First up today is a link for you.  Forbidden Planet International kindly asked me to nominate my Best of the Year.  And, with only four days left for you to enter, allow me to again tempt you to join the many people who have decided to have a go (for big prizes) at guessing the outcomes of various events in 2012, in our This Time Next Year Game.

Laurie Pink (who still won't tell me about her roller derby activities, I'll keep asking), on hearing that the internet was my theme today, provided the following...



I love the internet.  I live here.  You know at parties how people, if the conversation tends towards the online, will say 'oh, I prefer real human interaction to all this Twitter nonsense'?  I stare at them in horror and go 'are you insane?!  Twitter is real human interaction, turned up to the maximum!  It's me rolling around ecstatically at the heart of a pack of my friends.  You saw Frozen Planet?  Because no, I don't think you just watch television at weekends and otherwise use it as an occasional table.  You saw those penguins in a huddle?  That's Twitter, that's me in the middle, that penguin with a smile on its beak, satisfied and sheltered in the embrace of its warm fellow creatures!'  When the answer they were probably expecting was 'oh, absolutely, have you tried the dips?'  That particular appeal to 'we're all in this together' is actually code for 'help, I'm not following the latest youth thingy, am I getting old?'  So I suppose I should be kinder.  But come on!

For one thing, Twitter allows us to do mad stunts like yesterday's one from the brain of @jonnymorris1973, where every Doctor Who writer he could get hold of sang 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' line by line.  Excellent stuff, Johnny.

I take different approaches to different internet media.  I use Facebook only for people I know pretty well, who I've met in person.  (With a couple of exceptions for people I've collaborated closely with, and expect to meet in the future.)  That means several times a day, I'm pissing off people who want to befriend me, but who I feel I don't know well enough.  I think that Facebook seems designed to be a private space, but those who actually designed it think the complete opposite.  Though I just roll my eyes at most Facebook privacy scares (generally, if your options are all set to the highest privacy, you're fine, but please, if you know different, don't tell me, no, really, don't, now what did I say just then?), that public/private tension may one day push me away.  But not yet.  And certainly not to Google +, which I still post to in a desultory fashion.  But I don't really feel as if I'm there.  I'm kind of waiting to see if, as others give up on it, a specific group adopts it, as musicians did with MySpace.  Facebook is like VHS.  It's not the best video tape system (Betamax was far better quality), but it's omnipresent, everyone's got it, and that's actually more important than quality.  Any real contender would have to generate immediate ubiquity, and if Google can't do that, I don't know who can.  I don't like, however, that Facebook constructed a fan page for me, entirely without my knowledge, based on my Wikipedia entry.  I never go there, but the one time I did, there were people there hoping to communicate with me, and presumably getting steadily more annoyed when I didn't show up.  It's like automatically generated bad publicity.  I wonder if that's still there?  I'm not going to look.  I tried GetGlue for a week or two, but couldn't figure out, beyond the initial list-making fun, what it was for, so left again.  I may well get into Tumblr in some fashion. And as for the blog, well, here it is, look around.  (I do like Blogger's new editing system.)  As I said when I started this, it had become, before the 12 Blogs, under pressure from me having all my fun on Twitter, a bit of a place just for announcements.  I'll do my best to stop it reverting to that in January, but it's hard.  (I once set John Scalzi the Just A Minute theme of 'Twitter is killing blogs', and, mishearing, he thought I was insisting (rather as my Mum, influenced by the Daily Mail, thinks that Facebook can literally kill you) that Twitter was killing dogs.  I wish he'd done a minute on that.)

