Month: February 2013

Possible titles for my short story collection

By the end of the year I am planning on having my 30+ short stories all bundled up into one lovingly handcrafted and self-published volume. Freed from the dictates of a publisher I am able to follow my own whims when it comes to book design and so on.

Today I was thinking about possible titles for the collection. If all of the stories were of the same genre it would be easier but they run the gamut from fantasy to horror to (laughably bad) science fiction to speculative stories that would work nicely as Twilight Zone episodes.

Still, the majority are horror stories or ‘weird tales’ and I love alliteration and word play, so I came up with this:

Tales of Madness and Macramé

I like it but it sounds like a murder mystery set in a knitting club. Not a bad idea for a story, though.

Then I thought I could take the number of stories, cut the number in half and voila:

16 Pairs of Shorts

I kind of like this. A good number of the stories are lighter in tone or deliberately comical so this could put the reader in the right general frame of mind.

And now I realize I am blanking on the other titles I’d come up with so I’ll end this here and edit in my other semi-finalist choices when my brain deigns to remember them

Delicious spam stays in a can

From the dashboard of this blog (which runs on the rather popular WordPress platform even as my programming friends rail against PHP at length and with great vigor):

Stop Spammer Registrations has prevented 26753 spammers from registering or leaving comments.

That is a pretty impressive number of thwarted spam messages and accounts for a site that is only read by myself and possibly the ghost of my cat, underscoring just how pervasive and persistent these naughty spammers are.

Somewhere in that number there’s a short story waiting to be told. I shall mull the possibilities.

Combating your posting inner demon

Actually it may not even be an inner demon at all but one who hangs around, possibly on your shoulder if small or casually leaning nearby if not, like a shifty friend you can never quite trust.

I am speaking about the urge to post things on message forums that go against both your natural inclination and also your reputation, such as it may be, on the forum in question.

I was once cynical as all get-out and prone to sarcasm that was as thick as maple syrup on a wintry day. The cynicism has faded over time but the sarcastic impulse remains. I indulge myself from time to time, often making myself the primary target.

The difficult moments are when I see someone post something blatantly dumb, redundant or whiny and I fight this hill giant-sized urge to say something sarcastic. I stop myself by thinking about the irony in making a negative comment about something I see as a negative comment.

So instead I keep quiet and soothe myself by tooling around in GTA3 for a bit. As noted in my previous post on GTA3 this inevitably ends with me flipping the vehicle and blowing it up. It would be cathartic if it was intentional but I’m just a really lousy virtual driver.

And a nice guy. So instead of saying it elsewhere I’ll just say it here:

Some people sure complain a lot.

A walk on the windy side

Yesterday I walked around Burnaby Lake in anticipation of actually running it again (hopefully sometime in March–once I resume jogging I’ll have to ramp up slowly before I can tackle the lake’s 11+ km circumference). There was a wind warning in effect that I was unaware of–until my cap whipped off as I strolled around the athletic field. These are the only conditions under which it’s okay to wear my cap in dork mode (backward) because that’s often the only way to keep it on my head.

The walk went quickly (two hours for 14.5 km) and apart from the wind it was decent, with mild temperatures and sun for about half the way. Most encouraging, though, was the first tentative appearance of buds on tree branches. I am calling this the first confirmation that spring is on the way. I approve.

That is all.

Ready for summer now

It’s mid February and today was cool and showery. This means it’s time for my annual ‘ready for summer’ post. And here it is.

I’m at least glad it’s no longer dark when I leave work. There’s something mildly depressing about wrapping up a shift to find it looks like midnight.

I conclude this post with a yearning-for-summer haiku:

Inviting summer
How I miss you and your warmth
Winter sucks corn dogs

Ranking R.E.M. albums from 1983 to 2011

It’s music week on the blog!

R.E.M. released 15 studio albums between 1983 and 2011. I tend to group the albums into three eras:

  • The Early Years. This covers their first four albums from 1983-1986.
  • The Big Success. This covers their platinum sales era, six albums from 1987-1996.
  • The Post-Berry Funk. The five albums they were under contract to do after drummer Bill Berry left the band. Covers 1998-2011.

