The Magazine–a really excellent digital periodical–is doing a Kickstarter to fund an annual print edition. You should *really* consider kicking in $30, like, immediately to get a copy. Barring that, $15 is a great deal–gets you a one-year subscription at about 40 percent off–and even a buck or five helps.
That annual print edition–which is really the brass ring on this one–is gonna be a big, fat hardcover with 130 of the most-notable articles, color glossy pictures, the whole shebang. Here’s a layout preview–which happens to feature the first article I wrote for them, about the world’s greatest aftermarket “lens” for doing old-school pinhole photography with catching-edge consumer-grade digital cameras. Backers who come in at $30 or more (as of this writing) will get the hardcover, plus DRM-free digital editions of the book. (You can back at a lower level and still get some pretty sweet swag, though. For example, if you come in at $15 you get a one-year subscription, which normally retails for ~$20–and costs, like, $24 if you buy it monthly, like I do, because I’m a damn rube).
If you’re one of this “I Give a Damn About the Future of Long-Form Journalism and Think Pieces,” then you should be backing this project; The Magazine is basically the only forward looking periodical I’ve come across. They pay well, and the editors are meticulously ethical, extremely scrupulous, and great to work with–every story becomes the best possible version of itself.
Also, *DISCLOSURE* if this project funds, I’ll get a reprint payment of a couple hundred dollars. They don’t *have* to do this–not with the contract I signed; they’ve already paid me for the work. They are *choosing* to do this because it’s the right thing to do. Like I said, if there’s a future in this non-fiction thing, The Magazine is that future.
Category: Other Writing
“The New Guys Always Work Overtime” Featured In a #FREE Podcast (& I’m speaking at Ignite Ann Arbor on Nov17!)
My story “The New Guys Always Work Overtime” (which debuted in the Feb 2013 ASIMOV’S) is included in the latest StarShipSofa podcast: StarShipSofa No 312 David Erik Nelson | StarShipSofa
A second story in this series–a novelette titled “There Was No Sound of Thunder”–will run in ASIMOV’S next summer.
Also, I’m speaking about booze at Ignite Ann Arbor on Nov. 17. They’ve chosen the unconventional tactic of making the most erratic speaker go last, likely in an effort to clear the room prior to going into overtime and incurring additional rental fees. You should come check it out, because when I really totally flop, it is usually pretty exquisite.
Column: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the RoboRoach”
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In this latest installment we meditate upon the instantly controversial RoboRoach from Backyard Brains:
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Cockroach Thanksgiving
Come November, Ann Arbor’s own Backyard Brains will be shipping their educational RoboRoach kits. In just a few E-Z steps you (yes, you!) will upgrade a standard issue Blaberus discoidalis cockroach into your very own iPhone-controlled insectoid robo-slave – and just in time for the Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday Season!
I know, I know, you have questions – and almost certainly some objections – when it comes to icing a live cockroach, mutilating its antennae, drilling a hole in its back, and taking control of its brain – with a goddamn phone.
Readers, I share your moral panic. But I have walked in the Valley of Death, have been prodded with the SpikerBox, have bought coffee and a cookie for the lead roach-roboticisizer, have met their techno-insectoid minions, and here, on the far side of the vale, I want to tell you this:
I am not worried about the kids who unwrap a Backyard Brains RoboRoach kit sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of the year; I’m worried about the kids who don’t.
. . .
I know, I know, you have questions – and almost certainly some objections – when it comes to icing a live cockroach, mutilating its antennae, drilling a hole in its back, and taking control of its brain – with a goddamn phone.
Readers, I share your moral panic. But I have walked in the Valley of Death, have been prodded with the SpikerBox, have bought coffee and a cookie for the lead roach-roboticisizer, have met their techno-insectoid minions, and here, on the far side of the vale, I want to tell you this:
I am not worried about the kids who unwrap a Backyard Brains RoboRoach kit sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of the year; I’m worried about the kids who don’t.
. . .
Writing a New DIY Book
As I mentioned before, part of my relative silence here is due to me working on a new DIY book, which is all musical instruments and noise toys (primarily electronic and wicked *awesome!*) and slated for completion sometime prior to the heat-death of our universe. For those interested in how the sausage gets made, here’s a snapshot of today’s work:
I’m revising Project 7, which is 26 pages long. The only page that has *zero* revisions is Page 8:
(Just in case you think that’s a function of the paucity of text on Page 8, I’ll have you know that I have a page with just *nine* words on it, and *it* has red ink.)
Pretty much every other page looks more like good ole Page 23:
*Everything* I write goes like this. I write a page, only to scrawl basically an entirely new page overtop that typed page, then merge the two and cut 1/6th of it. That’s a process. It’s like I’m making Oreos from scratch only so I can crunch them up to be Oreo crust for a Jell-o Pudding Pie.
Anyway, if you’re ever feeling totally overwhelmed at what a hash your project seems to be mid-build, just look at Page 23 and say: “Christ; at least I’m better at this than Dave is at writing!”
