A cake I made at school

Potato Prints!

sorry for the picture being sideways....

Cute pens for back to school

Don't Eat

Using Clay, and the Basic Bracelet Necessities, Make a One of a Kind Charm Bracelet.

I love this fabric. I really do.

Small little owl

I love this onesie.

In fiction, children are almost as one-dimensional as puppies: cute but useless.

Picture taken courtesy of David at Umoja.

Much like a puppy picture in the middle of a writing article, children characters add little except for intolerable cuteness and are rarely, if ever, worth the time it takes to introduce them. Why bother introducing an 100% cliche character? Unfortunately, I’ve concluded that the vast majority of children characters are glorified props that fall into two categories: the adorable angel and/or the spunky brat. Both of these serve two purposes: to inject nauseating cuteness into the story and to develop the main characters (the parents), usually by getting captured by Bad, Bad Men.

Picture seen here.

Like puppies, children are interesting only when they have a bit of killer instinct or at least some ambition other than being as cute as possible. Perhaps the kid wants to make his difficult parents proud, or has some crazy-eyed dream like becoming Santa Claus, or whatever. Maybe he wants to be taken seriously by someone older. Alternatively, you can make a child character a bully like Dudley from Harry Potter, but he works better as a minor antagonist.

In light of this, I’ve created a set of questions to help you develop a child character if you plan to use one.

1. What does this child character contribute to the story? Is he put in merely because you think his parents “need” a child or because the story “needs” more cuteness?
2. If the child is primarily put in to develop his parents (like most child characters in adult fiction, I think), in which ways does he do so?
3. What sort of character traits drive the child’s personality or mindset? If you used “cute,” “spunky” or “sassy,” please redesign the character and answer again. Is the child curious, adventurous, independent, perceptive, etc? What sort of things does he do for fun?
4. Describe the child’s relationship with his parents or other relevant older characters. (Please give yourself something more interesting to work with than “his parents are totally loving” or “nurturing”– unless you’re writing a book about parenting, readers probably don’t care much about your vision of the utopian family). I think that everyone who’s ever had kids would agree that there are stresses involved and some parents, although definitely not all, have lousy/adversarial relations with their children. What are the stresses in the family? If there’s a dispute in the house, what’s the point of contention? Etc.
5. Is your child character extraordinarily gifted? If so, please do not make him extraordinarily savvy with mechanics or electronics. For reasons not clear to me, techno-kids are usually insufferably aggravating (like Micah from Heroes) in a way that generically gifted children (like Ender or Encyclopedia Brown) are not.  [Cadet Davis: I think it’s because a generically smart child has to demonstrate his intelligence through something the audience can appreciate, rather than the author just saying “oh, he put together something really impressive.  He’s a genius!”  A technologically gifted child really can’t show that he is intelligent, unlike (say) Encyclopedia Brown.

Do you think children characters are as problematic as I have suggested? How would you suggest improving them?

Reviewer: I like your work, but I think that [some aspect of your writing] is flawed.

Author: Oh, that? I meant to do that.

Reviewer: Ahh… do you think you could fix it?

Author: But that would ruin the style of the piece!

Deliberately inflicting substandard writing on your story for “stylistic” or “literary” purposes is usually a prelude to rejection. If your reviewers were able to discern that it was either stylish or literary, they wouldn’t be complaining about it.

Here are a few areas that are especially prone to intentionally bad writing…

1. The title. This is unquestionably the worst. “My title, Out of this World, is a parody of bad science fiction titles!” Sorry, no. Readers are not going to read that book, because they’ll take the title at face value and assume it’s a bad science fiction novel. To actually parody a title, you have to clearly indicate that you’re being humorous. For example, have you seen those ridiculous thrillers at airports with titles like Operation Chaos or Operation Luna? What about The Revised Operation Massacre: Now with More Toasters! I think that’s remotely funny, but even if the reader doesn’t laugh, he knows that the book is meant to be funny.

2. Writing that intentionally breaks with the tone. For example, I once reviewed a military thriller that had a quote from Shakespeare… in a military directive. The author attempted to defend himself with a paragraph that included the phrase “humorous juxtaposition.” I politely moved on to review other manuscripts.

3. A character starts acting “zany” by either doing or saying something really stupid. That works much better on a sit-com than in a novel.

4. Any linguistic or stylistic tics that are so annoying and prominent that the author decides to have a character or narrator refer to them. For example, if a character repeats himself often, or has some highly exaggerated speech style, we will notice even if you don’t tell us. Telling us will merely draw our attention to the bad writing and jar us because then it will be clear that you deliberately inflicted bad writing on us. (Most regular readers of the Superhero Nation proto-novel probably agree that Dr. Savant’s tendency to use the word “quite” fits in here).

The Hellboy Quote Generator is out, although it has been technically unreliable. On a comedy scale of 1 to 10, I’d give this a 5: amusing but uneven. It’s a well-done piece of viral advertising, though. (”Let me put this to you as delicately as I can.” *BANG*)

Hellboy interests me, mainly because its writing is merely OK but reviewers sometimes think that it’s been ripped off by other series. For example, “Atomic Robo is a robotic Hellboy!” I don’t regularly read either, but that comparison seems counterintuitive to me mainly because Hellboy’s hook is that the genre isn’t light sci-fi and involves a lot of planar travel (hell, etc), as far as I can tell. However, I think it’s valid to criticize both series for the ultimate cliche setting: WWII. I really want to see a comic book tackle the ultimate question: how do you solve a problem like Korea?

I’ll leave you with this parting thought.

C’mon. You’d have to be crazy to give up horns like those.

