Robin Sloan

But where is the zebra??!

Week 1565

Have you heard about the short 20th cen­tury? The notion is that the 20th cen­tury didn’t really go from 1900 to 2000. It went from 1914—the start of World War I—to 1991—the fall of the Soviet Union. Makes more sense, right? And its coun­ter­part is the long 19th cen­tury, 1789 to 1914.

I’ve started to think of 2009 as “long 2009″ in my per­sonal his­tory. It began in Novem­ber 2008, when my co-​​conspirator Andrew Fitzger­ald fin­ished his first novel and I, in a fit of (let’s be hon­est) jeal­ousy, decided to recom­mit myself to writ­ing. And now, “long 2009″ ends this month, when I begin at Twit­ter.

Which is not to say that the writ­ing ends! No: that course has been set. What I mean is that the fulcrum-​​power of the year is bounded by those dates. And “long 2009″ was cer­tainly the most impor­tant year for me since, say, 2004, when I co-​​produced EPIC 2014 and joined Cur­rent.

Mostly I just enjoy telling sto­ries about time: mark­ing out epochs and hinge-​​points. Maybe a bit of coun­ter­fac­tual thrown in there, too.

This week I saw Sep Kap­m­var give a talk at Twit­ter. His project with Jonathan Har­ris—We Feel Fine—was one of the very first things I encoun­tered that had been made with Pro­cess­ing, and one of the things that made me want to learn it for myself, which led to all sorts of other things. Some­thing about see­ing this old influ­ence in this new con­text… it was a nice juxtaposition.

This was a very suc­cess­ful week for Pil­grim. I wrote a lot of mate­r­ial. Very rough, but all in sen­tences and para­graphs, com­mit­ted to the screen, which is the essen­tial thing. I’m mind­ful of my notion to have a barf-​​draft done by mid-​​March, with SXSW as my arbi­trary dead­line; I think it’s quite pos­si­ble, and hit­ting that dead­line is my focus and my mea­sure of success.

That’s it! Short wee­knote this time.

The Great Christmas Monkey Hunt

[Rough scrap from a story to be writ­ten at some point in the future.]

Annie, age six, saw it first. She squealed, tiny hands pressed flat against the win­dow that looked out across the back yard, and cried: “An elf! AN ELF!”

I darted over, pushed my nose against the glass above her, and a chill ran through me—the chill of a strange sil­hou­ette in your king­dom. Annie was right: there, at the far end of the yard, was the shape of a lit­tle bent-​​over man strug­gling through the snow-​​drifts. But it wasn’t actu­ally a man, and it wasn’t a child, either. The shape was truly tiny. Miniature.

My brain was primed from watch­ing Planet Earth in school this year, and I rec­og­nized the shape: It was a mon­key. (In the next moment, a flash of won­der: I’d actu­ally used some­thing I learned in school.)

“Holy shit,” said Uncle Mike, lean­ing over my shoul­der. From the out­side, he and Annie and I must have made a Truman-​​family totem pole. “That’s a macaque.”

The lit­tle mon­key kept its pace, stum­bling step-​​by-​​step. It really did look like a lit­tle old man with long, lanky arms. It even had the sug­ges­tion of a bushy gray beard. Then the wind rose and gusted for a stretch of sec­onds, pulling a scrim of white across the win­dow, and when it fell, the mon­key was gone, dis­ap­peared over the bound­ary into the next yard.

There were many ques­tions. Where had this macaque come from? What was it doing in Min­neapo­lis? Had it been brought here and given as a gift? Who would give a mon­key as a Christ­mas present? How did it escape?

Was it dan­ger­ous? (Mom.) Could we keep it? (Annie.) How did Uncle Mike know any­thing about mon­keys, any­way? (Me.)

Tru­mans were suit­ing up: Dad pulling on his thick black boots. Cousin Mike Jr. paus­ing his video game and instruct­ing Annie in loud, mono­spaced syl­la­bles: “Don’t. touch. this. Okay? Don’t. touch. it.” Uncle Mike rum­mag­ing in the closet for ski goggles.

