Fast City
The new Tekka introduces a new and important part of the mix: original new media. The first work is Don Bosco's Fast City, from the high-rise heartlands of Singapore. George Landow writes:
One can "play" the PDA, creating an assemblage of texts, and one can also create one's own dub music by manipulating the buttons. Mousing over each of the 60 X's at the right of the PDA produces a snippet of urban sound and brings up a connected text, each a mini-portrait of life in the Fast City -- the out-of-work surveillance expert looking at the classifieds, urbanites assembling a home entertainment center, kids playing video games, dance-clubbers immersing themselves in the banbangbang of "guitaristic assaults," the fashion model on the runway, and the soldier back for R&R: lives and deaths, all permeated by modern media
This means that Tekka is also a professional market for Web fiction and other new media, giving variety and vitality to our literary ecology. There's a lot of good work sitting in people's desk drawers, work that could be finished and enjoyed if only there were a good place to put it. Now there is.
Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). incidentally, is about to launch The Right Number, an experiment in micropayments.