Daddy is way outnumbered now. I think I’ll take advantage of that later on when he’s more tired.

I went to watch the BC/Sask game online. Doh

There's a new CO+K podcast with Cat Morley and this one is all about moving home, including tips and tricks for easing the stress and staying organized. You can listen to the podcast directly from CO+K or, if you want to do us a very lovely favor, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes and you'll get the latest podcasts direct to you as soon as they're released. We're hoping to bring the podcast back as a regular feature, but we'd like your say on what themes to cover. Head over to this thread on the board where we're discussing it now. Also, make sure to check out the cheesy new theme tune. - Subscribe to the CO+K podcast in iTunes. - Stream the podcast. - Have your say on the next theme.

Have a happy 4th of July!

FIRST COMIC — PREVIOUS COMIC — NEXT COMIC (to be released on 7/7/08)

FIRST COMIC — PREVIOUS COMIC — NEXT COMIC (to be released on 7/7/08)

Jamie loves to sleep in her swing. Jamie is three weeks old.

Ava and me went to gymnastics today and jumped on the trampoline. Daddy forgot his camera though. Silly Daddy.

Thanks for coming.

I submitted a potential rewrite of our introduction to the Critters Writing Workshop. It’s very short (2 pages) and I expect that we’ll eventually expand it to about 5. Currently, it’s rated PG-13 for adult language, but we’re considering modifying it to PG.

Officially, IRS Agent Smith died to a car-bomb. The obituary mentioned his bereaved parents (“we’re heart-broken”), stunned neighbors (“it’s so shocking”) and his beloved dog (no comment). “Agent Smith’s death is a tragic capstone to a noble life of service that led to the prosecution of hundreds of individuals, drug gangs and fraudulent charities,” said a co-worker that Agent Smith doubted he had ever met before.

Smith paced across the office of the US Marshal handling the case. “Until we’ve actually arrested the perpetrators, we don’t want anyone to know you’re alive, or the attackers might try again,” said the Marshal.

“How long will that take?” asked Smith.

“Six months, maybe. Probably no more than a year or two. In the meantime, take some paid administrative leave.”

“Do you think I could tell maybe my co-workers that I’m not dead? I think that would making my eventual return less awkward.”

“We’re still examining the possibility that it was an inside job,” the Marshal added cheerfully.  “In the meantime, it’ll be like an unusually long vacation.”

That lasted about a week. Gary Smith golfed; he bowled; he drove forty-five minutes through the city to try out a new bakery. These ordinarily enjoyable experiences now only addled his mind. Were the caddies fully disclosing their tip income? Was the bowling alley improperly claiming land depreciation as a deduction? But it was the Au Bon Chic bakery that set him off.

“Our registers aren’t working yet,” said the teenager behind the counter. He fumbled with a calculator and gave up. “Your order comes out to, uhh… about $10. And let’s round it up to $11 for taxes?”

“Pre-tax, the meal comes out to $10.45. After Washington’s sales tax, $11.66,” he said quietly.

The French bread left a bad taste in Smith’s mouth.

Like most bad life-decisions, his next involved a bar. “I think I’m suffering from law-enforcement withdrawal,” he said to his drinking buddies.

“Fuck,” said the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms detective.

“Fuck,” agreed the DEA investigator. “I got two weeks of vacation last year, and it was so bad that halfway through that just driving past a skating park made me break into a sweat.”

“Can’t you just tell them you don’t want the vacation?” asked the ATF detective.

“I can’t. I’m ‘dead.’ I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention that to anyone,” said the IRS agent. His friends nodded sympathetically. They all took a drink of their beers.

“What about transferring? I doubt anyone would try looking for you at FBI or something,” said the ATF detective.

“No one would take me for just six months. The training alone would take that long,” said the IRS agent.

“You could, uhh, try…” trailed off the DEA investigator. He stared at his beer.

“Tell me!”

“Back when I was working in New York, we pulled a sixteen-man drug raid on a gang fortress. There was a helluva lotta blood when we got there. The OSI beat us to the punch, with one guy. Unarmed,” said the DEA investigator.

“Unarmed? Damn!” said the ATF detective.

“OSI?” asked the IRS agent.

“The Office of Special Investigations. It handles supercriminals, so they’re much busier in New York than here. OSI is always hiring, probably because their agents get killed so quickly,” said the DEA investigator.

“Obviously Suicidal Investigators,” said the ATF detective.

“Do you think they’d take agents for a six-month rotation?” asked the IRS agent.

“Do you even carry a sidearm?” asked the ATF agent.

“A Beretta, I think.” It was a point of pride for the IRS agent that he had finally mastered the safety just a year ago.

“Have you ever used it?” asked the DEA investigator.

“As much as any other IRS agent.” That was true, but not much to be proud of. He blushed and reached for his beer.

“Maybe OSI wouldn’t work out for you. It’s some serious shit,” said the DEA investigator. “He used his hands.”

The IRS agent decided to find out if they had any administrative vacancies. A waiter asked them if they wanted their drinks refilled. The IRS agent smiled and made a note to increase his tip from ten to twelve percent.

Like The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam, we’ve gathered up a list of questions that will help you identify potential problems in your writing. We’ve separated our questions into categories: for all novels, for sword-and-spell fantasies and for superhero stories.

1. Does any character, at any point, gaze at his own reflection?
2. Does the book start with a character waking up and/or going about his morning routine? If so, why?
3. Do you describe things a character does that are not relevant to the plot?
4. Are any scenes designed to show characters eating? If so, please recheck your answer to the previous question. How does eating advance the plot? Why would readers find it interesting?
5. Are there more than two point-of-view characters?
6. Do you ever switch POV mid-chapter?
7. Do you ever tell us a character’s eye-color? If so, why? (Does it show anything interesting about the character?)
   
