12 Things We Learned From Chuck Palahniuk’s AMA

By Emily Temple

As you may have heard, Chuck Palahniuk has some forthcoming novels lined up, and to ramp up anticipation for these (as well as appease his hordes of fans) he hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit last night. We waded through the cheeky banter, multiple counts of Internet failure, and sometimes sexually aggressive commenters to bring you the most interesting tidbits we gleaned from the session.

1. He’s not as hardcore as he wants the world at large to think. “A secret truth? Those [Jack Daniels] bottles on that tour… they were filled with Lipton’s tea. I wanted a sight gag that would look cool.”

2. He does research for his books with the (stoned) professionals. “Not to lose anybody his job… but some very stoned guys came from Stanley Steamer and taught me the blood-cleaning stuff. And this was ten years before Sunshine Cleaning.

Click here to read the rest of this story

The Economics of an Independent Bookstore

  By Jason Boog

In a Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview at Reddit, a former bookseller wrote this heartbreaking headline last week: “My bookstore went out of business today, AMA.”

The writer fielded questions from users, giving a glimpse into the bookselling lifestyle and the economics of this tough profession. The post also explained the tight margins of a used bookstore: “we’d clear 200 on a good day … the math did not really work.”

One independent bookseller responded: “$200 a day would kill us. We’re at roughly $1,300 a day, and it’s still not profitable. The worst part is, since we’re independent and a specialty store, people come in and ask me for recommendations, then go to Barnes & Noble or download it on a kindle for slightly cheaper. People just don’t give a s***.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

From Civilization to Big Brother: how a game recreated Orwell’s 1984

Civilization: not so civilizing?

It turns out that if you play Civilization II for long enough, you enter a world very much like Orwell’s 1984. Coincidence?

By Sam Jordison

If you happen to have touched a computer some time within the last 20 years, the chances are you may well have spent a regrettably long time playing on one of the many instalments of Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise. I doubt, however, that you will have devoted quite as much of your life to it as a contributor to the Reddit forums going by the name of Lycerius. He (it must be a he!) posted the following extraordinary statement:

“I’ve been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be.”

Just in case you are one of the few people not to have played Civilization, and are therefore unaware of the planet-shifting magnetism of Lycerius’ post, Here’s a quick primer.

Civilization is a game that – true to its name – enables you to build your own civilisation. You start in 4000BC in a small village, which you gradually expand by farming, building things like libraries (so that you can develop technologies), and producing armies to conquer other territories. It’s addictive, vaguely educational and most sane people stopped playing some time around 1997 (both in real and game years), once they’d built a spaceship and reached Alpha Centauri.

Not so Lycerius. He has carried on for an extra 2,000 years – although he is at pains to point out he doesn’t just play Civilization II non-stop (“Naturally, I play other games and have a life…”). Yet, as quickly becomes apparent when you read through the rest of his post (as I urge you to do), even if Lycerius had dedicated all of his time to playing Civilization, it wouldn’t have been wasted. The results are fascinating. He summarises them thus:

Click here to read the rest of this story

What Is SOPA?

If you hadn’t heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet’s most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress…

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it’s formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a “mark-up period” on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

…that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet…

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there.

…which would go almost comedically unchecked…

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off.

Click here to read the rest of this story

The Best Book Memes

By Gabe Habash

Memes are part of the Reddit corner of the Internet, the space where sharing gives content a new life and, in many cases, changes its original meaning. What’s a meme? Know Your Meme describes it as “a piece of content or an idea that’s passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way.”

To put it a different way, a meme is an image with interchangeable text. For example, there’s Conspiracy Keanu, an image of a perplexed Bill & Ted-era Keanu Reeves, pondering really deep theories about how the world may not be what it seems.

Considering Know Your Meme has over 1,000 confirmed memes, of course there are going to be some literary memes out there. So we’ve spent countless hours searching meme sites, finding the best book-related entries out there. Enjoy!

Click here to read the rest of this story