Says Strange Horizons staffer Kate Cowan:

1. Strange Horizons publishes short fiction, poetry, reviews and articles of interest to the speculative fiction community each week on Monday. Once each month we also publish an art gallery spotlighting a different speculative artist.

2. All of our 40+ staff members are volunteers. All the money from the funddrive goes to operating costs of the website, and so that we can pay our contributors professional rates. Yes, that's right. We pay for stories and art for a free web magazine. Pretty awesome!

3. We have some seriously cool book packages and other prizes this year. Everyone who donates will be entered into a prize drawing at the end of the drive.

You can donate to Strange Horizons here. They only need $3,000 more, and every teeny bit helps.

Image by Jeremy Tolbert.

Caveman Robot writes that you should only submit a bad Spock drawing if it meets the following criteria:

0. When some else looks at it they should ask you "is that meant to be Spock?!" with an interrobang at the end!?
1. Hackneyed, maybe you were drunk when you drew it
2. Totally Punk Rock, you should actual break your pen when drawing it
3. Ham fisted, as if you had not understanding of form
4. Half Baked, the dumber Spock looks the better
5. Sloppy, as if a chimp with metal hooks for hands dipped them in ink
7. Don't let your ability to draw (or lack there of) get in the way of drawing Bad Spocks!
8. Not Spock with a beard that is Evil Spock from the Dark Mirror Universe!
9. What happen to Number 6?
10. If you don't like Star Trek all the better!
11. YOU SHOULD CREATE IT YOURSELF, IT CAN BE A DIGITAL COLLAGE, AS LONG CREATED BY YOU!

Bad Spock Drawings via Mental Floss.

While plenty of studies have already shown that friendships have become much more casual in an era of "friending" random people on MySpace, this new study takes that idea further. Its authors describe how reality TV and social networking sites feed into each other, creating a world where many people think of themselves and their friends less as real people and more like iconic celebrities. The researchers call this a shift toward having "mediated" selves, as if all social interactions take place via the media.

According to PhysOrg:

These heavy [reality TV] viewers also produced a significantly larger number of mediated selves and had a greater intimacy toward, and urge to interact with, the mediated social images of others.

All of these, say the researchers, are commonly considered celebrity behaviors . . .

"Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality TV characters," [researcher Michael] Stefanone says, adding that these behaviors are believed to reflect the systematic processing of messages and behaviors modeled within the [reality TV] genre.

But if you regard this study as picking up on an early stage in a greater social change regarding friendship, it's easy to see how the good kind of real-life promiscuity might be involved too. If we all begin to see ourselves as mediated people, as celebrities, we're less likely to need intimacy before taking the plunge into the sack. We'll imagine that we "know" somebody already because we've seen them online and so we don't need all those "take me out to coffee" preliminaries before getting busy.

We're All Stars Now [via PhysOrg]

Also, you can check out a PDF of the study.

You can see more videos shot during the blackout here, including one by Hutchins' fellow podcasting novelist Mur Lafferty. But as the inclusion of pros like Lafferty makes clear, this isn't going to be pure user-generated madness. Hutchins has lined up contributions from frequent Star Wars novel writer Michael Stackpole, as well as Scott Sigler, podcaster and author of Infected. Yes, it's a giant circle of SF podcasting goodness.

And you can play along too. Writes Hutchins:

How can you play? You gotta believe in this conceit: On November 19, 2007, the U.S. suffered a coordinated terrorist attack, and was plunged into a nationwide blackout. The country devolved into chaos. Power and order were restored two weeks later. You are invited to be a participant in that blackout. I'm opening the gates and empowering you to create content that will appear in the OBSIDIAN podcast and YouTube experience. You can record video of yourself suffering through this mayhem. You can call a voice mail number and leave a panicked message, or a news report from the field.

Become a Victim of the Obsidian Blackout [JC Hutchins]

Here's a snippet from the story's opening:

We stood on a hill overlooking the meadow. A bunch of other kids ambled behind us, rags and bones, scruffy faces, some little ones on the shoulders of the bigger. Bit by bit, as Uxo and the damn machine cleared the meadow, we'd advance to the new safe zone for a better look.

It was a comical sight, if not for the stakes: Volkovoy, dull gray heap, like a breaching whale, trundled and pivoted, roared and smoked, extruding claws and spades and hammers. It plowed up the sod. Now and then, if it couldn't defuse a dinger, Volkovoy flashed and shook, encasing and detonating the thing, then dropping it out the back, busted metal dung. Meanwhile, Uxo, sweetie, his tail curled back like the tongue of a letter "Q," walked and sniffed and walked. His smart flat face was matted and dirty, but when he yipped and looked back at me and the kids - "A bomb here, boss!" he seemed to say. "Look how good I am!" - his eyes were full of light. Then I'd tiptoe out to fetch the dinger and disable it. He knew not to lick me then.

