Via Writer's Write: The Washing Post reports that a new study has found texting doesn't impact kids' ability to spell. Actually, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that 'text language' actually requires spelling ability:

The young people surveyed seem to know, without any sort of instruction, that there are "correct" ways of spelling in chatspeak. For instance, "probably" is abbreviated as "prolly," but never "proly"; "want to" becomes "wanna," never "wana" or "wanta"; "should've" is always "shoulda" and never "shuda."

"Kids who are good spellers [academically] are good spellers in instant messaging," she said. "And kids who are poor spellers in English class are poor spellers in instant messaging."

In other words, txt is a 'dialect' of the written English language.

This will surprise a lot of people, but it logically follows if you've read The Power of Babel. After all, we're all speaking a bastardized and watered down version of some previous language. Only history and the printing press has given our dialect any special stamp of authenticity. And guess what, the printing press is rapidly becoming obsolete...

At any rate, it's the norm throughout much of the world for people, even children, to speak both an official language and an unofficial dialect at home. There's no reason why modern American kids can't have room in their brains for both English spelling and 'txt'.

Very good stuff via Marginal Revolution -

In 1929, The Guardian polled its readers to find out which British authors they thought would still be popular in 100 years. Well, the century isn't quite up, but someone's unearthed this poll, and it's a cautionary tale for leading literary lights.

Here's The Guardian now:

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

Great War Fiction, where apparently somebody still reads this stuff, has some commentary:

Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.

And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.

The list looks a little better once we get out of the Top Ten, with some more familiar names popping up:

George Moore - 165 votes
Bernard Shaw - 110 votes
Conan Doyle - 101 votes
R.H.Mottram - 79 votes
John Buchan - 63 votes
D.H.Lawrence - 61 votes
Chesterton - 60 votes
Aldous Huxley - 50 votes

Garnering only one vote is the still very popular P.G. Wodehouse. And getting absolutely no votes is a British writer who is far more widely read today than anyone else on this list: Agatha Christie.

Just yesterday I was reading a very good article by Eric D. Snider talking about the 50's John Wayne-John Ford western The Searchers, a middling hit when it was released that somehow morphed into a classic twenty-five years later. This largely unheralded film is now hailed as inspiration by two generations of filmmakers.

The fact is that books and movies that the popularity of a book or movie in it's 'moment' seems to have little bearing on its relevance to posterity. I think if you survey many of the landmark author with classic books that are a century old or older, you'll find that very few of them were immensely popular in their time. Many in fact toiled in near obscurity, only to be 'discovered' well after their deaths.

It's probable that there's a large element of chance in these things - if you're lucky some influential critic digs up one of your books thirty years after you're gone and gives it a new lease on life. There's no control over something like that.

But all the 'classic' literature tends to have a few things in common: either it deals in Big Themes or centers on some truly Memorable Characters. Stylistic choices, cultural relevance, progressive thinking - these generally don't speak to people fifty years on. They may sell books (or movies) at the time, but they also date those same works badly.

But who can really say what will stand the test of time?

How 'bout it? Anyone care to wager on what modern authors will still be read in 100 years time?

I am still ploughing through Katherine Kerr's Deverry series (which I wrote about here and here). I'm on, what, the twelfth book? Thirteenth? I am losing count. At any rate, there's only a couple to go, and one of those unpublished as yet.

Katherine Kerr continues to work her page-turning ensorclement on me. I just can't put these things down. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, although I have some theories.

( Some ruminations on the art of page turning... )

That said, I am getting slightly less enamored of these later books. A certain world-weariness seems to grip all the characters. Not that this has ever been a series about shiny, happy people but I could do with a little less existential angst. The series seems in general darker and less joyful. Meanwhile many of my favorite characters have died off and the ones that remain, well, they don't endear themselves to me with their frequent stupid decision making.

I'm still scratching my head over why I'm supposed to like the female wizard who left her husband for an arrogant elf-spirit.