I’ll eventually come back and justify my rankings but for now here are two lists, the first is all 15 albums in chronological order followed by my arbitrary list of best to worst.

  • Murmur, 1983
  • Reckoning, 1984
  • Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985
  • Lifes Rich Pageant, 1986
  • Document, 1987
  • Green, 1988
  • Out of Time, 1991
  • Automatic for the People, 1992
  • Monster, 1994
  • New Adventures in Hi-fi, 1996
  • Up, 1998
  • Reveal, 2001
  • Around the Sun, 2004
  • Accelerate, 2008
  • Collapse Into Now, 2011

My ranking:

  1. Automatic for the People
  2. Lifes Rich Pageant
  3. Monster
  4. Collapse Into Now
  5. Murmur
  6. Reckoning
  7. New Adventures in Hi-fi
  8. Fables of the Reconstruction
  9. Out of Time
  10. Accelerate
  11. Document
  12. Reveal
  13. Green
  14. Up
  15. Around the Sun

It’s a testament to the ultimate resilience and strength of the band that the top five albums encompass their entire 28 year span of releasing albums.

Although I do not listen to it as often these days I still rank Automatic as their best album because it’s a perfectly balanced combination of maturity, experimentation and accessibility. The band went ‘dark’ but lost none of their tunefulness in the process. They also produced some of their most beautiful songs.

Their follow-up Monster nearly matches every strength of Automatic, including having no filler but does so with a completely different sound, as brash, weird and cacophonous as Automatic is quietly majestic. In between the two I’ve placed their final album Collapse Into Now which has the band exiting in fine form with an album that offers a little of everything in an energetic, well-crafted package that recalls their best work while staking out its own identity.

At the bottom of the list is the only R.E.M. album I’d describe as weak. Around the Sun is not a poor effort but much of it has a listlessness that suggests the band was either bored or tired of the whole thing.

Illustrating how whimsically I can change my mind, reference this post in which I ranked the top five R.E.M. albums as follows:

  1. Lifes Rich Pageant
  2. Murmur
  3. Automatic for the People
  4. Reckoning
  5. Collapse Into Now

In which I rank Pink Floyd albums 1971 to 1994 from best to not best

Nute on Broken Forum recently posted the following (in reference to the Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason):

Best Pink Floyd album.

COME AT ME, HATERS.

As I love any excuse to make a list this has inspired me to list from best to worst the Pink Floyd albums from 1971 to 1994. I don’t include the pre-1971 material because I am not familiar enough with it to offer up an opinion.

First, here’s the chronological order of the albums:

  • Meddle, 1971
  • The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973
  • Wish You Were Here, 1975
  • Animals, 1977
  • The Wall, 1979
  • The Final Cut, 1983 (minus Rick Wright)
  • A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987 (minus Roger Waters)
  • The Division Bell, 1994 (minus Roger Waters)

And here is my ranking, with notes attached:

