Robin Sloan

Glimpse of a remix

Well, well, well. Look what I have on my hard drive:

Five image files labeled “SF.” Gosh. I won­der what those might be.

This is a ter­ri­ble tease, I know. But it’s not quite ready yet!

I do wish you could see how much I’m grin­ning right now. You are going to love these.

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!

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…

Scheme Watch: thesixtyone

Aha! CFRAS mem­ber Joshua Dance just tweeted:

@robinsloan this seems kind of like the “fil­ters” you men­tioned in Annabel Scheme http://​bit​.ly/​3​p​c​0Cg

The link goes to the­six­ty­one, the newly-​​redesigned (and insanely slick) music site. From now on I’m just going to call it The Listener.

Welcome to the positive feedback loop

Here we go!

That chart shows the top ten vote-​​getting remix project ideas, with the four that are actu­ally get­ting funded high­lighted at the top. The x-​​axis is votes—so you can see that sup­port was actu­ally really well-​​distributed! But at the same time, the win­ners were pretty decisive.

You will dis­cern, per­haps, that the total bud­get is $2000, not $1000. Yes: the projects were just too good. They were just too cre­ative. So I decided to dou­ble the bud­get, thereby dou­bling the num­ber of projects funded.

And the win­ners are!

Read on…

Asymmetrical information

The votes are cast and counted! The Remix Fund is ready to roll! EXCEPT: a few of the win­ning ideas involve cre­ators who I need to con­tact and, you know, ask if they actu­ally want to do this. So I’m send­ing those mes­sages today, and when I hear back, I’ll announce which projects are get­ting funded. I think this will only take a few days, tops, but I’ll keep you posted if not.

The sus­pense!

CC shout-​​out

Nice men­tion from Cameron Perkins over on the Cre­ative Com­mons blog! The clock’s tick­ing down on Remix Fund vot­ing… and I’ll announce the win­ners this Sat­ur­day. Ooh exciting.

Exit polls

Right now at this very moment, in a secret sec­tion of this very web­site, Annabel Scheme back­ers are vot­ing to allo­cate the $1000 remix fund. I’m watch­ing the votes stream live into a Google Docs spread­sheet. I can­not tear myself away!

Tales from the N.E.R.D.

So, when you arrived at the Annabel Scheme launch party on Sat­ur­day, you were pre­sented with a piece of evi­dence from Scheme’s col­lec­tion. They were all dated and tagged in ziploc bags; they were all very strange.

Your mis­sion: come up with the story behind the evi­dence! There was a Nar­ra­tive Evi­dence Research Data­base col­lec­tion sta­tion set up, off to one side of the party, to cap­ture these sto­ries. Here’s just a taste of what peo­ple recorded:

(Note to par­ty­go­ers: My Mac­Book seems to have become some kind of unsta­ble quan­tum com­puter, because the sound on sev­eral of the clips got zapped. So there were some truly excel­lent stories—well, they looked excellent—that I couldn’t include. Argh!)

Huge thanks to N.E.R.D. col­lab­o­ra­tor Dan Bouk, who helped gather, pre­pare, and dis­trib­ute the evidence.

A party and a PDF

On the heels of an absolutely fan­tas­tic book release party here in San Fran­cisco, here’s the dig­i­tal ver­sion of Annabel Scheme for every­one to down­load, share, and transform.

More on the party soon—there’s lots to say! But here’s just a glimpse to start. All snaps are cour­tesy the Shamp­ton­ian Insti­tute.

First, the Com­mit­tee to Find and Res­cue Annabel Scheme:

(My pal Dan made those t-​​shirts. Amazing.)

Here’s the scene, mid-​​reading:

What you can’t see in this photo is the rows of peo­ple sit­ting cross-​​legged on the floor in front—like storytime!

(Looks like a sam­ple sale, right? GAFFTA had been trans­formed into an amaz­ing bou­tique full of algo­rith­mic fashion.)

And you must see this photo—which I don’t know how to describe, but I kinda feel like it should be the cover of the book now, you know?

Finally, ha ha, here’s my new author photo from @mbaratz.