The funny thing is, I don't find that these flaws are specific to Kerr's series in particular. This disenchantment seems to follow me into any series that runs longer than three or four books. Or really, any long-form storytelling at all - I don't think I've stayed with many TV shows past their third season (sorry 'Lost', sorry 'House).

Of course the obvious explanation is that familiarity breeds contempt. Even the shiniest, most original new author will repeat themselves over time. Eventually the unique stylistic flourishes or cleverly deployed plot devices or endearing characterizations seem old hat, and we begin to see the man behind the curtain, as it were. Certainly, that's a factor.

But another thing I've noticed is that authors who write long-lasting series seem to have trouble resisting the urge to 'go dark'. Each book in a series feels a bit more grim then the last. There are fewer moments of levity, catharsis gets harder to find, and vanquishing the villains seems to come at a higher and higher cost. Meanwhile the characters get more flawed, more world-weary, more mired in existential angst.

On the one hand, it seems realistic, right? Maybe these are just signs of a maturing author, one less willing to take the easy out and cook up a false happy ending. Fair enough. Real life is hard, and short on happy endings.

But, if you want to talk realism, you should consider the positives too: humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt to difficult situations and to draw strength and joy from little things. People who go through difficult times do pick up scars, but they also often learn and grow and become more themselves, in some sense.

But my sense is that it isn't a question of characters becoming more 'real'. Rather, over time authors have a tendency to turn their characters into sounding boards for their own personal philosophies and into soapboxes for their pet issues. Which is within their rights, I suppose, but possibly detrimental to the reader's enjoyment. Loyal readers will stick with you 'til the end, no matter who you kill off and what Obvious Parallels you draw between your world and the real world. But there are some of us who silently shake our heads and turn away and go find newer stories to enter into.

In Kerr's case, she hasn't quite driven me away yet. And with only two books left, she's going to have to try really hard at this point. Plus, she keeps adding dragons to the story, and I'm just a sucker for that.

Audience Participation: I am curious if other people tend to get disenchanted by long-form serial stories. And if so, why?

I've written before about how I'm not very impressed with Charles Stross as an author. I don't think he's an idiot, though. After diving into his latest novel, Halting State, I just wonder if he isn't in the wrong profession.

What should we do with him instead? Make him an economist, maybe? Give him a law degree and put him in charge of sorting out the intellectual property mess? Or possibly just make him a consultant for architecting Web 4.0?

I think he'd shine in any of these positions. And then we'd be spared sentences like this:

TI is an angel specializiing in high-tech start-ups, your typical Web 3.1415 outfits, and TI contracted DBA - in the person of Chris Morgan, full partner (and Director of Risk Management) - to produce full pre-IPO investment reports on their clients.

If you feel like you just accidentally read the prospectus for a Silicon Valley startup instead of a line from a novel, well, wait until you try the whole thing. And that second person singular thing is not an accident - throughout the entire book, all three different characters are referred to as you.

Which, believe it or not, doesn't help to make the long-chain molecules of jargon porn less hard on the ear. It's like being whacked over the head with a baseball bat made of old Wired articles. Stross is clearly trying to emulate old-time cyberpunk heroes like Gibson, but he comes off sounding like a copywriter for Microsoft on cocaine.

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense. Or maybe it does, but the author never slows down long enough to explain the soup of acronyms and buzzwords he's spewing at you, so whether they resolve themselves into something coherent at some level is anybody's guess. And remember, I write this as a member of the target demographic. What someone would make of this who is over 35 doesn't eat, drink and breathe the internet for a living I shudder to think.

So no, there's no character and no plot and the sentence structure will burn your eyes, yet I'm going to go ahead and recommend this as a book possibly worth reading.

Halting State takes place about twenty minutes into the future, and even as he does violence to the very concept of a novel, Stross has a lot of interesting and intriguing things to say about What's Next. Peer-to-peer networks, cellular phones, network security, quantum computing, ARGs, risk management and the economics of MMOs all get some attention here and it's fascinating stuff. I would rate his vision of the future as one of the least implausible ones I've read recently. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, this really is your ticket to ride.