Teller’s “Miser’s Dream of Goldfish” Is Breathtakingly Lovely
Teller is an excellent straight-man, and so is all too often undersold for his grace as a performer and genius as a magician–and, really, his qualities as an artist who basically never gets called an artist.
But none of that matters. What matters is that I see this, and it just breaks my heart, it’s so damn pretty. (The trick is the second one in the video, at the 3:30 mark–or click the link, which will take you to the video all queued up and ready to go.)
Penn & Teller on The Royal Variety Performance (UK 2011) – YouTube
Penn & Teller vs. Multi-Level Marketing #biz
I’m not a huge fan of Penn & Teller’s program BULLSHIT!–Penn Jillette’s rhetorical style is often senselessly inflammatory, and his gloss of Social Security in this particular episode is simplified to the point of complete distortion–but theatrical yelling aside, this is both a heartbreaking and informative snapshot of “multi-level marketing.” It’s shocking how many hours well-meaning people fruitlessly sink into these hopeless mutli-level sales schemes; the folk taking advantage of their earnestness and dedication is absolutely contemptible.
▶ Penn & Teller: Bullshit! – Season 8 Episode 5 – Easy Money – YouTube
So, I’m working on books and stories and columns . . .
. . . which is why the posts here are getting pretty dusty. But even when I’m working on the long stuff that keeps me from posting here, I can still be found kibitzing on various even-shorter-format social media thingies, like these:
Twitter
Google+
Goodreads
PinboardConnect! Open yourself to my near constant pestering! Enjoy!
A Brief Primer on Buying a Whole Hog for Eating
I continue to write a regular column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle (one of the many reasons I post here so irregularly). In my latest I offer the low-down on buying a live pig and getting it converted into a bunch of shrink-wrapped dinner portions.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In It For The Money: Whole Hog
Three kinds of weight come into play when you are dealing with domestic animals you intend to eat: Live weight, hanging weight, and processed weight. Live weight, you’ll be shocked to learn, is the weight of the live animal. Hanging weight is the weight of the dead animal, drained of blood, and minus the parts you don’t have any use for (such as the intestines, stomach, head, feet, skin). The processed weight is the final weight of all that meat (aka, the “cuts”) neatly wrapped in butcher paper (or, more likely, vacuum sealed in plastic).
Sharp tacks have already surmised that live weight is greater than hanging weight, which in turn is greater than processed weight. Things vary by breed, individual pig, and butcher, but in general the hanging weight is about 75 percent of the live weight, and the processed weight about 66 percent of the hanging weight. So when all is said and done, if you start out with a 250-pound live pig, you’ll end up with about 125 pounds of cuts.
Most of the negotiating you’ll do revolves around hanging weight – although a pig might be priced based on its live weight, its hanging weight, or just as a pig. Per-pig pricing is the equivalent of wholesale in most cases: The farmer is just asking for you to reimburse him for the feed (which, at today’s corn prices, means around $240).
In terms of hanging weight, the price currently seems to hover in the $2 to $2.50 per pound range. So on a hypothetical 250-live-pound hog, that would amount to $375 to $470-ish. If the farmer quotes well below that, then he’s probably doing so on live weight, and you should clear that up. I’m not saying anyone is being nefarious, but the difference between hanging weight and live weight on your average hog is something like 62 pounds. A buck-fifty per pounds sounds like a tremendous deal, but actually amounts to the same thing as paying $2 per pound hanging weight.
At the end of the day, you should budget around $375 for your pig. But that only gets you half way to the dinner table.
At this stage, you’ve dropped almost four bills on a live pig that, we’ve established, is of very little use to you within Ann Arbor city limits. It lives its happy piggy life out in the mud somewhere many miles from a Starbucks. It runs around under the pine trees listening to AM radio and rooting for fat grubs. If a spider is up in the rafters writing nice things about him, he has no clue, because he’s illiterate and happily snorting up mud and knocking over his brothers and sisters. He is a pig, just as God and evolution and human meddling in natural selection made him.
. . .
Sharp tacks have already surmised that live weight is greater than hanging weight, which in turn is greater than processed weight. Things vary by breed, individual pig, and butcher, but in general the hanging weight is about 75 percent of the live weight, and the processed weight about 66 percent of the hanging weight. So when all is said and done, if you start out with a 250-pound live pig, you’ll end up with about 125 pounds of cuts.
Most of the negotiating you’ll do revolves around hanging weight – although a pig might be priced based on its live weight, its hanging weight, or just as a pig. Per-pig pricing is the equivalent of wholesale in most cases: The farmer is just asking for you to reimburse him for the feed (which, at today’s corn prices, means around $240).
In terms of hanging weight, the price currently seems to hover in the $2 to $2.50 per pound range. So on a hypothetical 250-live-pound hog, that would amount to $375 to $470-ish. If the farmer quotes well below that, then he’s probably doing so on live weight, and you should clear that up. I’m not saying anyone is being nefarious, but the difference between hanging weight and live weight on your average hog is something like 62 pounds. A buck-fifty per pounds sounds like a tremendous deal, but actually amounts to the same thing as paying $2 per pound hanging weight.