And me, beg­ging to come along. Dad agreed, I think because he hadn’t seen the macaque him­self and wasn’t quite con­vinced it was real. Also because he knew I would be annoy­ing to Mom and Aunt Ron­nie if he left me behind.

Uncle Mike cracked the back door and it was like open­ing an air­lock; the warmth was sucked out of the room, out into the sil­very swirl. I felt like Mas­ter Chief in my lay­ers of snow-gear—thick and sturdy and a lit­tle stiff. We all tromped out onto the porch, and Mom sealed the ship behind us and waved farewell through the glass.

I fol­lowed behind Dad, hop­ping to place my steps in the craters he made with his black boots. We were going back across the yard, straight to where we’d seen the macaque last. I nar­rowed my eyes and made a tough expres­sion under my scarf. There might be macaques everywhere.

The Great Christ­mas Mon­key Hunt had begun.

Local color

The banshee’s hair pick

There’s been a Scheme sight­ing, and this hair pick has some­thing to do with it:

Read the story over at Sig­nif­i­cant Objects. Then, two things:

• You can bid on the hair pick on eBay, and the pro­ceeds go to 826 National, the writ­ing pro­gram founded by Dave Eggers. Might be cool to hold a real-​​life quan­tum arti­fact in your hands…
• How am I so sure this is Scheme-​​related? As you’ll see, the story’s nar­ra­tor doesn’t sus­pect it. The thing is, there’s a clue embed­ded in the story; almost a code, really. The first per­son to fig­ure it out and post it in the com­ments here gets a CFRAS t-​​shirt (pic­tured here).

Check it out! Bid on the object! Crack the code!

An important @robinsloan update

Hey, I’m going to go work at Twitter!

So, there are at least three things to cover. First: doing what, exactly? Sec­ond: what of all this around us—what of the vast robinsloan​.com empire? Third: whoah, let’s talk about how cool Twit­ter is! We’ll take it, as always, bird by bird:

First: doing what?

I’m going to be work­ing on media part­ner­ships with my friend and erst­while col­league @ChloeS. This couldn’t be cooler: it’s every­thing at the inter­sec­tion of Twit­ter and media, from live events on TV to cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism on the web to Na’vi tweets in IMAX 3D. (Just kidding—but you know Twit­ter is Eywa, right?)

Back at Cur­rent in 2008, Chloe was the mas­ter­mind behind our Twitter-​​powered elec­tion pro­gram­ming—prob­a­bly my sin­gle favorite project in all the years I worked there. So I’m hugely excited to be con­spir­ing with her again, and (soon) with all the pro­duc­ers, reporters, devel­op­ers and strate­gists at media orga­ni­za­tions that want to do cool, trans­for­ma­tive things with tweets.

Sec­ond: whither robinsloan​.com?

Don’t worry: all of this work con­tin­ues! I’m still plug­ging away on Pil­grim and still com­mit­ted to media inven­tion on a monthly basis. (iPad, hello?) This is def­i­nitely not a zero-​​sum game; in fact, I think Twit­ter is prob­a­bly the per­fect perch for a per­son inter­ested in—you know—words and tech­nol­ogy.

Third: wooo Twitter!

I’m excited to go work at Twit­ter because it’s a sys­tem and a ser­vice that I actu­ally, er, love. (Maybe you knew that already.) Now, okay, you don’t need me to tell you that Twit­ter is fun and use­ful. Got it. But let me just under­score three things that I think make it really, really special:

