by Amelia G : March 23rd, 2007
I attended the Fictional Bloggers panel at SXSW. The panel featured Liz Henry and Odin Soli. They are both active in Latin American political writing, which is an area I admit I don’t follow. I spent some time in Brazil when my mother was stationed there and got some creepy awful illness which caused blood to exit from strange places and caused me to take medication which made everything taste like metal for a month. Also, despite huge natural resources and local wealth, there were homeless children there and that kinda freaked me out. I haven’t followed much in the way of anything Latin American since. Even though I live an easy drive from Tijuana, the only people who generally try to get me to go south of the border with them tend to be professional adult webmasters. These are the sort of guys who just can’t help bribing public officials and finding out where the donkey show is. As a result, despite having lived all over the world and living in Los Angeles now, I have never even visited Mexico for an hour.
Liz Henry’s work these days is working for Socialtext, which is a company attempting the interesting enterprise of introducing wiki technology to the corporate environment. She also blogs for Feminist SF which lists yours truly in their index of female authors of science fiction, so they have to be awesome. Bonus points: Liz Henry wears purple hair well. Odin Soli works for a company called Aveso, which is either a webhost, or more likely a company striving to sell big business on the cyberpunk giftcard accessory of teensy weensy electronic displays. I know it doesn’t seem like this is …
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by Amelia G : March 20th, 2007
The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.
I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.
So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of …
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by Forrest Black : February 6th, 2007
Wow, Wired Magazine just really hurt my feelings. Genuinely. I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of their magazine from day one. I have every single issue from their very first three years on my magazine shelves. I remember how excited I was when they first came out, covering cool hacker counterculture with fresh artistic sensibilities. And now they would reach out just to be really petty and cheap and nasty to Blue Blood? That’s really not cool at all. What? $6.66 was too much of a micropayment? I would have gladly comped anyone from Wired, partly in the hopes of getting a press mention, but mostly just out of respect. Actually, come to think of it, we’ve comped quite a few people on the staff of Wired over the years, many times at their own request. But, I guess I’m just a chump. This is what I get?
(click to enlarge)
I realize it’s just kind of a bottom of the site blog section designed for negativity, so it’s not like it really counts, but it still seems really unnecessary. Partly, if you stretch a 180 pixel sample thumb image 167% and make it all blurry, yeah it starts to look kind of crappy. I know the folks over there are more talented and tech-savvy than that.
Normally, I’d like to write something a little more structured, and little more focused, but I’m actually kind of hurt.
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