Page 107 of 131

Lumos, Harry Potter Conference Starts Tomorrow

July 27, 2006 / Monique

Summer reading to me screams Harry Potter but this summer, without a new book to read, I’m left reading all the Harry Potter fan sites, which I actually really like. There’s all sorts of great plot speculations and preview photos of the films and fan fiction to tie me over.

One of the things I’m looking forward to reading about is Lumos, the Harry Potter conference taking place in Las Vegas July 27 – 30, 2006.

I know about Lumos from Heidi at http://www.FictionAlley.org

There are lots of great sites but I want to highlight FictionAlley.org for a second.

In 2005, a teenage fan fiction writer Katie O’Brien lost her battle with leukemia. At the time FAWC, the non-profit educational arm of FictionAlley.org created three scholarships for young, talented creators, in her memory.

The winners of the 2006-2007 Katie O’Brien Memorial scholarship are:

* Ashley Yutzy, of the Maryland Institute College of Art
* Michelle A., who will be attending Florida State University this fall
* Rachel W. of Colorado’s Naropa University

Each received an award of $500.

I’m mentioning them now because examples of their works will be on display in the FictionAlley.org booth at Lumos.

You can also see some of the work online:
Ashley’s portfolio

A selection from Michelle’s winning submission for the Community Service scholarship.

A selection from Rachel’s winning submission for the Writing scholarship

So if you’re looking for a Harry Potter fix, check out http://www.fictionalley.org

Hey Tappers Melissa Frakman Is In Vancouver

July 21, 2006 / Monique

SAT, JULY 22 at Harbour Dance

BEG 10 AM
INT 11 AM
ADV 12 PM-2PM **SPECIAL 2-HR CLASS

Anthony Bourdain Podcast

July 20, 2006 / Monique

Yesterday was an early day for me. I woke up at 6 am to be ready for a phone interview with Frank Barnako of MarketWatch.com.

It was exciting to have a tech/marketing conversation about this thing I’ve been working on since November.

So what’s that thing?
Raincoast and At Large Media are producing a literary podcast series, and over the month of July we’ve been releasing the 3 parts of a podcast with Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential and The Nasty Bits and host of the Travel Channel show No Reservations).

The podcasts caught Frank’s attention because he writes the Internet Daily column for MarketWatch and because he’s a fan of Anthony Bourdain. So I got to have my few minutes of fame talking about a famous chef and the not-yet-famous Raincoast podcasts.

Here’s the link to the MarketWatch.com article.

And here’s the link to the Raincoast podcasts page. I think Part 2: The Book Signing is my favourite but perhaps a listener survey is in order.

While I’m plugging Raincoast, there’s also a Raincoast blog that I write, http://blogs.raincoast.com

Enough said about the day job.

Similicio.us

July 20, 2006 / Monique

Find an article you like? Want to know what similar articles people have linked to on Del.icio.us? You need Similicio.us
http://similicio.us/

It’s kind of crazy, but an interesting addition to Technorati searches.

Censorship

July 19, 2006 / Monique

I just returned home from a meeting at the Shebeen Club. We had a great discussion about censorship, and then I stumbled across this clip of George W. Bush and Tony Blair discussing the Middle East crisis at the G8 Summit. It’s lunchtime, it’s candid, it’s oops you’re mic is on.

Link to Reuters video clip.

Art of Comix and Cartooning

July 17, 2006 / Monique

Eve Corbel (illustrator of this cartoon and also known as Mary Schendlinger) is giving a workshop on the Art of Comix & Cartooning.

22 July at the Listel Hotel

Full details are on the Geist website at:
http://www.geist.com/comwork.htm

It sounds like fun, and participants get a Geist cartooning kit.

Vancouver Folk Festival 2006

July 16, 2006 / Monique

Opportunity rang yesterday around 2 pm with an invitation to the Vancouver Folk Festival. I used to be a volunteer at the festival but in the last couple of years my life accelerated to a pace that made it impossible to volunteer the number of hours required.

