Last week I went on Cranky Geeks with the always-amusing John Dvorak (currently obsessed with a duck-shaped keyboard vacuum) and media-jammer Jacob Appelbaum. We talked about the PS3 riots, geek gifts for the holidays (I plugged the Chumby, even though it’s not on sale), and what the hell is up with YouTube and the RIAA. Watch us be dorks!

Last night I made two pumpkin pies from scratch. I took a frakin’ pumpkin and cooked it, then I pureed it, drained it in cheesecloth, mixed it with buttloads of sugar and cream and spices, and poured the mixture into two pie shells that I’d made out of flour and butter and stuff. Then I cooked them! And they turned out really well! I’ve literally never made a pie before, but now I’m a convert. Plus, Jesse and Chris and I managed to eat a quarter of one of the pies last night so I have a bit of a sugar hangover.

Over the past couple of weeks, when I haven’t been on deadline, I’ve been thinking about the spectre of a possible Microsoft Linux distribution. After the MSFT-Novell deal, anything could happen. Read more about that.

I’ve also been pondering the nature of happiness, from both scientific and philosophical perspectives. Possibly that’s because I’ve recently read economist Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, and philosopher Joel Kupperman’s Six Myths About the Good Life. I can’t say I would recommend the Layard, because his sole insight (that money doesn’t make us happy) is followed by a lot of misguided public policy wanking. Kupperman’s book, however, is satisfyingly spiky: he refuses to accept conventional wisdom about what makes us happy (in fact, he argues that some kinds of happiness are simply bad). And his references jump pleasingly from Western philosophy to Buddhism to pop culture and back. Also, in the course of my reading these books and some essays on the topic, I discovered that I’m apparently quite happy by most definitions. Read more about the science and ethics of happiness.

My column last week was about a brilliant study that some Canadian researchers just published in PLoS Biology. By studying the way fruit flies pass on “fitness” (ie, ability to reproduce plentifully) to their children, they discovered that some genes are only good for one sex. A gene that promotes fitness in a father produces daughters who reproduce far less than average. Same goes for fit mothers — their sons are also unfit. Contrary to popular belief, mating with a very fit person of the opposite sex may not be good for your future children.

This is comforting for many of us, though. If humans are anything like fruitflies, this research confirms my feeling that all those dudes with trophy wives and ladies with himbo arm candy are about to get totally screwed out of the gene pool.

Read more.

Come out to the San Francisco Public Library tomorrow night for Michelle Tea’s extra-cool RADAR reading series. I’ll be reading from my book-in-progress — a true story of communes, computers, and group marriage in 1980s San Francisco. Others on the bill include the amazing cartoonist Keith Knight, poet Kari Edwards, and performance artist Kathe Izzo.

The reading is tomorrow, Tuesday Aug. 14, at 6 PM in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin Street. We’ll be in the Latino Reading Room on the basement level. Yes, it’s free!

I’ve just started blogging on the currently-being-revamped Wired culture blog, Table of Malcontents, which was founded by the excellent Lore Sjöberg. The blog is currently undergoing a transformation, which includes changing the name (so don’t get too attached to “Table of Malcontents,” as cool as it is) and adding the blogging talents of John Brownlee (recently of Gawker) and yours truly. John blogs a lot about weird news and art, while I’m focusing exclusively on science fiction, fanasy, horror, comics, anime, etc. — you know, nerd culture. Lore continues to blog about web cartoons, weird flash movies, strange games, and other oddities of the webowebs.

All these changes are a direct result of Conde Nast, owners of Wired magazine, buying Wired News, the website. Few people realized that Wired News was owned by Lycos for several years, making it rather odd for those of us who write for both the magazine and the website. Now everybody is owned by Conde Nast again, so we’re all part of the same anonymous culture-extruding machine. I couldn’t be having more fun with my blogging life. I’m writing three posts per day, which is honing my “do it fast and well” skillz. Plus, I get to work with John and Lore, who both rule (I’ve been a Lore fan for quite a while). Anyway, surf the blagotubes over to Table of Malcontents — or whatever name we finally decide upon — early and often. I’ll update you when we have our new name.

I’m also continuing my bloggish duties at MeeVee, writing weekly reviews of Battlestar Galactica and Heroes in a column called “Totally Frakked.” I think Heroes is uneven but occasionally flat-out fantastic. If only most of the episodes focused on Claire the unbreakable cheerleader and Hiro the Japanese otaku I’d be a number-one fan, intead of an ambivalent fan. BSG, of course, continues to be the most compelling SF show on TV. This season takes us deep inside Cylon society, which has the drawback of making the mysterious enemy a bit less menacing and occasionally comical. But it has the advantage of giving SF audiences a chance to contemplate the meaning of alien life, which is the main reason why a lot of us love the genre. Now if only Veronica Mars would perk up, I’d be the happiest TV-watcher on Earth.

I’m also writing at the newly-created blog for She’s Such a Geek, the anthology about female nerds that I co-edited with Charlie Anders. The book is due out from Seal Press in mid-December (in time for holiday gifts!) and the book’s contributors are blogging about feminism, women and geekhood in our blog. Stop by and check it out!

Media historian Jeff Ubois recently published a research paper about why it’s impossible to do research on the history of television. I wrote about his experiments in my column last week:

Ubois found that studying one simple event in recent TV history was impossible. Copyright rules and poor archive access meant that even after months of work, he was unable to gain copies of a single primary source related to former Vice President Dan Quayle’s 1992 speech blaming TV character Murphy Brown for the nation’s decline in family values.

Read more.

Come out this Wednesday to hear me talk about how I got a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-nodervis license for my book Pretend We’re Dead. I’m part of the excellent lineup at this week’s Creative Commons Salon, a monthly gathering for people interested in liberating culture from the clutches of Big Content. I’ll discuss the rocky road to convincing your publisher that a CC license is a great idea.

The night will also include presentations from Flickr and the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, as well as music from the Kleptones. I’ve been wanting to meet the folks from the Homebrew Mobile Club for ages, so I’m psyched to be on the same program with them!

The event is from 6-9 PM at the Shine bar, located in the leetest locale ever: 1337 Mission St., San Francisco.

I was impressed by the pseudo-documementary C.S.A.: Confederate States of America, which was recently released on DVD. Filmmaker Kevin Willmott put together a dark and funny snapshot of what U.S. television would look like if the South had won the Civil War, complete with creepy ads for the “Slave Shopping Network” and mood-altering pills that make “servant control” easier. The meat of the film, however, is a BBC mockumentary history of the C.S.A., which charts 150 years of U.S. history in which slavery was never abolished.

Here’s what I said about C.S.A. in my column:

What’s sheer genius about this alternate history is how much of it is drawn from actual US history. We hear about Native Americans being rounded up and put into orphanages, which actually happened; and the fake commercials advertising things like “Darkie Toothpaste,” “Niggerhair Cigarettes,” and “Coon Chicken” are all based on real products sold long after the abolition of slavery.

More chilling are ads for a TV show based on “Cops” called “Runaway.” The message may be heavy-handed, but it nevertheless rings true enough to be thought-provoking: US popular culture is only one degree removed from being that of a slave-owning nation.

The same goes for US political culture. Historical figures and events in CSA also remain virtually unchanged. Kennedy is elected president and calls for abolition right before being assassinated, and the Watts Riots are portrayed as a “slave uprising.” Reagan’s presidency heralds a new spike in the slave trade . . .

Read more.