Incoming Books from the Top Shelf

You still have a little more than twenty-four hours to take advantage of Top Shelf's amazing yearly web sale, which ends on Friday. I just got my package of wonderfulness, which contains too many books for me to list them separately. (And, besides, I'm not going to do my usual thing and insert Amazon links, since that defeats the whole purpose of hyping the Top Shelf sale.)

But you can see them in this picture, including basically new graphic novels by Jess Fink, Rob Harrell, and the Amazing Unrelated Cannon Brothers, Zander and Kevin.

The books you crave might not be the same as mine, but Top Shelf has a wide array of great stuff, and the prices right now are, frankly, unbelievable.

If you actually have money to spend and eyes to read books and still don't take advantage of this sale, I'm afraid that I will judge you.

I'll give you that link one last time: Top Shelf web sale. After that, you're on your own.

Top Shelf Sale

Top Shelf, one of the finest publishers of interesting comics on this or any other continent, is having one of their periodic amazing sales right now, and I urge you to go check it out and buy a few things.

They have comics for a buck, graphic novels for three -- lots of stuff half off or more, and everything I've read from Top Shelf has been...well, top shelf.

I've blogged about their sales before -- they do this in September a lot -- and here's last year's post about the stuff I bought then, as a taster. Look, it's a whole lot of great comics at ridiculously low prices -- if that's not appealing, I don't know how you find the energy to go on living.

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Please, Sir, Buy Some Popcorn From a Poor Orphan Boy

Well, not an orphan boy -- it's my younger son, generally called Thing 2 here -- but he is selling popcorn, and it would be swell if any popcorn-lovers among you would buy some from him.

I may need to back up slightly to explain.

You see, in the world of fundraisers for youth organizations, there was once the great Treaty of Snack Foods. The Girl Scouts (and their associated Brownie gurkhas) claimed all of the territories of Cookie, and the Boys, magnanimously, agreed to limit their operations to the delightful land of Popcorn. [1] From that point forward, each organization -- assured of a consistent flow of funding to support camping, hiking and similar character-building activities -- was able to remain at peace with its great sibling, working separately but in tandem to provide unhealthy, but exceptionally tasty, munchables to their local communities.

And so, once a year, the forces of male Scoutdom -- both Boy and Cub -- set forth into their neighborhoods, wearing their crispest uniform shirts, and blink their doe-like eyes at any adults they encounter, asking, imploringly, "Would you like to buy some popcorn to support Cub Scouts?"

It is that time once again; Thing 2 has already been on two customer-hunting expeditions, and I have at my side a supplementary order form to post at my place of work. But this is the 21st century! Everything is -- as it must be -- online. And so Scouts can cajole popcorn orders from people far away from themselves, through the power of...a website!

If you are so benighted as to have no Cub Scouts near you -- or so popcorn-crazed that your local provider can't fill your needs -- and you're willing to pay the frankly quite high prices for these goods [2], then, please, click on this link, and help my son achieve his dream: winning a marshmallow-shooting crossbow for his very own.

Again, just click here, and type in the secret cub-scout number 7894409 on the upper right, where it says "You are supporting no one." -- because aren't you ashamed of yourself, supporting no one like that? -- and help a boy achieve his dream of high-powered soft ordinance.

Remember, you must enter that secret cub-scout number -- 7894409 -- or you will be supporting some other child (whom I'm sure is quite nice, but not nearly as deserving as my son), or, even worse, supporting no one.

And, really, is that what you want to be known for in life: supporting no one? Surely not?



[1] The Sea Scouts occasionally claim dominion over potato-based snack foods, but this is disputed; the Boys have traditionally claimed all of the salty treats as their own.

[2] This is fundraising popcorn; the point is to contribute money to a good cause, not to maximize your caloric intake for the lowest cost.

Another Excuse for Me To Say "Widget" A Few Times

Amazon has woken up after their long post-Christmas nap, yawning and stretching and scratching their collective belly. The warehouse, frankly, is a shambles, full of wrapping-paper ends, little bits of saved tape on every exposed surface, and half-packed boxes. Sure, inventory is down after the great holiday rush, but there's still masses of returned products that work perfectly well, if they can just figure out a way to sell them.

"Man," thinks Amazon to itself, "I've got to make a widget to move some of this stuff."

And so it did, and that widget, through the magic of the Internet, will appear immediately below:

Who knows what wonders will appear in the wondrous widget? Not I....

Top Shelf Comics Sale!

Top Shelf, one of the better publishers of comics in North America, is having a massive sale to celebrate the imminent release of The Surrogates, a movie based on one of their graphic novels.

Some books are as low as $3, which is frankly a steal for something like That Salty Air (my review is here) or Beach Safari (review) or After the Snooter. Besides the long list of $3 stuff, prices are also cut on The Surrogates, a number of Alan Moore books, Super Spy, Andy Runton's Owly books, and lots more.

I'm over there right now (in another window), working out what I'm going to buy; I recommend you do the same.