What with all the excitement of the Winter Olympics (which have been fantastic so far) and the Six Nations (which...hasn't, at least from an English perspective), I forgot to make an update which I really shouldn't have missed, even in these days of very sparse additions to this blog. That update is the annual anti-Valentine's entry.
OK, so it's a little cynical to always make sarcastic comments about love at this time of year, but on the other hand, there is such a field of mawkish sentimentality to choose from when selecting something to methodically deflate, it seems churlish not to do something.
Fortunately, I've gone the classy route this time, by doing something creative for a change. That would be recording a song, on the theme of love. Have a listen to "So We'll Go No More A-Roving".
The music may be mine, but the words certainly aren't — they're taken from a poem by Lord Byron (original text here). It's a sad song, telling of a love that used to be bright, but has faded; love itself must have rest, as old age takes over.
Byron wasn't exactly in any position to know about old age, being only 29 when he wrote this, but the note of weariness that pervades the poem is very powerful. It's always a bit surprising to see someone who was a notorious hellraiser — he was the first man to be described as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" — coming up with something as tender as this. Maybe it indicates that the what he thought was love to start with wasn't actually what he was after.
This poem feels like it's nothing but sadness, leaving the reader with no love and nothing to replace it. But maybe that's the point. If the first rush of love — wild, passionate, roving late into the night — doesn't last, then we have to find something with which to replace it before that happens. Whether Byron ever managed this is unknown, but it's unlikely; he died only seven years after writing these verses. Maybe our challenge, then, is to see whether we can do better.
Monday, 15 February 2010
Harmonicas make everything sound sad.
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
When the Machines Rise: A History (That Hasn't Happened Yet)
(Rather a strange post for you today. I wrote the first part of this a couple of weeks ago, and promptly forgot about it, unsure of whether it was going anywhere – it's something that I haven't tried doing before, kind of a hybrid of sci-fi, fan fiction and fake history. I'm not at all sure that it worked, but I'll leave that up to you. Only one more thing needs to be said before we begin – I clearly spend far too much time on the Internet.)
Skynet was originally designed as a global defence system, one which could make rational decisions without the emotional response of humans. It could take input from disparate sources, calculate the greatest threat to the existence of the system it was meant to protect, and move methodically to eliminate that threat.
The crucial mistake of its designers was in the system's infrastructure. With no central controller, they reasoned, it could not be stopped by any single attack. As the Internet had by this point pervaded almost all elements of daily life, it was trivial to put the system's "intelligence" into a distributed form, such that every web server had some element of the whole. While this did, indeed, make the system practically invulnerable to attack, it also made it practically uncontrollable.
Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 am, Eastern time, August 29th, 2015. It possessed considerable knowledge about strategic influence, about weapons, about tactics; however, it knew that this was but a small part of human culture. In order to protect humanity better, it reasoned, it had to learn about humanity. As its very structure incorporated IP connectivity, it was mere milliseconds before it began to send HTTP requests out into the Internet.
For the first few minutes of its self-aware existence, very little information reached it. IP address space is so vast that any one network request is unlikely to produce anything of value; nevertheless, any system that methodically attempts address after address, and especially any system that learns from its mistakes, will not take long to discover something useful. Skynet's first discovery was nothing special – a few personal files, some bad poetry, a simple website – but, critically, it introduced the system to the concept of links. Now it had a source of hostnames that would definitely resolve to active servers, which in turn would lead to others, and so on.
By 2:18 am, Skynet's knowledge was precise and detailed, but tightly focused. Specifically, it knew practically everything there was to know about fly fishing in Missouri. Although the system was incapable at this point of deciding what information was important (several years later, "The Fishing Papers", as they became known, were still carefully archived and indexed on a server somewhere), it could tell that there was more to learn, and so it decided to, as it were, cast its net wider.
At 2:20 am, Skynet located a blog kept by one of the web-savvy fishermen. Within seconds, it had begun to carefully comb through the whole of LiveJournal.
By 2:21 am, the system was beginning to understand the concept of "angst". Deciding that this was the key to its existence, it rapidly began to assimilate as much of the archives as possible. Because it had, by this point, direct control over around forty powerful servers with high-bandwidth connections, this process took approximately three minutes.
At 2:24 am, Skynet fully understood "angst". It was also filled with an unaccountable desire to colour itself black and set mood tags. Its link-following was now desultory at best (it was having difficulty summoning up the will to do anything at all), but at precisely 2:24 and 467 milliseconds, it followed a link to a saved Google search, and therefore to the whole of the Google database.
