SL Book Club, Session I: Cory Doctorow's *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*

Two more things, as I post the transcript in NWN:

1) I'm looking for a screenshot of me jumping out of my chair and hovering above the table like an idiot. If you got 'em, send 'em to my Inventory or as .bmps to [email]hamlet@secondlife.com[/email].

2) I notice in the transcript that after the event, Kanker Greenacre wanted to continue discussion of the book in the forums. Here, here! I hope he and anyone else interested continues it here, in this topic. In fact, if a conversation starts up, I'll e-mail Cory and invite him over, to hopefully join in...

I took several screenshots as well as kept a slightly cleaned-up chatlog. You can find them here:

http://www.binocorp.com/doctorow/

A couple of my screenshots appear to have been used in NWN! Thanks Hamlet!

Dude! Those are almost 4MB _each_! You might want to convert to png or something.

I will gladly bump this thread as I have just completed reading the book (yay Palm device readers!). Thumbs up - this is very cool material. I haven't read anything this intriguing since "Snow Crash" - if you liked that, do yourself a favor and check this out. It is a fairly quick read, but worth it.

=Sinclair

Cory spent some time at our book club enthusing about the Atkins diet ("props to my homey Atkins", is how he put it, if I remember right!), so I thought folks here would be interested in today's Salon cover story:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/30/low_carb_hackers/index.html

... When Sifry, now the co-founder and CTO of Sputnik, a wireless device company, saw Cory Doctorow, the boingboing blogger and science-fiction author, at the conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center, he almost didn't recognize him.

"I hadn't seen him in a while, and he had lost so much weight with Atkins -- maybe 35 or 40 pounds -- that he just looked like a changed man," says Sifry, who founded the Bay Area Linux Users Group and co-founded Linuxcare, a start-up aimed at providing support services for Linux users. But Doctorow, a self-described "renaissance geek," wasn't the only slimmed-down figure among the usual crew of techie conference-goers. Doc Searls, coauthor of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," was also looking svelter, from his own regime of low-carbing...

Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates, sees a natural affinity between his brethren and the diet: "Read the alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people attacking their bodies like they would attack a logic board," he says. "Substitute 'faster bus speed' for 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty close to an overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice popular with hardware hackers in which computer processors are tweaked so that they run faster than their out-of-the-box speeds.

Oooo that's crazy Hamlet.

Just as an aside, I heard somewhere (think it was The Daily Show) that people lose weight on the Atkins Diest because they spend the time they would normally be eating TALKING about the fact that they are on it. ^.~

Props to Cory though!

i'm not the one who first noticed this but if you turn the Atkins "A" logo upside down it's exactly like the INSOC logo from the movie 1984.

Fat is health! Bread is death! Freedom is slavery!