I’ve always been more of a paper person than anything else; I like the feel of a book in my hands, flipping the pages, discovering the story one page at a time. I’ve tried e-books and podcasts, but neither have become a habit, and they are sometimes downright a pain to go through.
A couple of months ago, however, I went and tried an audiobook of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It was slow going at the start, but by the third night, I was lying in bed in the wee hours of the morning, tired beyond belief, and still listening to the damn audiobook. I had to admit, if I was reading a book, I’d have succumbed to sleep a couple of hours before as I would probably have started seeing double by then.
I’ve tried a couple more audiobooks since then: an abridged version of His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, Sabriel and Lirael by Garth Nix (I had to buy it–Tim Curry was narrating!), The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. Right now, I’m listening to The Great Hunt, also by Jordan, because I finished the first while recuperating in the Philippines and couldn’t find the second book there.
I also found that I was “in the moment” more often than when I was reading: it was easier to be swayed by the emotions in the book than usual. Admittedly, this owes a great deal to the talent of the narrator, but I think it’s also caused in part because of the different kind of concentration that I need to do to listen to an audiobook. Certainly, reading a book warrants your full attention: it’s not like watching TV where you can listen in on the background and only spare a couple glances at the screen, but still understand what’s going on. But this is a different kind of attention, one that I’m not used to, so much that it feels like a higher level of concentration, and thus, a higher level of involvement.
An audiobook convert?
Well, not quite. The availability of audiobooks doesn’t replace having the actual book for me. I still buy the books–I read Catching Fire and Mockingjay as books. I still read faster than I listen.
But audiobooks now have a place in my reading life: I’ve decided that audiobooks are good for first-time reading, usually allotted to the first book in a series I was interested in (such as The Hunger Games, His Majesty’s Dragon, and The Eye of the World).
My approach to it is likely tied to the fact that I get an audiobook a month from my subscription at Audible, so it “feels” like I have a free book a month that I can be a little more adventurous. Certainly, the audiobook doesn’t really take up bookshelf space, which is at a premium. *pets bookshelf*
Writing processes have always intrigued me. I love reading what methods and processes various writers have when they work, if they write by hand or direct to computer, or if they hire someone to type it all, or if they record themselves and transcribe. To be sure, I’ve wanted to try many different writing work flows, but none has stuck yet–aside from what I’ve been doing when I was younger, as a writer and an editor of the school newspaper.
My writing work flow
I write on my computer, and then I print it out, double-spaced, a page per sheet. And then I take a red pen. And I massacre it with editorial marks.
What this does for me is a sense of accomplishment, at almost every stage of the writing process. When I’m done with my story, when I’m ready to clean up that first draft, a thick printout serves as my “congratulations for making it this far!” It’s closure. It’s a tangible output, something I can hold, hug, and kiss in the darkness of my room where no one will think I am odd. It’s the end. I HAVE DONE IT!
And the red markings? Oh boy. We are always our harshest critic, and seeing the page marked up with corrections, notes, and various curly stuff–it’s also a sense of accomplishment. At the end of the editing, to see the once-immaculate pile of sheets wrinkled, slightly off-kilter, and filled with squiggly lines–it is glorious. I know I did my job.
Then I go through another round, but this time there’s not a lot to go through. Things that I missed, stuff that I thought would sound better, but they don’t. Close friends might also take a peek at this stage, but it’s seldom. I’ve rarely needed to go through a third pass-through, but then the dozen stories-to-be-turned-to-novels in my hard drive were never printed out, and short stories (the bulk of my published writing) generally don’t need such an involved process.
Other interesting processes
As mentioned, I’ve always been intrigued with how other writers do it. Going through a “writing reboot” as I am, now would be the best time to sit down and familiarize myself with a new way of doing things.
I’ve heard of a couple interesting ones:
Recording oneself, then transcribing it manually or with some tool or service;
Writing everything by longhand, and then typing it out manually or by scanning it in and getting it converted;
Writing everything on different pieces on note cards, easy to switch scenes around;
Using a specific software with its own work flow.
Do you know of any interesting work flows, or do you have a particular one which works for you?
I'm talking about: Foursquare and location-based services
I lead a relatively “visible” online life. I tweet and I blog, and I’ve been active in various communities and places ever since I’ve been online. I know a good number of people online, consider one of my best friends someone I met online, and a lot more people know of me through the Internet though I might not know them.
But Foursquare (and other location-sharing services) has never been an option for me. I realize you can limit visibility of your updates, but why will I want the world to know exactly where I am? I can understand the glamor of it if I travel–hey, I’m in Paris, and now I’m in Rome, booyah!–but I lead a rather normal, boring life. I wake up in the morning and get to work, and after work I either go home or pass by a place or two before retiring. Occasionally things are exciting: I have a dinner party to go to, or a trip for business or vacation.
But do I really want someone to have the ability to walk up to me and say “Hi! You’re angelamaria, I know you through the so-and-so website! I saw you were here on Foursquare and thought I’d say hi!”
Antisocial? Maybe, but I think it comes with the realization I have a lot less privacy than I thought I had.
There is no such thing as privacy online
I know the very idea of leading a vibrant online life seems to say the opposite: there is no such thing as privacy. Once it’s on the Internet, it’s there forever. And having been here for a long time, I’ve become a lot more protective of my anonymity.
“But I thought you said you liked online visibility!”
I know, I’m in a bit of a pickle, aren’t I? It’s just another juggling game. These services online–a lot of them are free, of no monetary cost to use, but you do give them something in exchange for using their services: your privacy. Sometimes the trade is fair, and sometimes it’s not enough. It’s up to each individual to find out where that fine line is.
