Sympathy For The Intoxicated: Drunk On The Power of Technology

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Monday, we got to meet Nathan Shumate of the accurately named LousyBookCovers. It’s a fascinating insight into the man, the project, and the . . . less than ideal covers that occasionally appear in self-publishing.

He mentioned one thing that struck a truth with me; that some people get drunk on the power that modern technology, print on demand, distribution, etc. presents. I wanted to explore that a bit because it’s rather personal, and very telling for us MuseHackers.

There’s plenty of power modern technology gives us. In many ways modern technology is all about empowering because power sells and people want to do their own thing. People want to make videos and books and music and games; many of them can now live the dreams that years ago would have stayed dreams except for a few. We have sheer ability now.

However, as we’ve seen power may not be misused but . . . well it can result in products of questionable value. Oh we’ve all done it. We all have that fanfic we don’t want to mention, that bad book cover we’re not proud of, that AMV that was kind of awful, or the company brochure that proved there’s a reason we’re shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near desktop publishing. We wonder how we missed how . . . not that great we were.

We miss it because we get drunk on the power.

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The Bronies Have The Investor Report

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The bronies over at Equestria Daily got info on Hasbro’s Investor Report, and wow.  It roughly boils down to Ponies, Transformers, and money with some stunning brand growth, and apparently success for the fandom-controversial Equestria Girls.

Kinda makes me want to see other reports on geeky things.

Also remember, we are having a serious discussion of ponies, transformers, and investor reports.

– Steven Savage

Steve’s Update 9/9/2013

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Had a busy weekend – experimenting with building a HTPC.  Pretty educational and fun, and it reminds me of a lot of things I’d forgotten.  I’m still tweaking it, but definitely worth it – and I can see why people would move from cable boxes and consoles.  I’ll probably be writing about that some more.

As you’ve seen I’m trying to do more postings here, to reach out to people, to share things, and just to get ideas out of my head (and perhaps seed future books).  I know the cooking may seem odd, but people ask me advice about that too (in fact, part of “Epic Resume Go” and “Quest For Employment” coming into being was writing down stuff people asked me).

The next book (and yeah, no naming yet) is now in my first round of editing.  However as I want to do it right (and get a few other projects done) it’s probably not going out until January or even February.  I might also do some work later this year or next year on smaller books expanding on other themes.

I’m considering my next big “fan book” and probably need to run a poll.  I’m considering doing something on larger geek social involvement.

With a new design and a cool new logo, the Seventh Sanctum rewrite is now to the coding phase.  It’s going pretty well so far, but I’m coding the generators last because that’s going to be complex, so I can’t predict how tough that’ll be.  The back end code is solid, but we’ve got some formatting changes and those can get time-consuming and surprising – a few pixels here or there, a font size, a background, can all make shocking differences.

Still seeing if we’ll revive the community, there is interest but still figuring the form it’ll take.

I’ll be taking my MuseHack work in a bit of a different direction, looking to focus on culture issues and broaden my interviews.  Stay tuned, I’ll hopefully have some surprises.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.