Will a serene background image of a snow covered field and non-obtrusive piano really help me bang out serious prose? I don’t know about all the bells and whistles around Omniwriter Beta V2’s version of an immersive writing environment, but I’m sort of taken with the fading in and out interface and cool round buttons, and as a free download and a Mac only application its passed my minimum requirements to try out.
Posted on Monday, 30 November, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I’m very interested in reading this book by James Marcus Bach. He’s a self-taught games programmer who scored a swett gig at Apple with little to no direct experience and no management background. The introduction is posted at Gizmodo right now, which offters the following: “The book’s main purpose, as illustrated by the excerpt James has kindly permitted us to publish, is to show how education is not about pieces of paper on the walls, but the knowledge you cram inside your own head.”
“Chris was supportive. “You should not just read about software,” he suggested. “Try to find solutions to our problems in other disciplines.” Maybe Chris was more supportive than he ever knew. I treated that one casual suggestion as permission to spend work time to learn anything. I browsed many of the two hundred or so academic journals that came through the library. Even crazy stuff. I read “Anthropometry of Algerian Women,” and “Optimum Handle Height for a Push-Pull Type Manually-Operated Dryland Weeder.”
As much as I’d like to see her return to fiction for at least one more round, I usually look forward to about anything she publishes, which always seems to work as a sharp, double-bladd instrument, cutting through entrenched mainstream analysis while also giving the well-meaning “left” a few well deserved slices. Again using her homeland of India as a backdrop for showing the larger picture, this round looks at something contrary to most sensibilities, including my own, the “dark side of democracy.”
Why do people in places in mass revolt against something we know so many others are fighting to obtain?
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on the peoples’ behalf, informed us that “Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace.” What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Meanwhile Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir’s sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace alone they yearned for, but freedom too. Over the last two months the carefully confected picture of an innocent people trapped between “two guns,” both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.
Posted on Thursday, 2 July, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
On July 8 my father’s day present comes into play as we take in an afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot starring Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) at Haymarket Theatre here in London. As a comic, sci-fi geek and Beckett head, it’s about as perfect a storm as it can get. In honor of the occasion, here are some Godot links from around the websosphere:
5) The Barbie (or Ken, actually) edition. This looks like it was, at some point, a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, copyright (f)laws have rendered this one kind of useless. YouTube apparently found that some part of the track infringed on someone’s rights to sell something. Next to the clip it reads: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.”
Because, you know, I get that. Because someone heard three minutes of something on a YouTube video of some people essentially playing with plastic dolls, will decide, “all right then. No need to buy that now, I’ve experienced it to its fullest right here.” Total sense making. Based on all the blatantly stolen stuff you can find on YouTube, I hadn’t previously thought they actually paid attention to copyright. Interesting. If anyone out there knows where a version is with audio still enabled, let me know and I’ll update the link. However, watching it in silent mode is a slightly creepy, surreal way of testing your memory of the lines.
Posted on Saturday, 4 October, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Porn?
You know, I admit I’m a sucker for a censored work, or even an attempted-censored work. Film, movie, music whatever. It just makes me want to know so much more about what the message was when there’s someone trying to keep me from accessing it.
More so when the intimidating group comes from religious circles. It’s not likely I would have waded through Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses if there hadn’t been a fatwa issued. Tough for Salman, but I can just imagine the the publishing house’s marketing team clicking their heels over the noting that a religious nutter had done their work for them.
No, I suppose it’s not a cool admission. sort of like admitting you weren’t into some punk band back when they were with Sub-Pop Records.
So it’s interesting to me that an author of a book that is the subject of attempted censorship by religious zealots is herself turning on critics of her work, accusing them of stocking violence, just by criticizing her work.
Posted on Friday, 26 October, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Ariel Gore is famous. I know this because she’s highly googlable, can get the likes of Susie Bright and Dave Eggers on the phone, gets fan mail, and most recently wrote How to Become A Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. I read Ariel’s book for some sort of Red Bull style booster in advance of National Novel Writing Month. Yeah, scads of people are reading No Plot No Problem, and I heartily recommend this NaNoWriMo Bible as well, but I don’t just want to finish a novel, I want to publish a novel and be cradled in the voluptuous arms of pop-lit 5-minute stardom at least once, and hopefully the feeling becomes infectious enough to repeat it.
Ariel’s book does more than other writing-on-writing books do. It’s not just tackling the artistic side of writing, though much of the book does this. It goes after the reason we write, which is to illuminate and stir response. We want to either be loved or hated. We don’t want ot be ignored.
On July 8 my father’s day present comes into play as we take in an afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot starring Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) at Haymarket Theatre here in London. As a comic, sci-fi geek and Beckett head, it’s about as perfect a storm as it can get. In honor of the occasion, here are some Godot links from around the websosphere:
“I know now that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred towards anyone.”