NaNoWriMo novelist, blogger, cartoonist, rocker, tech geek, professional slacker, and hacker of memes.
I blog about just about anything that strikes my fancy, here and at http://thespacehelmetshow.blogspot.com Currently working on several unfinished novels and way too many songs.
Project blog: http://spannersworld.blogspot.com
Opinion blog: http://unpc-opinionsource.blogspot.com
Twitter's new retweet method is getting mixed reviews. From the experience I and others have had with it, here's two things they need to add before the new retweets can really be useful. These are:
I got Twitter's new retweet function a few days ago, and I find I kind of like it. I'm sure there's a few people on Twitter who can't get enough of it. I've been using it sparingly, though. Here's the reason:
You see, some people absolutely hate the new retweet. Their reaction is like Justine Bateman's. They get freaked out by having people they don't follow pop up in their Twitter stream. Earlier today, while I was fixing breakfast, I had an insight on what the reason may be.
I think it has to do with the nature of social networks. I mean specifically Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and similar sites. Those who started earlier that have similar reactions to the new retweet probably got started on the old America Online, or similar for-pay services like The Source, CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, and the original MSN. These are the "walled gardens" which strive to be self-contained and try to encourage you not to wander out onto the big bad Internet. AOL only started allowing people to surf the Web after subscribers demanded it; today, Facebook is trying to make it so people don't even need to leave for the Web at all. These services try to keep you within a limited group and protect you from strangers. So when the new retweet puts strangers' avatars on their Twitter streams, they freak out as if they're being mugged. Justine Bateman thought she was.
Me, I don't have that kind of reaction at all. I don't mind strangers popping up on my stream; I like to check them out to see if they're interesting. But I didn't start on AOL or Facebook. I come from the open Web, so my formative experience was much different. My initial Facebook-like experience was on public forums, where pretty much everybody's a stranger.
But because many of my followers hate the new retweet for the same reason Justine Bateman attacked it, I find I have to use it sparingly. Originally I was going to use it whenever I didn't feel the need to add a comment. But because some of my followers are threatening to block me (some even automatically report everybody who uses the new RT and everybody retweeted the new way as spammers), I now mostly use the old retweet method and reserve the new RT for tweets too long to be retweeted the old way, plus a few that seem important enough to have been retweeted the new way by multiple people including several people I follow.
Now if only Twitter adds the ability to add comments to new-retweets, I'll be happy. But there's still a whole lot of people who freak out, and they want the whole new-retweet thing stopped yesterday...
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By putting all my writing effort into winning NaNoWriMo, of course.
And not actually joining NaBloPoMo.
What the heck is this NaBloPoMo, anyway? you ask. National Blog Posting Month, in which you post a blog entry a day for a month. Originally that month was November, same month as NaNoWriMo. The NaBloPoMo FAQ states, "Not everyone can commit to an endeavor of such magnitude [as writing 50,000 words of a novel in a single month], though, and so National Blog Posting Month was born." But so many people got so into daily blog posting because of NaBlo that now they hold it every month. So while I'm returning to NaNoFiMo next month to have a third go-round with my still stubbornly incomplete novel Bad Company, I may very well join and attempt a NaBlo victory. Hopefully they allow multiple blogs for one contestant, since I have 4 separate blogs I post to (including this one). And, of course, I'll probably join the main NaBlo thing next November and try to win it and NaNo at the same time. Well, if I can win NaNo on Friday the 13th, then who knows just what I can do.
Oh, I also lost NaSoAlMo and NaNoMangO too. In the case of NaBloPoMo, the reason I couldn't win it is that I'd never heard of it till just last night. As for NaSoAlMo (National Solo Album Month: record an entire music album in a month, solo and not in a group), I have the excuse that I'm focusing on learning my instruments and recording software (and writing my novel for NaNo) and preparing for FAWM (just 2 1/2 months away!). Likewise, my excuse for not doing NaNoMangO (draw 30 pages of comics in a month, either November or June) is that my drawing is still lousy; I can do a few figure-type things, but otherwise I'm totally out of practice and probably need to take art classes (my last one was in 1994).
There are alternatives to NaNoWriMo if you don't do novels. If you do music, comics, or frequent blogging, you can avoid NaNo altogether (or do it in addition to your chosen alternative[s]). But if you're just writing nonfiction instead of fiction, or a short story collection instead of a novel, I don't know what to say about that...
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This entry was inspired by a discussion among people who used to take drugs, and especially marijuana. I never did any drugs, not even pot, but that won't stop me from writing.
You might have read the news: President Obama has directed his Attorney General to stop prosecuting medical marijuana cases in states where it's legal for medical use. Conservative columnist George Will says that America is likely headed for marijuana legalization. This part of the seemingly endless drug war that started with the Prohibition Amendment may be about to come to an end.
Now may be the time to revisit that most infamous of antidrug propaganda films, Reefer Madness. The original version, called Tell Your Children, was made by a church group of the kind that enacted the Prohibition Amendment in the first place, in 1930. The Prohibition Amendment wouldn't be repealed till 1933, when the Great Depression made alcohol prohibition, well, prohibitively expensive. It was re-edited into its final form by exploitation producer Dwain Esper in 1936. The melodrama of this propaganda piece is so shrill and over-the-top that it became an unintentionally funny cult classic when it was rediscovered in the drug-fuelled 1970s. It is now in the public domain.