  1. The Wall. This is a sprawling and at times meandering and indulgent album but when it works it works fantastically well and the shining moments are transcendent ones, from the theatrical opening crescendo and fade to David Gilmour’s soaring guitar that concludes “Comfortably Numb”. The Waters/Gilmour work on this album is consistently strong and the album is the better for it.
  2. Wish You Were Here. More a mood piece than any of the albums on this list, Wish You Were Here is bookended by the long instrumental “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and if you don’t like that song you’re left with all of three others to enjoy. Fortunately even these are terrific. “Welcome to the Machine” is creepily effective, the title track fittingly melancholy, with only “Have a Cigar” being a bit ordinary.
  3. Animals. Bookended by the spare and short acoustic track “Pigs on the Wing” this concept album contains one of the band’s longest songs, “Dogs”, which clocks in at 17+ minutes and it’s on the strength of “Dogs” that I place Animals where I do. The song begins slowly then plays through several movements, using sound effects, reverb and more to capture the feeling of alienation, of drowning in an unhappy world where fairness is a rare commodity and loneliness is in abundance. Not exactly make-out music but a mesmerizing journey.
  4. The Dark Side of the Moon. The biggest problem with this album is that certain parts of it, notably the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” are rather dated, sounding very much of the era they were recorded in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but you can’t help but imagine people grooving out on the shag carpet while listening to this. The classic tracks here are tight and strong and hold up perfectly 40 (!) years later. Sure, “Money” has been overplayed as much as any other 70s FM hit but even putting it aside you still have “Time”, “Us and Them” and “The Great Gig in the Sky”. More than any of the other albums here, this contains Rick Wright’s strongest contributions.
  5. The Division Bell. This was the last album the band recorded and came seven years after the previous. Much like Dark Side it has moments that firmly tie it to its era, with the ringing guitar of “Take it Back” bringing to mind U2 of all things. At its worst it presents some of the same calculated moves as Momentary Lapse but overall holds together with greater consistency. There are no standout tracks here but Gilmour’s reliable vocals and guitar work, alongside solid contributions from Wright, make this a good effort.
  6. Meddle. An odd album that is the final embrace of psychedelic weirdness before the band would establish its more familiar sound. This is a fairly mellow record, apart from the propulsive opening instrumental “One of These Days”, with most songs feeling like the aural equivalent of a gentle stroll. The oddities come in the form of the bluesy “Seamus” complete with barking dog accompaniment, the breezy confection of “San Tropez” (penned by Waters, of all people) and the mostly instrumental track “Echoes” that comprises the entire second half of the album. Over 23 minutes, “Echoes” drifts from Gilmour’s wistful vocals to strange, even unnerving sound effects and back again. There is no easy way to listen to this album. The shorter tracks and “Echoes” could be from entirely different records. If you’re in the mood for a bit of everything, though, you’re set.
  7. The Final Cut. This is more a Roger Waters solo album than a Pink Floyd effort. Gilmour’s guitar is absent from many songs, he provides only one vocal, and the rest of the tracks are given over to Waters’ overtly political and pessimistic observations of humanity. While there is a consistency in both the music and tone, this is not an easy album to get into, but if you give it time you’ll be rewarded by several standout tracks, from “The Gunner’s Dream” to the now-included “When the Tigers Broke Free” which was previously only found in the film version of The Wall.
  8. A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Why is this ranked last? It began as a David Gilmour solo effort, and indeed a lot of it sounds like Giilmour’s solo album About Face from three years earlier. I have two major problems with the album. The first is the effort to make it sound like Pink Floyd feels overly calculated, as if the female backing vocals, guitar solos, and themes of alienation were items on a checklist. The other problem is the lyrics. While Waters had his excesses and obsessions, he could craft some nice wordplay. Gilmour, even when helped by others, writes mostly in clichés and catchphrases, tackling ‘big’ ideas with trite phrasing. At best the lyrics stay out of the way, at worst they actively work against the song. “One Slip” is a wonderful sounding track, but the lyrics are awful.

I will, I will she sighed to my request
And then she tossed her mane while my resolve was put to the test
Then drowned in desire, our souls on fire
I lead the way to the funeral pyre
And without a thought of the consequence
I gave in to my decadence

“Drowned in desire”? “Our souls on fire”? And I’m not even touching the whole “drowned” followed by “on fire” part. This is just bad and emblematic of the album as a whole. There are some fine songs here. I particularly like the opening instrumental “Signs of Life”, the sprawling closer “Sorrow” and “On the Turning Away”, which has a quiet majesty, even if the lyrics are junior high-level simple. Overall, this is easily the slightest of Pink Floyd’s albums and far from essential.

Happy candy manufacturers appreciation day!

It’s my favourite manufactured holiday of the year–or at least it was when I was a wee lad. Back then I loved scarfing chocolate-coated marshmallow hearts and trading Valentine cards with classmates. Nowadays I try to limit my indulgence of sweets to a few carefully-chosen targets and sadly exchange cards with no one. The face-stuffing has been relegated to a fond, gooey memory.

And so Valentine’s Day is now simply that time of year when store shelves overflowing with Valentine-themed candy will soon be replaced with shelves overflowing with Easter-themed candy. Easter was my second favourite manufactured holiday as a kid because I loved scarfing chocolate-coated marshmallow Easter bunnies. I suppose the holiday itself isn’t manufactured but as a kid I didn’t care much one way or the other because of the chocolate-coated marshmallow Easter bunnies.

