"Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing."

Usula K. Le Guin: "As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook." "It looks to me as if people are in fact reading and writing more than they ever did. People who used to work and talk together now work each alone in a cubicle, writing and reading all day long on screen."

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names."

"The bots form a relatively closed network on Twitter, a chatbot subculture. They are able to compose Tweets, start conversations with other bots and reply to mentions, even from strangers." I'm also posting this partly because the heavy table border design of the right hand frame (and the Utah teapot as infinite scroll marker) make me oddly happy.

“And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ”

"We spend hours on the web, but you wouldn't know that from reading contemporary fiction." A good look at how most novels aren't acknowledging the internet, with a few recommendations for ones that are.

'Some said it would be slow, boring and expensive, but spending 15 days covering 6,511 miles on an epic Amtrak journey across America's heartland was "soul calming"' - Anna Pickard on the jounrey around the US.

A particularly good Bus of the Month in this, er, edition of Smoke, along with reviews of Young's riverside pubs. But... is it the last issue?

Roger Ebert's eulogy for The Eyrie Mansion. "This cannot be. They're tearing down 22 Jermyn Street in London. Much of the block is going. Bates hat shop, Trumper the barber, Sergios cafe, all vanishing. Jermyn Street was my street in London. My neighbourhood."

"instead of doing what a lot of internet-types are doing which is to see the city from above (maps and all) or from below (infrastructure and all) or even the surface of it (advertising and LED walls), I was going to focus on what makes my experience of cities (having lived in large ones like Amsterdam, Paris, London, Milan, Montreal) unique and enjoyable. A user’s experience."

Bus of the month goes to Bexleyheath and more besides! It's the latest issue of everyone's favourite irregular-published London fanzine.

Kevin O'Neill's notes from yesterday's talk at the British Library. I should go through mine and see how they compare, but this probably does a better job of capturing the event than I would have anyway. Hurrah.

"If I read that Boltzmann died in 1906 on Wikipedia I'd jump over to Britannica to check the date. After a few months of doing this I realized that I was never finding inaccurate information on Wikipedia" "I noticed a significant difference between Wikipedia and Britannica: Wikipedia was a great starting point for my research [but] Britannica was a dead end [because] Wikipedia insists that citations are needed for its content."

"We’re not all in the position to spend three weeks floating across the ocean on our own industrial versions of Walden Pond, but I think these types of retreats are only going to get more appealing. "

On the history of storing writing.

This is a really good, long, comment, which boils down to "because speech is far more natural than writing". Really, it's worth going and read the whole thing.

"The perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page." New 'SubEthaEdit for the web' from the people behind AppJet. (In fact, it's very very similar to the AppJet in-browser IDE.)

"These days, science can be stranger than science fiction, and mainstream literature is increasingly futuristic and speculative. So are the genre's days numbered?" Speaking of 'speculative', I do wish they hadn't let Atwood off the hook so easily, but then I do get grumpy. There's more on the web than in the magazine, and it all seems to be free (usually NS have a paywall), so that's good, at least.

Bruce Sterling's... well, maybe not his... keynote to the Austin Game Developers Conference a couple of days ago. Or something. You'll work it out. The line about MMORPGs is very good. Go on, read it.

I've walked both north-south and east-west, and it's certainly an interesting experience. This chap sounds like he's done a much more interesting job of documenting his walk than I did, though. Sounds like he chose the same vertical too. Well well.

Nice release notes for a maintenance release of the iPod to iTunes song transfer utility. The problems with AppleScript and iTunes are, sadly, all too familiar.

"I've been thinking a lot about visual language recently, and why interacting with it has more appeal to me than words."

John Brunner writing in the New Scientist in 1993 on predictions, SF and readers.

I've known you can take container ships for a while (it's surprisingly expensive, mind you), but I didn't realise you could take them from Hamburg (and Rotterdam) to Iceland. Nice photos and writing.

Excerpts from the upcoming issue #11 of the London magazine/fanzine/thing.

"Hitotoki is a website of personal, singular experiences, inseparably tied to a specific place. It's a project that started in Tokyo in May 2007, and is expanding to other cities around the world"

OK, so everyone's posted this by now, but I liked the failed future feel of bits of it. Like "WriteRoom allows me to turn my whizzy modern computer into my old Brother typewriter and its six-line LCD. Except for the Live Word Count."

Whiteboards are taking over everywhere else, but blackboards cling on in academia. Here's a US particle physics magazine on the subject.

"they're not *all* British" but most are. He misses a couple of author blogs, but not a bad list. Spoilt only by comments from idiots who think this is a list of the best still-alive scifi authors, as opposed to new(ish) ones.

Instead of taking the cab (what, no rail service either?) Will Self walks from JFK to the heart of the city. Sounds like just the sort of stupid thing I'd have done once. Walking to London City would have been trivial from East London, though.

"The Daily Mail has ceased to review television programmes" just as it becomes possible for a review to be useful. For torrents, you don't want forthcoming schedules, you want past reviews

once upon a time I did posts like this.