Zombies are on the move, and Kevin and Mara face some rather unusual “couple stuff” in this installment of ‘Someone Liche You’.

If I were to invest more time in getting this novel into shape for a book being published in the conventional way, I’d probably re-write the story to start from Chapter 1.9. This is where the action rises. Yeah, there was some scary stuff in the park, but it’s in Chapter 1.9 and 1.10 that we are treated to the start of the end of days for the New City.

He shook his head, feeling a hard stone of disappointment feeling in his gut, let down in himself for allowing the data walls to trick him. They were clearly the same as the local media and of the intranets– the information they displayed was capable of deception– just like anything else. He should have known better.

If our windows can lie to us, what can you trust, he wondered, stepping over the shells of the dead scupperers, still lifeless on the floor where they’d been smashed.

Poor Sugar Island. It was too good to last.

A few notes: Sugar Island Wisconsin is a real, unincorporated community in Wisconsin. But in this story’s timeline, it’s the largest, biggest and most technologically advanced megapolis on the North Continent.

The North Continent is what they call North America in this novel. Because America has given way to a hogemenistic planet-wide government controlled mostly by the secret world order. I can’t remember if this fact is included in the story or not. Consider this a DVD Bonus.

As always, the whole novel is being posted at indy book publisher Red Lemona.de and will eventually be packaged up as a single downloadable. But even now, you can start from the beginning of the novel, if you’re just catching up.

Today’s Chapters:

1.9

1.10

Why you need to know about TOR and why you will probably be using it in the future.

I’ve been pretty quiet about the whole SOPA thing. For your of you who don’t know, SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (and it’s Analog in the Senate (PIPA)) will allow the United States government to block certain websites based on an arbitrary set of criteria. You can find out a lot more online. It’s censorship, basically. In the same sense that China, Siria, Iran and other human-rights unfriendly countries do. Welcome to America in 2012. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

It’s a shame it’s come to this. Write your senator. Tell him you won’t reelect him if he supports the PIPA bill. Write the president. Tell him you care about the freedom of information. Tell your mom. Tell your sister. Sticker your cat. Shout it from the rooftops. Here’s a huge list of cool and easy stuff you can do to make your voice heard.

The bottom line: the world’s greatest library, the collection of the knowledge and culture that makes us a people, the Internet, is about to be shut off from you. You’ll still be able to use it, but you’ll never be able to trust it. The internet is going away in favor of a brand-friendly propaganda-only machine that prevents you from freely using, thinking, or learning things that your government, and the corporation it works for, don’t want you to know. Maybe you think this is a good thing. I don’t know. I hope not. I want us to stay friends, you and I.

If this doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what else will. Someday, the internet you know and love could look like this:

But here’s a sliver of hope for you.

I have, for years, been using something called “Tor.” Tor is “a free and open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as ‘traffic analysis’.”

They actually have a bootable live disk (based on Debian) now that works as a computing environment wherein all the traffic is routed through TOR. This is the same software that internet users in countries with oppressive governments use. It’s slower and clunkier, but it works, it’s (mostly) free and (mostly) safe.

Download the stand-alone browser bundle and give it a try. What can it hurt?

The bottom line is, Tor works. If not only as a proxy, at least as a source of anonymity. And using it, configuring it, and supporting it, I think, is something that is going to be very important to our future as a people.

Sad that it is so. But you would do yourself a real service to familiarize yourself with Tor and the Tor Project.

What is it about a 3x5 notecard that is so magical? I cut a bunch of my notecards down so I could fit them in the little biz-card pocket in my folder. Now they don't work as good. Damnit.

Look at me! I am raging against the machine!

I've been very interested in the slow, but inevitable build up of Google backlash. Anything that has ridden so long and so high on a wave of positive public opinion has to come crashing down eventually.

What's interesting, though, is that it hasn't really hung on the typical arguments. It's not a "privacy" thing. It's not a "evil" thing. It's not an "its-open-source-but-no-not-really" thing. The big arrow that will stick on google, that will probably lead to the inevitable betrayal of it's fans, is this "bubble" argument.

It's an old argument, but a good one. Google has become the de-facto gate-keeper to the information, and because it's the first (and often only) place people look for information, it's has a lot of power to shape the information that enters your consideration.

The search engine, DuckDuckGo.com has basically been pushing this argument as a way for it to gain the attention of the people, (And, I'm not unaware of their financial incentive to do so; a half-a-percent of world-wide search traffic is worth, what, like a quadillion-billion dollars?). That being said, GoDuckGo seems as though they really are trying to be a viable alternative to Google Search.

Lets get hypothetical.

I have a dog who needs some training. And I need help training him. WHat I need are some training aids for dogs. So I quite naturally put in the search terms: "DOG AIDS"

Interestingly, Yahoo Answers concern about Canine Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome seems to rank highly on both engines, but it's Number One on Google. And not remotely what I was looking for.

Take a look at the suggested searches. Both sites nail the "training" component in their suggestions, but Google thinks maybe I wanted to know more about dog STDs in general, and DOG Herpes in particular. Or maybe I meant Cats. Maybe. Although, I'm pretty sure I've never misspelled the word "dog" C-A-T. Go Duck Go does a nice job of suggesting products I might think about buying, because really, information is just a conduit to shopping, in the end.

The point is this: All of these products and services have one thing in mind, at the end of the day: YOU ARE A DUMB SHEEP WHO CAN BE EASILY LEAD INTO BUYING SOMETHING THAT SOMEONE IS PAYING THEM TO LEAD YOU TO.

Yea. It's cynical. But that don't make it untrue. The silver lining around this cloud is that there is hope. Now that you're aware that your clicks are being commditized, you can fight it. Don't let your search engine do your thinking for you. You're smarter than that.

The internet is great and important, but your brain is greater and importanter. Don't stop using one just because you're using the other.

Comedy Gold!

Gabe: Watertown Grass Fed Ground Beef is $4.19 per pound.
Jeni: geez.
Jeni: factory meats it is!
Gabe: Ground Elk Patties are $8 per pound.
Gabe: Elk Tenderloin is $29.00 per pound.
Jeni: We would be better off splitting a cow with someone.
Gabe: Just like in Apocalypse Now.
Jeni: Umm, sure...
Gabe: This is the end...
Gabe: My only friend...
Gabe: The End.
Jeni: Ok, Colonel Kurtz.

Source. For.

When I was a adolescent reading Sandman comics for the first time, I was amazed. Here was a mature, intelligent story that was didn't treat the comics medium like a kid's experience or with an angry indy sneer.
(Much love to Love & Rockets guys, from whom I would buy at least one copy of their amazing work every time I made a trip to the comics shops in Madison, but it was the Sandman stories that kept me coming back each month.)
I bought my first two copies of Sandman in November of 199X, and on the way home I was in a terrible car accident that should have killed me, but didn't. In fact, apart from a few bruises, I was fine. The car? Not so much. My dad rocked on his heels and wept when he saw the damage.
Needless to say, I didn't get back to the comics shop the next month to pick up the new issues of Sandman, so my comics reading slowed down for a while. Eventually, a shop opened up in my hometown so I could make a pick-up list and I got a few more issues of Sandman, and I came to really understand that this Neil Gaiman guy, he's special.
20 years later, I'm sitting in my cube in the lakehouse, and the rest of the world has caught up to Gaiman.

Gaiman, Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer and Damian Kulash spent the night last night recording 8-in-8. The album will be presented at the Rethink Music conference, which is being put on by Berklee College of Music and the music business website MIDEM, along with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School. They're donating the proceeds of the album to a Boston charity.

Cool stuff. Buy it.