The cliff notes of Stross's vision is a world where information is not getting any more centralized or any more secure. As distribution spins out of control, international powers have to find new ways of spying on each other and keeping their own stuff secure and where the spheres of corporate gamesmanship, international NGOs, government policymaking and the dabbling of private citizens bleed into each other. The resulting vision is somewhat compelling.

If you're not quite ready to wade into Stross's prose to dig these gems out, however, you can go straight to the horse's mouth. I don't know who got a leading New York Times economist and a science-fiction writer together for a panel, but somebody did and the resulting transcript is worth reading.

Novel writing research, guys!

As I pull together the outline for my Future New York Times Fiction Bestseller I am among other things trying to figure out the characters. A couple of characters who were fuzzy placeholders are starting to come into focus. I've got a brother and sister, and I've decided that a defining feature of their story-arc is that they're the offspring of a biracial family.

I've done some Googling on the subject and already found some really fascinating writing about children who grow up 'between two worlds'. In fact it's clearly one of those story ideas that you realize could easily be the focus of a book all by itself. Sadly it's just going to be squeezed in there somehow, since the focus of the book is already set. But I'm still interested in understanding this phenomenon a bit more.

If you or anyone you know have a perspective on growing up as part of a biracial family I'd love to hear about it. Also, any articles or blogs you may know of on the subject are of interest to me as well.  Note that I'm interested in personal experiences and the psychology of the situation, not the politics.

Thanks!

NOTE: Biracial does not strictly mean black and white, although that seems to comprise the bulk of the writing on the issue. That's probably both the most extreme and the most common kind of biracial family in America, but I'm actually leaning away from that combination for my characters. So stories of being half-Asian, half-South African or half-Philipino, half-French are also welcome.

Also - the most interesting articles I've found so far are this one, from a parent's perspective, and this one, from a child's.

About a year ago, I predicted that there was no way that the Watchmen movie could be good.

I finally got around to seeing it last night, on DVD. And... I largely stand by my statement. Saying that a film "can't be good" is a harsh statement, perhaps. And Watchmen is definitely interesting in a way that many films aren't. But as an artifact of film-making, it's just not that great. Between the constant intercutting between scenes (required for a story as dense with information as this one), the dozens of bit players and the constant philosophizing it just wasn't a very engaging film. You watch it for two-and-a-half hours and think, "huh."

I'd heard that Zack Snyder was changing the ending and was hoping for good things from this, but the new ending is not terribly different from the original. Maybe slightly less weird (the whole psychic space squid thing always felt jarringly out of place to me) but basically it's the same concept.

But here's the real reason that Watchmen doesn't and won't ever work as a movie: movies are too short.

There are many mediums for storytelling, and I love them all, and study them even as I enjoy them: oral storytelling, the written word, the stage, television, film, graphic novels, interactive fiction, video games (yes, it's true). None is better than the others, but certain mediums lend themselves more effectively to certain types of stories. This is something that auteurs of all stripes seem to forget, although filmmakers may be the most egregiously guilty.

The problem with the kind of story that Watchmen is telling is that it's extremely dense. There is a lot of information to transfer to the reader/viewer. Watchmen needs a medium which lends itself to long-form, episodic storytelling. Film is just not that medium.

If you insist on telling the story visually, television would probably work. I could definitely see a Watchmen mini-series, filmed documentary-style, being very engaging. But trying to compress the thing into a single arc that can be consumed in one sitting is a mistake. This is also true of books like Dune, which has been defeating directors since David Lynch tackled it in the 80's.

