I thought I had a neat time-travel story idea over the weekend, then Kristofer Straub went and broke spacetime.
Category: Plugs
It’s Plug Starshift Crisis Day!
Now I feel like I have to follow that title with a Girlsareprettyesque story about how your family life is weird and conclusions are disappointing.
Read Starshift Crisis! Seriously, why aren’t you reading it? You have the choice to read Kristofer Straub’s punchlines on a daily basis and you’re not! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!
Crystal’s Adventures is pretty amazing. She’s in Asia on a grant this summer (she’s in grad school at Tulane, although I don’t know her degree program); in May she wrote for an adolescent health website in Bangkok, after which she and two friends traveled overland through Laos to Hanoi, where she’s working on a sustainable community development grant proposal.
This sounded a little scary and exciting to me, as somebody whose only knowledge of Laos and Hanoi comes from old Doonesbury comics. Crystal’s account–which is well-written, clear and reasonable–makes it evident that this is a batshit loonball psycho death trip. Also that she is an action hero. Check out the part where she watches a cargo truck flip off a mountain, almost has her own bus do the same, stays in a house that uses old bombshells for dishes and scares a biker gang into carrying her down the mountain for three bucks. Man!
I found Crystal’s blog through her domain-co-resident and fiancee, Clinton Roosevelt Nixon, a name very familiar to indie RPG geeks who don’t read this. My Nobilis ballers may recognize him as the guy who wrote The Shadow of Yesterday (and, ergo, invented Keys).
Today’s Hitherby Dragon, The Land Where Suffering Is Remembered, is one of the best I can remember. It reminds me of a story we used to listen to in the car all the time, about frogs and a witch and three dogs and grains of magic corn. My mother knows a magic trick, which she used when telling this story aloud, to make a glass of milk turn blood-red.
My mother is flying to London now, with my great-aunt and -uncle and her best friend. Be safe, Mom.
Go ahead. Sign up for Urban Dead. I dare you!
I’m gonna eat your brains.
Grokster comes down tomorrow morning. Today morning, actually.
Not that this is the end any which way. But there are a whole lot of breaths holding, tonight, out here in the electric dark.
Quite some time ago I gave Joey Comeau a little bit of money so he could keep going to college, and in exchange he wrote a little bit of his novella, Lockpick Pornography. Lots of people did the same, and after a while he finished it and did, in fact, keep going to college.
I finally read Lockpick Pornography for the first time today, and it is fucked up. There’s a lot of talk about gender being a societal construction, and also breaking and entering, and sex. The protagonist is a dick to just about everybody and in the last chapter the author totally calls you out and makes you ashamed of what you’re thinking.
But I liked it a lot.
The first Anacrusis ad ever is running at Blank Label and its principal sites for the minimum of 20,000 pageviews. Judging by the run length of other ads I’ve seen on the site, they burn through that pretty quick.
The fact that I am paying to persuade people to come and look at something else I pay to make available is not lost on me. I always said I wouldn’t advertise for my work until I thought it was good enough for anyone to read it and like it. I held true to that.
I’m about a week late on this, but as somebody who’s been singing the “Clear Channel Sucks” song since 2001, I was fascinated to learn that they actually created a fake “anti-corporate” station in order to win back the listeners they lost by… being corporate. If there is any more flagrant evidence of a harmful and necrotic monopoly extant, I’d love to see it. What’s next? Ticketmaster sponsoring fake scalpers?
It occurs to me that they might already do that.
Anyway, there’s always Indy if you want your own interweb radio station that learns what you like. I can’t give it a glowing-eyes four-thumbs recommendation because, well, most of the music it plays is by people who wanted to get signed and couldn’t. Not all, but most. Still, I’m going to keep using it and see how good its collaborative filter gets; I’ll let you know if it does ever cross that golden threshold.
I keep meaning to talk about Vocabulary Notebook! Why haven’t I talked about Vocabulary Notebook yet! Ack!
So basically Jeiel (and, sometimes, his cousin Mia) checks the Word-of-the-Day lists at MW or NYT or wherever and finds a cool word, and writes a story using it. I think this is a fantastic illustration of an inspiring constraint–he starts every story with a limitation and the seed of an idea, and they’re different every time.
Jeiel’s stated that VN was inspired by Anacrusis, which is very flattering (and is how I found the site in the first place). This isn’t a sneaky back-pat loop, though; the stories he writes are good, and they’re getting better.