Yearly Archives: 2011

Cinemetrics 1

 in Blog  tagged links / movies / technology by

Cinemetrics This is a fascinating information visualization project. Wordle is a visualization of text, the homunculus is a visualization of the brain, and maps can be recreated and proportioned according to a number of factors, but I've never seen anyone do this with cinema before. As the creator points out, it is a time-based medium, and the additional dimension means that few people have tried to tackle a purely data-based representation. This makes me wonder: how could you visualize music, another time-based art? I'm sure someone has done it…

Alice in Wonderland

 in Blog  tagged lewis carroll / movies by

Finally got around to watching the 2010 Alice in Wonderland, and the last third was… a disappointment. There are at least five people who could have turned out to be the Jabberwocky, some less logically than others, but all heartbreaking. When I saw Absalom going into his cocoon, I was sure we had a winner. But no… the Jabberwocky was just an anonymous ugly dragon. Alice was just the generic dragonslayer. I’m not saying we should have some fluffy ending where she’s taming the Jabberwocky instead of killing it, or something similarly vanilla, but a little more nuance. Or coherence. […]

The Angel Experiment (James Patterson) 1

 in Blog  tagged james patterson / reviews by

Maximum Ride: The Angel ExperimentJames Patterson Continuing with my YA reading… I got 54 pages into this book before I started skimming.The pros: Max, the Maximum of the title, is actually a girl. And it’s not a big deal, just slipped in detail by detail. The cons: "Yes, you, standing there leafing through these pages. Do not put this book down. I’m dead serious–your life could depend on it." Does that sound familiar? Like, 54-book series familiar? Even now, when I can laugh at the clunky writing of the Animorphs series, I never forget how heartbreaking they are. In comparison, this book seems […]

Scrivener

 in Blog  tagged me.me.me / novel progress / technology by

I’ve had the Scrivener for Windows beta for a few months now, and this past month I really started using it. I’ve always been one of those bare-bones people who prefers to use Word instead of any fancy writing software. That still holds true for shorts, but I’ve turned back to one of my novel projects, and its scope exceeds the organizational capacity of Word. Scrivener’s true value became apparent once I started importing all my research files and images. Normally I feel guilty using multiple files for research; I label one "Geology" and then stuff several books worth of information into […]

Shiver (Maggie Stiefvater)

 in Blog  tagged maggie stiefvater / reviews / ya by

ShiverMaggie Stiefvater I haven’t read any YA in a while. (I finally got a public library card this week, and man, why did I wait so long? I forgot how amazing public libraries are.) But I seem to remember that even when I was in that target age range, I had trouble not with the complexity of abstract ideas but the language in which they were expressed. In other words, if you explain things simply enough, YA readers can grasp more hard science than adults might think. Writing for YA, you might minimize your linguistic contortions, but you don’t shortchange […]

Diviner

 in Blog  tagged free fiction / me.me.me by

I’ve exhausted my list of markets that accept novelettes/novellas, so instead I’m putting up Diviner (16k, dark fantasy with geology and renewable energy) on my WIP website. It’s under the Free Fiction page. I’m considering queuing this up as a YA novel… if I start the story earlier, the main character will be younger and just entering this particular world. Another interesting thing is that