Monday, June 29, 2009

Lord Of My Own Domains II

Heraldic Arms
As the long, slow death of Compuserve reaches its final throes, the time has come at last to move my 'static' website, The Observatory, to a new domain: www.rocketpunk-observatory.com.

I cleared up much clutter from the old site (e.g. political stuff from the early 2000s) that no one will miss, but this is as good a time as any to highlight a couple of retained items of interest to readers of this blog. (You will also note that I've added a shameless little plug for myself, both at the website and on the sidebar of this blog. What can I say? We live in a capitalist system!)


Interstellar Trade: A Primer. For much of the decade my post was the top Google result for the search terms 'interstellar trade,' which was pretty cool. Even now it ranks third, after two links to economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman. (He once wrote a paper on STL trade!) Alas, with the move it will lose old inbound links and drop down into the long tail somewhere. But you can still find it here.


The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. Obviously inspired by Diana Wynne Jones, encyclopedia-style thumbnail comments on space SF tropes. Winch of Atomic Rockets has done me the honor of citing quite a few of these - see his site for much, much more of interest.


The Observatory main page has a links to couple of other items, plus (scroll down) a few software toys I've written over the years.

And the comments thread for this post can serve for something I never had previously - a place to comment on Interstellar Trade and the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy, or anything else on my static site.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll have to take the time to brouse the site in detail...it seems pretty interesting.

Ferrell

Rick said...

I think you'll enjoy the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy.

PhiBlock said...

I love the Tough Guide, its funny and pithy, and I am glad you're preserving it.

Also, I was wondering if you were going to update the Guide, adding or amending the Guide with current trends in SF. Its been 9 years since it was written, and there are bound to be a few new things here and there.

Rick said...

I don't have specific plans to update the Tough Guide (which is quite a different thing from 'no'). But come to think of it, mini essays like those would be good to intersperse with the longer pieces I do here. (Classify under D'oh!)

Nine years have indeed passed, and right off I can think of a few things I didn't cover, such as elevators/beanstalks, nanotech, and the Singularity. Sort of odd, since they were all already 'big' when I wrote the original. Go figure!

Carla said...

Link updated. And I agree, there must be scope for some additions to the Guide :-)

Rick said...

I'll certainly pick up some of those topics here!

The old pages had quite a few links, which alas will evaporate tomorrow. I had no way of putting up a 'This site is moving' message, because a Microsoft update wiped out the software I used to upload things to my Compuserve site. (And it wasn't worth finding and wrestling with new uploading software for a site about to vanish anyway!)

So people will just have to find their way to my new pages. :-)

Calsir said...

I reached this blog via the plug you posted on your old compuserve observatory, which I reached through atomic rocket...

I really found your Tough Guide extremely entertaining (and accurate).

Good work.

Rick said...

Thanks! I will probably give into popular demand, as it were, and start posting addenda to the Tough Guide here. (Look for one in a day or two!)