I’ve lately been intrigued with nineteenth century aesthetics, and therefore it should be no surprise that I’m one of the many dorks who admires “steampunk,” an artistic style that marries computer tech with Victorian design. Many would trace the origins of steampunk back to the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson novel The Difference Engine, an alt.history thriller hinging on the idea that computers are invented in the nineteenth century. Others would say that H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction started the whole movement back in the 1920s by blending contemporary science with Romantic monsters and mysticism.

No matter what its origins, steampunk has come into its own over the past few years. It’s jumped from literary genre to industrial design, and now there are a spate of steampunk artists as well as steampunk movies and bloggers. In my latest column, I talk about why people are drawn to artistic styles of the past, and especially why they want to turn computers into things that look like steam-driven tech. I suppose you could say I look at the dark side of steampunk. Read more.

I’ve been intrigued by the copyright infringement case that Columbia brought against the guys who run Web site TorrentSpy last year. The latest development in that case has the potential to change the way parties to a lawsuit gather evidence during its “discovery” period. Usually, you can only subpoena evidence that existed prior to the lawsuit during discovery. But in the TorrentSpy case, Columbia convinced a California judge that she should order TorrentSpy to create new evidence during discovery by saving data about their users that they hadn’t previously kept. Columbia’s lawyers argued that TorrentSpy had essentially already been saving this data because it flashed through their servers’ RAM — the part of computer memory that’s temporary and never gets saved to disk. So generating this new data was really more like recreating what should have already existed.

The judge’s ruling could open a door for plaintiffs to force, say, VoIP telephone companies to start saving audio files of people’s phone calls as evidence during discovery since those audio files existed briefly in RAM when they happened before the case was brought. In some ways, the ruling suggests that if you can save data on your users, you should — because if you don’t, a judge might order you to start. It’s a bizarre, wide-reaching decision that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of technology and creates a dangerous loophole that allows parties to a case to spy on each other during the discovery process. Read my column to find out more creepy details and unintended effects of this weird copyright ruling.

Last week, Huffington Post ran a strangely geeky gossip item about how Gawker Media might be launching a science fiction blog, and poaching a Wired writer to run it. This week, C|Net reveals all, or at least a skewed version of it. Yes, it’s true. I will be the lead editor for Gawker’s new blog, which will focus on science fiction, pop futurism, and speculative knowledge. No, it doesn’t have a name yet. No, we don’t have a launch date, but I guarantee you’ll see it before 2008.

Yes, I am totally psyched.

And yes, I will continue to be a contributing writer at Wired. Also, you’ll still see my weekly syndicated column Techsploitation all regular-like. But now you’ll get to read my bloggy thoughts all day, every day. And it won’t matter if you don’t like them at first, because I’ve got a mind-control ray embedded in your RSS feed. YOU . . . MUST . . . READ . . . BLOG! And don’t give me that “Blog? What is blog?” crap. You will be assimilated.

No, really, Google Street View is pissing me off. It’s a new application that’s part of Google Maps that allows users to view street-level pictures of homes and businesses — using arrows, you can literally “walk” down a street, and catch glimpses of everything from local coffee shops to a guy peeing in the bushes. (The images were taken from a van that drove city streets, shooting 360 degrees of photos as it went.) Sure it’s fun to walk around in a virtual neighborhood, but there’s really no use value to this app that I can see, other than sheer voyeurism.

And voyeurism is what you get. Already, people have turned up countless pictures of people caught naked or semi-naked, somebody getting arrested, people groping each other, etc. Just because I might be willing to make out with my sweetie on a street corner doesn’t mean I want the image posted in public forever by Google without my permission. This is just another way Google is invading privacy and candy-coating it with a fun but useless app. Read my column this week to find out more about what’s wrong with Google Street View.

Yesterday I was on Cranky Geeks, talking about everything from TorrentSpy to my love/hate relationship with Google StreetView. Check it out!

I love Wikipedia — as many people have noted, it’s an incredibly well-maintained public resource of information written by its users. What makes it such a valuable resource is that everyone who contributes can bring their own area of expertise to bear. No piece of knowledge is left out, as long as it’s truthful and sourced. And yet there is one giant flaw in the system. Entries can and are frequently deleted due to “lack of notability.” In other words, if one Wikipedian decides that a minor artist of the early twentieth century isn’t “notable,” he can tag it for notability and it will be deleted speedily and without discussion.

The question I ask in my column this week is why? Given that there is an unlimited amount of space on Wikipedia, why should we worry about whether something is “notable”? If it’s true and it’s sourced, it’s a piece of knowledge that should be in Wikipedia. Why should only the famous and “notable” be preserved for future generations? Read more about this problem with Wikipedia in my column.

This week my column is about green libertarianism, something that most people think doesn’t or can’t exist. I like the idea of merging green values with libertarianism because it seems to me that the only way we’re going to start engaging in serious preservation practices is by making them appeal to smart people who believe in the free market system (i.e., libertarians). This was definitely one of those columns where I was thinking while writing, sort of coming up with ideas as I went along. Towards the end, I began writing about what a green libertarian future would look like, which was probably the most interesting part for me. What do you think?

I wrote several blog posts about WisCon for the Underwire blog on Wired. One covered two comic book panels on female superheroes, another was about a panel called “Why Is This Universe So White?” The latter has gotten some really amazing comments from people arguing over the importance (or lack thereof) of having more people of color in science fiction and fantasy stories. I also wrote about a strange performance art piece called Cafe Scifi+tique put on by Mari Kotani, a Japanese science fiction author, who wanted to critique Japanese “maid cafes” by staging a maid cafe where mad scientists wait on women. I think the mad scientists were supposed to be like the otaku who normally go to maid cafes and get waited on by cute girls. So the tables were turned: otaku waited on the cute girls, rather than vice versa. Finally, I talked about Andrea Rubenstein’s fascinating paper about body image in video games, especially her stuff about sexual dimorphism among fantasy creatures in World of Warcraft.

Feminism + science fiction / Wisconsin = WisCon! I’ll be at the world’s premiere feminist science fiction this weekend in Madison, feeling about as happy as I could possibly be. I hope to return home with a lot of books and new ideas.

I’m speaking on a few panels: Friday night, I’m on a panel called “Whither Hero(in)es?”, a discussion about the (lack of) strong women in TV show Heroes; Sunday afternoon I’m part of the “Battlestar Galactica Debate,” which no doubt will involve much dissection of Starbuck. Then, Sunday night, I’m on a late-night panel called “What if you don’t want to have children?” Topic is self-explanatory. I’ll talk about why I got a tubal ligation 10 years ago. Monday afternoon is a book-signing for She’s Such a Geek, and then it’s back to San Francisco! If you’re there, please say hi! I can be shy about approaching people, but I’m very nice if you talk to me.

Last week, Wired published an article I wrote about an event I attended in LA devoted to conceptual designers who create imaginary cities and buildings for science fiction/fantasy movies. Moderated by the amazing Geoff Manaugh, whose BLDG BLOG I’ve been reading for ages, the panel was a great introduction to unsung architectural artists of the movie industry. Now you can learn about speculative urban design and see a bunch of amazing pictures in the photo gallery.