Category: Pulverbatch

December 30, 2004 /

Apparently the Xorphorum is dead. This doesn’t mean a great deal to me, as I haven’t read or posted there in months. I know how to fix the problem, but since email and the LJ feed comment threads pretty much fulfill my desire for discussion of my work, I don’t have any real motivation to do so–except for the thriving Acid Zen Wonder Paint fan community which has grown there. It would be pretty callous of me to leave them homeless.

So I’m probably going to delete all the fora but that one and turn over ownership of the whole kit to Stephen. I’d be happy to host the AZWP forum in perpetuity, but it’d make more sense (and give Stephen more control) if it were hosted under his domain. Then again, moving the forum would mean starting it over from scratch–user accounts, posts, everything. Hmm.

Stephen, what do you think?

Story Hacks: Second in a Series

December 21, 2004 /

The most important source of material for a writer is autobiography. After all, if it actually happened to you, it is by definition realistic! Realism is the most important thing in writing.

The trouble is that some people don’t like reading books that are obviously about the author. Fortunately, since such people are pretty dumb, you can throw them off the hook in one easy step. Let’s say it together: “gender swap!”

You didn’t say it!

If you’re male, make your protagonist female. If you’re female, make your protagonist male. If neither of these applies to you, no worries–that just means you’ve got twice as many options!

  • Advanced Hint: For a little harmless extra zing, try making your character homosexual. It could conceivably get your stock double-shelved into the Lifestyles section. Plus, you won’t have to do the gender swap again when you recount your old relationships! You should probably put something in about how you always felt different. Consumers love that stuff.

Above all, relax and don’t worry. Nobody will question your sexuality for any of this. Now get in the car.

Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Men and women are pretty much the same, although whichever one you are is cooler!

December 18, 2004 /

I passed Performance Evaluations! With a B-, at that. Man, that must have been one serious curve, because I know that’s not how the numbers added up.

One more semester!

December 17, 2004 /

I’ve talked about syndicated comics versus webcomics before. I am excited and pleased by the accelerating collapse of comic strip syndication; like Matt Boyd (whom I quoted in that post, and whose writing makes me doodle our names together on my binder), I am interested in watching it die.

So it’s very, very funny to me that today, I received an unsolicited mass email–yes! spam!–asking me to “help save The Norm,” a syndicated comic strip whose creator just cut himself loose from King Features. It’s also kind of conflicting.

On the one hand, Michael Jantze is doing what I believe all syndicated comics should and will do to survive and prosper–taking back his rights from a syndicate and using the web as his primary distributor. I want to laud that kind of behavior. On the other hand, Jantze is the same guy who infamously took the syndicates’ side in the “Is Print Dead” forum at last summer’s Comic Con, so seeing him thrash the way Penny Arcade did a few years ago fills me with vicious glee.

I should add that the spam email did not appear to be sent to me by anybody directly associated with thenorm.com, but rather by a fan named Adam who probably shouldn’t be abusing his company address like that. I think this only makes the situation more pathetic.

Anyway, as I and a great many other people knew would happen, PvP is now being published for free five times a week in the Philadelphia Evening Standard. Penny Arcade, a strip which once nearly died in its aforementioned thrashings (at the hands of a kind of neosyndicate), is on track to raise more than $300,000 for this year’s Child’s Play. On the subject of who’s winning, for once, Websnark and I are in complete agreement.

Story Hacks: First in a Series

December 17, 2004 /

Want to establish that a character is weird and emotionally vacant? Have him count things! This works because everyone has seen Rain Man, or references to it on Animaniacs.

Example One

Topaz opened the door at Jake’s knock. “Oh hey,” she said. “Glad you found it. Sorry about the stairs.”

“I don’t see how you walk up those every day,” panted Jake. “Whew.”

Example Two

Topaz opened the door at Jake’s knock. “Oh hey,” she said. “Glad you found it. Sorry about the stairs.”

“The staircase is very long,” Jake agreed. “It has one hundred and seven steps.”

Now, which of these Jakes is deranged? I bet you already know!

It’s the second one.

Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: It is impossible to like numbers and still have feelings!

December 17, 2004 /

I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with iamcal’s Noted, a lightweight text editor that is everything Notepad ought to be. It has toolbar search and replace. It can read and convert linebreaks from (or to) any OS. It has an unlimited buffer size. It has no associations in the annoying editor wars. It counts lines and even lets you jump to them! And that’s almost exactly all it does. Noted is great.

The only things it doesn’t have that I wish it had are a tabbed interface like Firefox and a word counter so I could stop using stupid MS Word. The former would probably be very complex to implement, but the latter shouldn’t be too hard. I checked the Noted page again today to see if its source was available. It is! So I poked around and discovered that it’s written in… Pascal.

That’s really weird. People still write in Pascal? (Maybe not, as Noted hasn’t been updated in a couple years.) I used it as a training language in my sophomore year of high school–it was fun but bad for me, as it gave me lots of procedural habits that I had to break before I got good at OOP. A glance at Noted’s code just now mostly made sense, although it also shows some indications of classes, which I don’t recall in Pascal. For that matter, I never knew Pascal could do native Windows GUI apps.

I do realize that there are form-based web pages that count words, but unfortunately I haven’t found one as smart as Word’s tool, which isn’t all that smart. I also realize that I could write a form-based PHP script that would be as smart as Word’s word-counter (and probably will do so), but I’d really rather have it in a text editor; Noted is almost perfect for my needs, and browser textboxes aren’t.