Pulp Fiction Cover Art

Someone has posted a really fun gallery of pulp novel cover art over at Flickr.

Check it out.

Need iWork Templates?

iWork from Apple is nearly a complete package now that there is a spreadsheet application called Numbers. However, as great as the templates that come with the suite are you can always do with more. Here are some places that have additional templates:

iworkcommunity (lots of free ones)
KeynotePro (they sell their templates so I have no idea how good they actually are)
Jumsoft has some very orange ones for sale.
Oneeyedgoldfish has some for sale and a free one.

Those are about the best I could find. I'm sure there are more floating around though.

Backing Up Your Writing To Gmail

I love Gmail. LOVE IT. I've been using gmail since the very early days of it's inception because a good friend of mine invited me. Since Gmail is no longer invitation only and it lets you keep over 2 GBs of mail you can use it as a handy backup place for small files. I think the current upload limit per-email is 20MBs.

What I did is create a gmail account solely for the purpose of archiving some of my writing and small files like photos and such. The great thing is that most word processing documents are tiny so I .zip them and email them to my archive account and I have access to them from just about anywhere there is a computer. And they sit there, safe and sound until I need them. It's become a habit now to email documents and small files to this account so I know I'll have them when I need them. It's like a manually operated Mozy.com that only needs a web browser.

Book Plots In A Minute

Book-A-Minute Classics features descriptions of famous novel's plots that are so condensed some are only three sentences long.

If you thought Reader's Digest had condensed books...

Unintended Plagiarism

Maybe I should call it Accidental Plagiarism instead. Back in 2002, Pete Hamill penned a novel entitled "Forever" which is about a character named Cormac O' Connor:

Cormac was killed centuries ago ... and brought back to life _ eternal life. Granted immortality, he lives in Manhattan, still bearing the scar of his fatal wound, learning to play the piano, romancing the city's women until he finds the one who can grant him peace.

So, soon Fox will air a tv series about:

[A] lead character [who was] killed centuries ago ... and brought back to life - eternal life. Granted immortality, he lives in Manhattan ...

If you read the article you'll read about some other similarities between the two stories. Similarities that Fox is claiming have nothing to do with one another...it's all coincidence. And it very well may be. There are so many creative works out there that every now and again two ideas will be birthed which will be twins only from different mothers. But there's something else going on here I think.

If you take the premise of these works there's a natural tendency to create similar story arcs and rules. New York is a happening romantic place, immortals are usually battle-damaged (in fact it's estimated that if you were immortal you'd only live to be about 500 before, based on guesstimation, you'd die in some horrible body destroying accident), immortals would be lonely and they'd have lots of time to learn complex things. The initial premise, to me at least, seems to lend itself to a natural flow of components to the tale and character.

Then there's the old film Highlander too...lets not forget that one about Connor MacLeod, the scarred immortal, who lives in New York...etc...etc...


Connor and his Piano


Connor's Scars

Bonus Pithy Remark: While we're talking about immortals, why hasn't anyone made a decent film about Count of St Germain who also played piano (among a zillion other things)?

3 Million Dollar Book

Roger Shashoua is offering a diamond-encrusted edition of his new book Dancing With The Bear for the sum of three million dollars.

He says Russian tycoons are the target readers for the made-to-order book which features more than 600 flawless diamonds.

The book is an account of how the author made £100m through business in post-Soviet Russia.

I'm offering my unpublished book for 10Million dollars. I haven't finished it yet and I don't have any real ideas other than the title which will be "How To Sucker Rich People Into Buying Crap They Don't Need, To Fulfill Their Empty Souls And Lives Devoid Of Purpose".

Bean, a free word processor.

Bean has been updated. It's a simple word processor for OS X that many people like because of it's small footprint and low requirements yet it has enough features to be handy. It's actually quite nice for things like NanoWrimo or using on older hardware.

Features

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:
a live word count
a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
date-stamped backups
autosaving
a page layout mode
an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
easy to use menus
remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

What Bean doesn't do

Bean doesn't do footnotes, customized headers and footers, columns, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).
Also, no OpenDocument (.odt) format support (but it's coming with OS X Leopard).

Give it a try and see if you like it here. Oh, and it's free.

