Discombobulated

Yes, themes, again. I like this one (‘Steira’) but find the idiotically placed quotation marks on my blog’s pithy (yes; I am being sarcastic) subtitle irritating. It’s possible this one won’t last long. I see wordpress is now offering ‘premium themes’ with one-off costs associated with them, advertising them as a point of difference for the discerning blogger. I could never: I switch themes far to often.

Yikes, I’ve been away too long – this is reading like a personal diary entry rather than something that other people might see.

I have been away; and to be honest I wasn’t sure if I would return to the blog. As it is I’m painfully aware of the copious amount of work that needs to be done to get even a rough version completed of the online version of my grandpa’s war diary. It’s hard going though, with the scanner. I just need to get my arse in gear.

I have been busy though: two part time jobs, from which I’ve only recently had a significant break of any kind. Getting up early in the morning to try and rekindle my fiction writing joy (at this stage it’s play; and I like it that way). I’ve been writing a lot of game reviews as well – and just realised yesterday that I’ve now written over one hundred reviews for NZGamer.com, the first of which was written on the 6th of April, 2006, and was an Animal Crossing review I quickly scrapped up to show them I could conceivably write a review. Odd to think I’ve been doing it for five years now.

(Edit: I’m knocking this theme on the head. It does irritating things with links and italics as well.)

:::

Reading: North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

Reviewing: CrimeCraft

Listening: Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

Watching: The Clint Eastwood box set

This letter from the Irish Times Online, on proofreading in the age of the spell checker.

I came across this while reading about the Critters web group. Basically you enter a couple longish (1000 words or so) stories or pieces into the text field, hit “go” and weirdness results.

Here are a few gems that I got:

• A gentle easy-listening tune came back into a migraine.
• Carl thought, as he picked her up and watched the grey sky.
• The oiled pieces Lionel Ritchie sang “EEUNGH!” Safe.
• The girl had to do that sort of coffee with an angel with a strong cold bitter mess by the house held the gun club one out the golden grain But who shall tinge the radio in the shower.
• There, on the work bench.
• He was distracted from hitting a sip of winter.
• The woman still smoked.
• When he woke still in the pantry for sugar, and then was reminded of a crow, and walked barefoot into the thought of info-mercials, astrology commercials and the woman, and then to the couch.
• She nodded to the trees.
• He then started to melt, and smutty late-night programming roll over the house.
• He’d propped the yew and thrusted.
• Carl squeezed the couch.
• He wondered what hope could he?
• Carl slowly began to put her hand against the fridge potato and drove them again, the gun up a little.
• He had horrible nightmares all he wanted to be with him, what he saw.
• Everything, everywhere, had to do some cleaning up, all his clothes tangled in the bright orange pieces.
• Lionel Ritchie was no moon, so cold, and lay there, shivering.
• He yawned and half-wrenched the seat, the couch, and flip him about Jack Frost, who in a stool, and thrusted.
• Carl was usually the girl leapt from the garage for thee It reminded him up and smutty late-night programming roll over to him, playing at something He knelt and reached out to leave but he didn’t know what.
• She nodded, satisfied, and rushed to the toilet.
• Girlish singing in the small radio It was so hot.
• On impulse he had taken Mariah out get dressed, and her ice cube, like an ice that covered with green lichen and saw it wasn’t unusual for him to mention the snow woman.
• Carl realised what Edgar could feel, well-muscled.
• But his feeble protests were serious.
• “That’s nice,” he said grandly, feeling a beautiful Sunday Mornings.
• Sex.
• Something scrabbled high sweet voice as she iced the soft cloth.
• He was distracted from the snow.
• The girl climbed beneath the ash-tray seemed surprised but it was no blood, no time.
• He took his pant legs and feet and pulled off his head.

Just finished reading this fascinating article by Andrew Sullivan, called Why I Blog. It’s more than just a puff piece (of which there have been a few lately); it’s a thoughtful look at blogging’s place in the writing spectrum.

A few quotes:

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.

In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.