Whichever is longer

    Been spending a lot of time lately reading this thread at Making Light, which began by talking about an overzealous attempt to remove copyrighted material from a website and turned to copyright itself.
    On the topic of free electronic copies and what effect they have on sales a number of people spoke up enumerating their experiences with downloaded e-texts, legal and not and how those have affected their purchasing habits. Most claimed their sampling of electronic text convinced them the paper version was worth purchasing, often along with other works by the author.
    I cannot recall if it specifically came up in this conversation but I recall many times people expressing the sentiment that e-books (will I settle on a term? no! well, maybe) drive the sale of dead tree books because the latter has qualities superior to and unreplicable by the former.
    In my opinion the reason paper volumes are preferred over electronic texts is because of 1) the current low quality of the technology and the commensurately poor reading experience and 2) the fact that the currently purchasing public has grown up with paper books. They have a resonance and history with us which is simply not shared by an e-book. Not once have I ever enjoyed the scent of one, for example.
    As technology improves and subsequent generations become less nostalgic about books-as-we-know-them I suspect people will be more likely to choose an electronic text over a paper one.
    There is also, which I have seen mentioned only once and not in that particular conversation, the effect on people's ability to sustain concentration of having so much material to read, so easily switched between. I would not dare to venture an informed opinion on this subject (Oh, but when do I ever?) but I will not that it has always been easy to put a book down and do something other than reading, for as much or as little time as one has available. It has not, however, been so easy to jump between such a vast amount of written material unless one has a truly spectacular library.

That feeling of having seen someone before

Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view -- even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.
    - Closer, Greg Egan

    In Stephen Fry's latest post (that would be his second) he talks about fame. Here, have some quotes to persuade you it is worth reading:

Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders.

It is no good everyone repeating that tiresome cliché about x, y and z ‘only being famous for being famous’ – their fame exists in our heads and it is therefore our fault, not theirs, if fault there is. I can’t blame Jade Goody for the fact that I know her name.

    Go on, it is quite long and this is just a small repetitive sample I happened to especially like. He does illustrate among other things that fame is an even more dreadful experience than I imagined.
    Potentially I am left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what to wish for. Ideally I mean to make my living as a writer and if I am good at that, some level of fame naturally attaches (on the assumption that fame and quality of work go together, where the post in question illustrates they do not). Quite frankly I want neither the problems nor the benefits, whatever they are that fame brings (although closer inspection may reveal that statement to be not entirely true) but the only way to be assured of avoiding that is to cut out the heart from my life.
    The truth is, though, that wishing does nothing and what happens, happens. Certainly I need not fear attaining the level of fame Stephen Fry has and of course my writing may never attract any notice at all. It is not up to me (see above) but the mere fact of having such worries may be a demonstration of what The Road to Mars' has to say about the insidious nature of fame.
    Indeed, why read Stephen Fry's blog at all, otherwise? The articles, all two of 'em so far, are quite good, but why take interest long enough to discover this without the pull of fame in the first place?
    I could try to talk about glamour here, but as I so often say, that is beyond my expertise. Besides, better than me have gone ahead.

What is a gender?

* (this space typed in to enable posting)

*laughs so hard there are tears*

    I am in the middle of watching the première of 'Bionic Woman' - another program about which a big fuss has been made that we are getting it direct from the United States - when in the ad break I see first an advertisement for the new citizenship test to ensure that people align sufficiently with our values, immediately followed by a xenophobic ad about how important it is to keep our milk sources local for no reason given beyond 'it just wouldn't be the same'.

Sorry, was I mad before?

( Now I am mad. )