Hungarian book cover for William Gibson's Idoru

Book cover for William Gibson's Idoru, from this gallery of Hungarian book covers.

Link roundup

1. I saw this long William Gibson interview linked a few times today, not sure if I've read it before, or just read so much by him that it seemed familiar, but anyway, it's very interesting about his childhood. He's a great storyteller:

Wytheville was a small town. I wasn’t a very happy kid, but there were ­aspects of the town that delighted me. It was rather short on books, though. There was a rotating wire rack of paperbacks at the Greyhound station on Main Street, another one at a soda fountain, and another one at a drugstore. That was all the book retail anywhere in my hometown.

My parents were both from Wytheville. They eventually got together, though rather late for each of them. My father had been married previously, and my mother was probably regarded as a spinster. My mother’s family had been in Wytheville forever and was quite well-off and established, in a very small-town sort of way. My father’s father had moved down from Pennsylvania to start a lumber company. Once the railroads had gotten far enough back into the mountains, after the Civil War, there were a lot of fortunes being made extracting resources.

My mother had had some college, which was unusual for a young woman in that part of the world, but she hadn’t married, which was basically all a woman of her class was supposed to do. When she did eventually marry my father, he was the breadwinner. He had had some college, too, had studied engineering, which enabled him to wind up working postwar for a big construction company. My earliest memories are of moving from project to project, every year or so, as this company built Levittown-like suburbs in Tennessee and North Carolina.

2. Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks the new Google Reader design is inexplicably horrendous. It's so bad in such obvious ways that I wonder if it's a preliminary step toward eliminating the service.

3. Here's a talented artist looking for commissions to make custom action figures. (I post his work often at my custom toy site.)

Link roundup

1. William Gibson made the main character in Pattern Recognition afraid of Bibendum because his own daughter was terrified of him.

2. How to turn a dollar store skeleton mask into a Death Eater mask.

3. Suspected Russian spy trying to avoid getting deported from England:

Elements of the case . . . included her interest in Nato and a string of affairs with older men in positions of authority.

Via.

4. Book giveaway.

5. At Toycutter: Sucker Punch mecha Munny.

Link roundup

1. Part of a longer interview, William Gibson explains how he got published:

As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhaps an hour beforehand: “This is my new genius short story.” I read it—it was about someone who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drunks and prostitutes but are actually something else—and I saw, as I thought at the time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so much work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was really quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, “I hope this won’t piss you off, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique.” The next thing I get back is a note—“I sold it!” He had sold it to this hardcover horror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story.

People kept doing that to me, and it’s really good that they did. I’d give various friends stuff to read, and they’d say, “What are you going to do with this?” And I’d say, “Nothing, it’s not nearly there yet.” Then they’d Xerox it and submit it on my behalf, to places I would have been terrified to submit to. It seemed unseemly to me to force this unfinished stuff on the world at large.

2. "How to Get iOS 5’s Biggest Features in Android Right Now ."

3. Kotaku and Destructoid gave Arkham City great reviews, but this was definitely my complaint about Arkham Asylum:

It's just confusing to have so many buttons doing so many things, and so many enemies that require so many different ways of dispatching. It's certainly great to have options and variety, but there's an information overload that can drown even the most focused of brains. This is an issue that doesn't just affect combat -- with so many gadgets, it's tough to keep track of which items perform which tasks, and when they're needed against certain obstacles. I was stuck at one point because I forgot that, among everything else he can do, Batman can slide to get under low barriers. It totally slipped my mind among all the things I needed to remember. This ties into the earlier criticism of Batman's grappling hook -- there are so many things to latch onto that the game itself gets confused.

4. Relatedly, Topless Robot is giving away Arkham City figures.