I think that authors, directors, playwrites, etc. need to learn to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the storytelling mediums and select stories for them accordingly. Here's my (incomplete) categorization of those mediums:

• Novels: the novel is perhaps the most versatile of storytelling mediums.  It shines across many genres and styles, it accommodates more experimental forms well, it handles both complex stories and minimalist stories with equal aplomb.  For all that, it is not a visual medium and it is also possibly the least 'accessible' of the mediums, requiring a large investment from the reader.  The novel is of course one sub-genre of the medium of the written word, which also includes short stories, poems, and many, many others.
• Film/Television: film on the other hand is an extremely 'transparent' medium.  It shines at absorbing the viewer so completely that they simply lose sight of the artifice of storytelling.  Stories with strong visual components of course work well on film.  But film is a bad way to communicate lots of hard, specific information or a large number of important characters.  It also has trouble dealing with the element of time: everything in a film or TV show has a feeling of immediacy, as if it is happening Right Now.  Because of this, stories with lots of flashbacks or which unfold over a long period of time are trickier.
• Graphic novels: in many ways the graphic novels' hybrid of imagery and text brings together the best parts of both film and the written word.  The visual component is engaging but the textual component allows for the communication of a lot of complexity.  There is also no real restriction on length, so long-form stories are possible.  Graphic novels really shine at illustrating sequences of events and contextualizing images within time.  But although this medium does the jobs of both film and novels, it isn't as good at either job as they are.  Also, graphic novels ultimately have to make a choice about which 'parent' medium they want to emulate.  So an information-heavy 'novel'-style graphic novel will be less effective visually, and vice versa.
• The Stage: plays impose lots of interesting limitations on the stories that can be told.  Long form storytelling, for instance, is almost always not an option.  There are also lots of hard limits on the kinds of settings and action that can be shown, as it must all be realized in real time using props and human beings.  That said, there is something so engaging about seeing real people in real life act out a story.  Historically, this has been the most accessible of all mediums and it remains a potent force today.  It also offers a surprising number of sub-genres: the musical, the one act play, the opera.
• Video games/interactive fiction: far and away the youngest of mediums, this is also one of the trickiest and most complex.  While there already exist several compelling examples of 'interactive' storytelling, I suspect that we have not even begun to plum the depths of this medium and will not for some time.  The idea of giving over a great deal of control over the story to the 'reader' is alien to most auteurs, and presents many unique challenges.  At the same time, however, allowing the 'viewer' to literally be a character in the story is the holy grail of storytelling.  And since this is the one medium that truly offers that ability, it's worth exploring.

Watchmen is a story about history, albeit an alternate history.  History is hard to capture on celluloid, and is not well served by compression into movie length.  I just don't think this kind of story works as a conventional big screen flick.

Alan Moore's genius was to write a story that took full advantage of his chosen medium, graphic novels.  Because of that it's always going to work best as a graphic novel.  That's not to say that translation to other mediums can't be attempted with interesting results, but I doubt that such translations can ever measure up to the original.

The winners of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced. This yearly competition to see who can write the WORST opening sentence to a hypothetical novel is always supremely entertaining. If that sounds like your bag, you should definitely check it out.

As is usually the case, I get more of a chuckle out of many of the runners-up then I do the winners. Read them all!

Ooh, major grammar controversy over on Eric D. Snider's blog. Mothers, cover your commas! This may not be appropriate for the weak of punctuation:

Last week I posted an item that I thought would be entirely uncontroversial. It was simply a list of mistakes made by major North American newspapers in their reviews of the movie “Dance Flick.” The movie was made by several members of the Wayans family, which led to errors along these lines:

“The Wayans (should be Wayanses) keep making the same movie.”
“Like the Wayans’ (Wayanses’) last movie, this one is no good.”
“I hope this is the Wayans’s (Wayanses’) last movie.
“All those Wayans’ (Wayanses) should know better.”

As I said, I didn’t expect any controversy here. Plurals of last names are formed the same way as plurals of other nouns: by adding “s” or “es.” The only common exception is that last names ending in “y” don’t change to “ies” (e.g., baby/babies, but Murphy/Murphys). And once it’s pluralized, you show possession the same way: by adding an apostrophe. My boss, my many bosses, my many bosses’ offices. One Wayans, several Wayanses, the Wayanses’ latest movie.

Yet as soon as I posted it, there was dissent.