8. Do you ever compare a character’s eyes to gems or other precious objects?
9. Do you ever tell us a character’s hair-color without telling us how the character wears his or her hair? If so, why do you think the character’s hair-color tells us more about the character than his hairstyle? (Hint: it doesn’t).
10. On any given page, do you use more than five synonyms for “said?” “That’s damn annoying,” the publisher complained.
11. Does the narrator hide critical information from the readers just to “surprise” them? Has any of the POV character’s relevant information been withheld from the audience? If so, why aren’t you being forthright with us? Is there an in-story reason, or are you just trying to screw with us?
12. Are there any pronouns in the first sentence? If so, double-check your answer to the previous question. ““Until it happened, I had no idea how badly they had screwed me.” This narrator is obviously hiding what “it” and “they” are.
13. Does your novel ever confuse the word its with it’s? If you are not sure what the difference is, please see this.
14. Do each of your recurring characters have at least one interesting character trait? Do you consider “strong/weak,” “attractive/ugly,” “young/old,” or “brave” to be interesting character traits? (Demographic details aren’t interesting because they don’t usually show enough about the character. If I went to the gym more often, I would go from weak to strong, but that doesn’t change who I am in any interesting way).
15. Does your story use a made-up word or phrase (like Narnia, Hogwarts, World War Z, the Klingon-Human Salmon Conference of 1918, etc.) in title or first paragraph? Does it use more than 3 in the first page? Will readers actually understand what these words mean in context, or will these words just be pretty-sounding-but-meaningless to your readers?
16. Does Your Story Capitalize Words That Are Not Normally Capitalized?
17. Do your conversations feature lines that are only designed to show how polite a character is? (”Can I get you anything to drink?”) If so, do we really need to know how polite the character is, or do you think you’d like to skip to the part where something actually happens?
18. Do any characters have names that have dashes, apostrophes, more than one word, or more than eight letters?
19. Are any characters cryptic? (For example: do they hide information from another character for no good reason except that you want the story to keep going?) Is this character also mysterious, enigmatic, “cool” and/or a stranger? If so, please note that you are dangerously close to making the publisher’s wall of shame.
20. Are any of your characters Mary Sues, super-powered and idealized versions of yourself?
21. In your story world, is it possible for anyone to oppose your hero and not come off as stupid, evil and/or an ass? If not, please check again for Mary Sues.
22. Are any characters primarily included to beat home a political message? If so, check again for Mary Sues.
23. Does the piece have a political message? If so, do you make a good-faith attempt to represent the views of people who disagree with you? (If your argument is strong, you don’t have to caricature your detractors).
24. Does your narrator feel the need to explain everything the character is doing as he does it?
25. By the end of the first half-page, do we know what the main character’s name is? If not, why are you holding out on us?
26. Does any character temporarily change species? Is he changing from a human to dragon (or vice versa)? If so, do us a favor and shred that page. Actually, burn the whole chapter just to be sure.
27. Do you overuse italics?
28. Are your sentence structures monotonous? (Do you write many sentences usually start with a noun followed by a verb?) Even worse… is it the same noun?
29. Does your villain kill people for no good reason to prove how eeeeevil he is?
30. Does your villain cackle?
31. Does your villain imprison his enemies? (Stupid mistake #1). Does your villain imprison the heroes in the same cell?
32. If your villain captures the heroes, why doesn’t he kill them immediately?
    
33. Does your villain have some bizarre fascination with taking the hero alive?
    
34. Are any of the characters secretly family members? (Courtesy of TFNE.)
    
35. Do any of the characters have an unclear or mysterious lineage? (Courtesy of TFNE.)
36. Is there a great prophecy at the center of the story? If so, does it involve the main character saving the world and/or getting the girl?
37. Are you writing this book with a sequel in mind? Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
    

Fantasy Novels

1. Do characters use insufferably stilted language like “Is it not?” This may be the most serious single problem in this list.
   
2. Do any scenes happen in a bar? Does this bar scene involve a drunken brawl? If so, you’ve already gotten yourself rejected.
3. Do any characters have names that feature real-world words that are not normally used as a name? (Debra Moondrinker!)
4. Do any characters have names that feature animals?
5. Are any characters elves, dwarves, or dragons? Are these characters interesting and well-thought out people, or are they just collections of cliches? In-story, why do they act the way they do?
6. “Does your story involve a number of different races, each of which has exactly one country, one ruler, and one religion?” Courtesy of TFNE.
7. Do your characters blow a vast amount of time traveling from one place to another?
8. Is any one of the protagonists the subject of widespread admiration and adulation?
   

Superhero Novels

1. Does your villain feel the need to leave clues for the heroes, like Carmen Sandiego or the Riddler? Why?
2. Does anyone say “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know”?
3. Does the security guard ignore the security-camera malfunction?
4. Is time-travel involved? If so, is the destination year between 1939-1945? If so, are you using Germany rather than Japan or Italy (or even the USSR!) as the enemy? If you’ve answered yes to all of these questions, your story urgently needs a revision.
   
5. If you are 100% committed to setting the story in Nazi Germany, then try this tweak: the “villain” is a random American who went back in time to kill Hitler. He means well but does not know that killing Hitler will cause the Germans to win the war. The superheroes have to go back in time and prevent the “villain” from killing Hitler. Double points if they have to infiltrate Hitler’s bodyguard to do it, or have to apprehend the “villain” without killing him.
   
