For the first time since 2006, I just got smashed by a huge welter of spam, about 150 comments that dodged the spam filter in the last eight hours. I’ve turned off comments on the entries that were getting hit, and hopefully they’ll leave me alone now.
I still wonder what spam is gonna look like in the age of Google Wave. Did you ever watch the big presentation Google did about Wave? (Here’s the highlight reel.) Wave is the goog’s new hybrid: email + chatroom + blogs + social networking + project collaboration + ??? Wave invites are starting to filter out into the networks now, and it looks like it’s going to be a pretty big deal. But I confess that watching the original presentation, all I could think was that this will be a spambots paradise; you’ll be swapping recipes with your mother while insistent bots mess around with the live conversation stream, redirecting all your images to point at porn advertisements and adding dodgy hyperlinks to everything you say. I’m sure the dev team have thought long and hard about the risks but it just seems an order of magnitude more open to exploitation than anything else on the internets. Interesting times, anyway.
(The Squeakquel is the subtitle of the new Alvin & The Chipmunks film. I picked it up in the AV Club comment section, where commenters will sequelise pretty much everything in range with the greatest post-colon subtitles of all time – The Quickening, The Search for Curly’s Gold, The Secret of the Ooze, Smokey is the Bandit, and of course the all-time champion of sequel subtitles, Electric Boogaloo.)
Month: October 2009
Writing Update: September
Regarding tne twelve-short-stories target for the year, I’m finally hitting par with this set of written pieces:
– “The Tape”
– “Buckets”
– “Babel”
– “The Twelve Times I Drank Too Much”
– “Lift Story”
– “The Apotheosis of Melvin Rameka”
– “Inappropriate Boss”
– “The Intervention Upstairs”
– “The Confessions”
Not a single one of them is really ready for prime-time though, they all need at least an edit if not more. Only five of them have been out to other human beings for comment, four of them exist solely as pen-in-notebook scribbles, so got to get those typed up. Still work to do! I’m seeing some themes/types coming through in my stories, also; maybe I’ll try and break out of that for the last three pieces. Maybe not.
Notable scratchings ‘n’ failed drafts include:
– “Walking story”
– “The Big Drive”
– “Corrina’s Walk”
“The Beast” comic ticks along.
Having meetings about the follow-up to “Affair of the Diamond Necklace”.
Recorded my pieces for Dan’s podcast version of “Urban Driftwood”, the anthology of our work as young writers. This was a really challenging little gig, trying to get to the meat of stuff I wrote a long time ago and respect it for what it was. I ended up liking some of it more than I did before, and some of it less, and in the case of one piece I ended up really liking the first half and really disliking the second half. Anyway, when it goes live you’ll read about it here…
“Ron the Body” is still inert. Must get that submission train rolling again, so easy to slack off on it.
And working away also on “Lament”, a role-playing game I’ve had in my to-do list for years, Mr 2Trees did some wonderful art for it a few years back. Enjoying that process.
Ummm I think that’s it. [Last writing update]
Portrait Linky
From this flickr set
Get yer full-on serious proper culture, none of this internet-age garbage, this is the real deal: Bulfinch’s Mythology and friends, a collection of free literary works with a focus on mythology, everything from Paradise Lost to Flatland.
Romance novel covers re-imagined
Sokky’s singing blog has a fascinating post that helped me grok how singing feels when you’re really good at it
Diaries of the vampires
Amazing views of glaciers from space
30 Mosques in 30 days – two New York Muslims visit a different mosque every day of Ramadan and take photos. Neat fun. I’ve linked to the last one in the series.
And finally, the 100 greatest hits of YouTube in four minutes:
Filament Issue 2
So, a while back I received issue 2 of Filament in the post. I’ve been dipping in and out of it since, and finally feel I can write usefully about it. Here’s the thing: it’s really pretty amazing.
Filament, subtitled the thinking woman’s crumpet, is an adult magazine aimed at women, with a mix of smart articles and sexy pictures of men. The editor, Suraya Singh, aims to provide images of men that are aimed at straight women, rather than gay men. I wrote about it back before launch, here.
This issue includes an interview with the new member of Placebo, some short fiction*, and articles on: cover trends in erotic fiction for women; autism and neurodiversity; pegging; Brazilian dance/martial art/game capoeira; working as a television editor; drugs and fair trade; living with a low sex drive; and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864. The content mix is wonderfully diverse and interesting; this is how you do “womens content” in a way that makes sense to me, i.e., that reflects the diverse interests and opinions of all the smart women I know. (Compare with this example of how not to do it.)
Almost all the articles are from a woman’s perspective, but the tone is as far from Woman’s Day as you can get; for example the autism article was written by a mother who talks about her autistic son, but the focus is on how disability is positioned in society and completely devoid of the confessional/empathetic style that would dominate a glossy’s approach to the same subject.
Note also the article on living with a low sex drive – for a mag with a strong positive focus on sexuality and on women, to live up to its own ideals, it needs to be inclusive, and it achieves that here, with a smart piece interviewing women with low sex drive that allows women to decide for themselves if that’s a problem for them, and discusses what they can do if it is. (Compare to every single magazine targetted at men, and most of the glossy mags for women, where high sex-drive is the assumed default and alternatives are either invisible or actively derided.)
So much for the words. Also, lots of photos of chaps in various states of undress, including one photo of a man with an erection. This pic was the source of a lot of difficulty in getting the magazine printed and distributed, but I think the resultant controversy (e.g. NZ newspaper articles) gave the mag a lot of publicity so a good result overall.
Anyway, it’s a great slab of culture, and while I continue to be not the target audience, I really enjoy it. It occurred to me, reading this issue, that this is the magazine that the lead character of my Ron the Body manuscript** was looking for; magazine culture is an sub-theme and motif in the book, and it’s entirely possible that Cass wouldn’t be so bloody grumpy at the start of the story if she knew Filament existed. So, definitely worth a look, especially if you’re a smart woman who’s feeling out of synch with the culture. It will remind you that you’re not crazy.
Check it out here, including plentiful preview pages.
Final note of awesome: there’s a rumour that Warren Ellis will be answering reader’s etiquette questions in issue 3.
* including the first published work by my buddy Jenni Talula
** currently accumulating rejection slips if you were wondering