He goes on to detail the debate and quote from the relevant style guides. Then, to cap it all off, he emailed the senior copy chief at the LA Times to ask him if the LA Times (one of the papers quoted) made a mistake. Ballsy!

And guess what, the copy chief owned up. Snider was right, the LA Times and internet were wrong, and 'Wayans' should always be pluralized 'Wayanses'. To be completely fair, I would have gotten this one wrong too. I'm not a walking style guide, but I've read and written enough that my gut calls on grammar (if I can be bothered to look twice at it) are usually pretty accurate. But I would have been wrong to go with my instinct here. It should indeed be 'Wayanses'.

I still think it looks weird.

( My (literal!) gut response... )

So. Wayanses or Wayans'? What do you guyses think?

Today's redundant phrase highlight: 'brutal murders'. You always see these two together, but if you think about it, it's a bit odd. It implies that there might be other types of murders. 'Gentle murders' for instance, or perhaps 'kind-but-firm murders'.

Another common pairing is 'shocking murder'. One presumes that this is as opposed to the usual 'expected murder'.

Murder is a big, ugly word. It even SOUNDS grim. So ease up on those adjectives, writers: it's brutal, it's shocking, and someone's dead. We get it.

I often enjoy James Lilek's police blotter reportage, but The Arcata Eye Police Log really takes the cake. Some choice morsels:

2:04 p.m. A university employee parked at a South E Street mini-storage facility, leaving the car – laden with costly electronics – unlocked. Things that weren’t there when he came back to the car included a green military fanny pack containing Carl Zeiss military binoculars valued at $1,200, a $300 Canon S3 digital camera, a $75 strobe unit and a $700 Cochran Genesis Plus computer.

8:09 p.m. A shoeless traveler in white socks and baggy pants was reported waving a knife in front of the donutorium despite the fact that cutlery is hardly required to savor the delectable pastries, which are located inside anyway. Having failed a war of wits with helpless donuts, he wandered over to Tavern Row and was soon in handcuffs.

...

5:04 p.m. The items stolen from an unlocked car on the Plaza aren’t listed, but since it was a grand theft case they must have been rather grand.

6:17 p.m. Someone smelled women’s perfume at the Corp yard and checked the crematorium for loiterers. None found.

11:41 p.m. A cow mooed in the 5000 block of Boyd Road.

...

1:33 a.m. Oblivious disc golf athletes in the 500 block of G Street agreed to call it a night.

12:13 p.m. Despite all the methadone and alcohol on board, a hospital admittee didn’t feel all that great about life.

2:02 p.m. A woman’s ex-husband’s ex-girlfriend called and texted her and her daughter several times, offering to beat them up.

3:03 p.m. People were seen exchanging possibly mind-altering items at an I Street info kiosk.

...

2:46 p.m. The gas station was the stage, and the players were a “very slim” man in a brown hoodie and a “plus-sized” woman in a black shirt.

...

5:49 a.m. The week’s howling psycho quota was fulfilled bright ’n’ early at a Sunny Brae coffee house. The beanbag shotgun had a pacifying effect, and Mr. Shrieky was considerably more placid and could even be detained without handcuffs.

7:55 a.m. A man with a knife was supposedly following children in Sunny Brae. Police found the chap at Chester and Lena avenues, where he surrendered two butter knives and was sent on his way.

10:23 a.m. Butter knife man made a fuss at a 1oth Street medical clinic and had to be committed.

For more slices of the surreal life, check out the Arcata Eye. Or, I guess, move to California.

So I finally got around to seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This isn't going to be a review as such because I expect most people here have already seen it, but I did have some thoughts. And a question. So hang on until the end because I'd like to get your take on it.

I was privileged to get to see this film at The Movies, which is located in downtown Amsterdam and is one of the world's oldest cinemas. Very good experience. The seating wasn't anything special and the screen wasn't much larger than some people's flatscreen TV's, but the atmosphere was stellar - old wood and red carpet as far as the eye could see. Plus, you could drink beer while watching the movie*.

