This is awesome.

Or even a single mixed metaphor. Wait, I guess secret laboratories
can work on sauce. But can they sing a swan song? I tellya, I'm all sewed up in horse pies about it.

I can do that. If I can find my lighter I'll hold it up.

Body of same: I won't promise any rude villanelles, though. Maybe an
occasional discreet sonnet, or a whimsical haiku, or simply a fit of
alliteration here and there.

(I just sent off my betatester e-mail, and when I did, Google tried to sell me a "Got Tranya?" t-shirt. They know me!)

Shame the beta's not running now because all of UK fandom is
currently plunged into war following the release of the Clarke
shortlist. Would be a perfect test.

Overall, it sounds like a good idea, and I'll keep watching to see how things turn out.

In the meantime, that's me over there with the sausage-inna-bun stall.

And given that it's that rarity, a three letter domain name, it
would be even shinier if tor.com as well as www.tor.com worked as a way
to get there. Yes, I am lazy. :-)

So happy. Have books to read at work already--this will be another time sink!

...and Agatha Heterodyne? And knitting?

Does that mean we must eat your brain?

"Better nation-building thru brain-eating."

Good luck with the community in any case.

(Please note how, with such compression--three words, three--I
manage to suggest prior knowledge, settle myself clearly in the "in"
group, and nod-nod-wink-wink at the same time. Like: am I writing for
this thing or just hoping to rub up aganst the editor. And all without
giving way any actual information. If I don't make it in the writing
game, I might try being a spy.)

Oh, and PNH--that's the first time in a while I heard your actual
voice in a post. You wrote that as if speaking it. That wonderful,
breathless, words-and-ideas tumbling on top of one another manner you
have that makes any conversaion with you both delicious and difficult
to keep up with. Especially if one has a bad back, old ears, and a new
knee.

Jane

I will be signing up TODAY

Oh, and Patrick: bless you, bless you, bless you. I spent three
weekends in a row on business trips, and if it weren't for those ebooks
I would have failed all my sanity rolls.

I noticed that too! Except, from this perspective, change 'a while'
to 'ever.' No intent to disparage our host, but my textual glimpses of
PNH have mostly been of the more surly variety. Smart, sharp, usually
laying a superhero-like smackdown against the forces of idiocy.

This post made me giggle and grin, which nearly had disasterous results here at work! Encore!

Regarding signing up late: the previous download links are still
live (I don't know whether this is deliberate or an oversight, given
PNH's comment about going away) and the emails encourage you to forward
them to friends. I'll happily forward the previous ones on a catch-up
basis if requested.

Already sent in the beta email. I eagerly await my inclusion in the ultra secret super double magic inner circle.

Also, the "successfully subscribed" message needs to appear in a
more visible place. As it is right now, under the form in the same
font, color, and size, it is easily missed, leading to confusion,
multiple signups, and the breakdown of western civilization. Or parts
thereof.

Finally, while I did get the sneaky little signup successful
message, I never got my signup email--and I did check my spam folder. I
wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that I wrote "n/a" into
the CIP code field.

Wait...what? Why? Waaaaah!

Although I'd still like to win an Asus :(

P.S. I remember a while back someone complained that email addresses
got harvested for spam from here a lot (not by our hosts, by bots) and
was advised to put in a human readable version, e.g. with "at". I tried
that but the comment wouldn't post without a valid address...is that
new?

Congrats to one and all at Tor.

I've been pining for a new internet community to hang out at--my old
ones weren't a good fit anymore and I've been rather without for a few
years now. This sounds like just my kind of thing and I've been wearing
this funny little grin all through reading the post and comments.

Signed up for beta testing, too. Whee!

I also find gmail's spam control excellent - I only mentioned it
because I happened to look in my spam folder to check for false
positives and noticed it's now trapping 1300 messages a month. Which I
think is quite impressive.

OAnd since I'm wayyyy off-topic I should probably mention I'm looking forward to the new site. And not just for Free! Books!

Although they help.