One of my favourite folk fest memories is working Sunday morning and standing on the main stage when the gates open. The William Tell Overature plays on the main stage speakers and folk fest fans storm the seating area in front of the stage to stake their claim of space for the day. There are coordinated efforts with mom and dad each hanging onto a tarp corner and taking flying leaps to spread the tarp in warp speed. Sons and daughters in tow, coolers bouncing off legs. Flags and marker posts go up. And in 2 minutes the entire area is covered with a patchwork quilt of blanket squares.

Admist the bizarre, multi-tie-dyed, misguided fashionists, you catch glimpses of beauty itself. Yesterday there was the red-haired girl and this princepessa.

Publishing Statistics

July 15, 2006 / Monique

Stats on the publishing industry are collected at the below site. Most are American and there’s a disclaimer that numbers may not be up to date and that sources are only listed when known and often may not appear on the websites referenced. Sounds dodgey but I want to remember the link:

http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

Social Tech Brewing

July 15, 2006 / Monique

If you’re free Monday and are interested in a little networking, beer and hang-out session, come to Social Tech Brewing.

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Border-Busting: a conversation with Katrin Verclas
July 17th, Radha Eatery

What is Social Tech Brewing? It’s a meet-up of people working with non-profits and technology, and it’s fun.

This month’s event features a conversation with Katrin Verclas, the incoming director of The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN), an American group that works to support the diverse people and organizations who help nonprofits employ technology effectively.

According to Rob, “Katrin will lead an informal discussion about whether/how US npos can work more effectively here in Canada. Sheíll also introduce us to a new project from the N-TEN Technobabes Community: ‘BraCamp,’ which weíre hoping will lead to a broader conversation about gender issues in nonprofit technology.”

The presentation and Q&A starts at 7:15 and wraps up by 8. Pre- and post-presentation there are drinks at Radha at the Brickhouse.

RSVP on http://upcoming.org/event/87669

Date: July 17 2006, 7:00-9:00pm
Venue: Radha Eatery, 730 Main Street, Vancouver, BC. (map)
Cost: Free!

Made to Break Makes the Globe and Mail

July 8, 2006 / Monique

Heather Menzies, author of No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life, wrote a very positive review of Giles Slades’ book Made to Break in Saturday’s Globe and Mail. She starts by saying “Giles Slade has produced a riveting piece of cultural history to explain the veritable mushroom cloud of electronic waste threatening our planet, while hinting suggestively at why the public seems so detached from the crisis and even its role in creating it.”

She goes on to give a great summary of the narrative path Giles takes through consumer obsolescence: paper shirt fronts, the Yankee (a cheap pocket watch that ran for a limited time), razor blades, rubbers, santitary napkins, Flapper-era extravagance, seasonal fashion, yearly automobile model changes, death dating components, cell phones, tvs, bikinis, and basically all the things we’ve invented that generate more and more waste.

One of Menzies’ best observances of Made to Break is that “it’s troubling enough to consider that planet-exhausting and even planet-poisoning obsolescence is implicitly institutionalized at the highest levels of business and government leadership in the United States” (I’d include Canada, Great Britain and the rest of the first world) but “more troubling still is how we, the general consuming pulic, are wrapped up in it in a way that almost guarantees we won’t sense the connection.”

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth forces its audience to look at the connections between human activity and global warming. Giles Slades’ book Made to Break forces its audience to remember all the times that greed and economics have trumped responsible citizenship. The throwaway culture we live in means that we love the new iPod, the new Nokia phone, HD tv, we want and demand more, smaller, faster, better, but to what end.

We’ve allowed, in fact encouraged, shorter and shorter life cycles for products, to the point where it has become cheaper to produce something new rather than to tear down, re-purpose or recycle the old. The economics of our creativity has meant good things for business but bad things for the planet.

If you’re into saving the world, consider the reasons why you’ve bought a new car, a new computer, a new cell phone–at what point did we start accepting such rapid obsolescence of products?–but also consider how often you buy new shoes, new pens, new razors, new boxes of cereal, anything that is packaged and which gets thrown away.

The idea is to move from the ethic of discarding to the ethic of durability. Our challenge is to encourage advancement and innovation while not contributing to landfills. Can we do it?

So Misguided