary of Concise Writing would be much more effective than trying to read it on loan. I’ll definately have to buy it though, along with another book by the same author, The Dimwit’s Dictionary, because just reading the first part has really opened my eyes to a new way of editing my work. I think it will be very helpful.

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WORDS: The About Last Night weblog has a great essay by regular columnist Our Girl in Chicago today about the creation of Word Wars, a movie about competitve Scrabble and the people who play. She also talks about Spellbound, a movie I really want to see, which is about the kids participating in the National Spelling Bee and also mentions Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control which is one of my top 5 favorite documentaries of all time, and I’ve seen a lot of documentaries. One of these days I’m going to rent Spellbound and I’m really hoping one of the small theaters in town gets Word Wars. I have serious doubts about the later but hope springs eternal. The new Madstone theater here even got Stone Reader (which was great if a little slow in places) which I never would have expected to see in the theaters.

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COMICS: Once again, Dirk Deppey lays the smack down on the pro-superhero, pro-Direct Market forces in comics. Responding to Stuart Moore’s response to Dirk’s response to Stuart’s column (damn, weblog attributions and explanations are hard), Dirk goes after the idea that superhero/X books (superhero/crime, superhero/detective, etc.) are the Way Forward for the Direct Market. Moore tries to make the point that more creators should throw away the idea of making non-superhero comics for the Direct Market and go for superhero/ books (superhero/crime, superhero/mystery, etc.) because nobody will read your non-superhero book.

First, as a writer I have a problem with anybody telling me that I should be writing one type of story or another. If I want to write Terrorism Stories (the example Moore gives in his essay) that’s what I want to write. I don’t want to have to dilute and really, insult, my story by adding The Flash for pete’s sake. If I write Terrorism Stories minus the ridiculous Flash character and the Direct Market won’t buy it (which they wouldn’t) I’ll sell the story somewhere else (which is what’s happening). All adding superheroes to everything in the DM does is further marginalize the DM. People who want to read Terrorism Stories wouldn’t want The Flash and wouldn’t read it if it did have The Flash. Superheroes are, to the world outside the Direct Market, an old-fashioned, ridiculous, and childlike storytelling device in most cases. This doesn’t mean that all superheroes are for kids but it does mean that most adults won’t read them. Does anyone think it’s an accident that Smallville is about Clark Kent and not Superman? The episode of Smallville that shows Superman in his tights and cape is going to either be the last or second-to-last episode, depending on whether it’s a dramatic choice or a ratings one. It’s hard for a lot of people in comics to believe but most people do not want to read about superheroes. The Way Forward for the Direct Market is not superhero/mystery, it’s mystery.

Warren Ellis recently recently sent out a note on his mailing list simply saying that maybe comic book shops are just for superheroes and I think he’s right. Fighting for the Direct Market is pretty pointless since it doesn’t seem to want to be saved. If things keep going forward like they are, you’ll be able to buy your single issue superhero comics are the local comic book shop (if there is one) but the vast majority of comics are going to be sold in bookstores. And most of them are not going to contain any trace of superheroes. Really, in the long term I don’t think it matters what the DM does with superheroes because they’re the only ones who are going to be messing with them. Nobody else cares. Fighting for space on the deck of a sinking ship is not exactly the most productive way to spend your energy from the point of view of the people on the life rafts but apparently nobody’s told most Direct Market proponents that. The only reason to argue about the content of comics sold in comic book shops is sentimental attachment to comic shops. Really, it all comes down to this: The shops that want to get off the boat and into the life rafts will adapt and carry other stuff besides superheroes and the ones that just keep trying to change around the superhero genre won’t and they’ll drown.