But I made that word up! I made that word up when I was fifteen!

Life really is amazing sometimes. The internet has been remarkably good to me.

Thank you for it - I'd been trying to find a useful way of describing that precise technique recently.

(Filked from this.)

I signed up on the signup page (it's not https:, which concerned me
for a couple of seconds), and sent the email asking to beta test. This
is so cool! I want to be part of 17th Fandom, or whatever we're up to
now. I think actually there may be multiple distinct fandom threads
now; gone are the days when everyone in fandom had read all the books
that came out, or attended all the events at WorldCon. It just isn't
possible (literally, in the case of WorldCon).

So I think we're in the era of Multithreaded Fandom, which is beyond
the singularity of numbered fandoms. It's no longer possible to number
eras when there's no one focus. Perhaps the Tor.com site will help to
fuse some threads back together, and I certainly want to be part of it!

Start clicking the links;

It's launching today.

I want to be a part of it:

Tor com, Tor com!

I want to fanac

In a fandom that never sleeps,

Because we're Melbourne to Nome,

Tokyo to Rome,

We will destroy all those boys who come freep!

         (it goes on for pages, it's really the most disgusting stuff)

Signed up.

Torwristing the Web.

Book tours (no physical pages to rip or be raster image printed)

Folks! Stop being so great and launching awesome web sites--I have to get stuff done at work!

Please, people, won't you think of the PRODUCTIVITY?

Too damn much DELIGHT in the world as it is. Dratted goodness. Makes
me wanna go hit myself with a stick, just to remind me to be crabby.

(This should be taken as joining the fun of Cryss's's's' post, not criticising it.)

I look forward to the opportunity to do just that. (In my copious free time, snort.)

----

* In Dutch, onze sociabel dingetje

A-hem. Don't know where that came from. Truly.

I admit in some shame that I haven't (and probably won't) avail
myself of this week's freebie (Ms. Lackey not being my cuppa), but the
prior two rocked my socks. That's a heck of an average (even in spring
training) and I am looking forward to the upcoming season!

I've been saying 'no thanks' to all the little scout-things
infesting the shopping centers the last couple of weeks. Tomorrow they
hit the building where I work. Oh the horror! (Samoas?)

I've been away from ML for about two weeks, I have statistical analyses that continue to plague me. I miss you.

Also -- Farthing! Worth signing up just for that.

Please do write sestinas. I like them a lot, but I don't have time to write them very often; somebody ought to.

I didn't hear back until the next e-book was made available (in a
bulk post?). So, if it was sent out the day before you signed up, you
might have nearly a whole week to wait.

Oh, the Torment.

(But I've already signed up, so clearly I'm asking for it.)

All this brings me to my next idea, which is that the regular commenters on the Tor site should be called Toreadors.

Which is a good and fine thing in its own right, but is not tor.com :-(

rasfw has been pretty unreadable for a while, and LiveJournals, while fun, are too fragmented.

This should be good.

Pretty much all the posting guide is the couple boxes above the comment box (starting with the one that begins "Welcome to Making
Light's comment section."), though at least one bit of it is out of
date, viz. that these days about four URLs will get your commend held
for approval. There's also an implicit "don't be a d--k" guideline, but
you seem to have a good handle on that already. :-)

Xopher @70: I was trying to find a way to point out that today's
fandom seems to be larger and more diverse than the numbered fandoms of
youre, but you mostly said it better than I could have. In a way, Making Light is
a Focal Point Fanzine for one thread of modern fandom. (It was
certainly a large part of my introduction to same, though I'm still
just nudging about the periphery.) The trend toward diversity isn't
confined to fandom. Modern media markets---what I want to call the
modern attention market---is more diverse and therefore more
fragmented, and no one thing of any kind---movie, TV show, web
site---is seeing the kind of centralized attention it might have seen
in the Olden Days.

Here's a question pertinent to the original topic: Who will be moderating the new tor.com site?

Fucking. Rad.