At the end of the day, you should budget around $375 for your pig. But that only gets you half way to the dinner table.
At this stage, you’ve dropped almost four bills on a live pig that, we’ve established, is of very little use to you within Ann Arbor city limits. It lives its happy piggy life out in the mud somewhere many miles from a Starbucks. It runs around under the pine trees listening to AM radio and rooting for fat grubs. If a spider is up in the rafters writing nice things about him, he has no clue, because he’s illiterate and happily snorting up mud and knocking over his brothers and sisters. He is a pig, just as God and evolution and human meddling in natural selection made him.
. . .
Voyager 1 Has Left the Building, Entered Interstellar Space
The New York Times has a very charming, informative piece on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been confirmed to have left the influence of our brave and noble Sun, and entered the depthless black between the stars.
The piece–and the ongoing work of both the Voyager spacecrafts[*] (which were only supposed to run for about 4 years, their original mission wrapping up in the early 1980s) and team (most of whom seem to be pulling AARP discounts)–is an excellent meditation on progress and age and the simple fact that, for most of us, doing something great is not about a single dazzling moment, but about continuing to plug away, day after day, decade upon decade, until the many small success add up to something bizarre and wonderful.
Exiting the Solar System and Fulfilling a Dream – NYTimes.com
Voyager 1 left the solar system the same month that Curiosity, NASA’s state-of-the-art rover, landed on Mars and started sending home gorgeous snapshots. Curiosity’s exploration team, some 400 strong, promptly dazzled the world by driving the $2.5 billion robot across a patch of Martian terrain, a feat that turned the Red Bull-chugging engineers and scientists of Building 264 of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus into rock stars. By comparison, the Voyager mission looked like a Betamax in the era of Bluetooth.
The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.
“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”
The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.
“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”
Incidentally, the Voyager spacecrafts carry the “Golden Records“–analog phonograph records featuring sounds of Earth, as well as encoded photographs, and etched with pictograph instructions on how to play the cosmic record. Of the two dozen musical pieces included, only three are from the United States: A Navajo chant[**], Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground.”
Blind Willie Johnson, you’ve finally made it into interstellar space–on vinyl, and a gold record, no less! If that’s not the American Dream, then we’ve got the wrong kind of Americans.
At any rate, all of this is especially resonant for me, because the Voyager crafts were put into space the year I was born. Slowly but surely, we’re each getting somewhere. Amen.
Continue reading “Voyager 1 Has Left the Building, Entered Interstellar Space”
Voyager 1 Has Left the Building, Entered Interstellar Space
The New York Times has a very charming, informative piece on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been confirmed to have left the influence of our brave and noble Sun, and entered the depthless black between the stars.
The piece–and the ongoing work of both the Voyager spacecrafts[*] (which were only supposed to run for about 4 years, their original mission wrapping up in the early 1980s) and team (most of whom seem to be pulling AARP discounts)–is an excellent meditation on progress and age and the simple fact that, for most of us, doing something great is not about a single dazzling moment, but about continuing to plug away, day after day, decade upon decade, until the many small success add up to something bizarre and wonderful.
Exiting the Solar System and Fulfilling a Dream – NYTimes.com
Voyager 1 left the solar system the same month that Curiosity, NASA’s state-of-the-art rover, landed on Mars and started sending home gorgeous snapshots. Curiosity’s exploration team, some 400 strong, promptly dazzled the world by driving the $2.5 billion robot across a patch of Martian terrain, a feat that turned the Red Bull-chugging engineers and scientists of Building 264 of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus into rock stars. By comparison, the Voyager mission looked like a Betamax in the era of Bluetooth.
The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.
“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”
The 12-person Voyager staff was long ago moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus to cramped quarters down the street, next to a McDonald’s. In an interview last month at Voyager’s offices, Suzanne R. Dodd, the Voyager project manager, said that when she attended meetings in Building 264, she kept a low profile in deference to the Mars team.
“I try to stay out of the elevator and take the stairs,” Ms. Dodd said. “They’re doing important work there, and I’ll only slow them down.”
Incidentally, tThe Voyager spacecrafts carry the “Golden Records“–analog phonograph records featuring sounds of Earth, as well as encoded photographs, and etched with pictograph instructions on how to play the cosmic record. Of the two dozen musical pieces included, only three are from the United States: A Navajo chant[**], Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground.”
Blind Willie Johnson, you’ve finally made it into interstellar space–on vinyl, and a gold record, no less! If that’s not the American Dream, then we’ve got the wrong kind of Americans.
At any rate, all of this is especially resonant for me, because the Voyager crafts were put into space the year I was born. Slowly but surely, we’re each getting somewhere. Amen.
Continue reading “Voyager 1 Has Left the Building, Entered Interstellar Space”