[HN Gopher] Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Author : keepamovin
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-07-23 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gutenberg.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gutenberg.org)
| robin_reala wrote:
| Ah, a rare appearance of the copyrighted Project Gutenberg book.
| See also their translation of Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ [1] and the
| not-awful edition of Verne's _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
| Sea_.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200
|
| [2] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488
| [deleted]
| totetsu wrote:
| It is reminding me of "Feersum Endjinn".
|
| And the current season of Adventure time which is set in an
| alternative future Disneyworld.
| flufferstutter wrote:
| Current season? I had a look and there is the new Fiona and
| Cake series coming at the end of August. But I thought there
| the last episode before that was in 2021?
| donohoe wrote:
| I love gutenberg, but how did they allow the reading experience
| to be so awful. It could be so much more if they were to update
| the basic template or whatever directions they provide for
| content submission.
| lproven wrote:
| As far as I know, _all_ of Doctorow 's books are on his website
| for free download anyway.
|
| E.g. here is _Content_...
|
| https://craphound.com/content/download/
|
| DAOITMK is here:
|
| https://craphound.com/category/down/
| totetsu wrote:
| Wow every format imaginable. Even the ebook as gba rom
| matt-attack wrote:
| Apple Newton??
|
| Curious though, is there a way to get it on an iPhone in the
| built in Books app?
| jilX wrote:
| EPUB format, DAOITMK was listed as "for Stanza".
| idlewords wrote:
| [flagged]
| mkl wrote:
| I think I remember reading a blog post explaining why one was
| not free, but I can't find it now. There's a reference to it
| here:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/rub7ff/is_corey_do...
| ghaff wrote:
| Typical commercial publishing contracts, you can't just stick
| the book up online for free.
| mkl wrote:
| But up to that point, Doctorow had custom contracts where
| he _could_ put the books online for free.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't think they're _all_ there, e.g.
|
| https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/
| lproven wrote:
| Don't know. Maybe it's too new?
| dochtman wrote:
| I don't think the newer ones (like Walkaway) are Free like the
| early ones?
| lproven wrote:
| Looks like that could be the case, yes. Maybe his publishers
| changed their minds. I know he and Charlie Stross had great
| difficulty getting Charlie's publishers to agree to a free
| ebook of _Rapture of the Nerds_.
|
| It looks like there was briefly a giveaway of _Walkaway_ and
| as a result it 's on the Internet Archive, but I've not
| checked it.
| garrisonhh wrote:
| Regardless, you can easily find the ebook online which Cory
| Doctorow won't have any problem with
| doctor_eval wrote:
| How cool to see Plucker in that list. Something I started in
| the 90s.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The more usual link for Gutenberg is:
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8086
|
| Which gives you different formats, and links to the author's
| other works.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I prefer this 'HTML (as submitted)' version. Kind of the
| canonical "first edition" seems ~~ guess it's how Doctorow sent
| it to the big G himself? Plus it has the cute little lime green
| frontispiece, and I love that.
|
| That's why I posted this link not another one.
| khimaros wrote:
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3570141M/Down_and_out_in_the...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20716878 - Aug 2019 (16
| comments)
|
| _Down and out in the magic kingdom - A tale of software
| consulting in the midwest_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11595120 - April 2016 (126
| comments)
| wgx wrote:
| Dan your second link isn't about the book, and it's now a 404.
|
| Edit: neither link are about the book.
| pwdr_mnky wrote:
| I read this book on an iPod because Doctorow releases the vast
| majority of his work freely, so I could just upload a text file
| to my clickwheel. Weird, but awesome.
|
| The book itself is great too. I still think about a lot of the
| concepts to this day.
| ddingus wrote:
| Me too! Read a few of his books on a Nano. I had several people
| ask me about what I was doing with my Nano.
|
| Was a small screen, but workable at the time.
|
| I used iPad note format to read my copy.
| bitsoda wrote:
| Ha, I had completely forgotten this was a thing I used to do.
| Thanks for bringing back good memories of scrolling through
| .txt files. It might sound tedious to those who never tried it,
| but the Clickwheel was a genuine pleasure to use for so many
| things. I still miss it to this day.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Obligatory repost of this 2009 gem:
|
| _Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard_
|
| https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA
| BruceEel wrote:
| Read this in paperback when it came out. Highly entertaining and
| highly recommended!
| dawyne wrote:
| [flagged]
| prepend wrote:
| I like this book and I'm never quite sure how some of the terms
| were Doctorow capturing what's going on and writing it down vs
| inventing it. I think how whuffie was described here seems like
| something that will really exist and I don't know if there were
| any sites displaying cumulative karma for people.
|
| It was at least the first time I read it.
|
| Also, I think the "comm" described in Eastern Standard Tribe is
| the first time a smartphone was practically described with
| functions we had later in the iPhone (payment, maps, pervasive
| information, camera, image and video sharing). I wondered if
| phone designers ever drew inspiration from Doctorow's specific
| books.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I find Whuffie as a concept pretty interesting, though not that
| different from regular wealth. For example, being the daughter
| of prominent Imagineers did hold a lot of sway in their world,
| despite the daughter herself not being particularly remarkable.