6. Is there a walkway above a vat of chemicals?
7. Do your “undercover” assassins have barcode tattoos or other insignia clearly identifying them?
8. Are the force-field generators within their own force-fields?
9. If your supervillain is (supposedly) a genius, does he actually make intelligent plans that anticipate what the heroes will attempt and surprise them?
10. Do you describe why your supervillain decided to be evil in a paragraph or less? If so, you’re probably shortchanging him and us.
    
11. Why is the supervillain evil? If you answered some variation of “he was born that way,” or “he’s greedy!” you are definitely shortchanging him and us.
    
12. Pick a Marvel or DC Comics superhero that is similar to yours (usually Superman, Spiderman, Wolverine and/or Batman are comparable). Why would someone want to read your story and not a story from the similar hero? In what way(s) is your story better?
13. Is your character an alien that looks exactly like a human?
14. Is The Watchmen one of your sources of inspiration?
    

Viacom had astonishing balls to ask for the source code for the search functions that power Google and YouTube, the source code for YouTube's new "Video ID" program, a complete set of every video ever removed from the site, databases containing information on every video ever hosted at YouTube, and a copy of every private video.

So in the ruling by a Judge in the District of New York awarded Viacom's representatives to all of YouTubes logs.  I have a number of concerns about this whole debacle which I'll talk about here. What the hell is Google doing with over 12 Terabytes of data just containing logs?  I can really sense EU lawyers salivating over this, the EU have unbelievably strict privacy laws. 

Why was Viacom looking for access to source code? There are hundreds of cloned services out there that mirror YouTube, they were not the first to create this service, obtaining and possibly leaking code would just enable more clones to be made available.

Whatever happened to YouTube's amazing technology that would automatically weed out copyright content from the site?  Was this implemented?  If so, how many videos were removed as a result?  Who are Viacom looking for information on, uploaders or the actual content consumers?

Lastly, I personally find it hilarious that Viacom were requesting the search technology behind Google and Youtube.  They are the same technology, can you imagine for one second Viacom actually aquiring the most intimate details of Google's core business?  That's right, neither can I. What is really astonishing is that a division of Viacom, CBS, has major deals with Youtube, that involves having a large CBS channel within the site.  

It's fast becoming very clear that despite all the press releases and lawsuits there is a major battle waging between old media and new.  Content owners are trying to figure out what to do and how to do it before the old medium of television dies a lonely death (Not for some time I expect).  Youtube, Justin.tv, and many more of it's ilk, divide and conquer. 

Google may shortly begin regretting buying the service,  .  Mark Cuban once famously commented “Only a ‘moron’ would buy YouTube”, he may be right after all.  These types of lawsuit are only the tip of the iceberg.  It happened with book publishers, it has happened with radio, it's happening with record labels and artists.  Video is the new battleground...

Technorati Profile

As so often happens in the world of software, someone aquires a version of Dreamweaver and instantly think that the website that they have spend hours working on is now the bees knees.  Everyone has gotten this feeling at one time or other, I certainly have (blinking lights and ms clip art was all the rage back in the 90's).

A guy I knew during my my time in Dalian, China, got back in contact today proclaiming that he now has an outsourcing team asembled working as soldiers of fortune. Their mission, to crack open the mythical giant of the US & EU software industry and reap the rewards.  Anyhow, we get to chatting about the venture of his and his plans for world-wide domination, he then shows me his website.

My eyes are still bleeding, it looks terrible, it is terrible, small children would run away from this colourful behemoth, grown adults would roll into the fetal position and cry out for their mother.  Let's just say it was bad.  So anyhow I proceed to give him the benefit of the doubt, I remember saying that blue backgrounds full of ships and bright yellow links have no place in an outsourcing website, that the 90's want their webpage back, that messages to their customers should never contain the phrase "Just do it ,man!!!" and above all that practice of harvesting links pointing to the 90% of the worlds spam resources is just one very bad idea.  

To top it all off, during my browsing of this site (I was wearing protective glasses at the time), I was infected with a number of nasty trojans and viruses.  My friend has become a spam king.  He was wondering why he had no US & EU clients, so I gave it to him straight.  Every company, usually gets to give their first impression via their website, getting infected with anything is always a negative in their view.  These days so many mediums of information are are all inspected before a deal is done to ensure that the opposite party is legit.  My first google search for my friends page yielded results of Viagra, Erectile Disfunction and JS_DLOADER.JS, it's a very weird combination.  

One thing I always noticed was a huge divide between website design in the western world and design in China.  It's not a bad thing, it's a matter of culture.  I always equated it with walking down the main streets of the respective cities, in the middle kingdom you are faced with glaring neon lights proclaiming KTV bars, electronics and noodles, Ireland, thankfully, is a bit more quaint in that regard.  So when I see websites in China with all the bells and whistles I don't particularly pay much notice but do spend a lot of time trying to see past the junk for the nuggets of gold that are off to some side.  In the western world, things are much more minimalistic, each page focuses on a specific are, one which automatically draws the attention to the users point of view.  At the end of the day, it is chalk and cheese, I would have great difficulty designing any Chinese site and vice versa.  

I do hope that he takes some of the advice I gave him, but I doubt he will.  I'm a minimalist type of guy, I like clean lines, some curves and good content.  Flash, FLEX, Silverlight, well those are things I am not into, sure they have their uses, can look very eye-catching but mostly they are just used for evil purposes.  I know what I like and can definitely tell you what I hate.  Bells and whistles = FAIL.  Spam url's = EPIC FAIL....

