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Google just bought Pyra. Or, to put it in clearer terms, Google just bought Blogger. I, um, yeah.

The bad speculation is that Blogger posts will get indexed in more or less real time. I suspect that won't happen, because there are certain technological barriers in the way, but it might. It seems more than likely that Blogger will at least be used for page discovery.

The catch-22 is that either Google intends to take advantage of synergies, which would seem liable to give Blogger users an advantage in search results, or Google just bought Pyra cause they're doing cool things, which is not the sort of thing a canny dot com should be doing. One shouldn't get an advantage on the search page just because one's using a certain tool. Well, time will tell.

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Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers.

Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I've never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.

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Worth noting: the BBC put out a call for people at the anti-war protests to send their digital snapshots to the BBC. Many responded. The BBC didn't put up the raw results, which is perhaps a good thing, but I wish they'd filtered it a little less -- we wind up with ten pictures. Still, it's wild to see a major news publication doing this kind of thing.

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It's a little known fact that the best gonzo journalists around are writing for a little ezine known as the Death Valley Driver Video Review.

One time I was making fun of Bionic J because she was wearing this big skiing goggles and I said she looked like a doofus like Yoko Ono.   She sat me down and told me about Yoko Ono and how I should respect her accomplishments because she invented New Wave or something.  One time she was showing us how to do the inverted Octupus Hold that Dos Caras invented or something and she was kinda stretching Baby A when that "Spirit In the Sky" song came on and she let go of the hold and drifted into the song.  "Never been a sinner I never sin- you know you got a friend in Jesus..."  she was singing under her breath and this look of serenity was on her face.  It wasn't religious or anything, it was more of a psychadelic thing but not like a drug thing.  It was really weird and yet really cool. It was like she could really get into to it- like she is deeper than anyone I've ever met.  Like she was all weirdly centered, not all over the place like my friends my age and I felt scared of her- liking she was stooping to deal with us shallow schoolgirls or something.

The amazing thing is not that this is a review of a wrestling match. The amazing thing is that Phil Schneider wrote a review of a wrestling match recast as a first person narrative about 60s pop music and made it make sense as a review. It tells me what I need to know. I wish I could write with half his flexibility.

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CafePress has pre-announced their CD and book print on demand services. They're hoping to get 'em online in March. Man, that's like less than a month away.

The prelim specs for books are pretty decent. They're gonna be taking PDF files. They'll probably support a range of sizes for both perfect bound and saddle stitched. Hopefully they'll support standard book rack paperback sizes.

They'll be doing data CDs shortly after launch.

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Daniel Keys Moran is sharing his current novel in progress, The Sheriff of Shokes, on his forums. (If that link fails, try this.) You'll have to register to read it. The Sheriff of Shokes is not set in the Continuing Time, but it is related. DKM explained this once.

Who is this Moran person? He wrote four pretty good novels back in the late 80s and early 90s. You can get them today via QuietVision, and I recommend them. He's one of the most graceful writers I've ever read, blessed and cursed with epic wit. Occasionally it gets in the way, but he's just so much fun to read.

His setting is the Continuing Time, which is a vast interconnected timeline covering about ten millennia. He says it's very detailed and that he has notes of gargantuan proportions that explain everything. Thirty-odd books, planned out and in some cases partially written.

Alas, he more or less ground to a halt as far as publishing anything goes back in 1994. In a chronology he sent out then, there are something like 30 Continuing Time novels, and we're never going to get to see them, which is pretty sad. He's passionate enough about his work to make me want to see the entire series, but not passionate enough to get the damned things done. Now that print on demand is a reality, there's no "my publisher sucks" to fall back on. And he married his old editor, so he's got someone who can edit books handy. No excuse for not giving us a book every couple of years.

Still. It's worth buying and reading that which we do have.