Decrypting Rita, the sci-fi comic I write and draw, has certainly been the most relevant to me this year.

It's about a robot lady who's dragged out of her timeline and scattered across four separate realities. And a couple of hive-minds, one of which intends to assimilate the whole Earth. Also of course it's about the other versions of her - a normal lady in the here and now, a dragon living with her elf boyfriend and girlfriend, and a wizard journeying to the center of her world of floating islands. I try to keep it pretty fast-moving and action-packed despite it swerving into "what is reality?" territory now and then, though the page update rate has slowed to a crawl as I deal with fulfilling the Kickstarter I ran for the first collection of it.

Homestuck is the best web comic around, IMHO. Andrew Hussie is consistently pushing the boundaries of what a webcomic "should" "be" and making this crazy pile of transcripts, animgifs, and the occasional game or animation work as a coherent whole.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Especially the appendices. It's lurid trash but it's also a delivery system for some very interesting ideas about thinking.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. Note: I spend a significant amount of my waking hours drawing comics. If you care in the least about comics, as a creator or a consumer, this book will give you a lot to chew on.

d'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire. I credit this and their book on the Norse myths with my being what I call a "polyagnostic"; I knew from a very early age that there are religions that have come and gone, that their adherents believed as intensely as the ones we have now. With these as a foundation it was very easy to see Christian myths as, well, myths.

And some stuff I've simply enjoyed a lot:

The Stress Of Her Regard, by Tim Powers. Vampires, the tendency of Romantic poets to die of consumption, and a secret history of the world. I've read a lot of his stuff but I keep on coming back to this one every few years.

Against A Dark Background, by Iain M. Banks. As a SF writer he's most well-known for his "Culture" books; this one is outside that continuity. It's both comedic and tragic, as well as endlessly inventive.

Back in the c64 days, I saw a version of The Great Giana Sisters that had had its art hacked to be Super Mario Brothers. Well, a reasonable facsimile of the first level, at least; as the game progressed it pretty much reverted to being the Giana Sisters with a Mario sprite.

> an anonymous "thumbs-up" would be nice.

So would vote-stuffing scripts. This is why we can't have nice things.

Can you bring your own stuff into the workplace?

Maybe you could bring a Raspberry Pi and ssh into it to hack around, or jack a spare monitor/keyboard into it.
Maybe an iPad with Codea installed.

Also honestly I'd consider talking to the boss and getting permission to fuck around with this openly instead of doing it on the sly.

I second this. I'd upvote it if Slashdot's voting system wasn't so crazy. Also here's a list of young reader SF on IO9.

Most people are suggesting hoary old stuff from the 40s and 50s. There is a place for these, but I really don't know if they apply to a modern kid - it's hard to read stuff about "the future" when nobody has computers, cel phones, etc. Find well-regarded new books by NEW authors who are trying to write about the future we have NOW, instead of the future of the 1940s. Among other things you won't be filling your kids with a bunch of 1940s attitudes towards women.

I mean, I read a decent amount of the old stuff, sure, I even dug up the Lensman books and read them - but I read them when I was old enough to see them as being from a DIFFERENT TIME.

I find that my iPad has gotten me reading again. I have done things like curl up all day with it reading a hefty book. Its single-tasking nature means it's only a distraction if the book is boring, in which case why am I reading it anyway? The web feels a lot closer when it's only a window away than when it's a few swipes away, to me.

I used to have an immense library; then I moved back home to New Orleans three days before Katrina and lost pretty much all of it. My current library is the stuff that had never made it out to me from my parent's home, and a few things I bought since - both new stuff and old favorites I just had to have. And it underwent a couple of ruthless cullings, too.

It's still a pleasure to sit down in the couch next to my bookshelves and read a physical book, but honestly, it's just as much a pleasure to read one on my iPad. I will be delighted when people start paying attention to the typography and layout of digital editions like they once did to real books; that's really the only thing I find lacking.