Thinking about it now I kind of have a craving for one of those horrifically sweet Cadbury creme eggs they roll out (ho ho) for the season. I just checked and they apparently have only 150 calories each. I say only because the taste suggests the number would be closer to 10,000. I remember when I could eat a 3-pack of the things without stopping to take a breath. By coincidence I also weighed 40 pounds more back then. By fat overindulgent coincidence.

The zombie apocalypse is upon us

You see them everyday, their numbers slowly and steadily increasing. They are identified by the familiar gait, the shambling and mindless shuffle of the unthinking, the unfeeling, the unknowing.

“Must text…must post status update…rarrr…”

I am, of course, referring to cell phone users. At first I thought the novelty of the smartphone would wear off–the iPhone is six years old, after all, a veritable lifetime for a tech product–and people would treat the devices like a tool, a convenience.

Instead I see more and more doing the zombie shuffle as they step off trains or walk down sidewalks ever-so-slowly, their heads tilted down, their eyes focused on the tiny screen clutched in their hands, their world compressed into a glossy four to five inch display, their lives inescapably linked to the information conveyed from those tiny screens.

Most of that information being Facebook updates and other miscellany that they somehow survived without just fine for all the years before the smartphone existed.

I have a smartphone and it’s nice. It can be handy, entertaining and as my only actual phone it serves a very practical purpose in keeping me in communication with family, friends and co-workers. But I do not do the zombie shuffle. The Internet offers a smorgasbord of information–much of it dross or more generously, not particularly necessary or enriching. But instead of being discerning, instead of picking and choosing it seems many are gorging instead, filling up on the information equivalent of fast food.

And even that is not all so bad. I can be a slave to pop culture and fads if I want to be (I managed to duck acid wash jeans, though). Mostly I just hate that these slowly shuffling zombies always seem to end up in front of me.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to be a brainless zombie checking Twitter for your entire six block stroll, can you at least not shamble down the center of the sidewalk when you do it so I can more easily get by you? Thanks!

P.S. I like the stock photo I found not only because it shows people doing the ‘zombie cell phone walk’ but also because the guy appears to be some sort of hill giant.

A short review of Windows 8: 7 out of 10 tiny Bill Gates

I took advantage of the $15 upgrade for Windows 8 back in October thinking it was cheap enough that if I had any regrets I could just go back to Windows 7 and write off the experience as the equivalent of a lunch in a new restaurant I’d not go back to.

Some four months later I’m willing to say the restaurant wasn’t too bad but the presentation of the menu and dessert could use a little work.

The good things about Windows 8:

  • I was able to upgrade my existing Windows 7 installation on my SSD quickly and without issue. The whole thing was up and running in less than half an hour.
  • It works fast and has been extremely stable.
  • Task Manager is vastly improved and startup items are now easily accessible instead of being tucked away in msconfig.exe.
  • Some of the Metro* apps are decent, like the PDF reader and weather. Live tiles can be handy especially if you spend a lot of time on the Start screen (or pin apps — see the ‘bad things’ section below for more).
  • Windows Defender now does everything MS Security Essentials did, so there’s integrated anti-virus right from the start.
  • The right-click in the bottom-left corner is handy for accessing items like Control Panel, Device Manager and an admin command prompt.
  • The desktop is pretty much the same as the one we know and love in Win7 but with lots of small refinements in dialogs for common tasks like copying files.
  • The flat UI is kind of nice in how it gets out of the way.

The bad things about Windows 8:

  • Some things don’t seem to work right. I never get notified for Windows Updates, despite having set it up to alert me, so I have to look for them myself, even if they are critical security fixes.
  • File History, which backs up user data, will appear in Action Center when the drive needs to be reconnected but Action Center never makes itself visible, even when it has multiple alerts.
  • Discoverability is poor. You get shown a few gestures while the OS is installing but after that you are left to bumble around trying to figure out how to access features. A lot of it is not intuitive (try snapping two apps onto the same screen without reading how to do it first–assuming you even knew it was possible to begin with). Much of the potential of Windows 8 is hidden away and items can be difficult to find even if you know they exist.
  • The Start screen is okay as a replacement for the Start menu but it’s limited in odd ways, probably as a compromise for working with tablets. Re-ordering tiles is possible but not very flexible and tiles only come in two sizes. The All Apps view is a cluttered mess with no easy way to modify it.
  • Customization in general is poor. A lot of the UI design is ‘like it or lump it’.
  • I miss the dedicated links to Documents, Pictures, etc. that appeared in the Start menu. In terms of actual clicks it’s still the same but having to go to a different screen feels more cumbersome. You can bring these dedicated folders up by starting File Explorer but it still feels inelegant. I’d at least like to pin shortcuts to these folders on the taskbar but it can only be done on the Start screen. Boo.
  • You get one choice for window titles: black. If you don’t like it, too bad. If you selected a dark border color for your windows, it’s even worse, as those window titles will now be illegible. I’m not sure why this can’t be customized.
  • Most of the included apps (mail, photos, etc.) are half-baked and feature-poor.
  • The store (equivalent to Google Play or Apple’s App Store) has a fairly small selection and is missing some fairly big name apps. On a desktop machine this isn’t as big a deal because if you want Facebook, you can just hit the website. On a tablet this is more of an issue.

I spend nearly all of my time in the desktop away from the Metro* interface (apart from starting programs and occasionally checking the weather or something) and here the experience is so similar to Windows 7 but with (mostly) improvements I don’t regret making the switch to Windows 8. On the other hand if I was forced back to using Windows 7 it wouldn’t feel like a significant downgrade, either, nothing like going back to, say, Windows XP or even Vista.

Microsoft needs to provide a better experience on the Metro* side of things for (desktop) PC users, though. I doubt we’ll see much of that coming for Windows 8 but I am curious to see how Windows 9 will evolve. I suspect it will either better integrate the disparate Metro and desktop elements or further move away from the desktop in favor of a more touch-based experience.

In all I rate Windows 8  a score of 7 out of 10 tiny Bill Gates.

 

* it’s not officially called Metro anymore but much like Kleenex, that battle has been lost.

February 2013 writing update in thrilling 3D

What better way to conclude an evening of spamming posts to my blog than to provide a summary of my current state of writing or SOW as I like to call it (starting just now).

I have divided my writing into four categories, each more daring and fancy than the previous!

Category 1: Blog and forum posts
Status: Firing on all cylinders

I do this sort of writing every day, without effort and often without thought. Whether it’s posting the latest online gaming bargains on Broken Forum or lamenting my inability to float in water on this here blog, this is the one category that is never wanting for output. Each in its own way helps improve my fiction writing, too, by either simply exercising the writing muscles that may atrophy otherwise or through communal efforts like National Novel Writing Month.

Category 2: The Ferry (2009 NaNoWriMo novel)
Status: Like a slow ship steaming along a lazy river

I am slowly working through the second draft of my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel The Ferry. My intention is to do some work on it every day and have it self-published with a decent cover before the end of the year. I will start work on another novel sometime this year, as well.

Category 3: Short stories olde and new
Status: Like a car that sat all winter and you wonder if the battery’s dead but hey it’s not, so you may actually get somewhere

On the olde side I am working on cleaning up 30+ short stories with the intention of putting them together into a single volume to self-publish. I have no set timeframe on this and the stories vary in terms of work needed from minimal to ‘maybe this should be buried in the back yard if I had a back yard’. I am also working on new stories as I think of them, as long as they don’t distract from my novel writing. Unless the stories are so super-awesome that they simply must be written. Yeah.

Category 4: Writing exercises
Status: Uncertain

I have participated in writing exercises on and off since my days as a callow youth in college when I wrote bad poetry (my specialty) right up to having my own website devoted specifically to the task (which started out nicely but collapsed when I could not keep up the silly pace I had set out for myself). As my last few attempts to gather like-minded people to participate has met with middling success I haven’t done anything of late. I’ve decided on a new approach, which is to semi-regularly challenge myself with a particular exercise, complete it, then invite others to do the same and if they do, more to share and if they don’t I’ve already done my bit on keeping myself challenged and engaged.

P.S. Sorry, I lied about the thrilling 3D part.