• Twit­ter is built around this one odd, remark­able constraint—and if you ask me, almost all of its magic flows from that fact. Maybe once it was entirely a tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, an SMS thing. I think it’s become more than that. Frankly, I think it’s become poetry. Twit­ter makes me stop and think about lan­guage more fre­quently and more deeply than any other tech­nol­ogy in the world. What a great thing for a tech­nol­ogy to do—what a very human thing.
• I feel like I’m con­stantly learn­ing and re-​​learning how to use Twit­ter. And I think that’s because, paired with this odd con­straint, you’ve got this crazy openness—this refusal to spec­ify exactly what you’re sup­posed to do with the ser­vice, or how, or even why. So those deter­mi­na­tions fall to us, and as a result, the whole thing seems to be con­vuls­ing and trans­form­ing, like, every six months. Do you remem­ber when hardly any tweets had an http://? It wasn’t that long ago—but now whole ecosys­tems have sprung up around the busi­ness of prepar­ing links for Twit­ter. That kind of fast, organic change indi­cates real health and strength. It’s also just really fun! Like a good story, with that cen­tral, dri­ving ques­tion: What hap­pens next?
• I’m not a great pro­gram­mer, but I do dive in from time to time, and my first hands-​​on expe­ri­ence with the Twit­ter API, back dur­ing the elec­tion, was a rev­e­la­tion. Using ludi­crously sim­ple tools, and with­out ask­ing any­body for per­mis­sion, you can plug into this thing and get—well, jeez. You can get life. I don’t think there’s another API in the world that’s so sim­ple but so vital. And hon­estly, I don’t think we’ve come close to har­ness­ing all that it has, and will have, to offer.

So, those are all things I would have told you even if I wasn’t going to go work at Twitter—but they should help make it clear why I’m so excited that I am.

Okay, that’s the update. I’m going to con­tinue my wee­knotes here, but they will change in char­ac­ter some­what. There will no longer be any­thing about the per­ils and prac­ti­cal­i­ties of being your own busi­ness, obvi­ously. Instead, they’ll sim­ply chron­i­cle my “extracur­ric­u­lar” writ­ing and invent­ing, and the process behind it.

And as for all the cool Twit­ter media part­ner­ship work ahead: there will be a place to talk about that, too! When it’s ready, I’ll point you to it.

I start in mid-​​February.

Now I’m going to go tweet about this.

Week 1564

Post­ing this note a bit early, as if to ban­ish this week from my sight. I guess it’s impor­tant to have bench­marks, right? High and low. I got sick this week—sicker than I’ve been in years, bleh—and so the days were mea­sured mostly in mugs of tea and Net­flix streams. And I got approx­i­mately noth­ing done!

Among the media I con­sumed was Miyazaki’s Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind (which takes a while to get through—it’s four dense vol­umes). I find myself re-​​reading it more fre­quently than any other work of fic­tion, manga or oth­er­wise; I think this was maybe my tenth time through. I just can­not wrap my head around how good it is—and how it was essen­tially Miyazaki’s side project for years. The scope of the world, the speci­ficity of the vision… and the human­ity of it. Nau­si­caä makes me cry every time.

I haven’t deliv­ered on my tease about big news from last week; soon, soon.

Head spin­ning with iPad pos­si­bil­i­ties. It looks like such an insanely cool can­vas. I can’t wait to get my hands and fin­gers on one.

Okay, really, that’s it. This week is now OVER.

Elsewhere

If you fol­low this site, you prob­a­bly also fol­low Snark­mar­ket—but if not, I have two recent posts that con­nect back to media inven­tion that you might like:

• The future of designed con­tent, and
• a new class of con­tent for a new class of device, about the iPad.

Here’s the short ver­sion of that sec­ond post: I can­not wait to write and design a story for that thing!

Week 1563

It’s been rain­ing hard in San Fran­cisco, and it lent the week a strange char­ac­ter; to me it seemed to pass sort of out­side the nor­mal stream of time. Like a pocket uni­verse. A wet pocket uni­verse. (Also, these things were on the loose.)

It was a good week for mak­ing memes. Stock and flow got wacky-​​incredible trac­tion over at Snark­mar­ket and my post on instru­mented read­ing made the rounds in the data viz world.

And if I’m right about stock and flow (who knows?) then some small frac­tion of those swarms got curi­ous and made their way over to meet my stock—maybe Penum­bra, maybe Scheme, maybe some­thing else. Maybe one of those peo­ple is out there flip­ping through Scheme this very moment. It’s a delight to think so.

Another delight: it felt so good to put together that post on instru­mented read­ing. I have been think­ing about that idea, and imag­in­ing that very graph, for a year entire. Whew. Done. Exorcised.

I announced the Remix Fund win­ners this week and made the ini­tial pay­outs. I like the feel of money flow­ing, even in small amounts. It feels healthy. Almost… meta­bolic. It’s a sign of life.

Read on…

Clouds on the corner