Reefer Madness was meant to be a weapon in the US government's crusade against drugs. Now that marijuana is more likely than ever to be dropped from the list of forbidden drugs, it may just be the right time to revisit this film. The worldview it was intended to propagate is almost dead. Let us hope that Reefer Madness will soon be an artifact of an era that is no more.
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It's NaNoWriMo. You're trying to write at least 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. You procrastinate. You write a little, or nothing at all.
Suddenly it's the 20th. You've written only 20,000 words -- or worse, 0. Yet you still intend to win. But now it's starting to look like you'll never make it. Has your muse eloped with your best friend? Did a fox come and eat all your plotbunnies?
It's time to panic.
Does this describe you? It certainly describes me! Every time I've attempted a WriMo since NaNoWriMo 2006, I've found it difficult enough to get myself to write that I've found myself forced to panic in the last week or week and a half. It's Panic Time, and I shift into Panic Mode. Sometimes it's not quite enough, but sometimes (especially during NaNo) the panic can power me to victory. Take NaNo '08. After I'd burned out on the first day of AugNoWriMo that year, I wrote nearly 55,000 words in the last week of NaNo, going so far as to write over 13,000 words on the 29th. I was totally winging it (reversing my usual policy of outlining before NaNo begins), so the story fell completely apart and I wrote only a few useful scenes among the random rapid-writing noise.
So, if you're doing NaNo (or any other WriMo) and you find you've written hardly anything by the 20th, let yourself panic. It may be just the thing to drive you to NaNo victory. It certainly works for me.
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The official Philip K. Dick website has just posted a 1981 letter by Dick, newly released to the public, in which he tells Jeff Walker of the Ladd Company his impressions of Blade Runner. He had just seen a feature about the movie on a TV show. In an interview, Harrison Ford described the movie as, in a word, futurism. The legendary science fiction author more than agreed with him: not science fiction, not fantasy, but futurism on film. Science fiction's New Wave had long since subsided, and the cyberpunk rebellion was still in its infancy (and Blade Runner, along with Judge Dredd, would hugely influence the cyberpunks). The genre was stagnating in 1981. More than he knew at the time, Dick was right when he concluded:
...Blade Runner is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be.
Philip K. Dick didn't survive to see the theatrical release of Blade Runner, but he eventually did see a rough cut of the movie in a private screening. He said of it: "I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." Despite his skepticism of Hollywood, he became Blade Runner's first big fan, and said that the movie and the Dick novel it's based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, complement and reinforce each other.
When I saw it in its first release in 1982, I was stunned. And I am still stunned every time I see it, in each improved version. It belongs to the select group of science fiction films that I can say imprinted me, the others being Videodrome, Escape from New York, and Akira. Then in 1988 I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and the following year I discovered the manga Akira (new Volume 1 edition here) and Appleseed (volumes one, two, three, and four). By the time I started planning the earliest versions of my own (still unproduced) manga, Spanner, my storytelling sensibility was now set in stone. I was a cyberpunk.
Blade Runner is only half science fiction, really, and not technically cyberpunk despite its influence on the nascent subgenre. It's really futurism applied to a neoclassical film noir. There is much homage to noir throughout the film, right down to Sean Young's "Black Dahlia" dress and hairdo. And it possesses the same quality of languid beauty that characterizes the best film noir, particularly Body Heat, which came out the year before. Nicholas Christopher, in his book on film noir, Somewhere in the Night, felt that dreamy quality in one of the noir classics, Out of the Past. I watched it (along with Force of Evil, Touch of Evil, and Laura); however, I had already been spoiled by Blade Runner and Body Heat, so I found it rougher and tougher than the later revivalist films despite their violence.
Blade Runner was not a big success on its first release. It actually flopped. But its popularity slowly grew, through its video releases and many different versions, and it became a cult classic. But it is generally agreed that Blade Runner is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.
Here's an early trailer for the movie:
...and here's the official movie site, plus other sites: BRMovie.com, the Blade Runner Online Magazine, and the collected reviews at Rotten Tomatoes.
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In a previous entry, I noted one increasingly annoying Hollywood thriller cliché: the cellphone conveniently goes out in order to make our heroes helpless in the villains' clutches. It may get a little less cliché if the bad guy has one of these: a portable cellphone jammer. It's illegal in the US and many other countries, but you can find one online.
But, like any other technology, there's a "double-edged sword" clause attached: if the villain has one of these, there's always the chance that one of the heroes can take it away from him and use it against him when he most needs it. When you're writing a signal jammer into a story, always consider this possibility.
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When I posted my entry Social Media Is My Crack (still my most popular ever) here on this blog, I was still fairly new to the social media thing, still very much in the what I call the "honeymoon stage". But now, though I still spend way too much time on Twitter (since the amount of information I can glean from it is so immense it's intoxicating) and FriendFeed, and though I'm seriously considering spending more time on Facebook, I actually manage to get myself off my social networks in time to throw myself into bed for some much-needed sleep.
So what keeps me up at night once I've signed off my social networks? It's the articles, actually. Once I've closed my main browser window, I usually still have several other windows open, most of them with articles and blog entries in them. I read them. And then I read others. And then before I know it, the sun's coming up and it's only a few hours before my alarm clock goes off. Before I upgraded to broadband internet, I blamed this on my slow dialup connection. Now I know I have no excuse. I just read too much anyway.
Go figure.
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