The film itself, well - you should definitely see it, if you haven't. Take any criticisms I have with that foundation in your mind.

Now the idea of A Man Aging Backwards is such an intriguing one that it's hard to see how you could make a bad movie out of it. Get a committee of 'comedy' writers, insert Rob Schneider or Eddie Murphy as your lead, and write a bunch of fart jokes around the concept and you'd STILL have a decent flick. Or, you could hire a lone auteur like Charlie Kauffman and you could get a really brilliant classic of cinema.

The actual Benjamin Button falls somewhere in the middle. It's good, but it's not the best film that could have been made about this.

( Killing Brad Pitt... )

Okay, I promised you a question.

It seems to me that literature and film have a major and notable difference between them. In literature, we generally accept that the authors who sell the most and the authors who write the classics are going to be on separate lists. The bestseller lists are full of Tom Clancys, Dean Koontzes and the occasional Stephanie Meyer. But very few would argue that those authors represent the best that fiction has to offer. That category belongs to writers like J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who top the bestseller lists a lot less frequently.

This doesn't seem to hold in filmmaking.

Generally, if you start rattling off names of the major-league directors - Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, Steven Soderberg, M. Night Shyamalan, Ridley Scott - you'll only come up with a handful that people would argue don't have genuine artistic talent. Michael Bay is the only big name that immediately springs to mind. Maybe Joel Schumacher.

But the point is that I suspect that in Hollywood the lists of Best Directors and Best-Selling Directors isn't all that different.

So here's my question: Why is that? Why are literature's hacks it's bestsellers while in filmmaking the auteurs also bring in the big bucks?

Obviously, all these directors have made pictures that were 'risks' and that didn't do so well financially. But they've also all been given the reins on gigantic blockbusters - often after their less successful but more creatively daring efforts. Relevant example: David Fincher makes critically acclaimed cult films like Fight Club and Zodiac in between hits like Panic Room and Benjamin Button.

Meanwhile, we relegate the top talent in fiction to college literature courses. And how many literary giants have died in poverty? A lot, I would think. Why is this? What difference between film and literature causes this disparity?

Your thoughts welcome.

* I love Europe**.
** And I even like European beer***.
*** I didn't actually drink any this time though.

Writtenwyrdd has an excellent post on "the strange honesty of writing lies." It's about fiction, and how it can be true even though it's made up.

I've also felt the discomfort she feels, of writing a scene and hoping that readers don't associate me with my characters. But sometimes the truth demands writing uncomfortable things.

Fiction, at least for me, needs to be true at some level. It needs to reveal something about human nature, or at least the way I experience and understand it. And that can be very personally challenging.

I'm slowly catching up on Season Deux of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles through... various means, let's just leave it at that. Thank you, internet.

Anyway, it's my observation that in its second season it manages to still be a show that continually surprises me. And I don't mean that it's got a lot of crazy Lost-style plot twists or anything. I'm referring to the overall quality of the writing and to the directions they take the show.

I recently read an article (oh noes!!! TSCC isnt teh new Lost!) claiming that the problem with the show is, among other things, that it has no central conceit, no hook to draw in the audience. And I know what they're getting at. T:SCC defies the one sentence summary. There's no "a group of strangers trapped on a mysterious island" or "wacky hijinks in an average office in Corporate America" that quickly and easily encapsulates the show. From one episode to the next the tone, location and dramatic hook might all be quite different. The author of the article seems to feel that this is a serious Achilles heel for T:SCC.

One man's treasure, another man's trash I guess.

Actually, I think the fact that the show hasn't 'settled down' into a recognizable formula is astonishing. From a writer's perspective, that's really ambitious. It means that in some sense they're reinventing the wheel with each new episode, a truly daunting challenge!

