So, while it might seem like all I do on the interent is write wordy personal narratives or lengthy informal essays, I do in fact visit other websites and participate in other discussions. Here are a few recent tycho sightings and other bits of news (related to this site):

• Most obviously, we have a new design and a new sub-blog, coda. I initially described it as a long-form twitter site. And it is. Right now there’s a syndication feed for coda (and a separate one for just the essays), if this is more your speed. I’m not 100% happy with all of the display options, but this is a good start. I’d really like to know what you think, or if you find any bugs. At the moment I know about the archiving of the coda entries, and the inclusion some pages at the bottom of the coda display on some views. I’m also just assuming that it works on IE, because I don’t have access to this browser, help (screenshots?) would be much appreciated.
• I’ve been working on updating and cleaning up the static pages of this site to make tychoish.com a little bit more of a website and a little bit less of a plain old blog. This includes a contact page and a page about open source. I also wrote up a “support critical futures” page. Working on more…
• In Rewriting the Bases, Caroline (who calls/links to me as sam because she’s that good of a friend) outlines a mostly sarcastic commentary I made on gay male sexuality. I was mostly kidding, but I think it was sort of entertaining. Unfortunately, Caroline has used this as ammunition against my cynicism, making the claim that I do have a heart. Bah!
• There’s been a lot of ongoing debate in the SF blogosphere, about media-tie-in fiction. Like Star Wars and Star Trek books, which I remember fondly, but haven’t mustered the will or the time to really get into recently (in part I think, because there’s more lower grade stuff/stuff that isn’t indented for the audience group I belong to now.) In any case, I commented on this at jonathan Strahan’s blog and on the sf signal mind meld.
• I’ve started posting a lot of the writing related stuff that I used to post here, over on my sf writing list, which is 8 years old now. Wow! Anyway, its generally sort of an interesting thing, and if you’re prone to writing SF
• I’ve also started a more concerted effort to return to and become active in the ravelry community. I’d lapsed for a while for a lot of reasons in addition to the great knitting malaise of 08, but also because I wasn’t (and am still not) keeping my projects updated, and I don’t much knit other people’s patterns, and I’m boring/not hip enough in someways, but it’s a great community, and it’s good for me (and the blog) when I’m more active, so… I’m back.

More news as it develops.

I just wanted to pop in out of lecture mode (sigh) and give a brief sort of “meta report,” of what I’m working on, where I am in life, and what my plans are for the blog are in the next little bit.

First off, as next Monday is a national holiday (whew) and I’m going to be out of town doing family stuff for the long weekend, I’m not going to have a Critical Futures post on monday. The current story, “Visa Riots” (in Trailing Edge) will run through Wednesday (6 parts) and then I’ll have a little two part Station Keeping story so we’ll be able to start September with a new section of something fun.

I’ve been hard at work planning a new novel, writing more Station Keeping. I’ve also been working a lot, but my current employment situation is going to be changing significantly in September (I’m in a “hurry up and wait,” situation, but I remain optimistic.) In any case, the next job will be more flexible, whatever it is, and I’m pretty confident that the impending changes in my life that happen this fall will be exciting and productive.

In terms of the blog, I’ve decided that unless something seems really important I’m not going to talk about things I’m writing and the writing process. I might still post book reviews and thoughts on reading, but I’ll probably tone that down as well. I’m not sure that it’s been helpful to my process and workflow to spend time reflecting on these sorts of things, and I’d rather spend my blogging time talking about other things, like…

Knitting and technology. I’m starting to knit more again, and I’m pretty aware that you all in blogland are–at least for the moment–primarily knitters. So, I think blogging about knitting will be helpful and fun.

In terms of technology, I’ve been through a couple of phases about my writing about technology for this blog, and I’ve not been incredibly happy with my previous modes. I think writing about material technology gadgets/hardware, endorses consumerism in a way that I don’t thinks interesting or fun. And while I remain interested in productivity and technology, writing about being productive isn’t productive (ie. productivity porn) and in my experience always gets hung up on fadish systems or tools, and that’s not interesting. So I’ll probably continue to blog about producivity, but much less than I have been.