Our Sex And The City Craft Contest has been going strong and we've already had some fabulous entries including a knit Cosmopolitan Softie, Sex And The City Cupcakes and a Sex And The City Bag. The contest doesn't close until the 10th of July, so there's still time to enter your SATC inspired how-to's for a chance of winning the Sex And The City Movie book. Good luck! Check it out here ->

Movie rights to be purchased in 3… 2…

If you like icons… Smashing has em.

I did a Google search for “bad superhero writing” and Superhero Nation was the top result. Screw you, Google!

[B. Mac] Speaking of Google, it decided to celebrate the 4th of July on its front-page today, which is slightly unexpected because instead of national holidays, they usually focus on holidays like Earth Day that are equally unimportant everywhere.

Picture of Earth courtesy of the HSCD School Board, atomic bomb courtesy of the Department of Energy, and Bill Nye courtesy of TVgasm. All blame for the low quality Photoshopping is ours.

Creative Chicks At Play have been making these wonderful stars and stripes t-shirts for the 4th of July. Go to their blog to see more!

When authors or fans challenge negative reviews, they sometimes say something like “what have you written, because I bet it’s awful.” I think that reflects a fundamentally wrong conception of reviewing. Every day, people evaluate and suggest things without any experience of having made them. For example, over the past few years I’ve suggested that friends stay away from (ugly) Pontiac Azteks, (shoddy) Craftsman tools, and (inedible) McDonald’s food. But I’ve never designed a car, built a tool and hardly ever cook. Does my lack of experience disqualify me as a relevant reviewer?

I don’t think so. I think that a qualified reviewer is anyone who can articulate 1) whether the work was effective for them and 2) that they are similar enough to their audience that their reactions to the product are relevant. For example, I think that for the average young American, my opinion of fast-food is actually more relevant than a professional chef’s, not less. I imagine that my expectations for food are similar to those of most young Americans, whereas the chef would have very different concerns.

So when an author challenges the authorial credentials of a reviewer, I think that’s completely missing the point. Reviewers are speaking to the concerns of readers, and most readers aren’t authors. They don’t think like authors do! Second, I think that challenging the reviewer is inappropriate because it usually misreads the reviewer’s message. Most reviewers are not trying to insinuate that “my work is better than yours.” I don’t even think that most reviewers are trying to insinuate that their work is better than yours in these ways. Even if their own fiction suffered from every one of the mistakes they pointed out in your work, pointing that out won’t make your work any better.

ADDENDUM: I think there’s one instance when it’s OK to say that an observer is unqualified to review: when he doesn’t know what is feasible. For example, a artist might look at an engineer’s building plan and give some outlandishly unfeasible objection like “this building is ugly, because the base isn’t two-dimensional.” The engineer could rightly say that “that’s crazy– it’s not even remotely possible to design a building with a 2-D base. Because you have no idea what engineers are able to do, you should stop reviewing us.” However, I think that this exception generally does not apply to unpublished reviewers of fiction. When a reviewer says that “Eragon’s characterization is poor compared to Harry Potter/Narnia/etc.,” he is demonstrating that he has a realistic standard for what good writing can be. (Of course, we can disagree whether Narnia or HP are actually good standards for characterization, but they are certainly feasible).

I’ll leave you with this parting thought: You don’t have to be a car designer to know that the Pontiac Aztek came straight from the deepest and darkest pits of hell.

Few genres of fiction suffer from as much total drivel and utter hackery as the sword-and-spell fantasy. That isn’t to say that mystery, romance and books for tweens are junk-free (believe me, they’re not) but it’s hard to escape the impression that they are not quite up to their neck in awfulness.

Fortunately, there is a list of questions that will help prospective fantasy authors identify some of the most common problems of their field. Here are some of the problems that I find particularly poisonous…

• Prophecies, particularly when a character is prophesied to save the world and/or get the girl.
• Mysterious lineage for any character.
• Any character that is half-raced, but particularly half-dragons and half-elves. Also, if you have a character that belongs to more than two races (I’m a third human, elf and orc!), please make the character explode in the same sentence he describes his lineage. Your readers will love you for it.
• A character that is secretly the family member of another. Paging Darth Vader…
• Any female character that exists solely A) to be captured and rescued B) to embody feminist ideals or C) all of the above.
  
• A cryptic sage who speaks in riddles or otherwise hides information from the main character for no reason except that the author wants to drag the story out.
  
• A fighter of great strength, great fortitude, low intelligence, and a tendency to end sentences with exclamation points.
  
• A mysterious artifact of immense power that will either save or destroy the world.
  
• Characters transported from the real world to the fantasy realm. I think this trope is marginally acceptable for young readers, but it’s definitely unacceptable for readers above 13.
  
• Names with dashes or apostrophes. The list didn’t include this, but I’m a bit annoyed by names that are longer than eight letters or more than one word.
  
• Inn scenes, particularly inn scenes that feature drunken brawls. Christ almighty, if you have an inn scene, know that you are perilously close to the publisher’s wall of shame.
  
• The character falling in love with but eventually winning the heart of the unattainable woman. (Because the only women worth having are of a higher social class?)
  
• “Does your story involve a number of different races, each of which has exactly one country, one ruler, and one religion?” Well-said!
  
• The last two questions are “Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings? Read that last question again and answer truthfully.”

A while ago I nominated Habari for the SourceForge Community Choice award for Best New Project. Unless you're a first-time visitor, it should be clear that I think Habari is a great tool, and I'm really happy to say that we've managed to make the cut of finalists for the award! So now I need your help...

It's actually one of my goals to get myself nominated for a web award. But technically, this award isn't for me -- It's for the community of folks who have put together a really great blogging package. Allow me to live a bit vicariously and suggest that winning the award for Habari would be just as thrilling for me as to be nominated for my own award (which seems a long way off in coming, if ever).