The whole story is free online. Check it out. Photograph by Sarah Pickering.

"Uxo, Bomb Dog" [via Futurismic]

Here's what you'll get from this fictional company:

The DATAPOINTS Active Privacy® System allows members to control who sees and analyzes their unified data profile (UDP). In return DATAPOINTS® members receive an ongoing income stream based on the detail, purity and 'interestingness' of their UDP.

A kind of dystopian mashup of Choicepoint and Google, Datapoints comes from a future where Big Brother has been privatized and made "fun." If you're irritated by corporate-speak and web industry jibber-jabber, you've got to check this out.

Datapoints [corporate website]

Humans may have crushed the neosapien rebellion, but many of the bioengineered slaves continue to foment insurrection on the planets they were bred to live on. Meanwhile, the exosquad team, part of an elite military unit, works on keeping humans safe from all threats, neosapien and otherwise. Obviously influenced by popular anime import Robotech, Exosquad is surprisingly engaging and well-written, with characters who confront the darkness of war and death — as well as the coolness of giant robot suits.

Today's lunchtime distraction is definitely the free first season of Exosquad on Hulu. Watch it. (Thanks, Dan!)

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

Visitors to Activating Evolution - named for the book that Suresh's father wrote - will find such goodies as the introduction to the eponymous book, video interviews with fictional geneticists explaining how superpowers would work, and the chance to have your dreams analyzed by Mohinder "himself".

If you're suitably excited by the whole thing, you can even discuss the subject in Mohinder's wiki for accelerated evolution. Although doing so may get you under the watchful eye of Primatech Paper Company.

Activating Evolution [activatingevolution.com]

Each of the 28 contestants in the contest - visualized by Mike Miller, a somewhat controversial former DC Comics artist - will be posting "confessionals" about the unfolding contest as it goes on, written by different writers from the Wild Cards books. Kevin Andrew Murphy, whose first character (Rosa Loteria) is already offering gossip about her fellow contestants, promises that if readers ask questions of certain characters, they may just answer:

Of course, the contestants are all busy with challenges on the show, but who knows, some of them might answer.

American Hero [Wild Cards Books.com]

Since the writing on the website isn't covered by the Writer's Guild (even though several guild members have contributed to it), that means they'll have new content for at least three months, according to project manager Joe Tolerico. They're also working within continuity, and everything on the site gets approved by Tim Kring before it hits your screens. It's basically meant to serve as a gap between Volumes 2 and 3, and hopefully that means they'll be explaining why Volume 2 started out like a lead balloon.

Here's some of the better parts of Heroes 360:

• 
  
• The Comics. They're all fairly short stories, maybe five to six pages in length, but they feature quality artwork with some of your favorite Heroes characters. SEE Matt Parkman on the job! READ as Hiro learns how crappy the future is! GASP as Peter Petrelli gets ribbed for being a nurse! Plus one of the most recent stories features Horn Rimmed Glasses Man himself whaling on a superpowered guy with a baseball bat. Not too shabby.
• 
  
• The Spinoff Sites: Sites for places like PrimaTech Paper (the front for the mysterious Company), 9th Wonders (the comic publisher in the show), and The Yamagato Fellowship (a fictional Japanese foundation that studies heroes) do their best to make the world of Heroes seem real with updated content and design. PrimaTech Paper even has a page informing clients that Noah Bennet is unfortunately no longer with the company. Wink wink.
• 
  
• The Interviews, The Video, The Forums: There's enough extra content at these sites to make Peter Jackson's DVD producer jealous. Everything from video interviews to behind the scenes looks, and a forum that speculates on everything from Hiro's virgin status, to the secret powers that Mr. Muggles must wield.
• 
  

What the Heck? [Open the Future]

I chatted with Roush over email, who said he's definitely interested in moving over to traditional television, but that he wouldn't dismiss just staying Web. Why did he pick the gun-toting, Xena-esque heroine, played by Brynne Worley?

Alien had a huge effect on me when I was a kid because of seeing a strong woman stand up to incredible odds. I originally called the story Gentleman Wasteland but figured there were so many lead characters in post-apocalyptic films who were men, that a strong leading woman may be more compelling for our audience. I have always enjoyed seeing lead female characters in action/adventure movies and simply put... I find them quite often to be equally if not more bad-ass then most leading men.