For example, when the show first started it seemed as though the show might focus on John Connor as a typical teenager with a-typical problems. You know, the CW drill: he's got a paranoid-schizo mom, a 'sister' who is a cyborg from the future and the world is going to end, but what he's really worried about is who he's taking to the prom. Which, I think most of us can agree, would have sucked. But while the show has occasionally dipped its toe in those waters (John Connor IS after all a teenage boy in the twentieth century) it's just one of many story-lines the writers have chosen to explore, including:

• SkyNet trying to lay the foundation for its own success in the future
• Sarah Connor's concern over whether or not she has cancer (a possibility raised in the third film)
• Cameron's dualistic nature as evil robot and John's protector
• The attempts of various 'average joes' to uncover an apocalpytic, futuristic conspiracy
• Sarah's desire to protect her son at all costs
• John's desire to have a normal life
• Crazy WTF time-travel induced plot twists

The point being that there really is rich fodder for storytelling in the Terminator universe and a show that stuck exclusively to one direction couldn't mine all of it.

Now, this might be a surprise to you if you haven't sat down on watched the show. Its worst enemy is not, contrary to the I09 counterpoint article, itself. Its worst enemies are the previous movies.

Why?

( I'll tell you. )

Yeah, it's a complicated show to drop into the middle of. But season one is out there on DVD, not to mention Hulu.com, if you're fortunate enough to inhabit North America (*shakes fist at xenophobic Hulu overlords*) so it's not actually that difficult to catch up.

And it's worth it. I'm telling you, you should be watching this show. It's flippin' cool.

Finished the first season of Dexter last night. I thought it got a little over-dramatic towards the end of the story arc. Maybe a more restrained touch would have given it a firmer grounding in reality. Still a good show, though, and I'm fighting the urge to dive straight into Season 2.

I have to give Dexter major props in one all-important area: this is a procedural show where people actually do the jobs they are supposed to do. There are no forensics specialists doing interrogations, no detectives collecting trace evidence, no oncologists doing open heart surgery... you get the idea.

I've never understood why, on 'procedural' dramas, they have to have the main characters do EVERYTHING, whether it makes sense for their character or not. Dexter gets it right. Dexter Morgan is a forensics specialist in blood spatter, and that means he only does blood spatter! If he gets to the scene and there's no blood, he leaves it to the other forensics guy. Same with everyone else on the show - they know their places and even complain when forced to act outside their assigned roles, similar to the way real people behave.

And it works, because Hey! turns out inter-personal dynamics on a team are interesting to watch. At least when you've got good characters. Who knew?

Via Freakonomics -

I have to admit, this sounds mighty tempting. This author has decided to support himself by holding an IPO for his next novel.

Personally, I'd hold out for more than $12,000. Talk about your starving artists!

The author's grandiose claims notwithstanding, I've often wondered if being able to completely focus on writing would really produce better writing. Nothing happens in a vacuum. I've often been at my most inspired while stuck in a boring lecture or driving a desk at a 9-to-5 job. Being stuck in mundane tasks sometimes seems to free the creative part of my brain to really do its thing.

Not only that, but I imagine that if I did write for a living I'd only have about six hours of writing in me a day, MAX. Writing is, for me, the mental equivalent of marathon running. It's an intense, focused activity that I can't sustain over long stretches of time. Four to six hours, tops. So what do you do with the rest of your day?

During the 18 months that I didn't have a real job, I got less writing done then at any other period in my life. It turns out that not having any money can be very distracting.

So from that angle, I sympathize with this guy. I don't think I'll be buying in, however. Judging by the quality of his blog post, he ain't Tolstoy.

So Miriam-Webster is adding the words 'subprime', 'netroots', 'fanboy' and 'webinar' to the latest edition of the dictionary.

While my inner English-geek cringes at these additions, I can see where M-W is coming from. They're running to keep up with a language whose evolution has been thrown into overdrive thanks to the internet. The fast pace of technology-driven cultural exchange means that major language shifts can sweep through in months rather than years or decades. Ol' Webster is just trying to stay relevant.

Fair enough. But you have to ask yourself if the internet even needs a dictionary. Google has famously become the spellchecker of choice for many. It's an instant pulse-check on the currently accepted usage and spelling of a word. Exactly what the internet needs. A dictionary? Not so much.

