Rudy’s Blog

I have three new books coming up in 2011-2012. Well, four, if you count the new edition of my self-published art book

(1) I just published a new edition of my art book, Better Worlds, on Lulu. It has 79 color paintings now, and sells for $29 paperback or $5 as a PDF.

(2) Jim and the Flims, my fantastic novel of Santa Cruz and the afterworld will appear from Night Shade Books in June, 2011. See my JIM AND THE FLIMS page for more info.

I’ll be giving a reading from Jim and the Flims at the Capitola Book Café on June 4, at 6:30 pm, sharing the podium with Kim Stanley Robinson. And I’ll be reading at Borderlands Books on Valencia St. in San Francisco on Sunday, Jun 10, at 3 pm.

(3a) My autobiography Nested Scrolls is also coming out, first in a limited edition from PS Publishing in July, 2011.

(3b) And a second edition of Nested Scrolls will appear in a hardcover from Tor Books in December, 2011. See my NESTED SCROLLS page for more info.

(4) Last of all, my small anthology Surfing the Gnarl will appear in the Outspoken Authors series from PM Press in January, 2012.

First I’ll mention three talks in this post. And later, at the end, I add an update about the PDA 2011 con at Internet Archive.

(1) On Friday, February 25, at 4:45 pm, I spoke for a half hour on “Lifebox Immortality” at PDA 2011, a Personal Digital Archiving conference at the awesome Internet Archive in San Francisco—which is housed in a repurposed, Greek revival style Christian Scientist church, shown above

For background on my lifebox idea, see my recent post on “Digital Immortality Again.” I used “lifebox” to mean a digital or online simulacrum of a person. I go into considerable detail about the lifebox in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, and in a recent article “Lifebox Immortality” in h+ magazine.

In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to (1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base, and (3) Provide a nice user interface.

I made a first crude stab at this a couple of months ago, with my Rudy’s Lifebox page at www.rudyrucker.com/blog/rudys-lifebox. This page lets you Google-search my rather large www.rudyrucker.com site.

[A skyline in San Sebastian, Spain]

(2) Rick Kleffel made a nice podcast of a reading I did of “The Birth of Transrealism,” a chapter from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life, back on January 15, 2011, in San Francisco at the SF in SF gathering. Here’s his post about the podcast on his blog, “The Agony Column.” You can also get to the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station, click the icon below.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

(3) A videotape of my Garum Day talk in Bilbao is now online as well.

[Rudy being a Continental writer in his new *eeek* Basque beret]

You can find my description of my Bilbao talk in my recent post, “Selling Yourself”. It relates to the lifebox theme as well.

(Back to 1) Now for some notes on the PDA 2011 meeting at the Internet Archive.

As I mentioned above, the venue was in an amazing building. Brewster Kahle (shown above with his server) acquired it a year or two ago for housing the Intenet Archive. Instead of air-conditioning the servers, Brewster has fans drawing air through them…and the air cycles into the building to heat it.

Good old Ted Nelson gave a talk, to some extent promoting his awesome autobiography, Possiplex.

Gordon Bell, the famous lifelogger was there. I stood next to him and talked to him for a few minutes—a genial guy. And the SenseCam he wears around his neck must surely have taken my picture. So I’m safe in his lifelog!

Cathal Gurrin of Dublin City University was wearing a SenseCam as well, he’s accumulated I think 7 million photos over four years, it takes about 3 shots a minute. Searching the database is the hard problem. I asked him the two obvious privacy questions, and he said he reflexively pauses it for 5 minutes as he walks into a restroom and…he takes it off at night so it can recharge.

And my old pal Faustin Bray from the Hacker and the Ants days was there as well, looking good and, as always, taping and filming for her Sound Photosynthesis site, which features Richard Feynman, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and other freaky luminaries.

The meeting had an interesting vibe of a whole lot of people turning up and discovering that there were others interested in the same thing—logging aspects of our lives in digital forms. One thing that struck me was that everyone has their own very distinctive notion of what they’d like their lifebox to be like. In a way, it’s similar to the way that people select different kinds of statues for putting over their graves! Virtual funerary monuments. Ghostly pyramids of Cheops. I’m telling you, this is going to be a huge industry.