I look in quite a lot on message boards and fora about the fields I'm involved in.  For one thing, they give you a good idea of where the audience think what you're working on is going, so you can gauge whether to play it like they expect, or how precisely to surprise them.  If they all believe something is going to happen, that's the best possible reason to do something else, if that can be done in a way that doesn't harm the integrity of the text.  I'm surprised at how little moderation happens on even message boards that claim to be moderated.  That's why so few of them have creators commenting.  (The exception being Millarworld, where moderation is a full time job, and creators hang out there as a result.)  I gather the Bendis Boards are good in that respect too, but I've never been able to overcome the technical difficulties of signing up.  Still, I'm pretty much immune to the tone of voice found in most fora.  'You raped my childhood' translates as 'six out of ten, reasonable effort'.  Yeah, yeah, I grew up in Doctor Who fandom, where we eat our young.

I use Twitter in a pretty specific way.  Generally, I don't follow celebrities, just people I know.  (Not that I'm criticising if you do, I'm just saying I'm after a particular effect.)  That way, I can immediately tune in to the group mind of what all my friends are thinking and feeling, and get a genuine sense of human warmth and connection at any time of the day.  @charlesatan says 'good morning, sir' to me every morning, and I say 'good morning, sir' to him right back.  It's like something out of Frank Capra.

There are a few exceptions to that rule.  I follow a few space and science news sources. (Though I get most cool science stuff as retweets from @davidbrin1.)  I follow bookshops I like.  I give the odd celebrity a go.  At the moment I'm following @brianblessed, and he understands that one goes on Twitter to entertain, posting not often, but well, as does @ShaunDingwall.  Most actors I like (that I haven't worked with) I'll follow for a while, then gradually discover that they're far too restrained about what they post (to the point of blandness) and drop them.  Obviously, I need Skyrim news, so @ElderScrolls is vital.  Bloggers (@girlsreadcomics), shops (@axioncomics) and conventions (@Melksham_Con) get a look in too.

If I seek entertainment from others who Twitter, I must do the same.  So when I post, I'm kind of thinking of myself as a radio DJ, interacting intimately with an audience of several thousand.  (The 'perceived space' issues on the internet are always interesting.  People tend to think they're huddled down with just their closest buddies around the camp fire, even when they've done nothing to make that the case.  LiveJournal in particular is like people whispering 'it's just us here, we can say anything' when they're actually miked up in the middle of a packed stadium.)  I try to find interesting stuff to say, because I don't think I'm there to promote myself directly.  I'm there to have people enjoy what I'm saying.  When PR people talk about Twitter as a 'promotional tool', I tend to think it's only useful as that if you don't think of it as that.  We've all stopped following people who only talk about when and how you can buy their book.  (Though of course, I do that as well.)

I like that, on Twitter, I can move between modes, broadcasting to everyone, and answering individuals. And just as important, retweeting other people's replies.  Some of my favourite times are when we're mulling over some ridiculous topic as a group, and so many witty replies come in, and reactions build and build. I'm told if you're not interested in what we're on about, then those retweet storms are a bit much to deal with.  I've lost followers like that.  But I've decided that actually the pleasure everyone else (and myself) gets from them is worth two or three marching out.  When I'm feeling miserable, especially, going and talking to 'the audience' (like I'm in a 1970s British comic strip) cheers me up like nothing else.  It's not that I share the bad stuff very often, it's that I'm taken out of myself and given a feeling of community and connection.