Mmm, not wanting to sound ungrateful, because this really is the
bestest thing I've heard of in a long time, but, umm, what's the
privacy policy? (It's this pesky EFF droid drilled into the base of my skull that makes me ask such ungrateful-sounding questions.)

I used to break software for a living.

Does that make you a code whisperer?

If you could have worked in something about Yeovil HQ as well, I most likely would have spontaneously combusted right here.

Seconded. Especially misleading is the "All Fields Required" message
at the top, which is particularly evocative if an "input rejected"
screen.

Since no one else has mentioned it, I like the free wallpapers! If
Tor decided to release all their book art as wallpapers (especially
backstock), I would be decidedly squeeful.

Confirmational emails to those of you who offered to be beta testers
are going out in intermittent batches. Don't fret if you don't get one
for a day or three. There'll be nothing to see until early April
anyway. Oh, and yes, we're still accepting beta testers.

Confirmational emails to people who preregister at www.tor.com are also batched, although somewhat more automatic.

*it's perfectly lovely, like all of his covers. I'm just goofy.

I'm actually getting new reading material faster than I have time to read it at the moment; that's odd.

If you delete the Tor cookies & try again, does that fix it?

Tor cookies: A thunderbolt in every bite!

But... I'm trying to get retirement papers together, trying to
job-hunt at the same time, I still have the annual
run-around-the-house-cursing-hunt-for-everything-to-file-taxes-with
coming up next month, plus this winter's heavy rains have made the
backyard a jungle of weeds.

(Yes, I've finally taken that big scary step, and started retirement
proceedings from the Postal Service. If I'd know it would feel THIS
damn good, I'd have done it sooner.)(I've liked my actual job for
thirty-plus years, but... my god... the management system is so damned
toxic!)

So... I'll pass... for now.

[excessive ellipsises provided by the Bill Bowers Memorial Ellipsis Mine]

Neither rfm @sun .com or rfm@eng.sun.com works for me now, but I don't have to get up in the morning...

And it made me wonder what kind of policies will there be for submitting stories for this new venture.

Heh! "So, uh...apparently this book is about butts. And crows."

but it does make me wonder if you (collectively) are designing this
site to be in *competition* with Baen's site, or *complimentary to* it.
ie, same services, trying for the same readers, or different services
in degree or kind. i don't actually have an opinion either way, except
for 'yay! more book-stuff on the web!', but i am curious.

in any event, if you haven't checked out Baen's site for ideas, i
urge you to do so. if they're doing something you like, there's no
reason to re-invent the wheel, and site maintainers are pretty
reachable.

good luck with the new site!

-boogieshoes

There are other SF hangouts on the net; the newsgroups on SFF.net,
for example, or the general rec.arts.sf.* hierarchy (if you can filter
out the spammers and sporgers who seem to overrun it these days). But
they're all somewhat fragmented.

I for one would love to see the Tor site -- or anyone else, for that
matter -- do an outreach thing: use RSS or ATOM syndication to link out
to the other SF fan fora, not in an embrace-and-extend Microsoftish
kind of way, but in order to build bridges within the SF-ish
fluorosphere, linking the archipelago into a land mass. We'll see.

Earl, I have reason to believe that if you send a nice email to the
address that comes with the current book download email, they might
well send you the Scalzi link.

Desert ants suddenly form a collective intelligence and begin to wage war on the desert inhabitants. It is up to two scientists and a stray girl they rescue from the ants to destroy them. But the ants have other ideas.

Menacing Machine Voice: "Really, you're going to end up doing what
we want anyway, so why work yourself up over it? We'll all be together
by and bye. Now, isn't it time or elevenses? We are the Borggina!"

Russ @ #56 - It's that wacky "view all by" link. Chock full of tasty email address goodness.

boogieshoes @ #123 - Yes, I know about Baen's Bar. My SO lives there. I'm totally not their target audience.

I'll do that. I had some kind-hearted people email me the link, but I prefer not to use it unless I get official permission.

As in, neener, neener, I'm a betor tester than you?

Must we?