I’m interested in writing more about open source stuff. My post about drupal was a lot of fun, and I’ve had some other thoughts which will (hopefully) germinate into full grown posts in the next couple of weeks.

I understand that the geeks might not get the knitting and the knitters might not get the tech stuff but stay tuned in any case, I’m a generalist in both camps, and I promise to be enthusiastic.

Also I have a little script to ease in the posting of links and other miscellany that I find along my travels through cyberspace, I just have to get better at using it. That should help even out any over specialization that I might be prone to.

So that’s what’s on my plate and mind. What’s on yours?

On/up!

I rewrote the about page for tychoish this weekend. Because it was about damn time, really, and though this one doesn’t cover much new ground the format isn’t so… ass-y. And because it’s a slow blogging week, it’s also a post. Have a good day, check out today’s critical futures story, and I’ll catch you around tomorrow.–ty

This place is mine, I’m your host tycho garen. I’m just your average geeky, male knitter, who write science fiction, and posts to his ‘blog about things like writing, current knitting, technology, academia, and other shiny topics that catch my attention.

I’ve been blogging for a long time, the archive goes back to 2003 (but I don’t think you should read those anyway) and I’ve found residual evidence of my online presence going back to early 2001, and I’m pretty sure that I was doing this kind of thing since mid ‘99 give or take a little, but I’m almost glad that there isn’t a firm record of that early stuff. Once upon a time I collaborated on sites with Chris Knittel, but in 2007 we decided to divide up the archive and start posting independently. Hence tychoish.com.

In truth during the first (many years) I posted infrequently, but since the spring of 2007, I’ve made a point of posting something at least once a day. When I started tychoish, I thought that it would be like my paper notebook–a random collection of thoughts, lists, and raw ideas–only digital. Which meant that I might actually go back and use it more than once, and it might be a cool discussion starter, since I don’t have a lot to hide. Also, about this time tumblelogs became popluar (again), and I thought “nifty! want.” And seeing that I tend to post several hundred words of rough prose every day, you can see how well that idea went.

With the rhythm of daily posting pretty much under my belt, and a rather substantial reevaluation of the role of fiction writing in my life, in July of 2007 I launched a new website called Critical Futures. I’ve been interested in hypertext and the future of prose and fiction on the internet for a long time, and CF is a blog where I post manageable snippets of stories every day of the week. Eventually, I hope that CF will be a paying market and there’ll work from other similarly minded SF writers, but for the moment it’s a fun experiment and great motivation to write and edit (somewhat) my work regularly.

And before you ask, tycho garen isn’t really my name. I mean, it is in a sense, it’s just not what people in real life call me, nor is it what’s on my birth certificate. I like it for both of these reasons, and because it references some of my early writing, it allows me some measure of privacy or separation between my cyber- and meat-space identities, and it helps that it is an unequivocally cool name. I don’t capitalize it (nor my given name much) because names are as much adjectives as they are proper nouns, and particularly since tycho isn’t an official name, it seems even sillier to capitalize it.

That’s me. My email is all over this site, and my username on most major websites/communications services is “tychoish,” if you want to get a hold of me, you know how. I love hearing from readers and fellow bloggers.

If I left something out, don’t be afraid to ask.

Onward and Upward!

Hey friends!

So I might have mentioned that I’m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit–disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I’ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.

At the same time, I probably won’t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here’s the deal:

• There’ll be new critical futures stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won’t change, fear not. - I’ll post new things here, through the weekend. - I’ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there’ll be three posts, but I’m not sure when they’ll hit yet. It’s a blog, after all. Don’t be worried.

Because I doubt that administrivia is what you all came here to read, I think I’ll pass along some links and thoughts and questions that you might enjoy.

