Links and Thoughts 12: 21 May 2014
Net Neutrality in the US: Now What?
Good Morning.
…yes, I know, that YouTube video isn’t music. I hope you watched it anyway. If you really miss the music, keep reading to the end. [I’d previous written about Net Neutrality from my point of view on Saturday, 17 May.]
Books: Smashwords, OverDrive Ink Distribution Deal : Publisher’s Weekly
Confusingly, OverDrive’s books are available on Kindle but authors who use the Kindle Direct Publishing [Select] program can’t get their books into OverDrive, which means no KDP-exclusive books through local libraries’ ebook lending programs. [I think that’s correct?] If I were a self-published author, I’d take a second look at Smashwords. (still, it’s hard to say no to some of KDP Select’s incentives)
The Jokes Write Themselves:
“Facebook spends $2 Billion to push Oculus Rift to new frontiers… your local Chuck E. Cheese!”
“Chuck E. Cheese now has two ways to induce nausea!”
“Details leak on Oculus’s planned billion person VR MMO: endless ball pits, skee-ball, claw machines, and 50 trillion virtual paper tickets — which can of course be swapped for virtual crap at the virtual exchange counter.”
“Virtual animatronic band described by survivors as ‘harrowing’, ‘even more soulless than the original’”
Oculus Rift is coming to Chuck E. Cheese : The Verge
Tech:
“The Tablet that Can Replace Your Laptop” — or basically, a laptop. The future lies somewhere in the intersection between the Surface Pro and a Macbook Air, I think:
Microsoft Announces Surface Pro 3 : Tested
see also: Hands-on: Using Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 as a laptop—on my lap : Ars Technica
##
Diary entry for 21 May:
Yesterday I wrote a pretty long piece (well, long because it has a lot of block quotes from wikipedia and at least a dozen embeds. However, there was a fair amount of opinion in it (key quote: “I come to bury Disco, not to praise it.”) and some nice side-by-side comparisons and analysis on the border between Funk and Disco – I think I’ll let that one stand as this morning’s diary. —M.
Archie Bell and The Drells – I Can’t Stop Dancing (1968)
##
And following on that — Today’s Book Recommendation is Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco.
from the publisher:
“Disco may be the most universally derided musical form to come about in the past forty years. Yet, like its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop, it was born of a period of profound social and economic upheaval. In Turn the Beat Around, critic and journalist Peter Shapiro traces the history of disco music and culture. From the outset, disco was essentially a shotgun marriage between a newly out and proud gay sexuality and the first generation of post-civil rights African Americans, all to the serenade of the recently developed synthesizer. Shapiro maps out these converging influences, as well as disco’s cultural antecedents in Europe, looks at the history of DJing, explores the mainstream disco craze at it’s apex, and details the long shadow cast by disco’s performers and devotees on today’s musical landscape.”
#and now I am *done* with disco for a while.
[subscribe: rss – twitter]
[bookmark these: http://www.rocketbomber.com/category/links-and-thoughts/]
