Nou ja, misschien niet de meest gevaarlijke auto ooit... Die 'eer' gaat waarschijnlijk naar de Ford Pinto, de Mitsubishi Spacestar (da's een raar verhaal, maar wel de auto met de meeste doden in de US), en de Reliant Robin.
Maar nu dus de Volkswagen Golf MK8. Man, wat is dat een gevaarlijk ding.
With four movies and a thirteen episode television series many of us must have caught at least a glimpse of Appleseed. Or at leats of one of it's main characters: Briareos. Aka bunny-ears... Just kidding 😇
How about diving into other people's minds... Could be fun, right? Here's the 'slip into someone's mind' 2014's Stitchers which I would rapidly exchange for a remake of VR5.
In Stitchers the main character gets 'stitched' into the memories of dead people, helping to solve crimes (typically, ttrying to find out the reasons why those people died). It's a procedural, after all...
Deze is getekend door mijn dochter, en werkt geweldig als wallpaper op een telefoon, maar ook op een normaal scherm.
Wil je deze afbeelding ergens anders voor gebruiken, neem dan even contact op.
Klik op de afbeelding om te vergroten / Meer wallpapers
Another space opera, and unfortunately it fails in the typical areas of science and logic. The story might have been a lot better with a little more work on the technical aspects.
Here are more of my usual gripes with much of the SF Space Opera and Military SF out there:
Last year I was (trying to) do a review per week, and haven't kept to my schedule when 2024 started... So, let's use a week or two to catch up. First target: Casey White.
Casey White is an independent self publishing author, with a number of novels to her name. I can't figure out how many, as there are multiple authors with the same name / alias 😎
In the past you could install Windows 11 with a local account. These days? Not so. You MUST create a Microsoft Account to install Windows 11. That's... ridiculous. Can't even install a PC anymore without an internet connection.
And today, my local accounts suddenly disappeared.
In Nederland is dat iets beter geregeld, maar niet veel... En werkgevers maken er dankbaar misbruik van, omdat het een gemakkelijke manier is om ongewenste werknemers weg te werken.
Soms is een simpele wallpaper alles wat je nodig hebt, zoals deze waterdruppels voor een dual-monitor setup.
Klik op de afbeelding om te vergroten (meer Wallpapers)
My old Secomber maps were scanned 20 years ago, using a handscanner. It was about time I rescanned them, especially after finding other Secomber maps.
Click on any of these images for a larger version.
20+ years ago I created some maps for Secomber, a small town in the Forgotten Realms. I didn't pick the place at random. I selected it because it is known but not well documented thus allowing the DM lots of freedom. It's also close to a lot of interesting places.
I'm planning to revisit the old document and expand on it, so in preparation I googled a bit...
I like to differentiate my Chrome profiles by different tab colors, but the 'Chrome 2023 Refresh' enforced pastel colors on us poor users. I had not spotted that yet, but when I made a profile change, I suddenly couldn't select my original color again. Instead, we now have 'themes' that don't do what I want...
But it's fixable... for now...
Outdated. Old fashioned. Geeky, nerdy, cult.
And yet, in some ways, this old one season series is lots of fun. Sidney Bloom is a telecoms technician with a talent that allows her to creep into someone else's mind, entering a kind of 'virtual reality'.
It’s based on a computer game, but it has (fortunately) little to do with the game (besides borrowing characters and background).
Synopsis: two sisters survive in a world with lots of contrast between the rich and the poor. When a heist fails, the oldest sister goes to jail, and the youngest one goes… crazy.
I wrote about A Scientific Railgun some time ago, and here's the matching wallpaper. (If you understand the concept, this image of many a clone gets a lot darker!)
Click on the image to enlarge, or check out any of the other featured wallpapers...
I haven’t read the Hugh Howey novels this series is based upon, but this first season was highly enjoyable to watch. People locked in a silo-like vertical arcology need to survive on limited resources. However, there is a secretive group active in the background, controlling (and using) more advanced technology, and things might not be quite as they seem.
Now and again a little predictable - but worth a watch.
After a while building sentences becomes something automatic. You'll reach the stage where you'll effortlessly find the right words to describe the scene in your mind. This just takes practice. So write a lot, read a lot, then write even more.