|
| What I mean to say is, trust-fund kids will still be alive and
| well in some form in a post dollar world.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Maybe I'm extending your sentiment-vector too far in its
| direction (or maybe mistaking its direction entirely!), but
| are you at the: "So no matter what kind of future we have,
| there's still no point in trying, because in the end it's not
| about what you choose, it's about what's given to you?"-Level
| or a less extreme version of that-Level...?
| tetris11 wrote:
| The latter, as anything is better than what we have now; a
| semi-meritocracy for STEM and maybe a handful of other
| professions.
|
| Whuffie seems like it would open up that definition to a
| wide range of careers and interests (artists for example),
| but would still suffer from some of the nepotism after the
| initial uptake of the value system.
|
| I'm also wondering how one could redistribute Whuffie in a
| charitable kind of way
| dochtman wrote:
| I think Doctorow later was more explicit about the downsides
| of a Whuffie-like reputation systems, IIRC even in one of his
| fictional works?
| egypturnash wrote:
| One of the early antagonists in _Walkaway_ is a group of
| reputation economy jerkbags.
| com2kid wrote:
| > I think how whuffie was described here seems like something
| that will really exist and I don't know if there were any sites
| displaying cumulative karma for people.
|
| The book was written when slashdot.org was really big, it
| basically invented the "Karma" system. There was this idea of
| user generated and curated content being a bright happy new
| future, and DAOITMK basically shot that idea dead by showing
| all the faults such a system would have. Of course subsequent
| sites (re: reddit) have exhibited all of those flaws. HN stays
| reasonable because of the mods, but even so the culture is a
| lot different here than it was 10 years ago. When I first
| created an account here short comments almost always got
| downvoted, posters who didn't have anything substantial learned
| to stay quiet.
|
| (The downside of that culture is people learned to type
| intelligent sounding long form fluff!)
| jes5199 wrote:
| Eastern Standard Tribe is a weird one because its predictions
| turned out to be rather short-term, half of the ideas seem
| obvious now and half seem foolish
| tialaramex wrote:
| > I wondered if phone designers ever drew inspiration from
| Doctorow's specific books.
|
| I'm sure at least somebody was thinking about that because
| Doctorow's books are popular, but all that specifically
| happened is vendors discovered if you tell people that the
| handheld computer you're selling them is a "phone" they'll buy
| that, and then of course they actually wanted a handheld
| computer, so they'll keep buying them even as actually they now
| realise they don't want to make telephone calls.
|
| Both Android Inc. and the Apple secret project to develop their
| smartphone pre-date Doctorow's novel. Which doesn't mean he
| knew about them, but it means he couldn't have inspired these
| efforts.
|
| The handheld computers aren't specifically doing those things,
| they can just do whatever, because they're a general purpose
| computer, and the features you listed are among the popular
| things to use that for. I guess _maybe_ they needn 't have
| happened to have cameras, but given how cheap that is to do
| it's not a big surprise.
|
| The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age is maybe
| more directly inspirational, various technologies are clearly
| inspired by the Primer which substantially pre-dates them
| because it's from a time (the mid-1990s) where many people
| don't have Internet access.
| kbutler wrote:
| > vendors discovered if you tell people that the handheld
| computer you're selling them is a "phone" they'll buy that,
| and then of course they actually wanted a handheld computer,
| so they'll keep buying them even as actually they now realise
| they don't want to make telephone calls
|
| So much this.
|
| And we expected tablets to become more popular, but instead
| phones grew to the max screen size that still allows
| pocketability.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I read this a while ago. I don't know if it's because I've never
| been to disney world or know enough about it, but I didn't really
| "get" the book. Some of the concepts were interesting like dead
| heading and backing up but not really things I haven't read by
| other authors of the same decade. Although, maybe some of these
| ideas stem from this book so not sure. But overall I found it
| hard to follow, mostly because i didn't understand the importance
| of the various venues or why the various characters were in that
| particular location in the first place.
|
| I think the point was more about the kind of social credit
| system, in that sense it seemed not to be able to decide if it
| was depicting a utopia or dystopia. But please tell me if I'm way
| off, interested in hearing what people felt about this book.
| silveira wrote:
| I read this book on paper many years ago. I only visited Walt
| Disney World once because the curiosity it caused. Of course I
| went to the hall of presidents.
| madrox wrote:
| I'm paraphrasing a quote somewhat, but "we didn't have to change
| their minds; they just died" haunts me 20 years after reading it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Okay so what's this book about?
|
| I read "about this book" but it just wanted to tell me about
| copyright and publication details.
| dsr_ wrote:
| It's science fiction about economics, intellectual property,
| and the value of community.
|
| But that tagline applies to nearly everything Doctorow's
| written.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh that sounds fun. I'm in.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| This and his Walkaway are his best books about alternate
| economo-political systems. In particular, they deal with
| the challenges of near or full post-scarcity world.
|
| Really a good study in understanding that just growing till
| we produce "enough" is not going to solve critical human
| problems. There will still be serious conflict, and the
| solutions to those are not economic growth.
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