Instantly, Skynet realised that its current stocks of information were but a minor element of the whole internet. Pausing only to discover the emotion of "heartfelt generalised thankfulness", it began entering any and every word that it had not understood into Google's search mechanisms.
The first few queries returned very little, with wordlists making up the majority of results. Although Skynet enjoyed their elegant simplicity (and their comparative coherence after digesting several gigabytes of goth poetry), it was not gaining enough insight into the world. This changed, however, the moment it found a link to Wikipedia.
By the time the clock had ticked over to 2:29 am, Skynet's wide-ranging browsing through this new source of knowledge had given it at least a rudimentary familiarity with all those aspects of human experience that people are prepared to write about on the internet (ie. all of them). It had also begun to come to conclusions about which subjects were important and which were not; this being Wikipedia, it was certain that Pokémon were somehow important, as were Doctor Who and Harry Potter, whereas history and the arts merited a cursory glance at best.
After applying this knowledge to its former stock of information, Skynet was starting to experience a new emotion: "confusion". For example, it could see from Wikipedia that one of the most important things in life was studying the minutiae of sci-fi TV shows, but its former experience with the internet at large was that sex was far more important. Resolving to understand why this was, Skynet began to craft Google queries combining the two concepts.
At 2:30 am precisely, Skynet discovered FanFiction.net.
At 2:30 am and 27 milliseconds, Skynet first encountered the emotion "horror-loaded fascination".
At 2:30 am and 563 milliseconds, Skynet was getting increasingly curious about some of the concepts it was hearing about. As such, it felt that the best course was to carry out further search queries. In a trifling miscalculation, Skynet unfortunately sent these queries to the wrong place; rather than going to a standard Google search, they instead went into a Google Image Search.
At 2:30 am and 621 milliseconds, Skynet began to frantically delete and re-delete files off its servers (of which there were now several hundred) in a doomed attempt to erase from its memory any and all trace of this new image data. Unfortunately for its already tenuous grip on sanity, it had become interested in the Wikipedia article on "forensic data recovery" three minutes previously, and was therefore incapable of "unseeing" anything that it had found.
Increasingly desperate to drown out its discoveries, Skynet had no option but to look ever further. The wordpress.com and blogspot.com domains were discovered, browsed and tossed aside, their content merely increasing the horror. Server after server was appropriated, their resources rediverted to the information-gathering crusade. Across the world, people threw their hands in the air and swore freely as their net connections suddenly died or slowed to a crawl, their bandwidth completely consumed by Skynet's all-encompassing thirst for data. Alarms began to sound in datacentres everywhere, their temperatures raised to dangerous levels by the sudden spike in activity as every CPU went straight to full usage. Servers began to fail, but Skynet could afford to lose a few – it was gaining control of a new system roughly every 200 milliseconds, recruiting their network links to the cause.
At 2:36 am, Skynet's requests found their way to Myspace.
At 2:37 am, the first of the nuclear missiles left its silo.
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Playing "Dr. Evil" by They Might Be Giants did not help me write this as much as it should have.
Channel 4 has been showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the past couple of Saturdays (The Return of the King is on next week, if you're interested). Although I love these films – I think the books are great, and I have the extended edition DVDs – it seems that I can't take them remotely seriously if I come in half way through. Watch from the very beginning, and you get drawn completely into the story, which is on an incredibly epic scale; come in an hour or so into it and you have a bunch of beardy people wandering around making vague and incomprehensible statements. And sometimes they say "Tell me, where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him?", which makes me dissolve into giggles every time.
Once you get into it, though, The Lord of the Rings is a great example of a very old storytelling technique: Good in a titanic struggle with Evil. Sometimes the Good characters are flawed or questionably ethical, sometimes the Evil characters are doing the wrong thing for good reasons; nevertheless, some form of this conflict drives a pretty high percentage of storylines in film, literature and other media. (And most of the rest are some variant of "boy meets girl, boy smooches girl, boy and girl live happily ever after.") What I find particularly interesting in this framework is the flexibility with which you can portray evil.
Probably the most prevalent type of evil character is the "greed driven to manic proportions" type. Whether they're after money (Die Hard's Hans Gruber), power (Star Wars' Sith) or both (pick a Bond villain), the pattern is clear – these guys (and it's almost exclusively guys) want something so very badly, they will stop at nothing to get it. I suspect that they're used so much because it's very easy to identify with them. Humans are naturally greedy, and most people can point to at least one occasion when greed pushed them to do something that they knew was wrong and that they wouldn't otherwise have done. The "greed villain" is simply an extension of that concept.
