| Damien C. Edwards | Often inane. |
A couple of comic strips I did testing out the Comic Strip It Android app. I enjoyed doing these, maybe overly so, even though it means my sense of humor isn’t quite right.The title of the first one is “Good” instead of “Better” but I can’t be bothered changing it and I kind of like them different anyway, it suits the strips, I might stick with that as a theme if there are any more. There probably will be…
For educational reasons, I’ve been watching a lot of video music clips over the past couple of months, namely, because I’m currently involved in producing one. A lot of random and referenced YouTube clips and the weekend morning showcases. One particular program has shown a particular clip every(?) week since I was taking notice. Charge Group’s Run. It’s great, the song is some sort of progressive post grunge rock and the clip is without a doubt my favourite clip I’ve seen this year (the fact they are local and it was done on a small budget gave them no added points). There is a great article / interview on The Vine with reference to one of my favourite authors and book, something I made a connection with before reading anything about it. Although that’s not saying much because transformative / initiation stories tend to appeal to me. Unfortunately, the official YouTube version only has 6,849 views as of this writing. With the amount of exposure on (at least) Rage, this makes me feel disappointed in an entire generation.
Now for some negativity. With credit card ready, I googled the band, came across the YouTube video and article, but beyond the article I got stuck on YouTube and went through some links to their other material …it’s ffffolk rock… I have nothing against folk rock, I like it, some of my favourite artists are branded under that. Folk rock is very well represented in my music collection. But I sort Charge Group out, ready to buy their MP3s, based on a band promoting themselves through their single as progressive post grunge rock. That’s what I wanted, I wanted more Run, and I don’t mean 2 remixes of it on their 7 track ep (another track of which is also a remix), I mean more songs that would fit under the above four-word-label. By all appearances they are a folk rock band that did a progressive post grunge rock song, not a progressive post grunge rock band that have done a couple of folk rock songs. Maybe they could have got me through the folk rock stuff if that was my introduction to them, but they got me through Run and the rest inevitably has to be disappointing. I like both chocolate and vanilla ice-cream, but if I have a craving for chocolate, vanilla isn’t going to satisfy (and vice versa). So they won’t be getting my $6 (or more) for the EP nor $8 (or more) for the first album, but I’ll give them their dollar for Run. It’s unfortunate because the other stuff is probably great but I can’t get past the child in me who was looking through the freezer for chocolate ice-cream. Maybe a separate group with the same members doing the different styles, a’la Nick Cave / Grinderman, would be the way to go.
sfsignal.com Currently my favourite site, especially for their SF Tidbits page (current for November 5, 2011). Pretty much what keeps me in the know on spec and a place to steal links.
Lawrence Person on Hephaestus Books: A Different Kind of Ripoff
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is out – Haven’t read it but there is no doubt I will do as he’s one of my favourite writers. Random House link and another stolen link for an article by Matt Staggs, a writer I’m going to have to check out because the following article is creative psychobabble brilliance: Murakami’s ’1Q84?: Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? On a site I probably now have to look in to.
A further note on 1Q84; I read something a while back on the design on the cover that was interesting but don’t remember where – I’m sure it could be googled if I could be bothered.
Steve Berman at seattle pi Creative Destruction and the Ebooks Market. This is a little older than the rest of the links above, but worth a click.
A common thread in how to write books, how to write blog posts (seems to be every second writer these days but that’s another post) and writers groups is: Don’t info dump. In general, I’d agree, it’s previously turned me off getting too far into books, especially when it’s about a fantasy world that I have no reason to care about, due to being too early for me to give a shit about the characters or story, or about an internal, fictional-world-contained, philosophical, scientific, religious, magical or basic logical system, that has no impact on the real world E.g. four pages of fictional science based on the unexplained (or under explained) fundamental principal that hyper drives exist. This I don’t need to know, however, I can accept that hyper drives exist with little explanation in a fictional universe and be carried away with the story if it is either, not properly explained or explained using current scientific principles. But when it is not properly explained, and then something is over explained, based on made up fictional fundamentals, I’m not interested (actually, this could also go for astro and quantum physics but for some reason that can keep my interest).
But info dumping is not all bad, some writers do it well, some really well, for example, Neal Stephenson, a guy that gets away with having a five page info or history dump between a character pouring milk in their coffee and having their first sip, and keep it interesting. This has come up for me because I’m currently reading Reamde, which will shortly bring me to my next point. I haven’t read everything that he has written but everything that I have read, I’ve loved, and so far Reamde is no exception.
Reamde confirmed that I am not as bitter and twisted a reader as I was beginning to suspect. Over the last few months I hadn’t finished a single paper fiction or ebook fiction novel and only one audio fiction novel1. Everything I was reading was shit, often for very different reasons, at least from a subjective standpoint. A lot of the books were from authors I love, others were less known or unknown to me but popular and / or award winners or, unfortunately often, baselessly hyped. All of them had been released in the last few years. I’m not going to name any of them but I’ve been really disappointed. Checking out the reviews, they were often highly rated, but on reading the reviews, a lot tended to agree with my negativity (sometimes rating highly regardless, because of love for previous books by the same author), often on the same points. I also found that the intelligently written, low rated reviews were often spot on but were far outweighed by the high rated ones, even if they said the same things.
Strangely enough, there was only one book in all the above mentioned shit books that I thought was shit because of info dumping (95% of what I read of that book was an info dump), but there were a couple that may have been shit because of not enough info dumping…
1. I used to have a compulsive urge to finish reading everything I started but then I realised life is too short and there are a lot of great books out there that I wouldn’t be able to read if I continued with the drivel.
Not a fan at all and I seem to come across them way too often for my liking.
The dead looking one is (i think) a female Funnel-web in a state of cooked. I would normally leave them alone but it was in a place it shouldn’t have been and kept coming back with a lot of fight.
I don’t know what type the brown one is but it seemed friendly enough.
The last one is a Redback – street art just off Regent St. I like them better that way.
Links and stuff:
Why we need to fix the patent laws before innovation stops altogether http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20092679-250/google-motorola-patents-of-mass-destruction/
Kevin J. Anderson on self publishing back catalogs and ebook pricing http://kjablog.com/?p=2046
Australians have some trouble separating science fiction and fact (this would probably apply to most people) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-15/aussies-misinformed-by-science-fiction/2840050
On the street near my place. Don’t know why or who but it’s great and would love to see more of this kind of stuff.
I changed the blog template because I wasn’t happy with the variable width of the last one. While I like variable width myself, people have different sized screens and that makes it difficult for me to control the look. I thought about pretending to be a CSS monkey for a while but stopped as there are too many changes I’d do and it would take me too long to do it. So I’ve put on the 10PAD2-Rising Sun theme by Eric Crooks as a temporary measure, unchanged aside from the top image. I overlaid the robot bitch-slap image over his original Rising Sun image. Robot Bitch-slap took all of five minutes to do with a twig and ink.
Thought I’d do some more.
Think I may have to tweek the look of this blog. Although I like the way it its now, it’s variable width means I have little control of how it looks on peoples screens.
Testing mobile uploading.
When I took this picture I was thinking how delightfully creepy the scene was when someone came up behind me and softly growled at the back of my neck. Freaked the hell out of me.