Generally, me not replying to people is down to one of a few causes.  Sometimes they'll have said something perfectly interesting or fun which just doesn't demand a reply.  (Or it would just be 'ha ha!')  If it's very funny, in that case, I'll often let a retweet be my only response.  Sometimes they'll have said something not particularly interesting or funny, but still not wrong or offensive, and I'm sparing their blushes.  Sometimes they're Doctor Who fans who, as if desperately wanting to make me talk more about the show, will reach an enormous distance to connect something I just said with the series.  ('Just like Magnus Greel, ha ha!')  I feel, every time I see one of those, that I'm continually, crushingly, disappointing people who are hoping for something different, that they're always giving me one last chance.  ('Come on, Paul, just reassure us that you even remember who Magnus Greel is!') I once apologised for this, and asked the audience if they were okay with me talking mostly about SF, and then a bit less than that about comics, but about Who (or at least my own Who) hardly at all, and got a handful of very honest responses along the lines of 'actually, that is what we were here for, so we'll be off now.'  And that's fair enough.  Sometimes people ask me questions that are, diplomatically, impossible to answer in any way.  (That's usually not deliberate on their part.)  And sometimes an 'I don't know' would also be too revealing.  (Sometimes what I don't want to reveal is my own ignorance, mind you.)  Sometimes, after I've reacted to something that's just happened, I don't respond to you because you're treating me like I'm Google.  ('What are the details?  Who else is involved?')  We are, I think it's safe to say, both on the internet at that moment.  You could probably find the answers you seek.  Sometimes I've asked the audience a question (because, after you've got a certain size of audience, there's no better source of people who know stuff) quite urgently, and the joke replies, the 'yes, that does sound urgent, you should find the answer to that' replies, and, after the first person (thank you!) to provide the correct reply, the other one hundred people providing the same correct reply, for the next three days, replies tend not to get replies.  Some of which is just unavoidable.  All those other correct answer people are being just as kind as the first.  I do now, however, hesitate to proffer my own joke replies to anyone else's urgent question.

But a couple of weeks back I realised that there was one class of post that, completely unjustly, I wasn't replying to.  I used to feel a weird awkwardness about people simply saying they'd liked a particular thing I did.  So I'd get pleasure from them saying it, but then not reply.  I still don't quite know why that was.  I think perhaps I felt that a mere 'thank you' wasn't interesting enough as a post.  But replying to one person doesn't fill anyone else's Twitter feed with things not relevant to them.  Only that person sees it. Anyhow, it occurred to me that this wasn't something I'd dream of doing in real life, that it was unfair and rude.  So now if you say you liked my stuff, you'll at least get a simple thanks back.  Sorry about that.

There are a few, slight downsides to being on Twitter.  Not everyone has the same ear for self-deprecating humour, and it's just about all I do, so sometimes I'll set myself up as the butt of a joke, and have a handful of people laugh not along with me, but at me, as if I hadn't realised what a fool I look like, generally making the joke I just made, again, in their own way, at my expense.  That gets me down a bit.  There's also a tiny bit of direct abuse.  I woke up one morning to YOU RUINED BATMAN AND ROBIN!  Which is actually fair enough critique, but hey, there's now a new reason they're called 'block capitals'.

I have blocked a few people, but only a few.  Like I was talking about a couple of blogs ago, there are people out there whose mission in life seems to be to find what they call 'celebrities' and take them down a peg.  If they've worked their way down to me on their target list, I feel they must have started during the 'Dawn of Twitter' sequence, when we were all leaping about hooting and worshipping that Whale Monolith (work with me here, this metaphor isn't doing the job yet, but it could get there), beginning with a single furious tweet at @stephenfry and then setting out on a very personal centuries-long journey of abuse, working their way down through follower number.  (No, never quite worked, sorry.)  Those people are what the 'block' or even (the nuclear option) 'block and report for spam' buttons are for.  (I loved seeing, the other day, one very abusive guy moaning that 'almost no celebrity I follow seems to post anything at all now!')  I generally try to make a calm decision before using those buttons.  I think I'm only going to stay honest if I allow genuine, polite, negative reactions to my work to go unblocked.  My definition of polite is 'lacking  any abuse'.  You don't have to apologise for how you feel.  If it's just about the work, and doesn't allege things about me being evil as shown in the work, I might argue with you, maybe even angrily, but I'm not going to block you.  (Terms and conditions apply.)  I do sometimes fall into something approaching entrapment, replying in an oblique way to see if you are actually going to turn out to be abusive, but often I'm pleasantly surprised when, given more length, such people turn out to have been to the point rather than rude.  I have made the wrong decision sometimes, when caught at a bad moment.  The worst example of that was some poor guy who just asked 'what *are* these Hugo Awards you keep on about?'  (I think he might have pushed it with some form of 'dude, most people have never heard of them', or the implication of that.  You see the grey area there.  Is that a genuine request for information or an attempt to tell me I'm out of line with the (correct) majority?)  I tried to find him afterwards, but the 'blocked users' area is just a terrible Steve Ditko limbo of floating spambots.

