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Philip K. Dick

I mentioned a few weeks ago a link from Total Dick-Head, a blog dedicated to all things Philip K. Dick. Today’s post covers the new Library of America release of four of Dick’s most original novels that is released today in one hardcover edition. The novels are:

  • The Man in the High Castle
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Ubik

The Library of America’s mission is to _“preserve the nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions is as strong as ever.”

_

Their goal is to publish books to last the test time:

  • The paper is acid-free and meets the requirements for permanence set by the American National Standards Institute; it will not turn yellow or brittle. The books are bound with the grain of the paper to ensure that they open easily and lie flat without crinkling or buckling.
  • The binding boards are flexible yet strong and make the book light, easy to carry, trim in appearance, and a pleasure to hold.
  • The page layout has been designed for clarity as well as elegance. The typeface, Galliard, is exceptionally readable and easy on the eyes.
  • The binding cloth is durable woven rayon, dyed in the thread for richness of color. Handsome endsheets match the binding cloth and add to the visual unity of the series. The books are Smyth-sewn for permanence and flexibility, and each includes a ribbon marker.

Apparently the street date for the book is today. I actually picked this up almost 3 weeks ago in Milwaukee at a local book store. The book is gorgeous – it came shrink wrapped, and the paper quality and presentation is top notch. I own a lot of Dick’s short fiction, and look forward to reading some of his early novels.

Derivative Works

Big Media is nothing if not two-faced about the creation of derivative works. From the music industry busting re-mix artists – the same artists paid by the industry to promote their artists in dance clubs, to the film industry’s penchant for remakes. And how many movies made today are born from an original idea? Even this year’s Best Picture winner, The Departed, is a remake of a Hong Kong film.

Techdirt takes a look at this issue, using the story of the fans who re-made Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot starting in 1981 and taking the next 7 summers to complete it. As Techdirt points out, this couldn’t be done today. The author does a great job in pointing out the irony in the movie business on the subject of copyright.

Click here to read the article.

No Halo3 Beta For Me

I bought a copy of Crackdown when it came out a few months ago, and was quite happy with the game. It was fun to play a GTA-style game on the side of the good guys for once.

An added benefit of buying Crackdown was an exclusive invite to the Halo 3 beta, which went live this past Wed. Or was supposed to. Of course demand was higher than expected, and the download was delayed a few times throughout the day.

I was finally able to download, and I start the beta through Crackdown – which takes about 10 minutes from start to finally getting in the game after going through the Halo 3 lobby and matchmaking. And each time I try to play, I get an error: “The disc is unreadable” – which is kind of funny as there is no disc.

There are a few threads on the Bungie / Halo 3 forums about this, with other folks having the same issue, and no clear cut fix. Quite frustrating, to say the least.

doh!

Bladerunner DVD Details

One of my new favorite blogs to read, Total Dick-head, devoted to everything Philip K. Dick, has the details on the next Bladerunner DVD release, via DavisDVD.

I love Bladerunner – it was really the Director’s Cut being released in theaters that really got me into it, as I remember going to the Oriental in Milwaukee to watch it, and just being blown away. The first DVD release was pretty poor – it was basically just the Laserdisc version slapped on to DVD without being remastered, and the quality is iffy at best. Bladerunner is by far the best adapation of a Philip K. Dick story (though A Scanner Darkly is the truest adaption), and the story, the visuals, and the acting were all top notch.

I eagerly await this release on DVD! Read the details on the 5 disc box set here.

Joost Beta Invites

Do you need a Joost beta invite? I’ve hooked up all the friends (I think) who want one, and still have a bunch leftover.

Drop me an email at pcutler _at_ foresightlinux.org if you want one.

Mac & Windows only now, thought there have been rumors of a Linux client sometime in the future.

It’s definitely interesting – and different. Joost continues to sign up content partners, and it’s getting better each week. I don’t use it all that often as I’ve been mostly using my laptop now rather than my desktop, but when I am in my den, I’ll run it on my extra Windows box from time to time just as background noise and to keep tabs on what the Joost folks are up to.

Off the Grid

I’ve been off the grid most of the weekend, as I took the family home to Wisconsin to visit the in-laws.

My father-in-law has a wireless broadband connection (supposed to be about 1 meg down, but feels much slower). It’s connect to a Linksys 802.11b router. I’ve been unable to to get my Toshiba laptop to connect to the net, though my work laptop running XP didn’t have a problem nor did my wife. My Toshiba gets an IP address and saw the nameservers on the wireless (eth1), but has horrendous packet loss. Pinging google.com resulted in 66% packet loss, and web pages wouldn’t pull up at all. I don’t know if it was a Linux thing, Foresight, or the ISP itself.

It has reminded me how much I loathe not being connected. So much for tackling learning docbook this weekend for the Foresight user guide or the blog theme on WordPress MU.

Having some time on my hands, I did do some shopping yesterday, stopping at a local bookstore, who hosted John Scalzi just over a week ago. I missed him in Minneapolis last week, and was able to pick up an autographed copy of his latest book, The Last Colony, which oddly isn’t featured on his Books page yet. The Last Colony is the third book in his Old Man’s War trilogy.

On a recommendation, I picked up You Suck by Christopher Moore, which was good and as funny as promised. I finished it yesterday, and I love books that make me laugh out loud, which this did a few times. An odd note about the book: One of the characters is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, about an hour north of where I am visiting right now in Milwaukee. I was born in Fond du Lac, and most of my extended relatives live there. It’s fairly small with about 40,000 residents, and I was surprised to see it in a book. (But not as surprised when Oconomowoc, where I am right now, was featured in Cryptonomicon).