Whew! I’m exhausted, but elated. You’ll under­stand why when you see what comes next. Here’s a lit­tle sense of it from Paul. Hmm…

To every­one who attended: thank you. What a crew! What a delight!

Yes, every project has to involve a laser somehow

“Robin Sloan decided…”

You know it’s either really good or really bad when the arti­cle begins with “Robin Sloan decided…”—and it all depends on the next few words.

“…one day in Octo­ber that he could be the falafel-​​eating cham­pion of the world.”

“…that the Somali pirates were doing it wrong.”

“…to raise llamas.”

It’s not so dramatic—yet. Here’s the arti­cle: a sharp piece about Kick­starter by Chris­tine Lago­rio in today’s San Fran­cisco Chronicle.

And here is the part of the mod­ern media rit­ual where the blog­ger offers a few small for-​​the-​​records:

• To say “Sloan didn’t have high hopes when he posted to Kick­starter” isn’t exactly right; it seems to pin the doubt on Kick­starter. Rather, that first night, after I had posted the project but before I’d fallen fit­fully to sleep, I had hopes—I just wasn’t sure they’d amount to anything!
• Chris­tine writes that my inspi­ra­tion was “see­ing [my] friend Web entre­pre­neur Andy Baio post a project on Kick­starter” and this is 100% cor­rect, except that I don’t want Andy to think I am claim­ing him as a friend—“Wait, who?”—so let’s be clear: He is merely my nerd guru.

Finally, here is the pic­ture from the paper, for your locker. I feel that I look some­what Gollum-​​like here—

—but that’s my fault, not pho­to­jour­nal­ist Jana Asenbrennerova’s.

33 hours ’til midnight

As of this writ­ing, there are 33 hours left to get in on my Kick­starter project if you haven’t already. Here’s my lat­est post, where I talk about fin­ish­ing the text, share a glimpse of the edited man­u­script, and say thanks.

Real-​​time writing and Facebook memorials

A lit­tle writ­ing exper­i­ment here. I was so taken with this new Face­book fea­ture today—the abil­ity to turn a pro­file into a memo­r­ial after some­one dies, and the info that Face­book asks for in the process—that I just felt 100% com­pelled to write some­thing. No time to do a full story, so I dashed off a quick scene, a setup.

(You can skip straight to it if these process notes don’t inter­est you.)

The fun part is that I asked peo­ple for some quick feed­back on Twit­ter and wow—they deliv­ered! Using this form, I got six­teen really thought­ful responses in a mat­ter of min­utes. (I’d show them to you, but I never indi­cated to my on-​​demand review­ers that their responses would be made pub­lic, so I’m going to honor the assump­tion of pri­vacy. Seri­ously, though: so thoughtful.)

None of the feed­back said “meh” or “blech” so I decided to spend just a bit more time on it and address some of the prob­lems that peo­ple iden­ti­fied. I am not assum­ing that any­one will actu­ally want to com­pare these, but just for the sake of shar­ing the process: here’s v1 in Google Docs, the result of about 40 min­utes of rushed typ­ing; and here’s v2, with about another 40 min­utes of work put into it.

Any­way, I’m not sug­gest­ing this is great lit­er­a­ture, but I had fun with the process, and I actu­ally think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about being able to “metab­o­lize” stuff that’s very in-​​the-​​moment and make a story (or story-​​stub) out of it. And that really means being able to ask for feed­back, and get it, in near-​​real-​​time.

I wish I could keep writ­ing this story—I’m curi­ous to know what hap­pens next—but I’ve got to fin­ish this book and I’ve already spent an irre­spon­si­bly large amount of time on this today.

Any­way! Enough meta-​​discussion. On to the story-​​stub.

Read on…

Fire the ultimate ninja signal flares

Five days left on my Kick­starter project! I have a sense of accel­er­a­tion and increas­ing den­sity; the next week is going to be crazy.

Here’s my lat­est update. I talk about get­ting feed­back on the com­plete manuscript—and about gath­er­ing ULTIMATE NINJA ALLIES.