50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
Last night, my friends and I had a whisky tasting. As we neared the end, we were all feeling pretty happy … so I grabbed my silver sharpie and drew this, which I called #whiskyface.
It’s not as funny now as it was after several wee drams of scotch, but I think it's still worth sharing.
Preemptive FAQs: We tasted Caol Ila 12, Macallan Select Oak, Lagavulin 16, Laphroaig 10 and Laphroaig Quarter-Cask. Oh, and we poured our whisky into my Reddit glasses from r/Scotch.
I wrote this in 2004:
This morning over breakfast, I said to my wife, "Happy π day!"
"Happy pie day? What the hell are you talking about?"
"No, not 'pie'," I said. "'π'."
"Not 'pie,' but 'pie.'" She was clearly not amused. "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"
"Anne, look at the date on the calendar."
"Yes it's march 14th, and you're going to watch WrestleMania dos equis* with your brother." She frowned. "Are you trying to tell me that you're taking a pie to Jeremy's house? Because if you expect me to make you a pie . . ."
"No, I don't expect you to make me a pie." I said, well into that area where you've explained the joke so much, it's never going to be funny.
"Today is March fourteenth. That makes it 3.14 on the calendar. 3.14 is also known as π."
She blinked a few times.
"Oh. It's π day."
"Yes!" I said. "And at 1:59 pm, it will be even more π day. Isn't that cool!?"
She took a long, thoughtful drink from her coffee mug, carefully set it down and said, "You are such a nerd."
And to commemorate pi day in 2009:
I present this incredibly awesome song by my friend Chris Hardwick:
This year … well, I got nothin'. Except maybe … maybe we could use today's date as an excuse to talk about math with kids!
Yeah! Check this out: When I think back on my years in school, I realize that math wasn't hard, math was just boring. Until I got into high school and started solving equations in algebra, which were framed as puzzles for me to solve, math was always framed as this collection of facts that we just had to know by rote, because … well, nobody really knows why, we just do it and stop asking so many questions you damn troublemaking kid.
Maybe we could use today's date, 3.14, and its relation to π as an opportunity to show kids how numbers and mathematics are all around us all the time, like a secret language or something fun like that.
…or you could just watch the video Chris and Mike made and leave it at that. I'm not the boss of you.
Edited to add: Over at Geek Mom, they're doing a ton of fun math stuff for kids today that's all pi-centric. I highly recommend taking a look.
Project Kindle Store Get Books In has begun:
I started with Hunter because it was already in .mobi format, and it's my most recent thing (it's still in pay-what-you-want-even-nothing format, incidentally.) Assuming the world doesn't implode around me, I'll get Sunken Treasure in the Kindle store next.
Also, while I did this, I made myself an Amazon Author's page. Neat!
My brain desperately wants to write some stories, so I've been digging through the pile of Ideas That Didn't Quite Make It to see if anything in there inspires me, or is at least worth dusting off and poking with a sharp stick. So far, two stories look promising, though one of them needs a fairly serious rewrite. I also have this Batman story that I really want to write, that I know is going to be extremely awesome, but I doubt would ever find life at DC. It refuses to let go of my creative forebrain, though, so I may end up writing … fan fiction. Ahem.
During my travels though the pile, I found ePub versions of a few of my works, and I used Calibre to convert them into DRM-free .mobi format. Everything seems to be okay in the conversion, so I put Hunter and Sunken Treasure into the Kindle Store for 99 cents and 2.99, respectively. It looks like they'll get through the system there by the end of the week. If they do well enough, I'll make it a priority to get Memories of the Future Volume 1 and Happiest Days converted and published there before I go back to Eureka next month.
I would very much like to be one of those people who are making mountains of money self-publishing through the Kindle store, but I'm not all that keen on learning about sparkly vampires and bullshit, so it may be more like molehills for me. Still, the idea of being able to reach a zillion people as easily as "go to the Kindle store" in their Kindle menu is pretty awesome.
A question before I dive back into the pile of Ideas That Didn't Quite Make It: The Complete Works DVDs I took to ECCC were snapped up pretty quickly, and I probably could have sold twice as many as I took with me. I had a lot of fun putting them together, making the little sleeves and putting the seals on them and all that stuff, so I was considering making some more and selling them online, right here. Are you interested in that? Leave a comment for me so I can get a sense of what, if any, demand there is for that sort of thing, okay?
If you got one of the DVDs, I'd love to hear what you thought about it, and if you are happy with your purchase, too.