Hey, look at that! Miles, one of my Todd Six kids, is doing a Park Ranger internship at Yellowstone this summer, and he’s got a sharp five-letter domain name at which to chronicle it. Welcome to the five-letter brotherhood, Miles. Kevan and I will be flying in to haze you shortly.
Category: Pulverbatch
Thus begins… KIND OF ABOUT SUPERHEROES WEEK on ANACRUSIS
All the old blogs have been moved over to WordPress. People who blog or used to blog here: I’ll email you later with instructions and logins and stuff. When I find the strength. The Dispatch is a work in progress, as WP has no provision for importing comments except from other WP blogs, so I’m doing it manually. I didn’t realize it had this much content.
I’ve also uploaded the Idiotcams, all 278 of them, to Flickr. Now I just get to go through and retitle and retag every… one… of them.
I really miss NewsBruiser.
Hbleagh.
Okay, the highest-volume blogs are up, all content and categories and whatnot included. They also, regrettably, all look like WordPress blogs. I’ll fix that after I spend tomorrow importing the lower-volume ones.
With the exception of the calendar, category and random-entry pages, all the old links to everything SHOULD be working, so please let me know if you find stuff that isn’t. I’m tired. It’s almost 5 am here.
But there will be an Anacrusis later today.
I’ve fallen prey to the great Dreamhost CPU disaster and what that basically means is I have to change my weblog software. I’m very unhappy about this, but I can’t afford to move to a dedicated server and I don’t believe the situation would improve at another host. At least I won’t have to bug Leonard for help anymore (this is a lie, I’m writing him an email right now).
NewsBruiser did exactly what I needed it to do for almost four years and I’ll miss using it. Those of you whose blogs I host, I’m sorry; I’ll be sending out a guided tour email once I’ve got (sigh) WordPress or whatever up and running. The front page of NFD is static, so it will remain up for the duration, but everything else will go down later today.
THINGS NEVER TO DO.
- Store images in a database without a really good reason.
- Store them in BLOB fields, rather than MEDIUMBLOBs or even LONGBLOBs.
- Preconvert them to ASCII, rather than native binary, and ignore that your database is Unicode, and will inflate the images to eight times their size.
- (Consequence, just so we’re clear: those images you’re storing now get cut off after 1.5 kilobytes, for no readily apparent reason. For comparison, your typical Flickr photo preview is over 50k.)
- Fail to document any of this.
- QUIT AND LEAVE ME TO FIX YOUR HORRIBLE HACKWORK.
Blaaah. I’m tired of computers. My hair is 10% whiter after today.
Today the aristocracy frolic among us
And tomorrow, deep in the pixel trenches, we peasants will still toil on.
Speaking of Story Hacks
Hey, I actually picked up last prize in the Lyttle Lyttons this year!
Story Hacks: Fifth in a Series
There’s one thing every writer agrees on: child abuse is great!
Not real child abuse, of course. Real child abuse is tragic, and people who don’t love all its victims unconditionally are hideous monsters and probably pederasts themselves. This makes it very easy to find abusers in real life. Haven’t you ever asked your friends whether they’d spank their kids? Trick question! Good writers have no friends.
The thing that makes child abuse great in fiction, though, is that it’s worth infinity points on the badness-goodness scale. Is your hero not sympathetic enough? Do your readers say she’s “selfish” or “disturbingly violent” or “clearly you with your name spelled differently?” Reveal a history of abuse to explain everything forever! Or maybe you have an antagonist who just isn’t sufficiently evil–“I don’t think Wicca is that bad,” your readers might say, or “you psychopath, stop reading this garbage and let me go.” But make your villain a pedophile and watch their eyes glimmer with hate!
Aren’t you glad we’ve discovered this technique together? It’s like our own special secret! Just remember not to let anyone else know about it.
Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Black and white is one color too many!
Ride the flavor horns. Dammit! I knew there was a better joke than the “hyperspace” thing in the last entry, I just couldn’t get the bat off my shoulder. Oh well. There’s always next year.
Thanks to all the people who have offered further sandwich suggestions in the comments. More! More! I should clarify that I am quite familiar with the unholy power of bacon, but will generally not eat sharp or nontoasted cheese.