The L&L Blog
Chasing the Pigeon
The catalyst that lead to my moving certain posts over to a non-Lit'n'Lat blog was my rant about the Battlestar Galactica finale. One reader of that rant has just contacted me to say that he is sorry to see it go, though, as he liked the term "chasing the pigeon". I will thus proffer and elaborate on the term here.
There are already two great terms with similar meanings that have become widespread:
Welcome to Machine Dreams
Much of what is on this blog so far was originally over on lit-n-lat.blogspot.com. I have moved all of the stuff that was not pertinent to Scrivener or Literature & Latte over here, to this new blog, because a few readers found it perturbing to see a developer talk about topics that had nothing to do with development. So this is me being all professional. It is a new and curious feeling.
On Separating Rants From a "Professional" Blog
Since a couple of readers have taken umbrage at my using this blog to express my opinion on a beloved television show, I have removed the previous blog post on Battlestar Galactica. I guess the misunderstanding arose because some (possibly new) users expect this to be a development blog whereas I, being a one-man development team, have always seen it as a developer's blog. As I wrote in the first post on this blog four years ago:
Life without walls
Windows: Life without walls.
"Turning off Windows Firewall might make your computer (and your network, if you have one) more vulnerable to damage from hackers and malicious software (such as worms)."
Please bring Midway Still back...
Best blog I've discovered this year (possibly the best blog ever):
http://becausemidwaystillarentcomingback.blogspot.com/
I loved Midway Still. I had one of their cool T-shirts - bright orange, with the Converse All Star logo saying "Midway Still" instead of "Converse All Star".
*Sigh.*
In praise of another Ethan Hawke film...
Okay, a little while ago I raved about Gattaca, one of my all-time favourite sci-fi films. But there are, of course, two Ethan Hawke films that blow even that out of the water (and no, I'm not talking about Dead Poets' Society)... Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. You can call me an old romantic (although I'd rather you left out the "old"), but these two films are just superb. I just re-watched Before Sunrise, which, when I saw it in my early twenties, quickly became one of my favourite films... And it still stands up as a great romantic film about two people who meet and like each other, who spend a night wandering around in the way you do with someone you like when you're young, and who then part. It captures that feeling of spending a sleepless night just talking to someone you like beautifully. When I heard they were making a sequel to a film I liked so much, the sort of film that doesn't exactly cry out for a sequel, I thought Richard Linklater must be insane. But how wrong I was. Before Sunset is even better. It's one of the most poignant films I've ever seen, taking up the lives of two characters you cared about in a realistic way. They have separate lives, partners and (for one of them) children
Scrivener - alive and kicking
I've been receiving an increasing number of e-mails asking me if Scrivener is still in active development, which seems to be a result of people checking this blog and noting that my last post here was some time ago... So, yet again, I thought I'd best post a quick update to say that Scrivener is indeed alive, well, and in active development. (I've always said that the forums are a better indicator of the state of development, because I post on the forums nearly every day, but I do understand that some users, or potential users, don't really like forums much and therefore don't check them.) Of course, as I say on the About page of the main site, Scrivener isn't really about whizz-bang new features. I have always maintained that you should take it for what it is, and that my only real commitment is to bug-fixes and making it the best writing software for my needs. And indeed, I stand by that.
I didn't save anything for the swim back...
There was an interesting discussion on the forums recently about Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I love Blade Runner. That whole Rutger Hauer speech at the end about teardrops in the rain? Brilliant. And from the Final Cut DVD documentary, I discovered that Rutger Hauer came up with that line himself - my favourite line in the film. Oh, and for the record, I am also a massive Philip K. Dick fan, too (though I was alarmed recently to find a speech by him in which he suggested that we are all really living in Judea 2000 years ago - although I'm not sure why I'm surprised by this). And actually, I quite like Total Recall, too, which may be pertinent information when you consider my next opinion...
Whatever happened to...
Like most of the readers of this forum/blog, I read a lot. Duh. Obviously. That's what got us would-be writers (if you are actually a real writer please don't boast here) going in the first place. But in my twenties, I read voraciously. (These days I toss books aside if they don't grab me within a chapter or tell me anything new or interesting - I'm halfway to being a septuagenarian this year, after all!) In my early twenties, I had a temp job which had long periods of doing pretty much nothing, mainly because my employers were of an older generation and had no idea how long it took to do basic administrative tasks on MS Excel or Access. Thus they gave me jobs that they thought would take me weeks which in fact only took days and then kept me on regardless. For a whole year I was given the job of scanning in old engineering blueprints. Any normal person would have run a mile; me, I was the longest serving temporary worker there. The reason I stayed so long was that no one bothered me - and in all that empty time I usually managed to read sneakily. Whilst scanning in blueprints, I would feed paper, press a button and then return to my book as the paper whirred through the feeder.