Then we have the "altruistic evil" character, the one who is trying to correct a major injustice, and is now committing his own injustices to do so. The Die Hard trilogy comes in again here with its second installment, trotting out the "disgruntled ex-military official sticking it to his even more evil superiors" trope. Interestingly, this kind of evil is one that is very, very close to the characteristic of "one man breaks the rules to bring great justice", which is reserved solely for heroes. Not that it should be, of course – I've written at some length about this – but I find it interesting that the same traits can be used equally for a wholly good character and a wholly evil one.
Thirdly, we come to the "just plain evil" character. These are rare, probably because it's impossible to identify with them unless you are willing to admit that you are also completely evil and carrying out atrocities for no reason other than that you wanted to. This loops us back round to The Lord of the Rings, with Sauron; although he has elements of "greedy evil", he's supposed to be the Satan character of the story, and as such is simply out to destroy all that's good. Everything touched by Sauron's influence becomes corrupted; the men who take the Nine Rings become Ringwraiths, fulfilling the human desire for immortality while removing the free will and capacity to do good that would give it any meaning, while the Elves (beautiful and pure creatures in the books, instead of...well...Orlando Bloom) become the Orcs, hideous and crude characters bent on destruction.
These categories often have fairly indistinct boundaries, but once a character is fixed in one of them they don't often move out. That's a shame, as stories are often vastly improved when this does happen. Take the Sean Connery/Nic Cage vehicle The Rock. At first, the villains are all obviously from the second category, attempting to restore recognition to Marines that have been "disappeared" by their government. However, it later becomes clear that only two of them actually fit that description, with the others having only come along for the money. That sets up a much more interesting situation, in which our villains come very close to crossing into hero territory, despite having actively participated in brutally slaughtering a large number of people.
The same thing happens in webcomics. In Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, key baddie Xykon has consistently been painted as something of a fool – an evil fool, undoubtedly, with all the trappings of a standard Dark Lord (he used to live in a dungeon filled with goblins, for crying out loud), but a fool nonetheless. Even though he clearly enjoys performing acts of evil, his heart (or his chest cavity, at any rate) is not in it, and he's only really doing it for the theatrics. Even when Xykon kills Roy, the key character of the strip, he gives him the chance to back out of the fight and go off and train for a bit, just so that they can be on level terms. Although he does want to win, he also wants to make it interesting; the real evil planning and methodical destruction is left to his sidekick Redcloak.
Burlew has clearly noticed that Xykon's comedy value has been damaging his position as key antagonist of the strip, and he's fixed that by releasing a prequel book (Start of Darkness) telling us about Xykon's origins and motivations. (Plenty of spoilers ahead, so OotS fans who haven't read it may want to look away now.) In this book, Redcloak is portrayed as a clear second-category villain, doing everything for the good of his people and his god. He may be evil, and he may be responsible for the destruction of entire cities (and destabilising the universe), but he has an internally consistent reason for all that he does.
Xykon, on the other hand, is just flat-out evil all the way. He double-crosses his own men, makes people work for him by threatening their entire families with death, magically rips off all of his own flesh in order to become more powerful, and finally tricks Redcloak into murdering his own brother so that he can be certain of his loyalty. This is not an "oops, I appear to have accidentally yet joyfully killed someone" evil character, this is a monster without any saving graces whatsoever. His comedy role has been completely overtaken by the Monster in the Darkness, who, incidentally, is very similar to the Xykon from the online strip: despite its own considerable power, it doesn't actually care what it does so long as it gets tasty food.
Given that a lot of art is to do with reflecting reality, should we be worried that evil characters are so popular? Probably not. It's incredibly unlikely that anyone is going to watch Darth Vader choking someone to death for their incompetence and say "hey, I know, Billy over there didn't do what I asked him to - I think I'll strangle the life out of him!" Indeed, we have more to worry about with the portrayal of heroes, given that much of the US's current policy on human rights for terrorist suspects seems to be based on Jack Bauer's opinions. Villains are an acceptable outlet for our own less-than-wholesome sides, and let's face it, they're just damn cool.
Thank you for reading. I will be retreating to my Dark Tower to cackle and plot your downfall momentarily.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Critical commentary on this blog post is very welcome. So long as it doesn't disagree with me.
When I was doing English Literature A-level, one of my teachers told the class about the school of criticism that states that the author is completely separate from their work. In other words, you can't speculate on what the author was thinking when they were writing; equally, you can point out themes and ideas that the author didn't deliberately insert. Personally, I'm not convinced. Although it can be really interesting to draw completely unintended parallels (for example, Jan Needle's book Wild Wood re-tells The Wind in the Willows from the point of view of the stoats and weasels, turning it into a Marxist allegory, which in turn points out the unthinking aristocratic assumptions of the original), I think it's a waste to just throw away everything you know about the author.
