Can you spell cacophony?

My 12 year old son and his friend spent much of last weekend mixing and matching all his lego minifigs to make his own Dr Who Lego.

Given that there was nothing manufactured specifically for what they were trying to make, I think they did a great job.

I’ve never been that interested in branded Lego, but if they ever did a merchandising deal with the Beeb over this, they would have a large amount of my money. And plenty of my childrens’ too.

Please excuse the poor photography. I rushed a bit, perhaps I can upload some new versions later.

I was going to pick just one, but I can’t really stretch a whole post out of why I like a single webcomic, so I’ll speak generally and then give you a list.

I’ve followed certain webcomics for probably about 10 years now. In the early days that involved remembering which sites to go to and checking them every day. Needless to say, I didn’t follow too many back them.

At one point, I followed a set of instructions for writing a script for downloading all your favourite strips for offline reading (this was before always on broadband internet was common). It worked really well too. I even managed to write an offline ‘home page’ in HTML that displayed them all for me in one big page, one after the other. It also left me with a great archive of all the strips if I ever wanted to revisit them.

I never did.

Nowadays we have RSS feeds for most of them and it is a simple matter of plugging in a feed address into Google Reader or your reader of choice and away you go. Every time the strip gets updated, there it is. Webcomics have never been more accessible.

There is something about webcomics (as opposed to the normal paper-based strips) that appeals to me. First of all, I don’t buy the paper that often and the one that I do (the Weekend Australian) doesn’t have a funnies page (it’s far too high-brow for that). But as well as that, there are particular themes that run through many of them. Computers and the internet for one (for obvious reasons), geek culture in general is another. They make me feel right at home.

When I went to compile my list I noticed how small it has got. I have sometimes had as many as twenty or more, but I do cull them occasionally (like I do with all my RSS feeds) and I haven’t replaced them with anything new.

Just on the culling process, I have found that I don’t really like the larger strips with convoluted stories. Those strips that are essentially short stories in picture form. I like to just have a quick look, have a giggle then go on to the next one. For the same reason, when I read a paper with funnies I tend to skip over Phantom or Modesty Blaise and the like. If I want to read a graphic novel, I’ll go buy one from the newsagent.

Here I have my list of comics that are currently in my Google Reader:

• Darths and Droids: A screen-capture strip made in homage to the great DM of the Rings (and if Shamus happens to read this: please, please, please put the old strips of Chainmail Bikini up somewhere). The artist is taking screen shots of the Star Wars films and making a comic strip story based on the premise that they are characters in a roleplaying game. Plenty of D&D and Star Wars in jokes. A bigger strip, but not too many words for my attention span.
• Order of the Stick: D&D in jokes galore. OOTS is starting to try my patience with too-long strips, but I have had far too many laughs from them in the past to give up just yet.
• PvP: or Player vs Player. The life of the team at a (computer) gaming magazine. Crude and sometimes potty-mouthed but without a doubt my favourite strip. Characters are well-defined and lovable (especially Skull the flatulent troll). I sometimes miss the computer-game references but there is plenty of D&D love in there too and most of the jokes are PvP-jokes anyway. Good work @pvponline!
• Dilbert: Dilbert is required reading. It has its own line in the geek code for goodness sake!
• Doghouse: as in “In the doghouse”. I’ve only just starting following Doghouse, but anything that makes jokes about the differences between men and women is good value in my book.
• UserFriendly: The first version of The IT Crowd, only Canadian. An oldie but a goodie, but currently only running repeats.
• OK, they are not really webcomics but you can get Calvin and Hobbes and Zits via RSS, so I do.

With this post, I would like address what I consider to be one of this generation’s most serious injustices.

The fact is, Coffee Cat does not get enough love on the net.

Coffee Cat is a part time coffee van that parks itself on the shore end of the tanker jetty in Esperance. You’ll find it there Thursdays to Mondays and only until 2pm. But most days, regardless of how terrible the weather they will be flat out barista-ing for the loving people of Esperance.

They have no net presence of their own, though there is a Coffee Cat Appreciation Society fan page on Facebook. If you google a little bit, you might find some short posts on a travel blog site or something similar. Our local paper, the Esperance Express will (whatever else its faults) occasionally print an article on the Cat, or its staff or its biscuits or even on how hard it is to find someone willing to make you a cuppa when you’re in Esperance.

I remember when they first opened. I’ve lived in Esperance for the best part of 14 years and I’ve lost count of the number of cafes that have opened, closed, changed owners and closed again in that time. While that article linked above might suggest that we live in a coffee wilderness, the fact is that more coffee places go out of business down here than manage to do it right. So when Coffee Cat first parked down by the jetty I thought it was an inspired move. It was just something different. Still just somewhere to get a cuppa, but not just another cafe. And to tell you the truth, the money my wife and I have spent on coffee since they opened compared to before just doesn’t bear thinking on. And why not? Who really wants to take seven children down to the cafe? But the beach, that’s another question!