I note, by the way, that the "www" problem has been fixed; going to simply "tor.com" works now.

"Baen is the go-to place for red-blooded American MilSF, plus
sidelines in fantasy (including humorous fantasy) and alternate
history, and about 20% anomalous stuff on the side that doesn't really
fit in the above categories. And the barflies reflect this."

yes, i certainly do! ::grins::

but yes, i know Baen is very target specific. i think what i'm
trying to ask is how Tor and the Nielsen-Haydens envision their new
site and etc fitting into the already existing information stream from
publishers to readers? Baen's site, while offering a lot of promotions
and things not available in dead tree versions, is primarly a site for
reader to kvetch with each other and their favorite authors.

there is a considerable stream of information from Baen authors vis
a vis various sf/f things - mostly convention appearances, what the
next books will be, that sort of thing - as well as a considerable
amount of conversation over the state of the world today.

i'm asking, out of curiosity mind, if Tor plans to have a similar 'feel' to their site, or a more formalized place.

::scratches head:: i'm not actually sure if that makes any sense, but i hope it does.

-bs

-bs

No need to get angry; getting torqued will not help. Winners will be
awarded a free trip to Tortola, where torch singers will serenade them.
Don't stay out on the beach too long, or you will torrefy.

Torry. Couldn't help myself.

For example, it will not merely include authors talking about
what their next books will be, but feature Transcended AIs explaining
what those authors are going to write in the following books which
hadn't even occurred to them yet, reviewing new genres which are soon
to appear in writing, and so forth. Now you'll be able to form opinions
on the literary successors of Slipstream and InfernoKrusher without
having to wait for those pesky writers!

Or something.

Yes, you could have.

You chose not to.

We need Tor reform.

*Since that means 'Story House', it's the most appropriate place so to do.

'Ginger @248'

Got your time machine out again, have you?

Fragano @ 153:

"Serge #151...

'Ginger @248'

Got your time machine out again, have you?"

Isn't that redundant?

We should all be very careful not to get too excited, or we should
suffer torsades de pointes in our torsi, necessitating being slapped
upside the head with a torsk. Much bettor to get a torta (or torte, or
even a tortilla) in the face.

Ah, Nero Wolfe would be proud of my tortile taradiddles!

It's a TORDIS.

I don't have anything to do with Tor (except that I may have
inadvertently triggered a torrent of Tor puns), but my guess is we'll
find out what its feel is like once it gets here and we all, you know,
feel it up for a while.

Is it the cookies? For me, deleting the tor cookies & trying again worked.

::groans:: bad pun, no biscuit!

actually, what's torquing me off right now is that as a bona-fide
SCA herald, i have free rein to pun at people, in the most torturous
manner possible. except that my brain is so sleepy, i cant.

-bs

I am the Mastor!

That said, no two social areas on the net have exactly the same
flavor or tone, so I doubt our site, assuming it flourishes, will
"feel" the same as Baen's. But I certainly admire what they've done. I
don't see us as competing with them; quite the contrary, we're happy to
hold them up as pioneers to whose work we aim to add. The internet has
plenty of room in it.

We're closing in on about 500 signups for the beta phase, so it
should be fun. Particularly since the number of people who've
pre-registered at www.tor.com to be full members of the post-launch
site is waaaaaaay more than that. Reserve your place in the in-crowd
now!

I wandered over to the Tor-Forge site and found that the little
clicky numbers to go to the next page of Tor books don't work in my
favorite browser.

This is Konqueror on 64-bit Linux (Kubuntu). The clickies work in Firefox, but I only use that browser when forced.

It was a bit giddy, to be sure, though inspired by the punstorm
going on here, but I didn't think it was offensive or anything. It did
make some comments about macho-mil Baen books, taking off from
Charlie's comments on that.

I don't appear to have kept another copy, either, so I'm not about
to repost it or anything. If it was deleted on purpose, could whoever
did so email me and tell me why? I'd like to know what the problem was
so that I can avoid doing something like it in the future.