Cheap G4 iBooks

otherworldcomputing.com has a few used G4 iBooks for sale for around $500 USA. They get these specials in every few months it seems. I've bought one G3 iBook from them and one G4 iBook because at $500 or less (the G3 iBook was around $250 I think) they're -as far as I'm concerned- disposable electronic typewriters that can also do email and surf the web.

They're dinged up, scratched and usually the keyboards are a little warped but they run Mac OS X 10.4.x, Pages (albeit slowly on the G3) and can take a beating overall.

The G4 iBook I just bought has a battery that "ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo" tells me has only been power cycled 23 times, the screen has one tiny dead pixel way off to the side and the keyboard was a tiny bit warped which was easily bent back into shape.

I love these things because I don't care if they live or die and I ALWAYS back up my new writing with Mozy AND to a tiny flashdrive at least once a day. I take one with me everywhere because I never know when I'll need or want a typewriter.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary

I'll freely admit I'm a sciolistising lexiconophilist, heck, I even know the difference between hypnopompic and hypnogogic but if you want some really fun words check out the Grandiloquent Dictionary.

Rummaging around the site I get a distinct whiff of sniglets but of the handful of words I randomly tested several were listed in a few online dictionaries. They even have a convenient pdf to download.

But I'm no logastellus, that's for sure. Logophile sure...

Worthless Word of the Day

I'm a word junkie (yes, there's a word for that heheh) so one of my daily sites is the Worthless Word of the Day.


I highly recommend it for such morsels as:

suffisance
cumulose
obscurantist
subreption

and the hilarious:
helliferocious & ambisinister

p.s. no, it's not wordphile, it's logomaniac.

Quotation and Punctuation Marks

I've always been terribly confused with how punctuation works when it's around quotation marks. Do they go on the inside, or outside and how on Earth can you always know? I did a search for it and found this on some quotation marks page:

Inside or outside
Punctuation marks are placed inside the quote marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation (this system is referred to as logical quotation).
Correct: Arthur said that the situation is “deplorable”.
(When a sentence fragment is quoted, the period is outside.)
Correct: Arthur said, “The situation is deplorable.”
(The period is part of the quoted text.)
Incorrect: Martha asked, “Are you coming”?
(When quoting a question, the question mark is inside because the quoted text itself was a question.)
Correct: Did Martha say, “Come with me”?
(The very quote is being questioned, so here, the question mark is correctly outside; the period is omitted.)

From the quotation marks wiki page we find this:

In both styles, question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside or outside quoted material on the basis of logic, but colons and semicolons are always placed outside[2]:
Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”?
No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?”
In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English.

So it's fairly simple: if what you're quoting has punctuation, put it within, but if it doesn't, put it on the outside.

The Gender Genie

The Gender Genie purports to autoMagically discern your gender from your blog posts (although I suspect any bit of writing would suffice). What would be fun to do is to test it out with the same blog post and see if minor variances in the way the text was constructed affect the results. For example, I suspect that the more non-contraction word sets one uses would shift its results to that of female since, in my experience at least, I've noticed that females tend to write out "do not" more than they use "don't". But that's me.

Anyways, check it out here.

Just in case you're wondering, this blog post -what's above this sentence at least- caused it to think I'm female. I guess that just means I'm more sensitive than the average male :)

The Literature Author

The Literature Author generates text in several different styles. It uses rather difficult words, but at least they sound genuine. Best results are achieved when used with language you have some knowledge of.
A mathematically oriented aquintance told the algorithm has something to do with Markov Chains.

Try it out here.

Short, Short Stories

This site (which I can't read yet somehow know about) wants short, short stories. The stories have to fit in 160 characters so they can be SMS'd to people. That's pretty cool.

For comparison, this message is 64 words long.

The Sounds of A Writer

Do you miss the old days of actually hearing more than your keyboard when you type? For me I love the visceral sound of typebars striking a ribbon or even the 70's typeballs in Selectrics. Ever wanted to make your computer sound like a typewriter?

If you're using Mac OS X here's how, for free:

01) Launch System Preferences.
02) Hit Universal Access
03) Hit Keyboard
04) Turn "Slow Keys" ON
05) Tick "Use click key sounds"
06) Set "Acceptance Delay" to Short

It's also not a bad joke to play on friends.