• The cats are still nibbling toes. This remains not cute, though they haven’t gotten this memo yet.
• Though I’m only really interested in talking about electoral politics in the historical sense, or as a venue for placing friendly bets,¹ but I’m not going to lie this is funny. “This is the internet!” heh. Actually I’m more worried that someone has cracked Randall’s secret sauce
• A git-wiki that really rocks. It’s still early on development, and it’s lacking some features that would make it useable for me at the moment, but I can totally see a place for such a thing for some future projects.
  • The ruby guys are totally awesome, and I like a lot of ruby projects, and I think that in some ways ruby is going to be the “next php,” even I have a soft spot in my heart² for Python, but I said to chris the other day that “ruby is the visual basic of our generation.”
• I’m thinking of starting to hard wrap columns in my text files, because it would make running diffs and file histories easier, grepping is easier, it makes the text more spatially consistent, it would make using vim easier, and so forth but I seem to really enjoy changing the window size a lot, and he is probably right, there’s very little practical value, and hitting ^Q for a vestige seems ill advised. That doesn’t mean I won’t try it, you read my post about my email after all.
• I just finished reading “Star Surgeon podiobooks,” a delightfully quirky public domain science fiction novel by Alan E. Norse, and read by my friend Scott Farquhar of Promethesus Radio Theatre, which was delightful even if it wasn’t a fine example of tightly structured prose. Scott’s next book is “Black Star Passes” by John W. Campbell, which I intend to start while I’m driving to camp.

On Monday, that is next Monday (there! a firm week from now–if slightly relative–commitment) I’m going to start a posting to a new blog. This isn’t breaking news to readers of this site as I’ve been talking about this with some of you for weeks, and mentioning it sporadically on the blog. Let me tell you about the site, and what I intend for it.

The site will be called Critical Futures, and it will be a fiction blog where I (and possibly others) will post a new piece of science fiction every day. Not necessarily, as 365 Tomorrows posts an new independent story every day, but rather a new section or part of an ongoing story. I mean sometimes I might fit a whole story into a single post, but that’s not a goal that I’m aiming for as a writer.

[ETA: The site isn't, of course, up yet, but you can read the about page if you want a sneak preview. Remember next Monday.]

I’ve really grown to be fond of the regular blogging rhythm, and I think it would be nice to expand that habit into fiction writing. So the prospect of having a regular commitment to write and polish fiction for publication, will be a good thing. Kind of like the 365 projects, only different.

And I’ve been talking for a long time about a few things for a while: how blogging as a medium has potential for story telling, about how I want to write a story intended for online distribution. So I’m going to do it. Now. Because there’s no time like the present, and because I think that the most important thing for me to do right now is to just get content out there, and I think I’m at a point where I’d rather write toward a digital rather than a print audience. All the stars seemed to align, and in these cases I think it’s important to seize the moment and get stuff out there. So that’s what I’m doing.

So stay tuned. I’ll be posting little mini-entries here to announce the stories when they start to go up, and I have an entry for tomorrow that will cover/overview the story projects that I’ve been working on for the site. I’m really excited about this.

I just wanted to post a little note.

First of all I want to thank you all for the birthday notes. It’s great to hear from you, and it was great to hear from so many of you. Thanks.

I’m out of town, and likely completely out of touch starting tomorrow morning blindingly early until Monday afternoon/evening. I’ll be at this, and it’s an event that I never take a computer to, so I won’t have anything meaningful to say to you until then.

I’ll probably be harping on this for a while, but I put out a call on the twitter (with an offer of a beer, in compensation) for “Virginia Woolf Steampunk” stories. This is either for deritive Woolf fiction with a steam punk flare; or with better luck, Woolf as the heroine of a steampunk story. My friend Sam Tung posted the first, on facebook, I think though it was close, but Miss Violet had a good one as well.

I’d love to hear more of these stories folks… Keep them coming. Maybe we can do a collection?

Anyway… Have a good memorial day, and even though I plan to have a blast at my thing, I’ll confess to being a little jealous of the folks who are going to WisCon and Balticon. Enjoy, and I want full reports folks.