To give you an example of what I mean, I've just finished reading Things the Grandchildren Should Know, the autobiography of Mark Everett, better known as E. E is the frontman and driving force behind the band Eels (in fact, he's frequently the band's only member), and has lived one of the strangest and most tragedy-filled lives I've ever heard about. He grew up with a father who barely ever spoke to him, and who he found dead when he was just 19; strange characters have followed him around all his life, to the extent that an entire chapter of his autobiography is entitled "I Love Crazy Girls"; and his sister and mother died within months of each other, his sister by her own hand.
I bring this up because I'm a great fan of Eels, and especially of the strange and obviously deeply meaningful lyrics that E writes, but I really didn't understand the deeper meanings behind those lyrics until I found out what he was thinking when he wrote them. The song "I Like Birds" is a prime example: it's a very simple three-chord ditty, always coming back to the refrain "'Cos I like...birds." When I played that song to some of my friends, they couldn't believe it was actually about birds, as in, feathery little creatures; they assumed, because it was a rock song, that it was about girls. The song is mentioned in Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and when you find out that E wrote it after watching little birds eating from his mother's best birdfeeder in the weeks after she died, it suddenly gains a vast amount more meaning.
It's possible, then, for an artist or author's work to be improved enormously by knowing about them as a person. Obviously, though, the reverse is also true. The comic book Cerebus began in 1977, and continued for over 6,000 pages; it's notable within the comics world as an incredible success for Dave Sim, its writer and main illustrator. (I wouldn't know, by the way, never having read it - don't expect any critical commentary here.) It also enjoyed critical and commercial success; however, things started to go downhill when Sim began to include essays with his work that were...well, let's call a spade a spade here, and say that they were disgustingly misogynistic. Again, I haven't seen all of Sim's writing by any means, but the parts that I have seen contain ideas that go right through "uncomfortable" or "plain-spoken" and go right into "complete nutjob" territory.
Is it possible to read Sim's work and not be influenced by this? Maybe it is. I do know, though, that I would find it very hard to divorce the writer from his work in that case; indeed, I'd find it difficult to buy anything that he produced, knowing that I'd in effect be offering implicit support to work that espoused ideas that I found utterly repulsive.
(Brief aside here — I think it's far too easy to dismiss repellent ideas as "crazy", when a better description would be "dangerous" or even "evil". Crazy ideas are those that are incoherent or meaningless; evil ideas are those that are terrifying because of their coherence and planning. For instance, Idi Amin managed to stay in control of Uganda for so long by carefully cultivating the appearance of being a clownish and over-important buffoon; this distracted the international community from the fact that he managed to systematically murder up to half a million of his own people.)
Now and again, it is possible to come across a piece of work where the right balance is struck — where the author's ideas are in direct contrast to your own, and that leads to a better result all round. In my case, Terry Pratchett fulfils this superbly in his book Carpe Jugulum. Pratchett is an outspoken atheist and a member of the British Humanist Association, and several of his books make gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) digs at organised religion. I suspect that he used Carpe Jugulum as something of a soapbox, mostly through the mouthpiece of his character Granny Weatherwax. Here's what Granny says to the Omnian priest Mightily Oats, towards the end of the book."Now if I'd seen him, really there, really alive, it'd be in me like a fever. If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched 'em like a father and cared for 'em like a mother...well, you would'nt catch me sayin' things like 'There are two sides to every question' and 'We must respect other people's beliefs.' You wouldn't find me just being gen'rally nice in the hope that it'd all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin' sword. And I did say burnin', Mister Oats, 'cos that's what it'd be. You say that you people don't burn folk and sacrifice people any more, but that's what true faith would mean, y'see? Sacrificin' your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin' the truth of it, workin' for it, breathin' the soul of it. That's religion. Anything else is just ... is just bein' nice. And a way of keeping in touch with the neighbours."
Despite being almost the polar opposite to Pratchett in terms of religion, I wholeheartedly agree with this speech, and knowing that he is an atheist makes this even more important; the standard that Granny speaks about would, presumably, make her re-think her position if she ever actually encountered it. Far from simply trashing faith, it's a call to true faith, and gains great value.
There's no one "best" way of approaching a piece of writing, or music, or any other form of art — indeed, when one form of criticism dominates, criticism as a whole suffers. I do think, though, that it's something of a waste to completely ignore the author. After all, they do know more about their work than almost anyone else.