Note: using a decent keyboard and some blind typing helps a lot here!
Shock yourself and your reader.
What's the most exotic, outrageous thing your character would do? Would he / she really do it? Does the story lend itself to that? If so, create a situation where your character would do exactly that... the impossible, the unthinkable, the illogical (not from the character's point of view, mind you).
In general I don't see much use for extensive character sheets. I even tend to skip as much of world building as I can get away with. I did find it useful to make a small char sheet for my main cast. Not to flesh them out and delve into their deepest secrets and hidden background.
My reasons are much more ordinary: I don't want to get caught out.
Don't overthink. Or from a broader point of view: don't brood. Don't whine. Don't worry.
Advice is what it is: an opinion of another person. Listen to them, learn from them, but don't depend on them.
It's an odd dilemma: you must learn from others, to avoid their mistakes, and to improve your own work. On the other hand you must develop a spine. (Yeah, that's a little harsh, but read on...)
We're past Christmas, and a couple of days away from New Year's Eve. And so I think it is time to combine mathematics with the art of writing:
It's easier to add than to subtract.
Removing a plot line, a character, a chapter or a scene, all of that is way harder than adding something. Anything. (Especially adding spelling errors is easier, but that's not the point.)
Write short. Concise. Focused. You can always expand later.
Goodie. There are so many (good) video codecs these days that it is hard to pick one... Or not?
There are some very decent explanations of the different formats on the Internet... but, as usual, I just had to figure it out and see for myself 😇
Use a (real) keyboard.
Don't write on your phone. Instead, use a real keyboard (and a real screen). A tablet (with an external BT keyboard) will work, but nothing beats that big piece of screen real estate in front of you.
If you can afford it, go big. 27", or even 2x 27" or some ultrawide thingy. And don't forget you'll be editing as well! If you use an editor (as in: a person, not the software 😏) it can be nice to show the editor's and your own version side by side.
In the countdown to 2024 I'm sharing a bunch of the most obvious tips with the poor victims that landed on this blog. Hey! You're one of them! So, what should you do when you want to write but you're stuck?
Close your eyes...
This book uses the ‘beat sheet’ approach used by Blake Snyder to create and improve tv- and movie-scripts. Following a specific script or method might be your thing, or it might not, so I approached this book with a bit more caution.
Actually, it's nine hints before the end of the year, but this sounds better 🤔😁
Matt asked me for nine tips... Hmmm... So, here's number 9:
Write Readable
... but that is not a tip. That's the same thing I tell everyone.
So, here's another one to add to the list 😏
I needed to figure out what kind of USB-C cable I needed for a docking station, and then things got complicated really fast 😁
So, did you know that you don't need high speed cables if you want to connect (multiple) monitors over USB-C? Or that different combinations of adapters, cables and devices offer different charge speeds because they negotiate -- if they're all new enough, of a decent quality, and have a chip? Read on...
I've recently bought some books to become a better writer, and some of those were Janice Hardy's.
At 300 pages this one’s a bit bigger, and of the three Janice Hardy books I’ve picked up this one feels the most like a real ‘text book’, something to study. You can actually buy a companion ‘work book’ to work out the questions at the end of each chapter, but you don't really need it.
I strongly believe there is no such thing as 'writer's block'. (I do believe in procrastination though.)
But if there is, then the only cure I know of is writing bad poetry. Preferably so bad your brain tries to crawl out through your ears from pure terror.
Let's have another go at it...
Here's a new ditty, and after that my umpteenth attempt to translate a (horrible and disgusting) Dutch one...
Or, perhaps, not. Few action scenes, some romantic stuff, cock sucking, more access scenes, repeat ad nauseum. If you like sex scenes in your books, sprinkled with some Vampire hormones then go and read this. I gave up after a couple of chapters. Explicit sex scenes every other chapter just ain’t rocking my boat. If it’s yours then there are at least 5 sequels to work your way through.
Je zou een ton apps verwachten, welke allemaal claimen dat ze je helpen je monitor te kalibreren... Maar nee. En de paar welke ik gevonden heb waren niet echt indrukwekkend. Dus wat te doen als je geen colorimeter hebt?
