The Decline Of The High Elves

Via I-Anya, I recently found out about a series of Harry Potter fanfics that being published by Random House.  How cool is that?  It is nice to see good fan fiction taken so seriously.  Sadly, The Decline Of The High Elves is only in Spanish, but I hope there will be a English translation soon.  I really like this quote from the author, Francisca Solar, via a BBC article about the publication:

“When I read the fifth book, I was so disappointed - I’m a very critical reader, and I’m a huge fan, so the expectation of this fifth book was great,” Solar said.

“I took the principal characters and I did a story that is more rich than Rowling’s story, because you can have access to the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters.

“In the Harry Potter saga, you can only have access to Harry’s feelings and thoughts. That is a partial view of the Potter universe.”

 

John Coltrane

The San Francisco Chronicle remembers the late Alice Coltrane, but also discusses John Coltrane’s quiet involvement with the civil rights movement:

During the crest of John Coltrane’s life, from 1957 to 1967, jazz was popular music. That it shared the stage with folk, soul, rhythm and blues, and rock ‘n’ roll was unmistakable, but jazz stood out for the way it improvised, took musical chances, and — with certain songs — captured the nation’s mood so poignantly. John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” recorded in 1963, after the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham, eulogized the four young girls who perished and the dozens of others who were injured. Spare and with no lyrics, “Alabama” is a haunting and beautiful meditation that, heard today, still has the ability to make listeners shudder.

 

Second Life Open Source

I am really excited about Second Life becoming open source.  Boing Boing puts it best:

Second Life is distinct because it allows in-game creators of objects to “own” them, sell copies of them, give them away, and license them under Creative Commons. Most other worlds require that you assign all your copyright to the game’s corporate owners — and prevent you from doing some kinds of creative stuff to avoid copyright hassles (musicians in Star Wars Galaxies could only perform compositions provided by Sony, for example).

But there’s a fly in the ointment — it’s not very meaningful to amass in-game wealth if your ability to use it is contingent on your ongoing good relations with a single company. What good is your wonderful Second Life real-estate, architecture, gadgets and wardrobe if Linden Labs can throw you out at any time? It’s like amassing Soviet-era rubles — you could only spend them in Russia.

But by opening up the source code for Second Life, Linden is inviting a competitive marketplace for Second Life hosters. Indeed, they describe a “Second Life grid” of multiple Second Life hosters who interconnect — the way that today’s Web consists of a single Web with millions of servers that are all linked together by their users.

O’Reilly Radar has more information about the actual source code.

Weekly Reader

  • Simon Armitage discusses his new translation of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight over at The Guardian:

The poem is also a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale. For want of a better word, it is also a myth, and like all great myths of the past its meanings seem to have adapted and evolved, proving itself eerily relevant 600 years later. As one example, certain aspects of Gawain’s situation seem oddly redolent of a more contemporary predicament, namely our complex and delicate relationship with the natural world. The Gawain poet had never heard of climate change and was not a prophet anticipating the onset of global warming. But medieval society lived hand in hand with nature, and nature was as much an enemy as a friend. It is not just for decoration that the poem includes passages relating to the turning of the seasons, or detailed accounts of the landscape, or graphic descriptions of our dealings with the animal kingdom. The knight who throws down the challenge at Camelot is both ghostly and real. Supernatural, yes, but also flesh and blood. He is something in the likeness of ourselves, and he is not purple or orange or blue with yellow stripes. Gawain must negotiate a deal with a man who wears the colours of the leaves and the fields. He must strike an honest bargain with this manifestation of nature, and his future depends on it.