The creators say:

This is the adventure of Lady Wasteland. A story rooted in the misfortune of individuals left to scour a vast wasteland in search of their own private destiny. Each character: a fragment, a survivor, a wanderer. In a god-forsaken landscape after the collapse of civilized society, we find a generation left for dead, fueled by revenge, apathy, absurdity, and the need to find a piece of food.

Check it out.

Lady Wasteland [official site]

Like who knew about this apocalyptic animated short Dear Beautiful? Or the upcoming Christmas apocalypse movie Satan Hates You? And in case you need to plan your apocalypse carefully, they have a nice sidebar listing every pre- and post-apocalyptic movie coming out in the next year or so. Plus, they have a radio show. Hopefully next they'll have a recipe book. Stick this blog in your RSS feed. You won't be sorry.

Quiet Earth [blog]

Lefty videoblogger Jimmy Burns is doing a video podcast about the evils of corporate American when the Starbucks behind him explodes. A cable news channel scoops up his feed and stars airing it live, and he instantly becomes a global celebrity. Global News sends him to Iraq, where soldiers are searching for President McCain's son. Burns struggles with becoming a whore for the mainstream media and the U.S. army. But then a new radical Islamic terrorist group starts using Burns for its own ends as well.

(Weirdly enough, the McCain for President campaign is advertising on the Shooting War site, even though the comic depicts a John McCain presidency as an unparalleled catastrophe. I kept wondering if this was a joke, but it isn't.)

Shooting War reads like writer Anthony Lappé's love letter to old-school broadcast news, which no longer exists in 2011. Lappé runs the lefty Guerilla News Network and worked on a Showtime documentary about Iraq. In the graphic novel, the cable news networks are shallow and evil, and Dan Rather haunts the book like the ghost of responsible journalism. (The Shooting War website says the book version features, "by popular demand, more Dan Rather than you can shake a dead armadillo at.") So somebody must have really liked the Dan Rather cameos, which now seem a bit excessive and hagio(porno)graphic.

The Iraq war, meanwhile, has spawned terrorist attacks all over the U.S. and Europe, plus a suitcase nuke in India. The comic's worst case scenario presumes super-competent terrorists, but still seems freakily plausible.

One major improvement in Shooting War's book version is Dan Goldman's art, which no longer has to fit into a series of oblong rectangles. The mixture of photos, painting and drawing looks a lot more natural on the page, and the edits give more of a movie-like flow to the narrative.

The main weakness of Shooting War is its preachiness. You'll want to skim some of the long speeches that Lappé puts into the mouths of his characters. In particular, the leader of terrorist group Sword of Mohammed spews out a mixture of ideology and infodump that fills a few pages with word balloons. It feels like the mistake of a rookie graphic novel writer, who's more used to writing pure prose.

But Shooting War is lurid and clever enough that you almost forget it's a political screed written by a documentary film-maker. You can just enjoy the dystopian future porn and ignore the political messages, although you may find yourself thinking about them later.

Tyranny is being posted in bite-sized webisodes on YouTube, and currently there are several episodes up for you to watch. Though the plot feels a little bit like Darren Aronofsky's recent love-it-or-hate-it movie The Fountain where a guy quests after his love through the centuries, it's worth watching just for the dark, Soviet-style iconography and themes. Hofmann sums up the plot like this:

The story is about a young artist from San Francisco named Daniel McCarthy, who volunteers for a brain mapping experiment at Berkeley University in November 1999. During the experiment, he has a vision of what he believes to be the future - whether that is the near future or distant future, he doesn't know. In fact, he doesn't really remember what he saw at all, he only has the random scribbles he jotted down on a piece of paper when the experiment was over. It is now that his quest begins and he must solve the mysterious puzzle of his own making. Now enter Isabelle Lorenz, a young graduate student from Berkeley who is invited to one of Daniel's art exhibits. The two are immediately drawn to each other. They both feel something larger than themselves pulling them together. Is it fate, or something else? Daniel begins to realize there is more to meeting Isabelle than random chance as he discovers that she was part of his vision...in some way...if he could only remember... But that is simply how it all starts. What comes next is full of very strange people and twisted events, political chaos and corporate takeovers, international conspiracies and traveling across the globe with an underground group of revolutionaries.

Like a lot of current indie SF, such as Primer and The Fountain, Tyranny eschews rayguns and spaceships in order to study the alien interior of the human mind. If you like a little politics and paranoia with your dystopian visions, you'll be on the edge of your seat waiting for the next installment of Tyranny.

Tyranny on YouTube