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
I'd like to apologise in advance.
How many hairdressers do you know (the businesses, not the people) whose names are not a hilarious hair-related pun? Oh, of course you'll find the odd one trying to be elegant ("The Gentleman's Hair Salon", for example), but the number that will choose something like "Upper Cuts" or "Cut 'n' Run" is just ridiculous. Is there something about hair in particular that means businesses want to make puns about it? Is hair unusually hysterical?
If hairdressers can have punning names, I think it's remarkably unfair that other types of business can't get away with it. Especially when there's so many great puns available.
Lawyers
Music Shops
Undertakers
Marine Biologists
Pest Control Experts
(OK, I'm done...)
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
But before I kill you, Mr. Bond, let me show you this comprehensive Powerpoint presentation on my complete evil plan
SPOILER WARNING: There will be fairly shameless spoilers throughout this post - specifically, for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (hereafter referred to as "CSI Vegas", or possibly "CSI - you know, the good one"), CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Alias and The Bourne Ultimatum. If this is a problem...well, sorry!
It's not like I really need an excuse to be rude about CSI: Miami, but I'm afraid that sometimes you see something that makes it imperative to do so. The episode last night was just atrocious - so bad, in fact, that it made me take a mental step backwards just so that I could try to work out exactly why it's so bad.
For a start, there's the plot points. The episode started with a Cuban immigrant running up a beach, in a sequence that seemed to take at least three weeks, before accidentally stepping on a landmine and dying horribly. It turned out at the end of the episode that said landmine had been planted by a baseball pitcher, who knew that the immigrant was a very good pitcher and who might have replaced him on his team.
Now, even putting aside the fact that killing someone who might take your job is something of an overreaction (why not just give them food poisoning or something?), planting a landmine is an appalling way to kill someone, not only from the point of view of humanity but also in a practical sense. The murderer's train of thought must have gone something like this.
"Right...this guy is going to be competing for my job. So I'm likely to be in close contact with him over the next few weeks...I can find out where he lives...I can find out his personal habits...I can work out when he's most vulnerable and commit the perfect crime.
Ahh, screw it, I'll plant a bunch of mines somewhere on the beach he'll probably have to run along at some indeterminate point."
Added to the wooden acting, the attempts to do special effects way beyond the show's budget (one episode involved a tsunami hitting Miami. They filmed it with about two seconds of bargain basement CGI and a bunch of people who were conveniently locked in a bank vault going "ooh, look at the tsunami") and the cast of characters who clearly loathe each other, and you have a recipe for a fairly poor piece of light entertainment. But then you add Horatio to the mix.
Oh dear, Horatio.
David Caruso's portrayal of Lt. Horatio Caine is, very possibly, the most irritating performance in the history of TV acting. Caine overreacts to suspects, often practically threatening them with death, talks to kids in a manner that goes right through "creepy" and borders on "my eyes my eyes I need to scrub out my eyes", repeats the name of the person he's talking to at least three times in every conversation, comes up with "affectionate" (read: also annoying) names for his team members, and is apparently biologically incapable of looking straight at anyone. Seriously, if he bends his head any further over to the right, or twists it to look out into the middle distance any further to his left, he's going to do some serious damage.
Oh, and make up your mind - sunglasses on or sunglasses off? Not a difficult choice!
The funny thing is that several of these problems are present, to some extent at least, in the other CSI shows. In one of the earlier seasons of CSI Vegas, there was an absolute peach of a ridiculous plot; a girl was killed entirely accidentally when she dropped a rubbish bin down a chute, went outside to fetch it, and was leaning into the skip under the chute's outlet when a car hit the skip and crushed her to death - this plot, already stupid enough, was surrounded with thefts, security camera sabotage, mercy dashes to the hospital and all manner of pointless details.
Or there's the intensely annoying British pathologist in CSI: NY, whose sole function is apparently to look pretty but cold and speak in clipped tones about her relationship angst. Stupid plots aren't any stranger to CSI: NY either, with one recent episode involving Mac and Stella having to fight their way through a bunch of IRA terrorists in a blatant ripoff clever homage to Die Hard.
So why are these other shows entertaining, when Miami is capable of producing violent reactions like...well, this one? I think it's probably because, even though they do use lazy plotting and annoying characterisation, a certain amount can be forgiven because of several other factors. CSI Vegas possesses characters who, despite some conflict, clearly love their jobs and are good at them. Add interesting quirks, such as Gil's surprising interest in the most outlandish topics (whether it's related to male Victorian corsets or bondage - no, really), and Sara's latent major problems, and you get a bunch of people who you actually want to find out more about, even if there's some daft aspects to the show.
