On Writing

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Stephen King’s On Writing is a mixture of autobiography and ‘how-to-write’ book. It works both ways. I’m not a huge King fan but it was still very interesting and inspiring to hear about his early misadventures, especially if you’ve read some of his short story collections and get the fun of connecting story to real life incident.

As a ‘how-to-write’ book it was liberating to me. A lot of what King thinks just falls in line with what I feel, or even hope. One of his premises (and out of context it sounds a tad silly but it fits, believe me) is that stories already exist, and as a writer it is your job to carefully unearth them for the world to enjoy. King eschews elaborate outlines and summaries and instead lets the story go where it will. That appeals a lot to me.

There’re also some very practical tips and advice; in fact the book is jam-packed full of good stuff. If you’re struggling to find your voice, to meet your muse, read this book!

Kick-ass RSS News Aggregator

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been trying a bunch of different RSS Feed readers, but I think I’ve found the perfect (for me — these things are highly personal) solution. It comes in two parts.

First, get yourself a copy of AmphetaDesk. This is a cross-platform (written in Perl, so it’ll run on Windows, Mac OS 9 or X, Linux…basically anything that’ll run Perl I guess) utility to pull down RSS feeds. It uses your web browser to display the results. It works great! Problem is…it doesn’t look all that hot.

So second, get the bolt-on product, AmphetaFrames. You install it by renaming a directory in your AmphetaDisk install and replacing it with the AmphetaFrames directory. Its painless.

Last note for those of us who use quality browsers (something Mozilla based: Mozilla, FireFox, Camino), you have to make a small hack to a file. (Note that there’s a small typo on that page. In two places you’ll see # print out the http headers. $connection->send_basic_header(); there should be a line break so that $connection starts a new line. This typo is in both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ code segments.)

And voila, a flexible, good looking, free RSS reader that you can use on all your machines. You could even run it on a server and log into it from various places.

AmphetaDesk Thumbnail
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When biotech comes home

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When biotech comes home

[Freeman] Dyson called biotech the “new art form of the 21st century.” He predicted that the domestication of biotechnology will open up creativity to millions of people, with do-it-yourself kits for gardeners and snake breeders, for example. “Kids will buy seeds or eggs and compete with friends on who can grow the prickliest cactus or cutest dinosaur,” Dyson said. He envisions low cost DNA synthesizers that teenagers will buy like iPods and GarageBand to exercise their creative genes.

Um, yeah, ok….I certainly see that happening!

The scary thing is…I think he may be serious! I checked the calendar and it isn’t April 1st…

Bitten

Posted on by Nimgimli

Finished Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten this morning. It was a wonderful book; I can’t believe it was her first. I was very skeptical of the whole ‘modern day werewolves’ theme, to be honest, but damned if she didn’t pull it off nicely, telling us a riveting story while giving us glimpses into the whole werewolf mystique and leaving room for many more stories to come (I hope).

Overall she kept a tight leash on things (yes, pun intended) until the very last parts of the story where she got a little careless about leaving bodies behind, so to speak. This is forgivable in that the reader is so caught up in things by then that they’re probably just as happy to not have to pause for the explanation of how a fight scene is cleaned up. Ideally, though, we wouldn’t be left with questions of “What will the police think when they find….” and so forth.

That’s a minor nit, though. The story moved along really nicely; a real page turner. Elena is a believable modern day heroine. She’s got flaws and she has some very dense moments (perhaps a few too many — several times I was shouting the Bitten equivalent of “DON’T GO IN THE BASEMENT!”) but she’s still likable and a very sympathetic character.

I’m looking forward to reading more from Ms. Armstrong.

Video game ‘sparked hammer murder’

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CNN.com – Video game ‘sparked hammer murder’

Here we go again. The old “Videogames turn kids into killers” saw. You knew it was coming when Manhunt was published.

And honestly, while I certainly don’t think that this kid went apeshit on his friend because of playing Manhunt, I also don’t see the need for games that are this violent.

I’m not saying the company doesn’t have a legal right to make and sell them. I’m just not seeing the need for this much glorification of violence, personally.

Yes, it was rated for mature audiences but the facts are, at this stage of the game, its still too easy for kids to get ahold of mature-rated games to push things this far. It shouldn’t be that way, but we don’t live in a perfect world.