Anyway, I just wanted to put the word out there that I think Coffee Cat is fantastic. The location, the coffee, the staff, the customers and even the ridiculously shortened trading hours. Shane and Lara… thanks.

Another post that spent far too much time in my drafts folder. The original title was “Why did I win this year?”. Sorry ’bout that.

I am speaking of course, of my finally winning at NaNoWriMo. It was my third attempt last year and I think it would be quite a stretch to call my efforts in 2006 and 2007 “attempts” at all!

Creative commons licensed image

So what did I do differently? What made the difference?

Here’s what I reckon (in no particular order):

1. I got started straight away. In previous attempts, I fell behind on day 1. I don’t think I need to explain this further
2. I got involved in the community. My primary community was the “Elsewhere in Australia” regional forum (we have even continued our association at the new Elsewhere Wrimos forum. The Fantasy Genre Longue was just too busy.
3. A bit of competition. Had a month-long word war with my writing buddy Kamu. She got to 50K first, but I was never more that just a good day’s work behind. It kept me motivated.
4. Used my bread maker to keep me up. We eat home-made breadmaker bread at home. I set the bread to cook every night so that it finished at about midnight. Once that is done, I can’t do to bed, otherwise the bread will be soggy in the morning. I have to stay up to get it out. This saved me from quitting early (for the night, not the month) on more than one occasion.
5. Realised I can write 2000 words in a stretch without too much trouble. Once that clicked, I knew that I could do it. Good days could net me 4K or more, but I knew that on any one day I could the minimum required without any trouble
6. Made and kept to a writing quota plan. I set up a spreadsheet table. Calculated how many days I had and how many words I had to write. Each day was given a weighting: either 1 for a normal day, 0 for a day I was not going to write at all or 0.5 for an easy day. It turned out a normal day was 2.5K (see above) and 1250 words for a lighter day and I had planned days off (eg Friday nights). I never fell behind in my total plan (I kept track of that too) though I did have a couple of days where I didn’t quite make my required total for that day. But because I knew where I was (and I had a great day 1, see #1 above) I could do that safely.
7. Almost killed myself in the first week due to lack of sleep (funny how the headaches went away during week 2).
8. Listened to the podcasts. I even got my voice on one episode! I was always looking forward to the next one coming out.
9. Plan. I’m a bit ambivalent about this one. It was good knowing where the story was supposed to go, but I think with all the other positive things that went right this time I might have managed without it. For this year I am tempted to start blank with the Mythic Game Master Emulator. Don’t ask me to explain now, I’ve got a Mythic post in my drafts folder too!
10. Jer’s Novel Writer. To be fair, I used JNW in 2007 and yWriter in 2006 (when I was still a Microsoft slave), so this is not a new thing. But I could not have managed this without the appropriate software.
11. Mini-goals with cheese. What? I set myself little goals through the night. “You can’t have your first coffee until you hit 500″. “No toilet break until you finish another 100″. “You can listen to the podcast once you’ve done 1000″. That sort of thing. The cheese was Blue Castello cheese. My favourite (actually, red is my favourite but no one sells it!) and I couldn’t have any until I had done 2000 words.

Please don’t take this as a how-to-win guide, you can find plenty of those around the place. This is simply a list of some of the things that gelled for me in 2008 and helped me win! Roll on NaNo ’09.

Since November, I have finally read my novel and on reflection is what a lot less pathetic than I first thought. If there are any masochistic readers of derivative fantasy out there who would like a look, just leave a comment to that effect.

OK, this is old news and not terribly interesting, but I’m posting anyway.

2008 was my first whole calendar year using iTunes as my primary music player. I’ve set up a plethora of smart playlists and the like to manage my music (I’ve got plenty of posts to come about that) but at the end of the year I decided to do my own Countdown.

Unfortunately, each of the lists I made ended up being dominated by one or two albums so I’m left with not very much to say. Instead of a top 10 (with 5 being much the same), I’ll just share my most played songs of 2008:

• Top song added to my library in 2008: The Altar and the Door by Casting Crowns (from the album of the same name)
• Top song released in 2008: Runaway by Queen + Paul Rogers (a bonus track from the iTunes version of the album The Cosmos Rocks, which I reviewed here)

At the end of this year when I do this, I think I’ll make a rule that only the best song from each artist makes it onto the list. It might make for a more interesting post.

Sorry.