Prelude – One Hipster’s Story

In my final year at college I helped start a music magazine that briefly went nationwide. For a little while we covered a brutally hip range of ‘indie’ and electronica acts: Interviewing, smooching, listening to a lot of great new music and occasionally finding time to publish some decent writing.
Then, about a year ago, exactly twelve months after we’d started the magazine, and just before the release of our sixth issue and third nationwide release, trouble hit paradise like a leaky tanker with a drunken …

At P Con last week they ran a fun little contest. The idea was to produce a complete short story (SF, horror or fantasy) in just 100 words.
In the end my efforts didn’t place, though I’m egotistical enough to suspect the judge didn’t grok them what-so-ever. Perhaps he just preferred the story about the farting dragon…
In any case, it was a fun little writing excercise. Here are two brief tales I entered. Interestingly enough, I think this is one contest that might be significantly easier in “mainstream” fiction, …

Social media, user generated content, folksonomies, Web 2.0. Geeks usually view these emerging phenomena in a glowing light – as ways for individuals and groups to co-operatively contribute to the generation of technology, culture and information. To cynics such buzzwords define methods for private companies and corporations to build products and databases without needing to pay for the work involved. Either way, social media has become ubiquitous online, with topic specific social networks connecting the audiences of most major websites, while user generated content (from Facebook posts, to Google Maps …

I’d been wondering why our download speeds had halved, and why, for the first time since signing up with Digiweb, we’d exceeded our monthly (20 gig) download limit. I did some back of the envelope calculations and even including generous allotments of guestimation for Quicktime trailers from Apple and flash video from Youtube, it didn’t add up.
I ran a virus scan with AVG, and spyware scans with the old faithfuls AdAware and Spybot, which uncovered nothing. So I just assumed Digiweb were going through a rough patch, and we’d downloaded …