More: Daniel Reetz gave a great talk on the impact of ubiquitous low-cost cameras, especially as relating to DIY Book Scanning. And Rich Gibson gave an inspiring and relaxed presentation of the new movement towards gigapixel (and larger) photos, see the Gigapan site. I also met Evan Carroll, co-author of Your Digital Afterlife…this book was mentioned the recent New York Times Sunday magazine article about digital immortality.

Videos of the talks will be up in a week or two.

(Post updated on February 23, 2011)

I was in Basque country from Feb 14 – 22, 2011, giving a talk at Garum Day on Feb 16, 2011, in Bilbao.

My talk was called (with slight irony) “Selling Yourself,” and it had to do with various ways in which we try to make money by selling information, culiminating in the notion of creating software replicas of yourself—and then going on to “sell” interactions with your personality model online.

I posted a PDF of my “Selling Yourself” powerpoint slides online, and a draft of the full ‘Selling Yourself” essay.

The Garum Foundation, by the way, takes their name from a type of Roman fish sauce; part of the idea is that, at their meetings, they mix together an interesting stew of ideas, another part of the idea is that a recipe for a traditional recipe is kept alive by communication and interaction.

The Garum Foundation organizer is an idealistic banker, Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri. The conference was fun, and I had some extremely good meals.

Garum Day brought in a really big crowd, many of them were faculty or students with the Universidad de Deusto, and a number were execs for Spanish industries and banks. I took a photo of them at the end of my talk, which was more or less as outlined in the online PowerPoint and essay, although I threw in quite a bit of autobiographical material. Here’s the photo of the crowd.

The audience at Garum Day, Feb 15, 2011. If you want to find yourself, click for larger version!

As of February, 23, 2011, a videotape of my talk became available online.

At the end of my talk, one person asked if I had advice for entrepreneurs in our age of the internet revolution. I didn’t give a great answer at the time, but here’s a three things I might have said.

(1) Chatbot or lifebox emulations of humans will be a huge online industry, see my post on “Digital Immortality Again.”

(2) Any interesting online program should have a quality of unpredictability or gnarliness so as to appear lifelike and engaging. See my essay “Seek the Gnarl” or my Surrealist video, “What Is Gnarl?”

(3) Online sites are most interesting if you put a full personality into them, and have them be “transreal,” that is, in some sense autobiographical, but with a layer of elaboration atop that. For some discussion of transrealism see my post “Unpredictability and Plotting a Novel.” You can also listen to a podcast of my recent talk, “The Birth of Transrealism.”

And, yes, my advice isn’t what you’ll normally hear in business school but…when has past knowledge ever been right about the future? Odd paths and new recipes are worth a try.

Another fact about Garum Day—the conference’s techs and organizers were largely drawn from a cooperative group known as Las Indias, who say they were originally inspired by concepts of cyberpunk! Here’s a picture of me with them.

Finally, for non-natives of Bilbao, I’ve placed a photo above that shows the awesome hall of Richard Serra sculptures in the Guggenheim Museum here. Serra says his suite is about time. I guess the future is at the far end…

Upcoming event: I’ll be reading “The Birth of Transrealism,” a section from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls , at 7 PM this Saturday night, January 15, 2011, in San Francisco at the SF in SF gathering in the Hobart Building on Market St. near Montgomery St. and 3rd St. Diana Paxson will be reading as well.

My writing is moving slowly this month. It’s taking some time to ramp back up after the Xmas break. Also I pissed away days and days tweaking my music collection on my computer for my new iPhone, and coming to terms with the obtuse and balky iTunes music management software. And blogging about it, God help me. As an on-going part of the process, I’m “ripping” some vinyl records to files. Converting analog to digital, which is, of course, a good analogue for my lifebox-and-Ware-Tetralogy Digital Immortality kick. I have a brief guide to ripping vinyl at the end of this post.

One cool thing about my novel-in-progress, Turing & Burroughs is that it shows Alan moving against the tide, that is, he’s going from digital computers to analog biocomputations. But the more relevant thing is that it shows something computational (the skugly biocomputation) becoming symbiotic with human life (like people carrying smart phones).

I remain unsure about the over-all plot, which is hanging me up. When I’m lost sat sea in the middle of a book, I fall back on what we used to call “paper-shuffling.” That is, I play with organizational matters. Tidy things up. It’s like—when I lose my wallet, glasses or keys, I can often find them by cleaning up my whole office.