Personally, I think Miriam-Webster should stick to a more conservative approach. Stop trying to keep up with the internet. As a baseline for 'proper' English, the dictionary can still serve a purpose. Heck, we might need such a thing in a couple of decades, just to make sure we can all still understand our own 'language'.

But that's just me. What do you think?

I hadn't heard this: Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell are going to play Sherlock Holmes and Watson in a new film.

This does not thrill me.

I love Sherlock Holmes. I have two fat paperbacks which collect the entirety of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works on the iconic character. I reread them almost as frequently as I reread Lord of the Rings.

I definitely think that the World's Greatest Detective is overdue for a fresh film interpretation. But not a comedic one. With the modern mania for 'dark' interpretations of classic characters, it surprises me that Holmes has never gotten the treatment. After all, the character was dark before dark was cool.

The fact that TV's Dr. House is explicitly modeled on Sherlock Holmes should give you an idea of the reality of the character the way Doyle wrote him. Holmes was a sociopathic genius, an adrenaline junky with a drug problem, a man whose brilliance at everything he turned his mind to was eclipsed only by his total inability to form personal connections with people. Never has a character cried out more for a serious dramatic treatment.

It doesn't sound like he will be getting it in the short term.

The good news, though, is that most of the Sherlock Holmes stories have passed into the public domain. So there's no exclusive rights on making movies about him. So there's plenty of room for some other filmmaker to step up to the plate and come up with a fresh interpretation.

In the meantime, we still have Dr. House!

Audience participation: who would you pick to play Sherlock in a fresh film adaptation?

While blogging may indeed be therapeutic, I think we can all agree that it's a good thing our grade school English teachers aren't reading. If they were, the exercise might quickly change from cathartic to stressful. No editor stands between a blogger and the 'post' button, so who knows what that cruel red pen might reveal?

Alas for this fellow - his nerd-baiting list of the "10 Worst Video Game Consoles of All Time" was subjected to just such a treatment. Some of his game-blogging peers rang up their 6th grade English teacher - or AN English teacher anyway - and put her and her pen to work. The result should be a warning to us all - a sarcastic, hilarious warning (warning: bad language and poor language abound).

I have fond memories of many of my English teachers. That may be weird to say, but I think I always felt that we were kindred spirits. They shared my love of language and, more importantly, nurtured and guided it. That red pen could be a source of as much praise as correction. In some ways, I miss it.

I'm glad they're not grading my blog posts, though.

Any fond memories of your English teachers?

My brain is on over-drive today for some reason. Maybe it's just bouncing back after yesterday's 24-hour-flu, or whatever it was. Regardless, my neurons are firing at about a million miles an hour and I can hardly sit still in my seat here at work.

I keep thinking of emails to send, things to write, things to read about, all chasing each other around so quickly that I can hardly hold a coherent thought in my head. Today's the sort of day when I want to rewrite history, reinvent the wheel and take on everyone who disagrees with me.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons I want to be a writer, as opposed to any other creative profession, is that writing is so universal, yet so self-contained. Virtually any original idea I might have can be at least partially rendered in text. Have a brilliant idea for a movie or a video game? Write a screenplay. Write a design document. Whereas if I became a director and I had an idea for a novel, then where would I be?

Not only that, but writing is a great way to explore diverse interests. And diverse interests? I has them.

The other plus is of course I don't need an army of trained professionals to turn my visions into words on a page. I just need a word processor and a half-hour to myself.

Good news - your LJ habit might be good for what ails ya. A new study equates blogging with self-medicating, and says cancer patients who acquire the habits "felt markedly better". Blogging patients also recovered faster.

Strangely enough, I'm familiar with Alice Flaherty, the neuroscientist mentioned in the article. She wrote a book called The Midnight Disease which I read a while back. It's a tough book to quantify, because it's part biography, part case-study, but it's generally about hypergraphia, writer's block, and the links between creativity and depression. Worth reading, if you care about such things.