Uiteindelijk ben ik maar voor de goedkoopste oplossing gegaan: met het blote oog. (Da's altijd fout, maar soms heb je geen andere optie.)
You'd expect to find tons of apps that would claim to aid in monitor calibration, but there aren't that many... and the few I tried were not very impressive. So, unless you have an actual colorimeter, you're pretty much on your own.
I tried some things but in the end I had to settle for the cheapest solution: eyeball it. (Which is always wrong, but sometimes all that's left.)
Symbology aside (right) the BattleStar Galactica wallpaper is a great 2h wallpaper.
(Click on the image to enlarge.)
Janice Hardy is a Fantasy author, and runs the Fiction University website / blog. Her blog is a source of interesting titbits, related to writing fiction. She turned a number of those blog posts into books, of which I purchased three.
The three books by her hand that I'll discuss are focused on beginners to mid-level writers. They might make some good presents for under the tree, in case you have a young niece / nephew who wants to be an author some day…
Highly spoken of, 'a classic', and yet... I don't know.
It's epic scifi allright. Kim Stanley Robinson describes the colonialization of Mars, and all the stumbles along the way, and once you're done with book three, you know all there is to know.
But... after reading all three books, I was left with a kind of empty feeling, as things didn't go anywhere. Mumble muble bla bla mumble mumble... with a sudden stop at the end.
This series is literally using ‘imagination’ as the primary magical means and method. It has some interesting aspects and intrigue, but the main character is a little too powerful, and the whole writing style smells of LitRPG and Cultivation (which I don’t like) but… he doesn’t belong to that wave of writers.
I’m a little puzzled though. L.E. Modesitt has been around for quite a while, but I have no recollection of reading anything by his hand before. Hmmm…
I suffer from an old time music revival, and now I'm stuck in the 70's. So let’s throw a classic at you: Boston’s debut album Boston. I’ve been playing it whilst working on my latest Dapper contribution, and damn, every track (except perhaps the last one) is fantastic. Ah, more than a feeling… and that organ!
Verdict? After all these years it's still fantastic!
Space Opera by the numbers. So many books follow the traditional ‘captain down on his luck’ ‘fight against a secret force and a corrupt army / government’ etc. etc. etc. and this is just another one. Still, this series made it into book seven (or eight?) by now.
I believe human nature is effectively blocking any usable form of communism and anarchism. That's why I believe in enlightened capitalism, with a shot of socialism to protect the weak. That’s the role of government: protect the populace from getting hurt by greed and stupidity. (Click on the image to enlarge.)
Post apocalyptic YA with great concepts that becomes a little too far-fetched in the latter half of the third book. Concept: the world is overrun by a virus that blows up people. The only way to survive is eating the flesh of someone who’s sick but didn’t yet explode.
From there we move into split brains, gen splicing, and virtual reality, served with a dash of betrayal and a royal helping of romance. Like I said, pretty good all the way up to the virtual reality, that’s where it looses some steam.
Simple, step by step instructions on how to maintain indents for regular text, as set in Word.
In a nutshell: you need to set the indent used in Word styles.
Read on for examples and instructions.
Yeah, that’s a song, not a book 🤔 Although the original was performed by Fred Astaire in the musical The Sky’s the Limit, and the best known version is perhaps Sinatra’s, this one’s my to go to. It’s night, and nobody knows if it’s the end of a love affair, or the end of the world.
Shivers... I think I'll have to read a Chandler / Marlowe next...
Here she is on YouTube...
Some newer drives use SMR instead of CMR recording. Unfortunately, manufacturers are not clear when they are using SMR technology.
SMR mostly affects the writing speed, may decrease lifespan, and greatly hampers (if not completely blocks) recovery of data upon OS failures, drive failures, or power failures. It should be cheaper (to manufacture)...
I’m alternating between two fantasy / romance series, Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock and Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, trying to understand the appeal and writing styles.
It’s interesting to see how they both approach the classical notion of vampires and werewolves, and twist the readers’ expectations, whilst on the other hand serving them exactly what they want...