Some abuse can be funny with its over-reaching uselessness.  @GailSimone, who's like, shrugging off bullets tough, is genuinely entertained by extreme Twitter abuse directed at her, and used to retweet selected examples, only to stop when she found that her followers would gang up on the abuser.  @neilhimself's mere expression of interest in a website can collapse it through using up its bandwidth, so many are his followers.  He could probably wake up in the morning, think 'hmm, I'm not fond of... Ecuador', tweet about it, and by lunchtime have the Presidential Palace surrounded by tanks.  (I, on the other hand, by flexing my own net muscles, can create a slight frisson of in a comic shop in Yeovil.)

I don't regard unfollowing someone on Twitter as a statement of anything.  I follow and unfollow people all the time.  Although it can be a shock to look at your new followers one morning and see someone return who you had no idea had gone away, I don't expect people to notice when I pop in and out, and so I shouldn't notice it from them.  People tweet-commentating on The X Factor on a Saturday night, or coming out strongly on the opposite side of Electoral Reform, or feeling that the Pope's tour of Britain was their chance for a comedy tour de force... I'll just leave you to it, and will probably refollow you later.  On Facebook, I usually stop following people just because I feel there's too large a distance between us now, with no malice at all.  Although, a couple of times, I have dropped people for saying bigoted things.  And there are just a couple of people who I actually quite like in person, but who present their views on Facebook in such a way that I just don't want to be around.  (And I don't want to just 'hide' them, what's the point of that?)

I'm fascinated by the evolution of spambots on Twitter.  It's like watching the different classes of Terminator in R and D.  When I first joined, primitive 'Britney' with her full on penile display was the best Skynet could do.  Millions of iterations of her were quickly shoved into limbo as Twitter proved, rather wonderfully, that it was actually very good at spotting and destroying spam.  Which was the pressure that began the evolutionary process.  The start of the war.  A low end model of spambot now will at least have an avatar of a normal person, but with perhaps a whiff of 'porn CV photo' about them.  And their name will be hootingly ridiculous.  A classier make will feature a photo of a mundane person posed as anyone would for their Twitter pic.  (And I feel sorry for the girlfriend in question, who, smiling from the veranda that day, had no idea what her chap did at the warehouse with all those servers.  That sort of photo also looks suspiciously like 'un-named Wikipedia contributor of 18,000 edits'. Look. (They'll have changed it tomorrow.) What's the matter, Wikipedia, didn't you quite believe the name she came out with?)  This model will still have a ridiculous name, but with a kind of baroque beauty to it, as if it's been chosen by a bored real person (with perhaps a distant memory of what people were called in the Gormenghast trilogy).  They will, every second tweet, make a stumbling attempt at real conversation.  In real life, this would be like a pile of metal limbs with a cardboard face on it lurching up to you in a bar and saying 'I love my life and I love my friends.  Would you like to buy ringtones?'  The most highly evolved spambot I've encountered didn't actually seem to be a bot at all, but a real person (still with the anonymous photo and, well, just slightly mad name), who would fill every second post with actually quite meaningful conversation, only breaking off, like a Tourette's sufferer, to blurt about ringtones.  (Has anyone ever actually bought anything in this fashion?  I'd like to hear from you. Actually, I have some things I'd like to sell to you.)  Or was that a person?  Has the evolutionary war between spambots and anti-spammers created its first AI?  Will our first meeting with HAL not flounder on the small but vital question of the Pod Bay Doors (back to that metaphor, working better now), but actually on our distressing failure to download a snippet of Lady Gaga?