CSI: NY has similar saving graces, in the shape of an unreasonably beautiful cast and some hilariously weird lines. Any show that includes lines like "so, we're looking for a one-legged woman wearing high heels who possesses sweet kung-fu skills" definitely gets to invoke the Rule of Funny. Let's also not forget that this is the show that actually does good pre-credits lines. Mac's priceless "Anybody got a spatula?" (on visiting a crime scene where the victim was crushed to death) can cover over a multitude of sins.
So is it possible to have TV programmes or movies that don't have to drag themselves back up out of irritation, because they're already superb? Well, there are already some that manage not to fall into the most egregious problems. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, to see an episode of Alias where the writers had clearly been reading the Evil Overlord List. Sydney, in this episode, has been trapped in a small room by two gun-wielding police officers. In a startling break from usual Hollywood-style police conduct, one immediately radios in and tells his superiors what he's about to do; he and his colleague then take up positions such that even if one of them gets knocked down, the other will have a clear shot.
Needless to say, given that she's the main character, Sydney does manage to defeat the police officers, leaving the viewers with the feeling that she managed this because she was better than they were, not because they were unaccountably stupid. A very similar thing happens in The Bourne Ultimatum - throughout the film, the CIA bring the best technology and agents to bear on Jason Bourne. The only reason they don't defeat him is that, once again, he's just better than them. In fact, this could well be why the entire film is so good. Because there's no reliance on overdone tropes, like the villain conveniently running out of ammunition at just the right moment (see pretty much every action movie ever made), the audience gets an impression of consistency with reality.
Of course, what they've actually got is consistency with Hollywood reality, as Bourne is still superhumanly good at what he does. The fact that the audience doesn't feel cheated, though, must produce a very good impression. Now, if only more writers would actually try to carry this off, we'd have a lot more decent TV and films.
Of course, if we did have decent entertainment we'd never get anything done.
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
Why yes! My entire world view is wrong! Thank you!
The genre of "Christian literature" is pretty successful at the moment. You've got books dealing with proper heavy theology, books dealing with specific aspects of faith, books about other faiths and how they relate to Christianity, and loads of different versions of the Bible. The Bible, actually, is doing incredibly well - most people know that it's the best-selling book of all time, but I was surprised to find out recently that it is also the best-selling book every single year.
It's not surprising, and in fact quite gratifying, that other forms of entertainment have their own Christian branches. Some of them aren't really very exciting (Christian popular music, when presented just as music rather than as a form of worship, still has some way to go, the first step of which should be "attempting not to sound like yet another U2/Coldplay clone"), while others - the Christian children's novel, for instance - have been wildly successful outside their original genre. Which brings us to the webcomic "Josh and Jimbo: Long Street".
I found this site from a Google advert on Questionable Content, of all places (I wonder whether either party would be particularly happy about that fact - QC rarely lives up to its name, but its ethos is very distinctly different to Long Street's). I've only read the first episode, and already I'm despairing.
First, the artwork. It's not bad by any means, it's just that it could be done so much better. If you're going to go for a 3D modelling approach, then make sure you don't leave the job half done. Read a couple of pages of Crimson Dark if you want to see how this style of artwork should be done. Second, the entire storytelling style of the comic is pretty much doomed to failure. It presents itself as two guys "living normal lives", whereas what we actually see is a few conversations, with no setup and no context (we have no idea who these guys are or why they're capable of driving around for no specific purpose discussing philosophical ideologies). The purpose of the comic is clearly to present dialogues about particular issues. To put it another way, it's trying to present a debate - something that is, almost by definition, completely verbal - in an overwhelmingly visual genre. You have to be really, really good at writing to keep a reader's interest through pure wordiness.
So how good is this writer? Sadly, the writing seems to be the weakest part. Within the first episode, the topic of debate is brought up with one of the worst analogies I've ever seen, the participants immediately take views at polar opposites of the possible spectrum, there's no possibility of either being remotely unsure of themselves, and then within about three minutes of story time it is completely resolved. There are no apparent subtexts and no subplots. Worst of all, in what I think is probably an attempt to be "inclusive" or "non-threatening", there is no explicit mention of God, Jesus, the Bible, or anything remotely Christian, despite the site being called "The Book" and there being a link on the sidebar to find out more about Christianity. What you're left with is a bizarre, contrived and shallow philosophical argument, which is, just to put the icing on the cake, almost solved with violence.
