So, yesterday evening I went to see Cory Doctorow do a reading and discussion about his new book For The Win. I haven’t finished the book so this is not a review of that… this is more of a quick talk about the reading and meeting Cory.

First off, Cory is an extremely nice guy. He was extremely personable and seemed like a guy I could hang out and shoot the shit with no problems.

He did a nice 10 or so minute reading and then opened the floor to questions. To paraphrase him… “I don’t know what you want to hear about, so ask me questions.” As the subject of his new book is “gold farming” in virtual worlds that was obviously a big part of the conversation. Turns out, he actually did quite a bit of research for this book. Travelling to China and other places and speaking to actual gold farmers. He had some very interesting views on why “chinese gold farmer” is a racist term based on the economic “war” between China and the United States. As he found in his research the gold farmers are located all over the world. He also found that there are only a few brokerage houses that exist for this sort of stuff and they are all based in one area. (Okay, so I forgot the area… I wasn’t taking notes, I was too interested in actually listening.)

There was also some interesting discussion about British politics, and the possible repeal of a bunch of the laws around surveillance in England. When asked about his thoughts on if the changes to British law might affect the laws in the US he was… skeptical at best. There was also a great discussion about a new movement we should start called “Oh come on!” Very interesting and I hope Cory really does start it. It’s pretty much a movement that when the government does something stupid(you must take off your shoes at the airport to check for x-ray invisible materials)  the group just goes… “Oh come on!”. Again, I’m paraphrasing here… but that was the gist of it. He told us a little about some of the stuff he is working on and stuff he read growing up that influenced him.

Overall, it was an awesome time. Cory is a great guy and I hope he comes back soon. I would definitely love to hear him speak again.

Anywho, here are some pictures from the event. I had some video… but my BlackBerry decided to fuck up and not save the video. Yes, most of the pictures suck… but thats what you get for using a phone as a camera.

and here is my Kindle that Cory signed(along with 6 books, I really like his books…)