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Last week, Rich Burlew broke all kinds of records when he launched a Kickstarter campaign to reprint his webcomic The Order Of The Stick; in the last twenty-four hours, Tim Schafer has raised over one million dollars to make an old-school graphic adventure game. Kickstarter has allowed these creators to reach out to their audience, and completely disintermediated not only their respective publishing industries, but the entire marketplace.

It should come as no surprise that the internet allows for this kind of individual patronage. Any number of creative individuals can thank the internet for their success, from Jonathan Coulton to Leo Laporte. It was inevitable that modern communication technology, when coupled with these new societies and communities, would allow us to re...

Let’s take another run at this, shall we?

I was going to shut the Bettyverse down. That was my vote. I spent a couple hours a week on it, maybe, but Alastair was spending up to ten hours with all the back end stuff, Friday Bests, Weekend Editions. We have kids to raise, a business to run. 20% of his work week is a big chunk, and we couldn’t do it anymore.

“Shut it down,” I said.

“I don’t think we have to do that,” Alastair said. “Let me think of something.”

A few days later, after spending even more hours trying to figure out a way to keep the Bettyverse without it being so onerous on us, he came to me with a plan.

“And the thing is,” he said, “it gives the writers an audience of t...

Although some of my friends laugh at me for it, I believe that we can find important lessons in the lives of animals and our interactions with them. Maybe it goes back to adoring Philosophy classes in college and vehmently defending them whenever someone would claim they were somehow less useful than nebulous “business” classes. I firmly believe that the search for the good life is useful and will contribute more to my lasting happiness and peace, which in turn will help me be efficient and contribute more to society, than taking an entire class on how to manage employees. I’ll use what I’ve learned from Machiavelli and Arendt to manage people, thank you very much. Half joking there, I’ll also use what I learned about Aristotle and positive-based animal tra...

I saw yesterday that I was up to ten reviews for my paranormal romance ebook over on Amazon--all of them 5 Stars, which is very gratifying indeed!

(If you're one of the folks who left a review, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. With ebooks, this is even more important!)

I was reading the 10th review, which was very cute and very funny, when I discovered a surprise twist towards the end. It kind of tickled me, so I thought I'd post it here.

5.0 out of 5 stars Entrapment!, February 7, 2012 By Harvey L. - See all my reviews This review is from: Witch Ever Way You Can (Kindle Edition) Entrapment! That's what it was. I get this innocent-looking e-mail, shamelessly promot...