I do think there is one big risk inherent in Twitter, though.  A lot of us now tend to get our news (at least initially) that way.  We think of it, I'm sure, like hearing about something through gossip down the pub.  But there's one big difference.  One doesn't select everyone in one's company down the pub.  When one gets one's news from a quality newspaper, one expects to encounter opinions one disagrees with, even if one is onside for the general political stance of that paper.  As with me getting fed up with various England cricketers for just not getting the Single Transferable Vote system, and thus dropping them, on every issue, we're being told what's happening largely by people who think like we do, and we can even narrow that further if the going gets tough.  We think that the far right can't possibly be getting their news from Twitter.  But of course they do.  To them, Twitter is a bunch of people who all think they same way they do.  I think, therefore, that Twitter is actually a force against consensus, that it pulls factions back from the grey areas between them, as anyone who can't muster enough support is pushed out of that warm, friendly pack, and must often feel they can only find understanding in the warm, friendly pack across the way.  That is, on the opposing side.  I find the power of Twitter to summon a mob with flaming torches terrifying, and tend to end up feeling at least some sympathy for even the most terrible people on the other end of that.  And sometimes the mauled targets didn't deserve it at all.  If that's how the ideologies of the future are formed, we're in trouble.

But the internet as a whole is just people, in all their positive and negative shades.  Sure, Comments sections (apart from here, obviously) are often hard to take, but that's what people (when we don't get to choose which voices we hear) are really thinking.  That brutal rudeness on message boards is also the genuine voice of real people.  But so is the warmth of Twitter and the mass opportunities for kindness it provides.  Like I said, I love it here.

On each of the 12 Blogs, we meet a creator who's been kind enough to tell us what they're planning for the festive season.  Today it's a Mr Bill Willingham, who writes (in a piece entitled Christmas in the Company of Wolves, which drops quite a few hints for forthcoming developments in his work)...

'How will I be spending Christmas this year? While it’s true I’ve neither the math nor the research expenses to prove it, I suspect I’ll be spending Christmas in the best of all possible ways.
     I’ll be working.
     To be specific, I’ll be writing, which I’ve been fortunate enough to make my career. No, I probably won’t get much writing done on Christmas Day, what with having to cook dinner for twenty, but otherwise this is steadfastly a working holiday for me, since I let myself get so far behind on so many things of late – emphasis on late.
     Don’t feel bad for me. Working through Christmas isn’t automatically a dire thing. Look at the fellow in the red suit. He has to work every Christmas and he’s still unbreakably jolly about it. Truth is, it’s truly a grand thing when one has my work.
     For a few days I’ll be out in America’s heartland, fighting a city of werewolves. Dangerous? Sure, but it’s so much fun. Then I’ve got to spend some time in the vast, frozen north, helping a timid young girl transform herself into a real howler of a North Wind, only to drop everything to skip over a great and magical ocean to spend some time in none other than Toyland. I’ll get to unwrap a few gifts along the way, such as a sword brandished and a dagger or two just perfect for sticking into an unwary back. I’ll hang out with a martial society in search of a new god, and spend some time with the Fisher King. Along the way I get to resolve at least one romance and start another, take part in an insurrection amongst cloaked wielders of blue swords, and help a young fellow named Loren escape into the night, just moments ahead of the law. I’ll rattle around for an hour or two in the House the Jack built, help hide a few clues to an otherwise unsolvable murder most foul, try to talk the Snow Queen out of a nasty bit of business, and write nonsense lines for a pair of sea monkeys.
     Spending time in a dozen impossible worlds, most of my own making, seems a fine way to spend the coming days.
     And I’ll get to read. I’ll find time to immerse myself in lost worlds of fairy tales and folklore, myth and magic, and all the while I’ll get to call it work.
     Best of all, someday when the time is ripe, I’ll get to share every bit of this business with you, in books such as Fables and Fairest, the sequel to Down the Mysterly River, a new unrelated prose novel, and a few other special things we’ve got planned.
     See? I told you. Best Christmas possible.'

And Bill provided the cover to much of that loveliness.


Tomorrow, I'll be offering you my feature review of Kate Bush's new album, Fifty Words for Snow, plus other surprises.  Until then, Cheerio!