I’ve also been firming up my ever-evolving conceptions about the skugs and their origins, and this involves revisions. It seems a bit much to suppose that the skugs have really strong personalities, as they’re just AI-tweaked networks of biocomputations. I need to keep reminding myself that they’re not alien invaders. This said, I do have the possibility of giving the skugs a hive-mind personality that’s to some extent based on what they pick up over radio and TV signals. This could be a correlative for, e.g., the hive minds you see if you study Twitter or Facebook or Google search results.

Looking ahead, I had been planning to add in a higher level of reality populated by dreamskugs, effectively a second race of odd critters. But yesterday in the car, driving up to Berkeley with my wife, I was telling her about my plans for the book. And when I got to the dreamskugs, she was like, “What!? Don’t do that again, Rudy! One kind of creature is enough. Don’t always overdo it.” And she’s right.

It boggles the mind to think about how many kinds of critters I jammed into each of my last three novels, that is, Postsingular, Hylozoic, and Jim and the Flims. It’s okay and maybe even good that I packed those books with alien eyeball kicks, but it’s a baroque high-SF supercartoon style that I’d like to get away from for Turing & Burroughs. I’d like to see novel one be a more stripped-down. Like a 1950s black and white SF invasion movie. Like Them or the originals of The Fly or The Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers.

But way of opening up my mind to a new conception fo the novel, I moved the second half of my former outline into a new “False Paths” section of my notes for the novel. As I discuss in my free “A Writer’s Toolkit” on my writing page, having this kind of data repository means that I feel less constrained in making brutal cuts and changes to the old outline (or to the text). And thus, today I managed to rewrite my working outline, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a month. It’s the kind of job that only takes an hour or two when you do it—but getting your head in the right place for the job can take weeks or months.

And now a word from our lord and master, the computer. I’ve been delegated to make a long story short on the subject of ripping vinyl. By the way, the first album I ripped was the first one I ever bought, Go Bo Diddley, purchased fifty years ago when I was 14. “Crackin’ Up.” [Apparently people can post copyrighted songs on YouTube because the users don’t get to keep the song, they only get to listen to it stream from the site.]

(1) You can use a regular (non-USB) turntable, but it’s advisable to have a little pre-amp box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The turntable sends two plugs into the pre-amp, and you run two lines out of the pre-amp. You need a two-to-one connector to hook the pre-amp to your computer. This can be the same connector that you might use to plug your one-socket iPod or iPhone into the two stereo input jacks of a living-room sound-system amplifier.

(2) You use the two-to-one connector to run from the pre-amp into the “Line In” jack that you can find on the exposed back of your sound card on the back of your desktop computer. Most laptops don’t have a Line In jack. You don’t want to use a “Microphone” jack, as that won’t pass the stereo through.

(3) You get the free software Audacity for Windows , Linux or Mac. You fire up Audacity and click on the round button to start recording. At about the same time you put your needle onto your turntable and let your record play. You can set Audacity to pass sound out to your computer speakers. See the Audacity help files for help on recording a record on your computer.

(4) Tape both sides of the record into a single sound track. You might want to run the Effect | Click Removal and maybe Effect | Normalize to clean up your track. Now to save as separate songs. You have to show Audacity where the breaks between songs are, see the Audacity help on this. The easiest way to do this is by hand, inserting labels. There’s an automatic Analyze | Find Silences control you can use, but it doesn’t work very well because vinyl really never is silent anywhere. So I put the labels in my hand, sometimes looking at the song list on the album to make sure I get the right count. Don’t bother putting song names in the labels, just leave them blank, Audadicty can put in numbers for the labels when you save, which keeps them in the right track order. You save the recording into separate files, one for each song. You can use the “Export Multiple…” command, sending the files into a reasonable directory like Music\Bo Diddley\Go Bo Diddley, as numbered files. And tell Audacity not to ask you about each song. Typically you save them in a fairly high quality MP3 format. Don’t close your Audacity project file until you’re sure that everything exported properly and is in good shape.

(5) Open your newly created directory of (still unnamed) mp3 files with (if you’re a Windows user) the tool mp3tag. You can set the album name and artist for all the files at once yourself. And then you can use the album name and album artist to get mp3tag to look up and install the track name metatags for you. There’s various places to search, sometimes you need to try more than one of them. When you find the right list, mp3tag can copy the web data into your track title metatags. And then you can get it to copy the track titles onto the file names. I don’t know what the best free Mac tool for this is, you can find a list of some apparently free options on Softonic. It doesn’t work very well to ask iTunes to find the track titles for you, it tends to only want to help you with tracks that you bought from their iStore.

