Discussion of "Sythyry's Journal"

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bard_bloom also writes the fantasy serial "Sythyry's Journal" under the username sythyry. This is one of the earliest and longest-running fictional journals. There is no request for money (other than the fact that it serves as bait for the excellent World Tree gaming handbook) so technically it is not cyberfunded creativity. However, it's exactly the same kind of material that some people use for CFC, and the current discussion is highly relevant. The poll asks whether to continue the journal in its current form, or start a new journal with the same characters, or do something totally different.

The Future of Reading

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The Internet Review of Science Fiction has an excellent article about the future of reading:

The Cloud and the Networked Book: Science Fiction and the Future of Reading
by Robert Bee
What will the future of reading be like? Will reading long form narratives be imperiled by our fast-paced modern world? We are entering a future in which we are always connected, receiving feeds, emails, and phone calls. Cellphones are rapidly becoming portable, as are touchscreen computers. In ten years cell phones and small portable computers will have more memory and capabilities than the best desktops today. Everything—our pictures, music, work documents, financial info, books, videos, personal records—will be available everywhere, all the time. Does this sound like heaven, or a stress-filled nightmare? With WiFi, WiMax, or some other sort of high-speed Internet connection we can look forward to a future of ubiquitous always-on, always-connected computers. The difference between virtual and physical reality is rapidly becoming meaningless.

What do you think about the future of reading?

Poetry Fishbowl Report for Tuesday, January 6

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Tuesday's poetry fishbowl had some interesting features. Several prompts came in quickly. The first two stuck together and produced a set of four connected poems about the same setting, a far-future North America flooded up through Nebraska and the Dakotas, inhabited by sentient cockroaches and manta rays. Eventually I did catch up with the rest of the prompts. I started at 12:15 and stopped at 11 PM, so that's about 9 hours with breaks. I wrote 14 poems. There were 42 comments including mine, and 10 people sent prompts. Two of the fishbowl poems have already been posted:

"Biofare"
"For Want Of..."

This month's donors are: ellenmillion, arielstarshadow, and minor_architect. Their support is greatly appreciated. There will be a poll to select poetry funded by general donations.

This month someone posted prompts referring to short stories. I did get the fascinating Nebraska poems out of that, but it's a little more time-consuming than is practical for a fishbowl, so I'm not likely to repeat the exercise. It was interesting to see how prompts stuck together, though -- once I had that setting in mind, with its native species, I could look at other prompts and try to imagine how they might attach to the current motifs.