I don't WANT more physical books in my house. Unless they're something like the broadsheet-sized reproductions I have of "Little Nemo In Slumberland". Fiction is perfectly cool with being virtual, in my opinion. I'd basically stopped going to the bookstore, and thus stopped keeping up on new fiction, but having the Kindle software available on my pad and my phone means that I can easily acquire books anywhere.

Yeah, I really rue the day Adobe "refreshed their branding" by letting all the people they got when they bought Macromedia loose on every single product. At least they have made the abstract shapes less LOUD AND GARISH than CS1... but I'm still replacing AI and PS's icons with the last pre-CS ones every time I upgrade.

I have Illustrator running ALL THE TIME so the only time I ever see that damn orange thing is when I reboot my entire machine, which mostly happens when there's a system update. But still. Uuuglyyy.

If you have multiple Nests they'll talk to each other and share data. Plus, well, much simpler UI. People comparing it to things like the EcoBee and saying it loses because it has less features sound like CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

But ANYONE can figure it out in seconds. And it looks GOOD. And that counts for a LOT.

On the other hand... how many things do you see out there that you can drop an iPhone into, versus how many things you can drop an Android phone into? The huge number of different form factors of Android phones works against it here. You'll never find, say, a toy car that lets you plug your Android phone into it to work as a webcam so you can have a driver's-eye view. Lack of customization has its advantages.

iPad1s seems to run around $350-400. And will do surprising amounts of office work. I can't get my Real Work done on mine because I'm an artist, and there's nothing on the iPad yet that holds a candle to Illustrator, but people whose dayjob is writing text can do just fine on an iPad plus an Bluetooth keyboard. I do a lot of my email and web on my iPad these days.

I just installed a TV in my apartment for the first time in nearly a decade. Well, sort of. I got one of those pico projectors, made a little mounting bracket out of some scrap cardboard, and put a sheet up on the wall. After dark I get a pretty nice 4' wide image, suitable for kicking back on the couch and watching. (And for me, not having it usable during the day is a plus - otherwise there's a part of me that would go get a game system and spend weeks getting nothing done but acquiring achievements.)

But I suspect it's not a "TV" by the metrics this article's using, given that I feed it video from my iPad or my computer. Funny, that.

I think in the next decade or two, the "TV" will simply vanish. Especially when my tiny projector seems impossibly quaint because we can just roll out some e-paper or something...

Hell, my circles *leapt* enthusiastically onto G+, then were largely driven away because they're all prone to using Funny Names On The Internet. My G+ stream went from being a happening thing to a ghost town.

> The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.

This sentence is confusing. Is it trying to say that the A1000 was portable? Because I had one and I can assure you that it was not.

I've got Google Music and I quit trying to use it after I got a ton of errors uploading music from my computer. It's a nice idea but it didn't actually work for me in practice.

Let me try to be vaguely useful here, or at least vaguely thoughtful. The temptation to be sarcastic is strong but I think everyone's gotten all the good lines in already.

- If you like having access to information and media, consider the neighboring area: is there a decent bookstore nearby? video rental place? theatres? You won't have the Internet to get this stuff over. If you're in the burbs, consider moving in town where all this stuff will be much easier to find.
- Your social life will quite possibly become sparser if your friends are accustomed to planning things over the net; you'll be out of the loop unless someone loves you enough to phone you and say "hey Anonymous Coward we're having a party on Sunday, wanna come".
- Phonebooks will stop becoming something you throw away or leave forgotten on the doorstep for a month.
- In general you will need to have room for More Stuff if you keep wanting new books/music/etc. The library can help with books but you're probably stuck accumulating more atoms for music.

I was recently deprived of Internet for most of a week when I went to a regional Burn - out of cel range, out of power for my phone. The only thing I really missed was not having map data for my phone's GPS, and that was just while we were going to the event. But this was a recreational, temporary thing, not a permanent lifestyle choice.

You probably want to go read Thoreau. n.n