Going Rogue

The intertwined histories of science fiction and smut fascinate me. A File 770 reference to Harlan Ellison and Lenny Bruce teaming up on stories for a 50s-60s men’s magazine led me to the Wikipedia article on Rogue, full of the names of the sf writers whose work I grew up on. A follow-up to it is that after the events described, Hugh Hefner raided the rival men’s magazines for editors, including Robert Shea. He then read a pseudonymous Realist article that inspired him to add Robert Anton Wilson to the team. The rest is secret history.

The Disaster Story Disaster

Cory Doctorow on the radical idea of writing stories in which people act decently when things go wrong. [Slate]

Thanx to File 770

User-friendly, my ass!

What’s wrong with tech interfaces [Guardian]

Not Alone

We are in the Age of Inadvertent Programming. I am glad that World War III has not been started by someone inadvertently bumping into a touch screen, but I don’t know how long our luck will last.

I am both old and dyspraxic, so it’s not surprising that I have trouble with interfaces, but I just shared/blogged an article about the problem, and many people feel the same way.

I have realized for a long time now that two-valued logic is not a good way of dealing with issues like sex and race, but I miss the days when pushbuttons worked that way. The article notes that the iPhone (which I am fortunate enough not to have) conveys one message if you press it lightly and another if you press it just hard enough. There’s a lot of that going around. Facebook can, as usual, serve as a Horrible Example: When I use wheel on my mouse, I sometimes Like things and offer to friend people because my touch is not delicate enough.

GUIs are gooey. I feel as if they were quicksand I am sinking into.