Damn. I think this means I lose.
Category: Writing
Story Hacks: First in a Series
Want to establish that a character is weird and emotionally vacant? Have him count things! This works because everyone has seen Rain Man, or references to it on Animaniacs.
Example One
Topaz opened the door at Jake’s knock. “Oh hey,” she said. “Glad you found it. Sorry about the stairs.”
“I don’t see how you walk up those every day,” panted Jake. “Whew.”
Example Two
Topaz opened the door at Jake’s knock. “Oh hey,” she said. “Glad you found it. Sorry about the stairs.”
“The staircase is very long,” Jake agreed. “It has one hundred and seven steps.”
Now, which of these Jakes is deranged? I bet you already know!
It’s the second one.
Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: It is impossible to like numbers and still have feelings!
I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with iamcal’s Noted, a lightweight text editor that is everything Notepad ought to be. It has toolbar search and replace. It can read and convert linebreaks from (or to) any OS. It has an unlimited buffer size. It has no associations in the annoying editor wars. It counts lines and even lets you jump to them! And that’s almost exactly all it does. Noted is great.
The only things it doesn’t have that I wish it had are a tabbed interface like Firefox and a word counter so I could stop using stupid MS Word. The former would probably be very complex to implement, but the latter shouldn’t be too hard. I checked the Noted page again today to see if its source was available. It is! So I poked around and discovered that it’s written in… Pascal.
That’s really weird. People still write in Pascal? (Maybe not, as Noted hasn’t been updated in a couple years.) I used it as a training language in my sophomore year of high school–it was fun but bad for me, as it gave me lots of procedural habits that I had to break before I got good at OOP. A glance at Noted’s code just now mostly made sense, although it also shows some indications of classes, which I don’t recall in Pascal. For that matter, I never knew Pascal could do native Windows GUI apps.
I do realize that there are form-based web pages that count words, but unfortunately I haven’t found one as smart as Word’s tool, which isn’t all that smart. I also realize that I could write a form-based PHP script that would be as smart as Word’s word-counter (and probably will do so), but I’d really rather have it in a text editor; Noted is almost perfect for my needs, and browser textboxes aren’t.
You thought I wasn’t going to make it, didn’t you? You have no faith.
The difference between Anacrusis and any given webcomic is not so much that it doesn’t have pictures–more the fact that I made it through finals without ever posting a placeholder and an excuse.
For a long time I pretended not to play RPGs
More than a third (it used to be more than half) of the things I’ve bookmarked at del.icio.us/xorphus are related to role-playing, in theory and practice. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, until a couple of days ago. Hopefully in a few days it will become clear to you too.
Anyway, one of the links I just got around to reading today is the brilliant Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore. Unfortunately it doesn’t have permalinks or anything, but if you scroll down you’ll get to an entry called “A Small Thing About Suspense,” which suddenly makes clear to me things I should have realized a long time ago about scenario creation and writing in general.
I want to design games for a living, but I come up with ideas for stories much more often than I come up with ideas for games. I want to reduce that ratio, and I’m hoping all this reading and That Which Will Become Clear will help.
Metasnark
I guess I should finally talk about Websnark. I’m not a big fan of Websnark; I think Mr. Burns’s writing is self-important and sometimes really pretentious. He writes about webcomics the way college sophomores talk about politics. There are things about his style and tone–neither of which ever really drops from the surface–that really rub me the wrong way. And some of what he does is exactly what Checkerboard Nightmare, my favorite webcomic, has been doing for four years. But not as bitingly funny.
That said, he’s not a bad writer, and he knows what he’s talking about. He’s also managed to do what nobody else has done, which is establish himself as a guy who just blogs about webcomics every day, and people like it. Other people have tried to fill that niche, but Websnark is the first to really get tacit approval from the webcomics community in general. And he did it by just writing what he knew, and writing a lot, and spelling stuff right and everything. That isn’t nothing.
So I read Websnark, because everybody else reads it (even Sumana!), and because I like to read things by people with whom I disagree.
Now, I write an anacrusis every day, and I dislike applying the term “blog” to everything that’s written on the Interweb, and anyway I still want to think of myself as a webcomic artist. For those reasons, I privately think of Anacrusis as my current webcomic, because it’s more like a webcomic than anything else.
Mr. Burns has expressed before his belief that a comic well written is superior to a comic well drawn–that, in fact, the art in a comic is irrelevant if the writing is good (see Dinosaur Comics). So I’ve been tempted to email him and ask him to write about Anacrusis before; what would he make of a webcomic without any pictures at all? But I never did, because I have an intense distaste for self-promotion, among other reasons.
Then today he linked to Pulp Decameron, a “microfiction experiment” that doesn’t really qualify as microfiction under any definition I’ve heard, but whatever. It’s pretty good, if uneven as any daily fiction exercise, and I guess I know now how Mr. Burns reacts to a webcomic without pictures.
Okay, I’m done talking about Websnark now.
I have a much bigger mouth about free culture and copyright reform lately, which requires that a bigger amount of metaphorical money be put where it is.
I’ve loosened the Creative Commons license on Anacrusis. It was previously Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs, or basically “rip but don’t sample.” I’m pretty big on sampling, so it only makes sense that I should allow it of my own work, musical or not. Anacrusis is now under an Attribution-Sharealike license, or “rip, sample, mash, share, sell, as long as you say the same thing about the results.” (So is NFD, for the record.)
This will probably make very little difference for anyone else–I believe the Anacrusis fanfic community is fairly small–but it’s a difficult and powerful step for me. They’re not just my characters anymore, but then they never were, really. I took the pieces of them from the world and put them together, and now I’m putting them back.
Check out this awesome plot twist I came up with
And the janitor says “I don’t know how you could have talked to him, sir, since he’s been dead for ten years.“
And I pretend I don’t care about having an audience
The NFD LJ feed and the Anacrusis LJ feed each have exactly 32 subscribers. Of those, 23 of the NFD subscribers are on my LJ friends list, whereas 12 of the Anacrusis subscribers are. Only 10 people on said friends list subscribe to both.
Interesting, but probably only to me.
I would like to have similar statistics for the regular RSS feeds, but of course there’s no big site organizing and tracking who hits those. Does anybody know a way to parse Apache log files and see who’s hitting a given location? My current (weak) webstats software won’t do it.
Hi, Mom. I finally put up a permanent link to Anacrusis on the right side of the page (I think you are now the only person who reads the NFD front page, actually). That’s the place where I do the stories that you haven’t read yet. I promise there is not very much cursing in them, usually.
For the rest of you who read both notebooks, I should take this opportunity to state that while I endorse certain political ideologies, Anacrusis does not–except that, universally, it should be difficult for one human to kill another.