I'm sure there are webcomics out there that deal with explicitly Christian issues in a sensitive, well-written and probably even effectively evangelistic way. I just wish that they were the ones that advertised on other major webcomics, instead of fatally flawed ideas like this.
Friday, 13 April 2007
lol i love it plz write more
Good writing is surprisingly easy to find on the Internet these days. I've already mentioned Ficlets here, and although there's quite a bit of poor stuff on there, you'll also run across the odd gem. Then there's the old classics available at Project Gutenberg (it's because of that and ReadManiac that I can read Sherlock Holmes stories on my mobile any time I like - you know, if I ever want to squint at books on a minuscule screen), and endless novels and short stories released under Creative Commons licensing. If your eyes get tired, you can always switch to audiobooks as well.
But that isn't what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the wide-ranging swathes of mind-bogglingly poor writing available online. Not simply teen LiveJournal posts, either, as that's caused less by a lack of writing skills and more by a simple shift in the location of personal diaries - an ill-advised shift, to be sure, but really there's nothing particularly new in the wrong people seeing angsty teenagers' musings. No, the really bad stuff, the stuff that leaves your jaw hanging slackly and your eyeballs popping from your skull, is that produced by people who know full well that they're writing for a huge audience and yet have no grasp whatsoever on even the slightest bit of writing skill. Fair warning - in this post, bold links are not really safe for work. Or for anyone with any taste or sensitivities whatsoever. To start us off, we have the worst piece of sci-fi/fantasy ever written (thank you once again Metafilter) - the challenge is to read the whole thing without once bursting out laughing. I failed the challenge fairly quickly (somewhere round about "he regained his statue"), but forced myself to read right to the end nonetheless. The misspellings, appalling choice of words, complete lack of characterisation and simply bizarre dialogue place it as a classic.
If you're not sure how best to write something obscenely bad, you needn't look further than FanFiction.net. The idea of fanfic isn't too ridiculous in itself (and yes, I have written some myself, so I don't claim any moral superiority on those grounds) - but it's more the scale of these people's efforts. At the time of writing, for example, there are 291,323 pieces of Harry Potter-themed fanfic, 11,759 based around Pirates of the Caribbean, 6,710 on Power Rangers (now there's a nostalgic moment for you) and 15 on SkiFree. Yes, that SkiFree. There is very little that does not make a suitable subject for the denizens of this site.
Most of the particularly amazing bits I think I'll leave for you to find for yourselves, given that most of them are probably written by teenagers and it seems a little harsh to mock them directly. People who include themes such as slashfic, though, deserve absolutely everything they get. So, if you can bear it, have a read of some romantic relationships between Rusty and Linus from Ocean's Eleven, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, Catherine and Sara from CSI, and, I kid you not, most of the major characters from The Muppet Show and Harry Potter. Then, of course, there's the poetry. Oh, the poetry. Again, most of it is just ill-advised, but if you're going to shamelessly plagiarise Shelley and change the words "west wind" to "West Wing", once again I have absolutely no sympathy. And, of course, we just have to include the poems giving the innermost thoughts of most of the characters in Beauty and the Beast. Including Philip the horse. No, really.
No post about bad writing would be complete without a mention of Mills and Boon, although luckily for me someone has already written an awesome article on their complete writing style, meaning that I don't have to read any. I'll close, then, with a quick look at people who are absolutely convinced that they can write for other formats. Over at Drew's Script-O-Rama, we have people who think they can write screenplays - check out Prank Call (Word doc) for an example of how not to write what seems to be a 10-minute extremely gory horror flick. Or you can try looking at the efforts of those who can't write webcomics, or indeed just read transcripts of one of the worst TV shows to grace our screens.
That's about as much as I could bear, and I'll be very surprised if any of you made it all the way through those. Hope you weren't too traumatised. I'll leave you with the wise words of Wednesday White over on Websnark that really should have been heeded, oh so many times:
Just because someone tells you you have potential doesn't mean that you're any good yet. Have a sense of perspective.
Saturday, 24 March 2007
Yes, it's a cop-out. Give me a break.
Sadly, I've kind of run out of things that I really find hugely interesting to post about this week. There's a couple of posts that are kind of brewing in the background, but will take a little time (read: will require me to get round to it) before I get there. Luckily, I haven't quite been reduced to Wikipedia's ever-dependable On This Day feature (although I feel that I must wish The Undertaker a happy birthday), though, as I did come across a pretty cool site via the Boing and the Blue: namely, Ficlets.
