Category: Pulverbatch

March 28, 2006 /

One of the hilariously demented* developers who works on this floor has recently posted a sign in his cube, which reads “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” I, being much cleverer and more handsome,** immediately thought “ah ha! This human has printed a corrupted version with the incorrect word order! The correct phrasing is ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.'”

I was so certain of this because my version fits nicely into an iambic pentameter, while his doesn’t (you can make it fit, but that involves stretching a short vowel to a long syllable and vice versa). But it turns out neither of us was right: the Divine Comedy translation which spawned the phrase, by H.F. Cary, actually goes “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” which is much better and still in perfect iambs. Bah! Iambs are fickle! That’s why I support dactyls. Want to hear more about the Pro-Dactyl Initiative? Contact your local poet laureate today.

* Developer may be neither hilarious nor demented.

** I am very handsome and clever.

Reluctant openness

March 23, 2006 /

I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!

I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.

It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.

The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)

I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.

Brendan Talks About Things He Doesn’t Understand

March 9, 2006 /

Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:

“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”

Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).

That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?

According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.

Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.

March 6, 2006 /

Since I arrived here, our IT department has used XStop software to filter the naughty bits out of our workday. The only way it really bothered me was that it blocked the Onion (but left the AV Club unfiltered). I got used to it.

This morning we got an email informing us that they’d switched to WebSense, which has already proven to block nearly all my favorite webcomics, the Onion and the AV Club, IMDB and basically anything they categorize as “Entertainment.”

Awesome!

I assume the guys who installed this software (at the behest of the legal department–liability, you know) have passwords that will let them read Megatokyo; I’m sure they also know that getting around this kind of thing is startlingly easy when one has one’s own website. Then again, xorph.com is still listed as a webcomic in plenty of places. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep tunneling out?

Update 1317 hrs: Oh, “Entertainment” has been unblocked. Cancel jihad, cancel jihad.

March 3, 2006 /

Kelly Link describes her stories as “kitchen-sink magic realism,” which I can understand, because the moment you say “fantasy” people think Robert Jordan and their ears shut down. Conversely, in her own words, “people hear ‘magic realism’ and they think ‘oh, like those Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories where people fly.'” (Everybody read exactly one magic realism story in high school, and that was it.)

Anyway, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d call Anacrusis “Kelly Link magic realism.” Look, it almost rhymes.

California game update

February 26, 2006 /

My uncle John offers a rhyming take on Atlantis, and my mom gently reminds me that of course I didn’t invent the form: both “California” and the game were inspired by a picture book she read us when we were young, called Whose Mouse Are You, by Robert Kraus.

Also, saved from the LJ comment thread:

Will:Where is Atlantis? Under the sea.

What’s under the sea? Not you, and not me.

Well then, where are we? The internet.

How’d we get there? Zeroes and ones.

What do those stand for? Video fun.

What is flypaper?

Me: Sweetness that kills.

David: What can’t be killed?

Scott: Everything dies.

Josh: Why do they die?

William: They run out of time.

Beth: What is time?

Kevan: Memory. [Then, because of a crosspost:] Curse you, time!

Ken: What time is it?

Stephen: It’s hamburger time.

David: Do hamburgers rhyme?

Scott: Not on my dime.

Me: OKAY NEW ONE. What is a curse?

Scott: Bad karma, realized.

William: How is it realised?

Ken: Through the teachings of the Maharishi.

Beth: What is the Maharishi?

Me: A teacher of hunger.

Scott: Where is the hunger?

David: In the bowels of the cursed…

Which seems like a neat place for a cutoff.

How many is seven?

A game to play while walking

February 24, 2006 /

I call this the California game, but it doesn’t actually have to rhyme.

What is noir? A story about losers.

Who are the losers? They didn’t win.

Who are the winners? The writers of history.

What is a history? Lies that come true.

What kind of words come true? Magic ones.

So for a noir story you make up people who know magic, then write about the ones who don’t.

Your turn. Where is Atlantis?

Which that story isn’t but still

February 13, 2006 /

“The Slush God: Are you totally sick of seeing rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors stories in the slush pile? Have you ever read a good one?

Kelly Link: There is a wonderful epistolary story by a Canadian writer, Robert Boycuk, in which an editor is lowering himself into a terrible void, in pursuit of an author’s manuscript. It’s a sort of apology from the editor for how long it’s taken him to get back to the writer.

Otherwise, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I would say that there’s probably a novel waiting to be written about hapless slush readers, but it would have to be very well done.”

February 9, 2006 /

So apparently my “include virtual” server-side commands (which make all the content appear at xorph.com/creator) have stopped working, and are now rendering as plaintext. Awesome! Luckily, I appear to have exactly two readers who actually go to that page instead of reading via RSS or LJ, so the tide of complaint and bewilderment has been, well, minor.

Of course, if you do read NFD via the front page, you won’t be able to see this, and if you don’t, you probably haven’t noticed the problem. So this is pretty much a reminder to myself to change the damn Advent webcam already.