[Plura-list] Bubble

[Cory Doctorow]

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This Monday (Aug 23), I'm helping Ben Rosenbaum's launch his new novel, "The Unraveling," in a livestreamed event with LA's excellent Book Soup.

https://www.booksoup.com/event/benjamin-rosenbaum-conversation-cory-doctorow-discusses-unraveling

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Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/

Today's links

* Bubble: Fantastic graphic novel adaptation of the brilliant comedy/sf podcast.

* This day in history: 2001, 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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🪦 Bubble

Bubble is a wildly improbable artifact - a graphic novel adaptation of a comedy/drama podcast that manages to turn podcasting into a visual medium. 

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250245564

Written by Jordan Morris and Sarah Morgan with art by Tony Cliff and colors by Natalie Riess, this Firstcecond book manages to recapture the comedy, the snark, the trenchant commentary and the drama of the original Maximim Fun podcast series.

https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/bubble/

Bubble is a comedy/sf story about a distant outpost on a hostile planet where human colonists live under armored domes that keep out the hostile, overpowered critters that live on the surface. 

The bubble-dwellers have lives much like our own, dominated by social media, nostalgic sitcom binge-streaming and precarious gig work whose miseries are relieved by craft beer and trivia nights. 

The corporation that owns the bubbles and ultimately controls the lives of the colonists is mostly benign, except when it is arbitrary and vengeful, and it certainly is innovative. 

For example, when monsters start to make incursions into the bubble, management harnesses the power of market forces to fight them, launching Huntr, a gig-work app that connects freelance monster-hunters with residents who have monsters that need hunting.

Unlike a boring state-based public safety apparatus, these freelance Huntrs are incentivized to keep it all really entertaining, stalking the interlopers with cool parkour moves, shouting dope catchphrases, and then posing for dead-monster selfies afterwards.

But it turns out that gig work isn't actually that great, actually. And also, maybe living in a company town isn't all that great even if you can order a really good oak milk latte with an app with great UX .

Maybe, in fact, it's all kind of...sinister? Plus, a lot of the best Huntrs are also bush-babies - born and raised outside dome among people who live with monsters in the wilds - and there's something a little weird about the way the company is recruiting and scoring them.

The conspiracy that unspools - about mutant powers, a mystic crystal, and a deep secret about the founding of the colony - makes a great vehicle for a cast of fantastic, snarky, flawed characters and hilarious, dry and ironic dialog.

It feels like a perfect synthesis of the weaponized irony and meta-humor of the best of 90s culture and Millennial tired-of-this-bullshit rage. The acting in the original audio drama caught this perfectly (especially Tavi Gevinson's performance).

The transition to visual storytelling replacing that acting with superb character design and delicious facial expressions from Cliff's art. In either medium, this is a knockout.

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🪦 This day in history

#20yrsago AP threatens copyright suit over one-sentence quotation https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/https://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#20yrsago The joys of dumpster diving https://web.archive.org/web/20011115053410/https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0808/p13s1-lihc.html

#10yrsago Google's Nym Wars must end https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#10yrsago G+'s Real Names clusterfuck https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/nym-wars/

#5yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#5yrsago  US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG

#1yrago Boeing fixes the 737 Max problem (by renaming the jet) https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8

#1yrago College Covid app is a security dumpster-fire https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#thick-description

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🪦 Colophon

Currently writing: 

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. Friday's progress: 264 words (16350 words total)

* A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation.  PLANNING

* A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown."  FINAL EDITS

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Managing Aggregate Demand https://craphound.com/news/2021/08/08/managing-aggregate-demand/

Upcoming appearances:  

* Launch for Ben Rosenbaum's The Unraveling, Aug 23 (Booksoup)
https://www.booksoup.com/event/benjamin-rosenbaum-conversation-cory-doctorow-discusses-unraveling

* Ethics in Tech with Dr Sarah T Roberts, UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy, Aug 25 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ethics-in-tech-a-conversation-series-tickets-166575189877

* From Wayback to Way Forward: The Internet Archive turns 25, Oct 21
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-wayback-to-way-forward-the-internet-archive-turns-25-virtual-tickets-163615196457

* Keynote for SeaGL 2021, Nov 5-6
https://seagl.org/news/2021/06/08/format-2021

Recent appearances:

* Privacy Without Monopoly (Defcon)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deRRR5B1hwI

* Building the Digital Commons (Money on the Left)
https://moneyontheleft.org/2021/08/01/building-digital-commons-with-cory-doctorow/

* Reset the Internet? (Project Syndicate) 
https://www.project-syndicate.org/podcasts/reset-the-internet

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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