Monthly Archives: April 2015
Neil Clarke, editor at Clarkesworld, published a list of the Top Ten Most Common Short Story Names, derived from the magazine’s first 50 thousand submissions. And, since there were a lot of ties, the actual number of titles in that Top Ten list is nearly 50.
I see four containing the word “home.” There were 16 submissions named “Home,” 16 for “Homecoming,” and 8 each for “Coming Home” and “Going Home.” A compelling numerical and semantic symmetry.
Although not a perfect match, it makes me a little embarrassed to have a short story titled “At Home.”
And, while I don’t have a story called “The Box” (which was #3 on Clarke’s list, at 15 submissions), I did start a serial called “The Crate” which didn’t generate much interest and was abandoned.
To be fair, once you do the math (and I always do the math) you realize that even the #1 short story name on the list, “Dust,” at 18 submissions accounts for less than one story every 2500 submissions. That’s actually not so bad, in my opinion.
Let’s just hope stories about kinnebecks and ligans don’t start taking off …
Finally, someone has articulated my feelings about how Assassin’s Creed IV : Black Flag seems so schizophrenically awful and awesome at the same time, and why this installment still seems like such a game-changer despite the persistent drawbacks in its franchise.
What drawbacks, you ask, citing the AC franchise’s massive profitability?
Well, I’ll go into how to create a better high seas, open-world game later, specifically citing some of the crappy things in AC that you might not have even noticed. But, for now, let’s just talk about how the creators of Assassin’s Creed, a collection of perhaps the greatest period pieces in the history of video games can’t just let it be the greatest collection of period pieces.
DO ONE THING Continue reading
I’ve said before that remakes and adaptations are often better than the originals, using OutKast’s Hey Ya! and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind as examples.
The argument is now being made, by Chris Taylor at Mashable (but also by others), that the HBO series Game of Thrones is surpassing its source work, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire:
In 1996, Martin published … A Game of Thrones, the first in what was then supposed to be a trilogy, to critical acclaim. In 1998 came the second volume, A Clash of Kings, and lo, it was even better. The year 2000 saw the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was perhaps one of the most densely layered and consistently surprising tomes I’ve read in any genre. It took the HBO show two seasons to do justice to this book.
And then? Martin spun his words, and his characters spun their wheels. He sat in his home in New Mexico typing out page after page, introducing new character after new character into his world of Westeros but not really advancing any of their storylines …
The showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, have been far less self-indulgent. (And for good reason — if a book is only bought a million times, it’s still a huge hit for the publishers. But if a show drops down to a million viewers, it’s a disaster.)
… In short, wherever Martin seems to be going out of his way to keep strands untied, introduce ponderous new strands and frustrate the reader, Benioff and Weiss are doing the opposite — uniting strands and delighting the viewer.
Read the rest here.
Modified due to reader concerns that the previous version was racist. *shrugs* Thesaurus progressivism.
So, a campaign finance protestor landed a gyrocopter on the grounds of the US Capitol, well within the National Mall’s civilian no-fly zone?
Sure, the flying curmudgeon posed no threat to anyone, but imagine if he had. Imagine if he and the copter had been strapped with explosives and had slammed into a group of people. Say, a group of Senators or Representatives.
It’s time to expand that commercial no-fly zone to include the entire original square of the District on both sides of the Potomac, so that any violating aircraft can be detected and intercepted well before reaches any critical buildings. And then, we could roll out a platform of reforms to follow that.
Close Reagan National, use the airport’s land for a larger National Zoo, optimize the Metro to help people move easier to outlying airports, reform DC traffic and building codes to allow for better development to boost the economy, open a Jazz Age theme park, and create a National Museum of Sail to complement the District’s ongoing efforts to make better use of waterfront space.
LEITH. A channel on the coast of Sweden, like that round the point of Landfoort to Stockholm.
– The Sailor’s Word Book
What qualifies someone to judge literature? Who gets to be one of the “gate-keepers” deciding what traditional publishers publish, a translator or reviewer of translations, or—the most sticky issue of all—a critic?
This all came to a head for me recently, after the season finale of the Breaking Bad prequel series Better Call Saul. Several critics complained that the final episode didn’t give us enough time get to know and care about Marco, a friend of James McGill (AKA Saul Goodman), before [SPOILER ALERT] Continue reading
fantod, fantad _ And commonly, the fantods The condition of being unstrung, ill at ease; of having the heebie-jeebies … The earliest citation is 1867 nautical, “a name given to the fidgets of officers.”
– A Third Browser’s Dictionary by John Ciardi