Robin Sloan

The real Locust Grove

The nar­ra­tor of Annabel Scheme is a super-​​smart server named Hu who lives in a data cen­ter on the banks of the Hood River in Locust Grove, Ore­gon. Here’s Alexis Madri­gal on the real Locust Groves. These are such zeit­geisty places, and for my money, such Amer­i­can places, too: high tech­nol­ogy and crazy amounts of cap­i­tal mixed with back­woods weird­ness… and lots and lots of empty space.

World of Jesus

This bit from Tim over on Snark­mar­ket, and the ensu­ing com­ment thread, is my favorite thing writ­ten about Annabel Scheme so far.

In other news, what­ever hap­pened to my wee­knotes? They’ll return soon. This site is like a hiber­nat­ing bear—actually no, it’s like a bear that is not only hiber­nat­ing but also dream­ing, and oh boy, wait ’til it tells you about its crazy bear-​​dreams.

Hello, Hu

Atten­tion Annabel Scheme fans: Scott Jack­son is build­ing Hu. (If you ask me, a story’s not com­plete until it spawns a Github project.)

Love and quantum physics

In the very first scene of Annabel Scheme, we meet Scheme’s new client, a skinny dude name Ryan Kelly. He’s a musi­cian, and he’s con­cerned about some strange tracks that are mak­ing the rounds. They’re tracks with long-​​dead voices on them. Tracks from beyond the grave. Or… something.

These tracks and their ori­gins are cen­tral to the first big chunk of the story; it all cul­mi­nates in a strange dance party in a grave­yard for genet­ics exper­i­ments gone wrong. Naturally.

So, just as Emily Cooper ren­dered Scheme’s San Fran­cisco, now Matt Ryd, another remix project win­ner, has com­posed a Pam-​​n-​​Ryan track.

Pause for emphasis: !!!

Here’s the acoustic version:

Matt Ryd — I’ll Never Under­stand (Love and Quan­tum Physics)

You can also play it here, on Matt’s site, and you can read about his writ­ing process, too. Here’s a gem:

The first thing that popped into my mind (both upon read­ing Robin’s words and the Thinkquest arti­cle [on quan­tum physi­cis]) was that I do not under­stand this con­cept. Then I thought to myself: “Hey, you know what else you totally don’t under­stand? Love!”

And there’s more on the way:

A YouTube video (fea­tur­ing Joan Hoede­man!) will be forth­com­ing with a mul­ti­tracked electropop-​​meets-​​Casiocore final ver­sion, but I wanted to get this out into the pub­lic as quickly as possible.

Electropop-​​meets-​​Casiocore!

I know I’ve said this sev­eral times, and maybe it’s like, okay, we get it, but once more: it is so cool, and so almost, like, dizziness-​​inducing, to see and hear these arti­facts from the page out in the real world.

Awe­some work, Matt. I can’t wait to see and hear the video.

Scenes of Scheme’s San Francisco

So I want to be clear about what has just transpired:

• Some num­ber of months ago, I sat at a cafe down the street and made some stuff up. It involved quan­tum com­put­ers and alter­nate San Franciscos.
• After pub­lish­ing that stuff in book form, I asked other peo­ple to remix and reimag­ine it.
• Together, we picked some win­ners.
• And now, Emily Cooper has fin­ished her beau­ti­ful, sto­ry­book 3D ren­der­ings of five San Franciscos.

I almost hate to embed these here, because 500 pix­els doesn’t do her work jus­tice. These are huge images—definitely suit­able for use as desk­top back­grounds. Don’t miss the full-​​size ver­sions on Flickr:

Or, if you like, you can just snag a pack of full-​​resolution JPEGs here.

But wait—there’s more.

This is the coolest: Emily has agreed to share the 3D geom­e­try that she built to ren­der these images. That means you can import it into SketchUp, Blender, Pho­to­shop, or the 3D app of your choice and make new images from new angles. Or maybe there’s a 3D print­out in your future?

Get the mod­els here. You’ll find mostly OBJ files with a few 3DS thrown in for use with SketchUp—the full down­town scenes and a few iso­lated objects. Like the images, these are all Cre­ative Commons-​​licensed.

If you use these mod­els for some­thing fun—and you should! you must!—let me know and I’ll link it up here.

Wow. If I could go back in time and show these images to the Robin Sloan in that cafe down the street, he would flip. out. That stuff he made up one day—it’s real. It’s there. It’s Fog City, and glim­mer­ing within: the Shard!

Thanks, Emily. Great work.

And com­ing soon: updates on the other remix projects!

Less and more

I love this descrip­tion of Annabel Scheme:

It feels like a less drug-​​induced Philip K. Dick mashed with a more tech-​​savvy Dou­glas Adams and a more play­ful William Gib­son, all writ­ing of a world with demon-​​possessed com­put­ers and ghosts using elec­tric lines as an inter­net to haunt the liv­ing. The para­nor­mal is mixed lib­er­ally with the tech­no­log­i­cal, and both are infused with a mis­chie­vous and affec­tion­ate satire of google, hard-​​boiled detec­tive nov­els, start-​​up cul­ture, urban ghost sto­ries, and sundry other things. It may not be great lit­er­a­ture, but it is cer­tainly good entertainment.

I bris­tle a bit at the “may not be great lit­er­a­ture” caveat, of course, but in the con­text of the descrip­tion over­all… I’ll take it!

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.