Fantasist's Scroll

Notice that I’ve been a little behind in posting?

Well, for that one person who reads this blog, I’ve been busy! As I mentioned in my other blog I’ve changed jobs which has been a little stressful. And, I’ve been Google spammed, so that’s been taking up a bunch of time. But, I hope the new job will allow me more time, thanks to less travel-time on my commute, to write, so it’ll be worth it. I hope. But, I do promise to do better on keeping this blog up to date.

“Evercrack”, indeed!

I rarely make social commentary on this blog, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Wired News ran an article recently about on-line game players and addiction. It seems that there are a number of games that include character boosting “drugs” that players can use to get more points in their respective games. These drugs work like real drugs, with side-effects. Like, for instance, they give you the boost, but eventually require higher doses. Eventually, requiring doses so high that they can kill your character. But, even knowing this, people still use them.

Wow. What does this say about our society? First, it’s interesting that the game designers would put drugs into the game. Especially drugs that have consequences. Second, that people who know better, or should know better, still use them speaks to something fundamentally flawed in our society. Has life become so cheap? Even virtual life? What’s next?
More importantly, how many good stories are there in the discussion of what this all means and what might be coming? Go, write them. Make us think!

Okay, this is kind of self-referential, but…

According to this article on AustralianIT, the fine people who make the Opera web browser, are making a blog browser. Sort of an interesting idea, I thought, considering how popular blogs are getting these days.
But, when I read the details it turns out that what they’re doing is incorporating Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, into their web browser so that users can have new items from blog RSS feeds that they subscribe to come in as individual messages in Opera’s mail client, which is packaged with the browser. Which is still not a bad idea. Interesting article, anyway.

(And, yes, this first appeared at my other blog!)

Frankly, it doesn’t look good.

First of all, there was the brouhaha about pricing. Then, there was the whole issue of licenseing. Now, frankly, it’s a matter of simple existance.
People kept posting on their blogs to go look at this interview with Ben and Mena Trott, because it would explain so much about what’s happening with MovableType. Well, it did, at least to me:

Mena Trott: IT’s not going to scale. Movable Type will have to cease to exist in terms of development because it doesn’t pay its operational costs. And it will be interesting.

Hmm, that pretty well says it all, doesn’t it? Yes, that was actually Mena Trott in the aforementioned interview. Time to find a new blog system!

Not sure this is really a good thing…

I use MoveableType for this blog as well as the Fiction Blog on this site. I also use it on my other site and my wife uses it, too. So, we have a lot invested in this free software. But, I’m willing to pay for it. Especially if they’re adding features. And, there’s the rub. They’ve updated it, okay, and they added a comment registration feature, which is good, but that’s all they did. Well, they made changes to the API to make it easier to write plug-ins, but in the process, they may, or may not, have broken existing plug-ins. Now, that I’m not willing to pay for… On the other hand, what else is there? Nothing else seems to be as robust or extendable. At least, nothing that I’ve found yet. So, I have an e-mail in to them regarding my particular licensing issue, and we’ll see what they say. I may pay for the commercial version, based on the idea that this site will have commercial content, but we’ll have to wait and see…

UPDATE: Don’t panic! By commerical content, I mean that I might start selling things off the site, not that I’d start to charge for what is already here.

Okay, so if you’ve been wondering what’s up…

I’ve been busy! Lots of stuff going on at my day job, er “jobs”, including some talk about outsourcing. Luckily, part of why I’ve been so busy has been a job interview. Not much time for writing, but at least I’ve been reading. I have a couple of reviews to do up and I’m working my way through Describing Morphosyntax : A Guide for Field Linguists. I can see why this was reccomended by several conlang folks. Basically, it takes you through building a descriptive grammar step by step. It rocks!
More soon, I promise…

It’s nice to have a quality journal to write in.

I may not be an Oscar Wilde, who was famously in love with his own journal, but I do occasionally like to write in one. And, I have to tell you, I’ve scribbled in everything from cheap, spiral-notebooks to heavy, leather-esque tomes, but the best that I’ve ever seen is Moleskine. My mother got me one for Christmas one year and it was so beautiful that I was afraid to write in it. It’s bound with real leather and the paper feels, well, creamy. It takes ink like a dream from any pen. And, they have a built in book mark to mark where you stopped! Not to mention the elastic band to hold it closed and the pocket for small papers in the back cover. Really, these are superior journals. And, no, I don’t get a commission off this.
If you like writing in journals, you owe it to yourself to at least look at these. (You can buy them here.)

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, or are freshly hatched from the Great Egg, William Gibson is one of the fathers of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if sometimes bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare.
If you’re interested in science-fiction at all and haven’t read any of his work, you have no idea what science-fiction really is. And not the movies, either, you have to actually read his work.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Bill.