Real Life

Busy time at the home office: Fantasy Craft Second Printing is in the can and off to the printers (we'll have the electronic versions out in your hands soon), Epoch's complete and should go into editing later today (the rest of the Adventure Companion's close as well), Time of High Adventure's going into layout this week, and tonight Alex and Pat are meeting about the last of the materials we need for the Spycraft Third events at GenCon. The final Spellbound stretch is waiting in the wings, and after that it's - wait for it - a return to the World on Fire. Good times.

This article presents an eerily familiar concept...

A new Pew Internet survey of 900 Internet experts leads with a headline finding that will surprise few: the experts largely agree that, by 2020, we'll all be computing in the cloud. But an even more interesting notion is buried in one corner of the report, and it's an idea that came up in two of the three cloud interviews I did in the wake of Wired/Ars Smart Salon. This notion is that, at some point, there will be a massive data breach—a kind of cloud version of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but pouring critical data out into the open instead of oil—and that this breach will cause everyone from private industry to government regulators rethink what cloud computing can and cannot do.

The authorities have been alerted and photo analysis has begun. If you know anything that might help safely recover our little darling, please call 555-HELP.

Thank you.

I don't remember most of my dreams but when I do they're sprawling epics to make the 70s cinematic masters proud. The casts are huge and are clearly following directorial cues. There's sometimes a score. The plots are complex with twists and turns aplenty - often ones I don't see coming. I've even had dreams that continued over multiple nights, miniseries-style.

Did I mention they're almost always fairly bleak? Take last night for example. It focused on a multi-day court case about a plane crash in which I was (presumably) the only survivor. I was testifying that not one but two different people had noticed instrument failure before takeoff and a corrupt judge who was somehow involved was trying to block me getting to the stand.