If Matt Asay would stop by any of the places where our group congregates, he'd learn how deserving of such an award both the software and the community is. We're not fringe, we're up-and-coming!

So here's what you can do to help Habari: Go to Sourceforge and create an account if you don't already have one. When you have your account, vote for Habari in the Best New Project category. While you're there, look at the other categories and vote for them too. There are a lot of good projects in the lists. (Although why Drupal shows up in half of them is a mystery to me.)

At the end of July, we'll see if we have made any difference. Hopefully with your help, Habari can win the first of many awards like this!

For the past year that I have been working within this company I have found myself with a number of significant applications that have fallen under my mandate.  Some of these applications have been designed by myself, others by third parties external to the company and some I have inherited as legacy applications.  There is not one set framework between all these applications, some are coded in Ruby, others in Java, PHP, VB, Rails...the list is pretty much endless.  So as you may know I have handed in my required notice for the company and with about 1 and a half months of notice remaining here I have begun the unenviable task of documentation.

Yes, yes, I hear your cries of procrastination, yes much of the documentation should have been completed with their original owners, however times have changed.  This company is no longer a startup, processes are beginning to mature and documentation must be completed at all costs.  So now as I sit before the lists of applications which must be handed over I'm discovering all sorts of pesky yet vital applications which I have had some impact on in some form or other this past year.  Apparently I am the technical owner for all of these applications, some of which I have never heard of before.  Most modern IT companies are like this, back 5-10 years ago it was natural to fire up access and pull up an application that does a bit of importing of raw data, tidies it all up and shoots off a pretty looking report full of breakdowns.  

Much of the code is well written, others not so much.  Not all of the code contains comments and some code contains such horrors that leave me wanting to gouge out my own eyeballs after viewing it.  Such treats that I talk about should never be mentioned or ever see the light of day.  Code reviews are vital however are not as common as perhaps they should be within many companies.  I will be facing a number of code reviews whilst doing these handovers over the coming weeks and came up with some thoughts on the process

Review the code, not the developer.

Let's face it, people can be assholes at least some of the time during their life.  Don't be one during a coding session, everyone makes mistakes but it is how they learn from them that counts. 

Short regular sessions

Don’t make it too long, an hour is ideal per session.  Reading code at the best of times can be a tedious exercise, reading other peoples code can be even more so.  Remember that this should be an on-going process and is a vital necesscary part of creating productive and efficient code.

Be prepared

I had this sudden image of the scouts motto there.  Anyhow most of your time should be spent in preparation. Of course, you want the handouts, program listings, documentation, diagrams, flipcharts, and other meeting necessities prepared in advance so as to not waste people’s time.

Own your code

Don't be afraid to stand by your code. It is a learning experience and these sessions will make developers write better code in the future.  All participants in a review should feel that they can speak openly. As a reviewer, give comments in a constructive and positive way. As the developer, don’t take comments personally. You’re all there for the same purpose.

At the end of the day, laugh about screwups, don't take it personally and learn from the experience.  Everyone wins!

Scott Teplin has been posting some images from his new "Crash" series on his weblog. The color version of the one above is awesome, but I love his initial sketches just as much; the details are excellent. Don't miss his Alphaville series either. You can even see how his work progressed on the whole series on his Future Trash weblog.

I think the best way to teach yourself a new web technology is to build yourself a weblog application. Well, I wanted to learn Merb, so that's what I did. Kinda. Basically, I just took the same database layout that I had in the last incarnation (which was written in Ruby on Rails) and then just wrote a Merb application around it.

I'll probably have more on Merb as I've learned quite a bit, and I've become quite enamored of the little framework that could!

For those of you in feed readers, I apologize if you get all my posts in your reader again. Some URLs have changed, and the commenting doesn't work as well as I want it to yet, but it's passable for now.

The New York Times has an interesting run-down of cartoon updates, from apparently successful endeavors like Strawberry Shortcake and the ugly-but-popular TMNT series to horrible flops like Magic Earring Ken and Warner Brother’s Loonatics…

“There have been some noteworthy misfires. Warner Brothers has struggled to make the Looney Tunes crowd relevant to modern children, introducing futuristic-looking versions of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a new television series in 2005. But many parents hated the ‘Loonatics,’ which had mohawks and menacing eyes.” I think that Warner Brothers really missed the point. Kids aren’t moving away from L.T. because they aren’t “modern” enough, but because of the advent of children’s shows that are far better. For example, shows like Jackie Chan Adventures, Kim Possible, Justice League, Pokemon and TMNT actually have plots and make cursory (and sometimes successful) attempts at characterization and humor. In contrast, the characters on L.T. are not actually characters but just a single zany antic played to the hilt. How many times do kids want to see Wily Coyote fail to catch the Roadrunner, or Sylvester fail to catch Tweety, or Fudd fail to catch Bugs?

I think that the L.T. as currently written have about as much of a future as Tom and Jerry.

This story is not doom and gloom for all franchises, however. The NY Times shows the graphic redesign of the Strawberry Shortcake character.

I’ve never watched any variation of Strawberry Shortcake, but I feel absolutely confident that that its stylistic update has made it more watchable and pleasant to look at. Nor does it seem to have compromised the wholesome quality of the original, unlike Loonatics and Magic Earring Ken… According to the NYT, Strawberry Shortcake has actually sold 2.5 billion dollars worth of merchandise since 2003. Hot damn.

Don’t you feel better already?

The original picture can be seen here.

I'm not a big fan of rum, but this recipe for Pineapple Rum from Life With Monkey looks and sounds delicious. I may have to give rum a second chance!