I also picked up a nice hardcover edition of four Philip K. Dick stories – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. I own a number of his short stories, and since it was featured on Boing Boing, the Total Dick-Head blog has been a favorite of mine to read, so it was good to pick up a couple of Dick’s classics.

I enjoy supporting local bookstores, it’s always worth the premium I pay in my mind. I enjoyed visiting Harry Schwartz Bookstores. They had a fairly good collection of books in all genres, and had recommendations for books by their employees all over the store, which I loved.

Now it’s off to lunch and a 6 – 7 hour drive home today.

Gaming on (Foresight) Linux

Linux seems to always get a knock when it comes to gaming. I know personally I believed the FUD, before making the switch to Linux full time 2 years ago and learning otherwise. What Linux doesn’t have in quantity as a gaming platform, it does make up in quality.

A lot of the open source and freeware get the publicity, but id software and Epic, among other developers, makers of Quake and Unreal Tournament respectively, continue to put out native Linux binaries of their software.

With the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars release, I installed Quake IV, Doom 3 and the original Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on my desktop today. Since I did a clean install of Foresight a couple months ago, I wanted to make sure I work out any kinks before ET:QW’s release.

Everything worked like a champ – I downloaded the Linux installation files from id software’s bittorrent server, installed those in /home/silwenae/games (I’m lazy, didn’t feel like chmod’ing /usr/games), copied the pak files over, and ran Doom 3 and Quake IV. Mapped my keys, cranked the video settings, and I was online in minutes fragging away.

The only small glitch I ran into with Quake IV, and this hasn’t happened in my two or three previous installs, was that it started in Spanish. A quick Google search turned up the fix: Go into your home folder, and in the .quake4 directory (which is hidden, hit ctrl-h in Nautilus to view hidden files and directories), and then the q4base directory, and edit the Quake4Config.cfg file with your favorite text editor, and change the value of sys-lang to english, and you’re all set.

Everything worked great out of the box, I didn’t have the funky Alsa / OSS sound issue I had in the past with Ubuntu, even that worked flawlessly.

Who said you couldn’t game on Linux? Come get some!

Quake Wars gets a release date

Michael Larabel, of Phoronix fame, has a blog post noting that Gamestop has started pre-orders for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Best Buy will begin pre-orders on April 12th, with the game being released on June 5th, the first time I’ve seen a release date assigned.

As I’ve noted previously, this is the first time in a long time I’ve been this excited over a game release. Since I gave up Windows 2 years ago after being a hardcore gamer for many years, I’ve cut way back on my gaming, and have pretty much turned into a console gamer. I still play Battlefield 2 about twice a month at a buddy’s house who has an extra PC set up for me, which is quite fun when playing with friends in a squad. I’m hoping ET:QW takes the squad based, objective elements to a new level for a first person shooter. That, and it’s the Doom3 engine, so it will be gorgeous. Once UT2k7 comes out later this year, I should have plenty to keep me busy gaming on the Linux platform.

I did have UT2k4, Doom3 and Quake IV installed on my Linux PC, which reminds me I need to get it installed on my new Foresight installation, and throw up a wiki page for installing 3D games on Foresight.

Dreamhaven Books

Dreamhaven Books on Lake Street in Minneapolis is one of my favorite bookstores that I’ve ever been to. Dreamhaven specializes in science fiction, comic books, and fantasy and horror. Not only does one of my favorite authors frequent there, they have a great collection of new and used books, with some of the deepest catalog selections you’ll see in a book store. They have very rare books, and a large selection of author signed books.

Unfortunately, Neil Gaiman writes on his blog that Dreamhaven was broken in to Saturday. From the email he received from Greg Ketter, owner of Dreamhaven:

We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreaked

terrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly but

insurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in current

business, this really will hurt. I don’t like charity but if you could

encourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.

Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months and

I don’t want to make it four.

Hit up Neil’s blog for more info. Dreamhaven was the bookstore that sponsored Neil’s reading and showing of Mirrormask late last year for the launch of Neil’s latest book, Fragile Things. This was where I won a very rare copy of Mr. Gaiman’s Angel’s & Visitations, that was published by, who else, but Dreamhaven books.

I get to Dreamahaven a couple of times a year – and I was just there last Friday spending my birthday money a day before the break-in. Looks like I’m on my way back to pick up an extra book or two to help them out in their time of need.

Geek Mafia

Welcome to the first in a new ongoing feature, “Recently Read”. Brief reviews of books I’ve just finished reading, Recently Read starts with G33K Mafia by Rick Dakan. I’ve been taking recommendations from Cory Doctorow, and reading books based on his recommendations and reviews he posts at Boing Boing, and he hasn’t done me wrong yet, starting with Geek Mafia.

Geek Mafia

Geek Mafia tells the story of Paul Reynolds, a former comic book writer who co-founds a gaming company, and is let go from the company he co-founded a few years later. Paul, while wallowing in his sorrows, meets Chloe, and together Chloe helps him hatch a scheme to get back at his former company. Paul’s adventures continue with Chloe, who leads a small band of con artists, and Paul soon finds himself involved in the underground world of hackers and con artists.

The book is fast paced, and you quickly come to care about the characters. Trying to figure out who’s conning who, Geek Mafia gives you an insider’s view to a seedy side of Silicon Valley you never thought was possible.

After reading Geek Mafia, I visited Rick Dakan’s home on the web, and was surprised to learn he self-published Geek Mafia (which explains a lot of the typos found in the book) and that the book was semi-autobiographical. Rick co-founded Cryptic Studios, makers or City of Heroes, and was also let go before the game came to fruition. Rick is currently working on a sequel and blogs frequently at Rickdakan.com.