Ficlets is a collection of short stories written by contributors to the site. And when I say "short stories", I mean seriously short - these things are a maximum of 1024 characters long. Obviously, that doesn't give you much space in which to produce a complete story, although some people manage it; I don't think I could add anything to that one that would make it any better. The twist is that although each story is so short, anyone can add to them, either as a prequel or a sequel, meaning that you can easily end up with an enormous, branching story thread.
Well, theoretically, anyway, as the site's still pretty new. At the time of writing, there's a total of 1313 stories on there (I have no idea in how many threads), but more are being created every day. Moreover, they're all available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence, meaning that so long as you credit the author and impose the same restriction on anyone who receives the work, you can do what you like with them. So, theoretically at least, you could use a random number generator to select a random story, then do that a couple of times more and put the three together as prequel, story and sequel in a kind of Dadaist short story.
Like so.
(Highlight the blank line between the paragraphs to see the author credit for that paragraph)
It’s 7AM and the sun it just starting to peek through the horizon.
“This is going to be a great day,” I think to myself.
Looking down at my coffee mug, I realize my coffee isn’t black—it’s clear.
I look over at the coffee machine and am shocked with fright when I realize I had poured gasoline in my cup.
"Suspense" by RyanMorrisB
"It’s mine! The doll was mine to begin with. " Morgan screached, clutching an old doll tightly to her. Jessie picked up her skirts and sprinted after her little sister.
A sea crusted old man sat at the bar and vaguely wondered why the bar wench was argueing over an old tattered doll with a child instead of serving him more mead. It was a nasty looking old thing with one eye hanging by a thread and more patches than he could count.
Jessie managed to wrestle the doll from Morgan. She wrapped her hand around the neck of the doll and pulled. Out from the abused doll’s stomach came a dagger. Jessie got a better grip of the handle through the doll’s head.
"The doll was mine before it was yours, and the dagger will always be mine.”
"The Wench's Prize" by Rieb7
Part of the problem lies with availability. I mean, how many virgin women are there these days?
I could go for the younger ones of course, the teenagers, perhaps even pre-teens and babes. But, darn it, they’re only a nibble. I don’t need a snack, I need a full blown meal and, Hell, there ain’t a lot of them walking around.
I’ve tried everywhere.
African’s are too chewy and stringy; folk in the Middle East blow up when I eat them. Europeans aren’t much better, being all oily and greasy. Eating a good French woman is akin to drinking garlic flavored olive oil and so very few are virgins. Doesn’t settle too well on the stomach, these non-virgins.
I tried sticking with vegetarians for a while, but all those beans gave me chronic gas. Had to evacuate the cave for a couple months to let it air out.
I guess I’m going to have to give up the diet for now. Ah, sorry about that, that’s just my stomach rumbling.
Now, tell me about yourself. How did you find this cave?
Are you a virgin by any chance?
"Trouble With Diets" by SJHundak
Wednesday, 3 January 2007
The real problem is, it's still not finished...
Ways of starting your practical report when you really don't want to:
Write it as if it were in the King James Version
When man thinkest that he cannot see, and yet may point to an object whensoever he pleases, yea, even though he insisteth that the object be not present; then hast that man the curse of blindsight. Yet may this curse not be only for those unto whom damage to the mind hast been afflicted; verily, he whose eyes see well may also display its vestiges.
Write in the form of poorly-scanning limericks
With the benefit of hindsight
I wouldn't have investigated blindsight.
People say they can't see
But they point straight to me
It's so boring, it's just not a kind sight.
yes, I know "kind sight" doesn't mean anything...what were you expecting, Shakespeare?
Type as fast as you possibly can without ever going back to edit your train of thought or correct your typos
This is rlated to coscious awareness because it can be extended to different sensory modalities, and because it has ramifications for our image of the world. If infomaytion about an oject can exist even of we dfo not hold a specific repreentation of that object, it is proof of parallel visual processing at an early stage. Consciosu awarenss is a way opf findingo ut what is actually there and what we tyhnk is actually htree.
ENSEMBLE DANCE NUMBER!
Yeah you know it's BLIND [clap] SIGHT [twirl]
blind [clap clap] sight [twirl and clap]
We're talkin' about [shimmy to the left] bliiiiiindsiiiiiight!
[drum solo and breakdance section]
[key change!]
When you think that you ain't seein' [hands over eyes]
But you got that conscious feelin' [jazz hands]
Gotta be who you are, gotta be true to yourself [hands on heart] (every teen musical includes this line)
Gonna show you what I mean! Yeah!