The creator of Heroes, Tim Kring, has promised that season 3 will have more villains. Yes, more characters… that’s exactly what Heroes needed.

“You’re going to see a lot of bad guys,” he said to Sci Fi Wire. “We’re playing off the idea of our characters as heroes or villains. So it’s really the duality of good and evil.” T.K., I will see your duality of good and evil and raise you character development, interesting traits and a well-rounded cast. For one, I’d start by killing off about half the cast…

• Molly (way too cute and causes far too much mushiness for the cop and Suresh)
• Suresh (he was useless in season 2 and killing him might help the writers overcome their proclivity to start every episode with a Dramatic Narration… I did, however, like him in season 1 except for the narrations).
• Mikah (almost as bad as Molly, but with more spunkiness!)
• Maya (in retrospect, I hope she and her brother were a cruel joke at the expense of proponents of more diversity in TV casts).
• Everyone in Mikah’s extended family except for D.L. (no, he’s not really dead) and maybe Nikki.
• Maybe Peter Petrelli (I found him a lot more likeable when he was Farmhand Luke than an amnesiac Luke Skywalker. Also, his actor only shows emotion with a deer-in-the-headlight look).

The single biggest problem with Heroes was that the writers overreached because they were too confident that they could make a slew of stock characters interesting by painting quickly with broad strokes. The Darling Daughter, Noble but Troubled Scientist, Spunky Son, and whatever the hell Maya is fell apart completely. The only one of the stock characters on the show that is remotely interesting is Syler, the Nietzschean psychopath. “This is usually the part when people start screaming,” indeed.

The Space Planner by Meg Mateo Ilasco is a workbook dedicated to helping layout and decorate the space in your home. Divided by room, each section offers helpful advice and know-how for making the best possible use of space, creating harmony and styling your home. To find what's best for you, the book includes lifestyle questionnaires, budget sheets and furniture stickers with worksheets, which allow you to plan the layout of each room Whether you're moving or just revamping your current home, this book is seething with practicality and sure to prevent a lot of unnecessary stress. As they say, 'failing to plan is planning to fail', so make sure to plan your space well when it comes to your home. You can find out more about Meg on her website or pick up a copy of The Space Planner from Amazon now.

Mamiedale has posted photos of this fantastic birthday cake on her blog, Mamiedale Does It Again. I love the way she's incorporated the birthday candles in to the design of her cake. It looks yummy too!

PutPlace.com is the first company in the Tuesday push initiative by Damien Mulley.  Hopefully it gets some companies some needed attention and hopefully some exposure to investors and customers.  I know not many are reading this space, I havent put much effort into it lately, but to family and friends who are, well, let me say this simply.  BACKUP YOUR JUNK!

The whole premise is this, 2GB free space. What's not to love about that.  It also has a few more nifty features:

• Set and forget automated backup
• Access your files from anywhere
• Quick and secure
• Full backup of all your changes
• Share files with Family and trusted friends

It's not a sexy business, it has a lot of competition and everyone should be backing up. After the catastrophe I faced a few months ago losing 1TB of data it is something that should be really pushed out to normal computer users.  I really hope they do well...

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp.I stayed in Room A for "Podcasting in Plain English", which was a decent summary of podcasting, doing exactly what the title says: Translating all of the technical terms down into understandable language. Using metaphors to do this can be powerful, but some of the metaphors in this one were off. For example, "bandwidth" is not "number of cars on a bridge," but rather, "the width of the bridge, which increases its capacity to hold cars." Also, there was some contention over whether you could create a podcast without a blog, and here's where the trouble with the entire conference starts.

Rule #1 of podcamp (and specifically even posted beside every door at PodCamp Ohio) is:All attendees must be treated equally. Everyone is a rockstar.

So when someone in the audience started talking about how you could create a podcast without an RSS feed, he should have been allowed to have his say without being shot down by the session leader. Likewise, when I said that there are tons of services that provide a way to publish podcasts without a blog, including at least one of the podcamp's sponsors, I should not have been told anything like, "Ok, but you really need a blog."

The resounding theme with all of the sessions I attended was one where the camp put a person in front of the room to speak at the crowd; to convey the speaker's message and that message alone. Although there were some Q&A periods, there really wasn't any sort of dialogue generated within the session.

I think this is where the real value of unconferences exists. Apart from having a set structure of how things work and licensing applied to the conferences, the primary value of an unconference is having a room full of people in the same mindset as you to discuss a topic about which you know or want to learn. Granted, you need to have a reason for experts to participate, and having a session leader fills that potential void, but it's the session leader's job to lead a session not lecture for the duration.

There were a couple of sessions that I could not attend because there was simply no room. This is a problem that I've seen at other conferences, since there's not accurate way to gauge in advance which sessions need the larger rooms. It's in this one odd case where not having the "unconference mentality" that I mentioned above actually pays off, since I will have missed nothing - having had no opportunity to interact with the session - by actually having been there. I can simply listen to the recording of the session and gain everything I need to know. This leads me to another disappointment.

I traveled 450 miles to attend PodCamp Ohio. I spent more than $300 for the flight, and more than $150 for the hotel. Plus I paid for food and other minor things. For what reason would I travel so far, spend all that money, and use my most valuable asset - time - if listening to the sessions on the web offers no different access than sitting in the session in person? If I didn't have other reasons to be in Ohio this weekend I would be more than a little pissed.

