I think this is a great illustration to add on to my last post about unfollowing on Twitter.

The past week has seen a firestorm in a part of the net that I regularly lurk around. I didn’t even notice it happening and only know those involved by name and reputation. So I am not pretending to know any details or to pass any sort of judgment on any of the players.

The fallout is interesting though. One of the players is relatively well known in the scene. It seems that someone upset him. A great deal, if this last twitter post is anything to go by:

And to judge by the link from the twitter profile, he was serious:

I know children who would have trouble topping a dummy spit like that.

Gotta say, I understand the urge to pick up my marbles and go home. But surely a more sensible (not to say mature) response would have been to:

• turn off comments on my blog (leaving the useful information there for those not involved in annoying me in the first place)
• protect my tweets (perhaps blocking certain followers at the same time)
• unsubscribing from offending RSS feeds
• never going back to certain forums
• Say nothing. Nothing at all.

All of which would at least leave the door open for a gracious return to the fold (if desired) once the fires have all died down. Rather that using the fire to burn all of his bridges.

For an interesting exercise, I’ve created a soundtrack for the forthcoming film of my 2009 NaNovel.

We can dream can’t we?

• Love Lies Bleeding – Elton John
• Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad – The Clash
• She’s Invisible Now – Eurythmics
• Would You Believe? – Roxy Music
• Superman Main Title Theme*
• He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother – The Hollies
• You Know I’ll Always Love You – Budgie
• Flames of Fire – Machinae Supremacy
• Super Steve – Machinae Supremacy
• Laura – Flogging Molly
• Liar – Queen
• Blood Brothers – Iron Maiden**
• Liar, Liar – Castaways
• For All Tomorrow’s Lies – Berlin
• Ride of the Valkyries*

* I apologise in advance for the use of the Superman Theme and the Wagner. It was just too hard to leave them out, being a superhero story and all (My MC can’t even fly!)
** I also apologise for the Maiden. But I’m fairly convinced that my muse comes disguised as Eddie, so I’d best make this small offering for the sake of a smooth and comfortable November.

We’re well within two months of NaNoWriMo 2009 and I’m not really sure what I’m wanting to do.

Last year’s story only told half of the story I had planned, so I was originally planning on doing a sequel. But now I don’t want to. I was happy to leave it where it finished. In fact, the story I ended up telling started off being just the introduction to the story I first envisioned telling. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes!

I need to come up with something else. That doesn’t need to be hard, I’ve always got lots of ideas, I just need ideas plus inspiration. And a bit of interest developed in the subject matter.

So instead, I’ve come up with a completely different and very stupid idea that will have me doing almost everything differently to how I did it (successfully) last year.

I’ve been playing around with the Mythic Game Master Emulator (demo here and yahoo group here) for my role playing games this year and I am considering using that to completely “wing it”. The GME book says this:

Finally, Mythic: GME can be used as a writing tool. The architecture that creates dynamic adventures is really an automated story-telling system. It will work just as well without any games or formalized characters attached. Just set the scene, ask some questions, and start writing.

If it works the way I see it, I could just come up with a general concept (or even make one randomly) and then use the system and appropriately phrased questions to let the plot work itself out.

Some years ago, I did some rough outlines of an alternate-history Earth. Very little of it got detailed, but the setting has a reasonably defined place in my mind. The idea of writing a novel set there, and having the Mythic Fate chart to help me flesh it out really appeals to me.

I’ll keep you informed as to how it goes…

Yeah. Right.

While tidying my sidebars recently, I updated my token adsense ad (surely an act of purest optimism to even bother). Probably because my topics here are all over the place, I can never predict the sorts of ads that might turn up.

Have a look at one that I noticed today:

“Novel Writing Software. Guaranteed To Have Your Novel In A Month Working Only 1 Hour a Day.”

1 hour a day? For a month?

I don’t think so. It took me three goes at nanowrimo to even get a crap 50,000 word story happening.

That’d want to be some super magic software. Don’t think I’ll be clicking on it.

It’s been almost three months since I’ve posted. A far cry short of the 15 posts in the month of August last year and even less than the two I managed during NaNoWriMo (when I managed to finish a 52k+ novel as well).

Creative commons licensed image

You know why I haven’t managed anything? It could be that I had nothing useful to say (I’m sure there would be plenty out there who would say that most of my posts were also made when I had nothing useful to say). I could perhaps have been too busy. Having a rest?

No, none of those.

Simply put, every time I do into the admin section, I fiddle. Fiddle with the plugins, the themes, the widgets and whatever else looks interesting. Tweak things to make them look or work better. Generally procrastinate.

From someone who makes a point of saying that presentation is a lot less important than content, this was a bit of nasty revelation. It wasn’t that long ago that I was telling my #2 son off for writing a project with colours and fonts and everything organised as he went (didn’t help that he kept getting grumpy with it when it wouldn’t work like he wanted) instead of worrying about what he wanted to say first.

So I won’t make any promises, but from here on it, I’ll try to post more often than I change the theme!

I’m a big fan of the webcomic PvP. I almost fell off my seat when I saw this little speech bubble on yesterday’s strip: “It [Ghostbusters] was the first movie I memorized quotes from.”

That’s me. I was quoting from Ghostbusters long before I discovered Monty Python and before there even was a Blackadder. It’s been all downhill since then (just ask my wife!)

What is wrong with these people?

I’m not saying anything about the desirability of a new Islamic school in Camden, but judging by this sign shown in the ABC’s story on the issue I think some people could make better use of the schools they do have.

I’m sorry, but this sort of thing really brings out the [Bob the Angry Flower][2] in me.

[2]: http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Daylight savings time is coming up this weekend in WA. Once it is over, we get to vote in a referendum (again).

Slashdot ran a story today about the end of DST in the northern hemisphere. Here a few of the more insighful comments.

I grew up in AZ – moved to a state that does daylight savings a couple years ago. I hate it. I never felt any lack for not having it or thought, “Gee, I wished we messed with the clocks twice a year.” – stoolpigeon

make everyone talk in UTC. That should do it. – frank_adrian

Russia has a dozen time zones and fares just fine – as does China, with only one. This business of claiming that ‘light’ is a problem needing a solution is the only issue here…- djupedal

So, scrap daylight savings time and replace it with a system of several thousand time zones, each updated daily based on the predicted “high noon” for that particular day at that particular location. If the prediction ends up being off by a few microseconds on a particular day, just change the time to correct it right then and there! Sure, wristwatches will become orders of magnitude more complex, but it’s the only way to have a truly sane and accurate system of time measurement. And after all, isn’t that what we all really want here? – eln

If people want/need to get up earlier or later to take advantage of the daylight then JUST GET UP EARLIER OR LATER! There is no good reason to change the clock backward and forward. Lots of places don’t do it and they don’t have any problems. – slashname3

I have had my copy of [NWN2][1] pretty much since it was released.

After a couple of false starts over the last two years, I have finally managed to play more than once or twice with a character and really get moving. I am almost at the end of Act I, and at 10th level.

This is not a review (it is a bit late for that), but I just wanted to share a mistake I found in the text.

At the Neverwinter Archive you find a series of books that you need to answer questions on. One of these books is [*"To Counter the Assumption of a Flat Faerûn"*][2], with ideas much like the old belief in a Flat Earth.

Now this is all well and good, but the name of the planet is **not** *Faerûn*, it is [*Abeir-Toril*][3]. This is like saying Flat Europe instead of Flat Earth.

Yes, I’m pathetic. No need to tell me.

[1]: http://www.nwn2.com
[2]: http://www.gamebanshee.com/neverwinternights2/walkthrough/neverwinterarchives.php
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeir-Toril