I have to use Firefox for my banking because they use a Flash login
app for security (the mind boggles) and while I can watch YouTube on
Konqueror it chokes on the bank's app.

If you treat me nicely, I'll share my toroids.

I've since received (& replied to) a confirmation request, so
either one of my applications got through or someone /w/a/s/
/w/e/a/r/i/n/g/ /t/e/n/n/i/e/s/ did it manually. If the latter, Thanks.
If all the c. ten tries eventually go through, I suppose I'll ignore
the "confirm" requests and have to turn in my "Aspiring Geek" badge.

Mind you, my current s-f Enthusiasm is for a non-Tor writer I've
been re-reading -- I've decided that I've fallen In Love with the
person who wrote _Komarr_, and In Awe with the writer who produced _A
Civil Campaign_ (a fine Jane Austen Comedy of Manners, re-written by
Wodehouse, with the Dinner Party Scene added by the Marx Brothers...
and none of it quite (to my taste) overdone).

(The above paragraph is not to be taken as rescinding my opinion
that if one is to pick books by Publisher, Tor is by far the best bet.)

I believe you, entirely. Indeed, s-f publishers in general seem to
be remarkably unparochial and un-terriTORrial (sorry about that, he
says insincerely) -- they genuinely like good s-f, wherever it might be
found, and give praise whenever they consider it deserved.

Where will the fiction come from?

Although when they say "the theory that calorie intake and nutrient response affect lifespan by altering TOR activity" they mean
"TOR activity affects calorie intake and nutrient response," because
the presence of TOR is associated with forgetting to eat, or sleep, or
anything else until the book is done, I find.

Certainly one of the best middle names in the genre.

Ummm, if I sign up for the beta program, would I end up fighting
tooth and nail with over-influential marketing people who don't
understand the importance of web standards and handicap accessibility
of web sites?

In multiple languages.

Short answer: I hope not. We definitely care about those things.

Longer answer: If we do screw up, it's not necessarily going to be
the fault of "marketing people." In my experience, editors are as
capable as anyone else in publishing of making fatally stupid
decisions. The habit of assuming that anything Dilbertean is the fault
of unnamed "marketing people" leads, I find, to assumptions that
diverge quite a bit from reality.

And, for what it's worth, I'm a definite connoisseur of weird pharaoh embarrassment, within the minuscule fluorosphere.

(1) Some (not all) non-Americans have a variety of difficulties getting their signups accepted.

(2) Feedback meant to confirm successful signups is unclear.

(3) Some individual addresses are being persistently rejected by the system.

Technical problems that have been fixed:

(1) You can now go to "tor.com" rather than having to type "http://www.tor.com".

Okay, I'm embarrassed about this. I generally am all about
functional vs. bells and whistles, and I've been on the web since most
sites had black text on gray backgrounds. But the forum software they
use there just screams 1997, and it gives me the willies. I know, good
people, good conversation, but it's a little like having a intimate
party in a hugely cold and drafty warehouse.

Is it just me?

*My vetorinary school is on St. Kitts, if that means anything; to me, it was a place of torment.

J

(1) Some (not all) non-Americans have a variety of difficulties getting their signups accepted.

Next time the TSA volunteers to help you with a project, say no.

Maybe there's a genre filter in my mail that only lets me receive
Epic Fantasy, and not SF or Alternate History? That would be very sad
for me.

Should I email someone about the missing mails?

(Which means, by the way, that notice of when we should get our beta
tester information would be a good idea, so we can all delve through
our p2n2s and v25gr5 advertisements if it doesn't arrive.)

I've really been wanting to read Farthing and oh, would have got
around to ordering it online eventually. When I could convince myself I
had made sufficient inroads into the TBR shelf to start adding more
stuff.

It's my first ebook. I don't like reading stuff on the computer -
feels too much like work - and I'm blowed if I'm printing out a pdf
hard copy for more than the cost of an actual book - but I do happen to
have a PDA. Haven't done anything about getting ebooks on that before
now, being very reluctant to pay out for software and content when I've
no idea if I'll like reading that way. But free book and the reader
too? Sure, why not!