Before you comment in response with "why didn't you interject?" I should tell you that I did not try after that first session. From what I saw, many speakers were set on a path to talk about what they signed up for, and didn't seem to want to be interrupted from their task. Also, I didn't attend every session. Most session timeslots were packed 4 or 5 sessions deep, so there was no way to see everyone (although I did wander a bit when I had the chance). And finally, I do see value in occasionally getting preached to, especially for people who are just receiving a topic for the first time. If you don't know about it, you can't ask questions. All that is granted.

What I'm saying is that if PodCamp Ohio is the same next year, it's truly not going to be worthwhile to its attendees, who will have moved on to more technical questions based on what they learned this year. It's what happened to blogOrlando, and I see it happening around Philly, too. Without a chance to interact, the questions people have will inevitably outgrow whatever a presenter can put in his slides, leading to disappointment.

So I tuned my session on tools a little differently. The major fault I found with my own session is that it was clearly too broad. I had expected that we would talk briefly about all different kinds of software tools. I think we didn't even really talk about software at all. We got stuck in hosting and DNS registration. But what I think is good is that because I simply guided the session and let others participate, we got a great discussion about DNS and hosting horror stories from the veterans in the room, while the newbies in the room got to hear these trials first hand and learn to avoid them. People who needed help asked specific questions, and I wasn't the only person answering. That's how it's supposed to work.

You can dump a whole lot of canned information on people at a session, but it's probably no more than what they can get out of a book and a few hours with Google. If you're doing a presentation of any kind, it's better to give personal accounts and insider tips than focus on the basic tedium that you can get by reading a For Dummes book. Especially at a podcamp where other people are expected/expecting to share their stories, too.

So yes, next time I'll introduce a much narrower topic.

I would love to be more positive about the event. I think I would be, but I wasn't swept away by the buzz. Sometimes these events become tight echo chambers. I challenge anyone who comes away from an event like this to think of three things they've applied from that event after three months have passed. Then we'll call it worthwhile. It's great to see friends and talk tech, but shouldn't that be happening unfocused outside of a conference too?

Here's a question: To where did the money go?

I have my t-shirt. I am wearing it as I write this, in fact. On the sleeve, there is the logo of the printing company. Were these donated, or was the logo just a discount? Why were no other sponsors logos on the t-shirt if it was just a discount?

Folks at Habari pulled together a good bit of money (for an open source project!) to sponsor PodCamp. I'm not sure what we were expecting for our money. The list of benefits as a gold-level sponsor don't really indicate anything more than what we involved ourselves enough to receive. Still, the 10' of table space was shared with any other person who wanted to throw their business card on the table. The bowls we set out to offer our buttons were filled with other people's giant home-made podcast promo buttons by afternoon. And while we have no standing upon which to complain, for the value received in return for sponsoring podcamp, I would recommend that organizations considering it avoid it in the future, simply because there is no exposure.

The most bizarre thing about the sponsorship is the utter lack of recognition of them in the speaking components of the event. ITT was recognized for offering the location. TechSmith gave away a few screen capture apps in the closing session, and that is the sum total of talk time provided for sponsors, whose names weren't mentioned at all. The sponsors weren't even mentioned in aggregate.

Moreover, a glaring and unforgivable omission is a thank-you to the participants in the sessions. If not the lecture-giving session leaders who offered their time (since that would violate rule #1), then thanking anyone who did participate, including the session leaders. Isn't that fair? I flew 450 miles!

And finally, what is with the WordPress blitz? Haven't you people ever shopped around for blog software? You'd think it was the only software on the planet for publishing a website based on the session lineup. You know, Drupal has a capable podcasting component. Habari might not podcast just yet, but it does support rich media like nothing else does, and it was a sponsor of the event. It was very disappointing to see that the bulk of sessions were about making WordPress go. They should have called the event WordCamp Ohio, and then I could have played games at Origins or gotten sauced at ComFest.

My favorite moment at PodCamp was in the lightning session. Skippy was doing a quick presentation of Habari for the room. Someone asks, as they always do, "Why would I use this and not WordPress?" To which the room gives quiet consent to the proposal that even looking at another blog package is heretical. My instant response, as Skippy will tell you, is "Because it's better" with an implied "duh" on the end. Ten minutes later, skippy's shown them how the admin works and people are saying, "I need to write this down." This is the kind of revelatory experience that I'd hope to get out of every session, and I'm glad that it happened when skippy showed them Habari.

Also on the upside, I met a few neat people that I wouldn't have if I didn't go to Ohio, and we exchanged cards. I met some people in person that I've only talked to online before, which is always fun. That's really the best part of these things - interacting with the other people. For me, I'm "shy" -- I don't like to just interject myself in people's space to make friends as fast as you'd have to at a conference. This is actually what I'm doing in the background of this video (on the right, in front of Skippy) with Michelle Lentz, the leader for the session on Twitter. That's why the interaction in the sessions is so important for me, since it gives us a context and conversation to build on where it's ok to interact with people I don't know.

The afterparty at Dave and Busters was decent, although the Dave and Busters itself had some so-so service. I hear there was some issue with the tables needing to be turned over very quickly instead of letting people sit and talk, which is a bummer. Seating at the bar wasn't bad, and had some live video streaming. I played a round of House of the Dead 4 with Mitch Canter, and got the skinny on some of the behind-the camera workings of some of the Ohio-based podcasts. D&B was genuinely worth the time. Thanks to Dr. A for the Bass.

So what's the verdict for next year? If there is a podcamp in Columbus next year, I doubt I would attend, simply because it's going to be off the radar. I think I will refocus my efforts closer to home. For example, this September there's a podcamp in Philly which would be interesting to lead a session at. More focused, tight, with my friends from the area, talking about the evolution of rich social media beyond previous years' waves of "What is it?" and "How do I?" I'm thinking that year three's topic will be a great focal point.