(6) Use the File | Add Folder to Library… selection in iTunes to bring your new files into iTunes. You can find a nice album cover with a quick Google image search and paste it into place.

See some of you Sat nite, I hope.

Another art show! Rudy’s latest paintings.

It’ll run all month, starting November 5 at Borderlands Cafe at 870 Valencia Street in San Francisco. Public parking lot on 21st street.

Opening party is Friday, November 5, from 5 to 7 pm. Join us if you can!

I’ll be reading from The Ware Tetralogy on Saturday, August 14th at 3:00 pm at Borderlands books in San Francisco.

The store is at 866 Valencia Street, see directions here.

We’ll also be selling some of my older books, and my art book Better Worlds, and some high-quality prints of my paintings.

Hope to see some you there!

I had two art show parties in the lobby of the Variety Preview Room in the Hobart Building on Market St. in San Francisco. It’s a small space, but it has a bar. Here’s a link to a Google map. It’s not easy to park right there, so you might plan to park in one of the garages a block or two away.

I squeezed in 23 of my recent paintings. Rina Weisman of SF in SF fame is doing a lot to make this happen—thanks, Rina.

The opening party was Friday, April 9, from 6-9 p.m. (We had a nice crowd that night, maybe 70 people. I sold a few books and prints. Thanks for turning out, guys!)

Here’s a video of the pictures after I hung them—a couple of hours before the actual show.

And the closing party on Saturday, May 22, from 6-10 PM, where I’ll also read with author Michael Shea as part of the SF in SF author series. I think the plan is that we’ll party from 6 to 7, have the readings (with breaks) and discussion from 7 to 9, and party a bit more from 9 to 10. Don’t feel like you have to come for the whole thing, but do drop by if you can. I’ll be reading some of the all-time gnarliest scenes from my Ware novels, soon to appear . m My readings will be some of the gnarliest bits from my forthcoming four-novel omnibus Ware Tetralogy. Michael will be reading from his kick-ass new novel, The Extra.

To have some stuff to sell besides paintings, I made a new edition of my book of collected paintings, Better Worlds, with paintings #1 through #66. I ordered twenty-five of them on spec, and I’ll be selling some of them at the parties at about the same price as on Lulu, charging $32 each—only signed and with no shipping charge.

I’m also planning to sell a few prints. This weekend I made about 20 high-quality prints of my paintings, using my new high-end Canon Pixma 9500 ink-jet printer and some classy 13” x 19” Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper. As always, you can also buy the prints online from Imagekind, but the ones I’m selling in person will be signed, and a (slightly) better buy, I’m thinking $29 each for the big ones.

A real bright spot on the art front: I’ve found buyers for the Hylozoic triptych, for Under the Bed, and for Octopus in a Funny Hat. But don’t worry, there will be plenty more pieces on sale at the show, see the price list on my paintings page for what’s currently available.

It would be cool if I could keep inching the art biz upward. Or not. Just painting for fun is okay, too. Whether or not it pays, turning painter seems like a good move for an aging writer. I remember as a teenager being impressed to learn that the geezer-writer Henry Miller was selling his dashed-off-looking paintings. Forget the words, just smear the colors around!

At the show, I’ll be offering my painting, Thirteen Worlds, for sale. Unlike my other works, Thirteen Worlds is also available as a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike hi-res download, so you can make your own print of this one. Cory Doctorow generously funded this release of Thirteen Worlds, which he’s using as an alternate book cover for his “freemium” story collection With a Little Help .

Retro old coot that I am, I thought I’d sold Cory the painting, and was all set to ship it to him—and he was like, “Oh, my place is too full as it is. Keep the physical object and sell it again. All I really want to buy are the rights to use the image as a cover. And…can you make it a Creative Commons release, too? That fits the theme of my book.” Sure, Cory!

On a completely unrelated note—to allay my pre-show jitters, I dove back into fractal programming for the last couple of days, and I figured out how to draw the quartic and quintic versions of the Julia sets and the Rudy sets. Rather than making a fresh post about this boring-for-most-people news, I just added the new material into my prior post, “The Rudy Sets.”

Freakin’ and a-geekin’!