After the great post-eating disaster of 2008, I've elected to experiment with offline composition tools until I get distracted by shiny objects or I find one that I really like. My two candidates are Ecto and MarsEdit. I actually used Ecto quite a lot until I upgraded to Leopard and it expressed its allegiance to Tiger by refusing to work. Luckily for me, the developers gave it a nice talking to and the most recent version appears to play nicely with 10.5.x. I suppose we'll really test that theory out when I hit publish, won't we?
So, rather than make this one of those "testing . . . testing . . . is this thing on?" entries we all make from time to time, I thought I'd take a moment to share some links:
I've begun playing pmog. I figure that if I'm on the goddamn internet all day, I may as well rack up meaningless badges and add an extra layer of fun to my whole experience. I'm a mighty level 3, and I'm not quite ready to reveal my player name.
Warren Ellis has been doing a free weekly online comic called Freakangels. It's been running for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it. Unlike most of the serials I've read over the years (Green Mile, I'm looking in your direction), this one works in both short weekly installments and as a longer narrative arc when you read several episodes at once.
There's a new version of Propeller in the works. I've seen it, and I'm just blown away by what it can do. There's some official talk about it on Newsquake. Hear me now: Propeller is the future of social news, and the new Propeller is going to redefine the standard for a social news community. I can't remember the last time I was so excited about something like this. Disclosure for the seven people who don't know this: I work for Propeller as a scout.
Some dipshit at TBS thinks that it's a really great idea to interrupt a show -- by pausing the show in the middle of dialog -- to run annoying interstitial advertising. This has to be seen to fully appreciate the magnitude of idiocy on display here. I submitted the link to Propeller a few days ago, and posted the video in my Vox blog.
Yes, I have a blog at Vox -- mostly for pictures and videos -- because what I really need is another fucking blog.
Ecto is as easy and full-featured as I remember it. I especially like how it handles creating links. Just for grins, here's an Ecto-created Amazon link to Interzone by William S. Burroughs. There's a story in Interzone called The Junky's Christmas that is one of my favorite things he ever did. I was introduced to it when someone gave me the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, where Burroughs performs some of his work. Unlike a lot of authors who really should stick to the writing, Burroughs, like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, just make their work something -- well, the best I can come up with is more -- when they read it. In fact, I think the best way to experience Burroughs is to listen to him perform it.
I just found out this very moment, through the magic of the googles, that The Junky's Christmas was adapted into a weird and avant garde claymation movie in the early 90s. There's a short clip from it on YouTube.
Have I mentioned before that Burroughs is one of my primary influences? It's a little strange, because I don't write anything like he did, but something about reading and listening to him accelerated my desire to write more than just a series of journal entries when I was in my early twenties. My first short story, called Scene Missing was heavily inspired by stories in Naked Lunch.
Okay, I am not making this up: in the middle of the last paragraph, my machine's screen saver turned on, and it refused to wake the screen up. This is the second time it's happened to me this week, and I had . . . an episode . . . while I shut down the motherfucker and restarted it. I thought it was the second time in two days that I'd worked on a blog entry and lost it to the land of wind and ghosts.
But! It turns out that Ecto has an auto-save feature which meant I only lost half a paragraph instead of an entire entry. For that reason alone, Ecto is a HUGE SUCCESS.
I'm off to lunch with a friend of mine who just got laid off from TokyoPop. I think we're going to plan global domination together.
. . . I am now hitting publish, and hoping for the best.