So I shall read it en route to Dublin for P-Con and see if all those
folk who tell me ebooks are ideal for travelling are right.

Will I still buy the hard copy? Quite likely - paper books remain
immune to crashes, viruses etc. Will I go on to buy Ha'penny sooner
rather than later as a consequence? Highly likely.

So, who should I speak to in order to get my name removed from the lottery?

Haven't had any acknowledgment of that yet.

LMAO! I had to tell 'em twice.

Well, I don't know what kind of people JM's teaching, but I have trouble imagining anyone not liking Farthing.

"Spock, report."

"It's spam, Captain, but not as we know it."

"It..seems..tobe..alive, Spock. In..a..newand..intriguing..way. [..] Ifeel..strangely..compelled..toapproachit..and-"

Kirk will indeed if it's femmespam.

Which is to say, I want my Making Light! And as glorious as the
comment threads are, and the particles, and Jim MacDonald's posts on
How Not to Die Just Yet -- well, dammit, I miss hearing from P&T in
here.

Got no standing to tell you two how to spend your time. Just sayin'.

We haven't started discussing Farthing in class yet, but the students I've spoken to individually are loving it so far!

Sadly, my class isn't strictly about world-building; it's a very
basic freshman lit/comp course to which I awkwardly appended the theme,
and I don't think I'm actually teaching them that much about
world-building.

well, dammit, I miss hearing from P&T in here.

Word.

It's a common mistake for inexperienced web developers, because + is
special for some web stuff. But this is mail, so I'd urge y'all to get
it fixed.

Thanks!

There wasn't a link on the site to report bugs, so hopefully it's
okay to report it here: the signup form doesn't allow + (plus) in email
addresses, even though that's been a valid character for internet email
since 1982 (if not earlier.)

Ralph will be so disappointed.

Too bad. He would have made a great addition to the forum.

Wanna Beethoven?

------

sent from my Gmail account, and I've checked the spam catcher Verdi often.

You all better clean this place up, or I'm gonna ship you all to Swieten.

*No, not really.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering, will we get to design our own avators?

As a matter of fact...(*clears throat*)

HEAR ME, O GODS!

When the beta testing emails start to go out, please post something on this thread so we can all check our spam traps.

Thankyewverymuch.

Two points, though, in the spirit of beta-testing.

1) It was from "torbeta smith", which set off several this-is-spam red flags in my head if not for Gmail.

2) It says, Please be aware that volunteering to beta-test
isn't the same as signing up to be a fully-registered member of the
real site. To do that, please go to http://tor.com. It might be a
good idea to specify (in future, obviously) that "signing up for the
free-ebook mailing list" actually means "signing up for the new site"
so people don't go hunting for a form they haven't already filled in.

Am I right in assuming

(Still no Farthing though, and I can't seem to find any place to contact Tor about the current giveaway.)

"Am I right in assuming" was part of something I incompetently
deleted, after working out that yes, of course our hosts weren't giving
away free e-books out of the goodness of their hearts - it's all a
dastardly plot to lure us into a huge new focal point zinevironment
furnished with all ultramod cons and everything a fan could want, and
we wouldn't be given the option to take the free ice cream without
signing up for more free ice cream later on.

I'd already signed up at tor.com, so when the betatest email came
with instructions to go sign up at the same site, I just naturally
assumed*

ATM, there's nothing at the tor.com sign-up page to suggest that
"signing up for the free-ebook mailing list" also means/meant "signing
up to be beta-tester for the new site".

*Rest of sentence redacted so that the telepathic Fluorospherians have something to do.

Hmmm. It's just after sundown on Maundy Thursday (start of the
Paschal Triduum) in Sydney. This might mean I can toast & consume
my first ceremonial Hot Cross Bun of the season. Yum, have been looking
forward to that from the time in January(!) they first appeared in the shops.

If it's an error, I'm suffering too.