Ok, it’s been a quiet weekend, as I half predicted. I did get some writing done and other work done, but nothing is quite ready for prime time yet. I fear that I’ll be done with six entries all at the same time tomorrow afternoon, and that wouldn’t do at all. And I haven’t posted a general *how’s the tycho doing” report in a while, and I haven’t been writing these things here much.

I know that the post of the beginning of the latvian dreaming sweater might have happened a little fast, so I’m going have a series of quick posts that explain my reasoning here. Also, if you’re interested in doing a cardigan, I’ll cover that as well.

So here goes on the report, as much for archival purposes as anything

My grandmother had her right knee replaced a couple weeks ago (those of you who were playing along at home will remember that she broke a knee cap in January; that was the left one, which seems to be quite alright at the moment). My father and I–despite cold symptoms (his) one working voice (mine) and minimal preparation (ours)–trekked across the state to visit her in rehab. Turns out she’s doing great, but it was a really good thing that we were able to visit and help her out a little.

Then this weekend my entire family has to go to a wedding. Feh. I hate weddings, a lot. Though the couple in question lives locally, they’ve decided to have their party half way across the state. And we live in the midwest, so that’s a schlep. And since my father is going to be the best man (ugg) we can’t exactly swoop in for the ceremony grab a nosh at the reception and swoop out. Two nights we have to be there. Have I mentioned that while I think I live in a pretty nifty little city, the rest of the state is… somewhat less interesting. Mom and I are brining our spinning wheels, and are going to sit around in some yarn fiber store and cuss. If I post some rant against weddings and marriage, don’t take it personally.

On Thursday morning it’s May day, which means I have to get up at the crack of dawn, put on my morris dancing gear and dance the sun up. If the sun doesn’t rise, blame me, in other words. If you’re in St. Louis, email me for directions!

Then, from the wedding I’m going back to stay with my grandmother so I can help ease the transition back from rehab. That’s another week, though I hope that I’ll be able to get settled this time.

I have to rush back here on that friday, because I think I have to work and teach a knitting class that weekend. And then. As if that weren’t enough, I start my summer job that Monday. Which means I have a lot of things to take care of before that happens. The job is cool, it’s a shame that it isn’t more long term. My main focus of this summer–other than writing another novella and knitting 3 sweaters–is going to be finding a job for the fall and beyond. No pressure.

That’s the state of the tycho. I think I need another cup of tea.

Onward and Upward!

So I’m off in a few to go visit with my grandmother who has recent had a knee replacement. (Indeed this means that the blog has been down one reader for a few weeks–rehab centers not having wifi and all–and likely will for another week and some change.) While there is high speed internet (how do you think said grandmother reads the blog,) my posting time might be a little bit sparse.¹

My goal is to post the first bread crumb of the latvian dreaming tonight.

I did want to share a couple of links that I’ve been collecting over the past few days and weeks.

• sockpr0n’s schacht matchless - This blog posting has some useful info on “hybrid” double drive setup, where you can do double drive with two separate bands rather than one band. This means you can have a finer degree of control over tension like you would with a break band, except with the evenness of double drive. Rock. On.
• y knit - I started listening to this as I was spinning with my mother this morning before getting ready to go. It’s great. Perfect length, great guys (hi mike!), nice insight. I’m generally pretty nonplussed towards the Stitch and Bitch stuff (the “consumer feminism” wigs me out, as does the hipster stuff.) but hearing Debbie Stoller talk makes me like her more, even if the aura isn’t something I”m into. I suspect I’m the last person to be getting into this (I’m generally 3 months behind on getting into new podcasts, at least), but if you’re not listening to this one, work on it.
• Tea Gadget - I got an email from the marketing department of this company, that makes this portable loose leaf tea brewing thing. I think the website might be an interesting place to start a semiotic study of advertising, and the contraption looks interesting. I’m not sure if it’s right for me, but you might be different. I think getting this email either means that I’ve arrived, or I’m officially passed my prime.

Anyway. Looks like that’s all the news that’s fit to sing.

Brownie points to the first person to figure that one out. That isn’t family.

Onward and Upward!