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This is the point at which members of the Kindle’s design team may want to take out some pen and paper for notes.

There’s four different covers on the print book, a hand-bound limited hardcover whose end-papers come from the paper ephemera of various writer-friends; a free audiobook read aloud by voice actor/writers and a for-pay CD-on-demand of the same thing; a donation campaign, and even a one-of-a-kind super-premium chance to commission a new story for the book for $10,000. All the financials for the book will be disclosed online and bound into the books on a monthly basis.

If Cory were to start a religion, I would worship there.

We word types love to piss and moan for days about minor niggles in usage and grammar, but, I’m worried about something a lot bigger and a lot more malignant: a broadly held belief that deliberately opaque PR horseshit is not only okay, but necessary in order to sound — horrifically enough — “real.” And, that’s a shame.

Merlin not only rips those who foist this PR bullshit upon us a few new orifices, he also has the courtesy to show them how it should be done. That, my friends, is class.

“You’re not delivering the facts, you’re delivering emotion and weak opinion. The best data in the world is useless if your means of conveyance is suspect.”

Rands on making excuses.

Saving these words for every future argument I get into.

This midwestern farm country is in my blood. By build and by disposition, I am a prairie schooner.

We’re so ecstatic to get that single useful email out of hundreds that we can’t keep ourselves from compulsively pressing the new email lever over and over and over, hoping it will happen again soon, like the caged rats in Skinners’ experiments.

So many great quotes and ideas here that I chose this one because it is so provocative especially when taken out of context.

I think what I like most about this, YAEIER™ (yet another email is evil rant), is that while all the right notes are hit about the problem, the solution offered is just as smart:

Instead of abusing email as a “one size fits all” conduit for communication, be smart. Know when to escalate your communication to the right medium for the particular message you’re trying to deliver.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Stop every email you are reading and go here now.

Been meaning to link to the beautiful redesign of the personal site of my friend Jorge Quinteros for a while now. Check it out. Understaded elegance at work here.

Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you..and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible.

Philip K. Dick wrote this five months before he died, four months before film was released, and only having seen a short clip on TV. Yet, even he knew then what we know now. Every science fiction film made since owes a tremendous debt to Blade Runner.

Of further note, if you have not seen the Final Cut (not to be confused with the directors cut – see here) of the film you have not seen the film and, I would argue, you have perhaps seen one of the worst sci-fi films made, not the best.

Also, Letters of Note is one of my favorite diversions on all of the internets.

In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they’re indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We’ve now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.

Yep.

The result of all this is that it’s even harder to find blogs that you can read for pleasure. Whereas reading offline is for downtime, reading online has been demoted to killing time, and tablogging is to blame. I think it’s time that well-meaning publishers abandoned the blog format in favour of something more suitable for their content, their audience, and their long-term prosperity.

Every bit of this is so good I wish I could quote the whole thing.