A friend recently said that it seems that as we get older, we get a little more conservative with sharing. That’s completely true for me:
2000 – 2003 (thereabouts) – I had an online journal hosted on my website, maintained by hand. No permissions “system”. There were sometimes “hidden” links.
2001 – Livejournal created.
2002 – 2009 – Livejournal generally public, with friends-locked entries. As the years went on, I had more and more friends locked entries, and made heavier use of group filters.
2009 – present – Livejournal completely locked to public and contains only friends-only entries.
As I got older, privacy online has become more and more of an issue. People knowing what you had for breakfast is harmless for me, but people I don’t know knowing where to go find me to harass me is another matter.
And that’s why you’ll never find me in Foursquare ;)
I moved to my own place early last August, and have been spending a fair amount of time in the kitchen. I've never been much of a cook, but I'm pleased at the chance to experiment and learn at my own pace, with fun and without pressure.
gamewhims, a irresistible, breathtaking, inescapable and sagacious lady
For the past couple of months, I’ve been dabbling in a new browser game called Echo Bazaar, a turn-based role-playing game. They are currently in beta, which means that many things may be subject to change in the journey to 1.0-hood. Recently, they updated game mechanics to remove a slow-refresh feature, introducing a hard limit on how many actions you can play every 24 hours. Users have a pool of 70 actions everyday that refresh at a normal rate of seven minutes per action; prior to the change, after these 70 actions are spent, the refresh rate goes down to 70 minutes per action.
In their blog post regarding this change, the reasoning for the removal is that users do not get as much out of the slow refresh rate, in return for niggling, annoying bugs (countdown going to negative, for example), possible well-known “exploits”, and spending a lot of time on support due to users not understanding the slow refresh mechanics.
The change is a controversial one, ranging from those who love it and those who are strongly against it. While I’m far from being on the warpath on this, this change initially did spark a strong sense of disappointment (and feelings of betrayal? “How dare they limit how much I play!”, lol). Along with it, however, are thoughts on gaming and communities in general. Echo Bazaar is far from hardcore gaming, but as a gamer and as someone who works on community-related projects, I am interested in the issue not just as another user but as an…intellectual puzzle, if you will.
What is Echo Bazaar?
The game, which won Best Browser-Based Game in the 2009 Escapist Awards, is set in London–Fallen London, that is. You have been sent down to the ‘Neath, situated “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell”. What you do, what you live for (as death is not permanent in the ‘Neath) is all up to you.
The call of Echo Bazaar is the prose. Oh, the prose. The prose is simply beautiful. You are not simply a success with the audience, they are
…quietly captivated. Your poetry ravishes. Your music entrances. Your drama transports. They love you, today. They may even love you tomorrow. You are toasted with fine wine.
I knew of the prose before I knew the game: I’d been seeing a friend tweet random snippets with the #ebz hash tag, until, my curiosity piqued at the charming little phrases, I clicked through. And was hooked.
The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Quick as a ratgun! Sharp as a gnat!
“Whose name’s on your collar Mr Starveling Cat?” “Come closer, my dear, if you want to read that…”
Starveling Kitty! Starveling Kitty! Ruled the roofs of five stolen cities!
Just who is this Starveling Cat?! It called out to me, and continue to keep me interested through various content updates.
The good things about the change
I can well imagine the relief the Echo Bazaar team had in washing their hands of this feature. I’ve noticed the glitches, the times when my refresh timer would dip into the negative, and it was distracting and “annoying” at first, but in time, I learned to ignore it. (Clarification: it was “annoying” for me because as a frontend engineer, I felt like, but why can’t you fix it! Call the server again at any time the timer is at negative when uer does an action! Of course, it’s not that simple with all systems.) And since it seems that a lot of users have been complaining about the bugs, or is unable to grasp this feature, to be able to say “okay, it’s gone now! Don’t bother us anymore!” is something I have wanted to be able to say multiple times myself ;)
This freeing up of resources, specifically time (which is, as we all know, gold), allows the team to work on other things. Better things. More narratives, more features, fix other bugs. This can only be good.
The hard limit of 70 actions a day also frees up users from feeling any sense of obligation from playing the game. Personally, the knowledge that an action is slowly trickling in does not completely free up my RAM, so to speak. If I get home at 9pm, I quickly open up my machine because my 24-hour refresh will be up soon, and I want to use whatever actions I have managed to get during the exhausted timeframe. I have Echo Bazaar on a tab in my browser at almost all times of the day, for a quick run through my ten actions (I am at end game, or nearly at end game whenever they raise the content cap: that means I’m either just farming items, or quickly going through opportunity cards, or cycling through content I’ve done before; new players or arrival of new content would likely not run through the actions as quickly).
With the hard limit, once the middle of the day hits (which is usually when I’ve used up all my actions), I can finally file Echo Bazaar away. There is nothing more to be done for that day, no matter what I do, so my brain shuts it out of active RAM. I’m free.
But there are bad things about the change, too
I do most of my world-exploring during the slow-refresh period. With an “unlimited” pool of actions (it’s arriving slower, but it’s there), I don’t mind listening to a friend’s Nightmares; endlessly trying out a low-yield storylet to get a Rare Success that increases a minor, hard-to-get quality; trying dubious actions; etc. With the slow refresh rate, I can pretty much endlessly flip through my opportunity cards for nice cards to use up (after 70 minutes, when I have another action) which frees my hand for other opportunity cards which I can flip through. This pretty much means I am always going back to the site to “look for stuff to do”. As a roleplaying game, user exploration and immersion is a big thing.
With the implementation of a hard cap (it is not a “bug fix” as some are saying: a bug fix fixes bugs, not removes the feature), once my 70 actions are up, there is no more reason for me to go back any time that day. I can’t do anything on the site anyway, so there is no reason (or maybe, alibi) for me to go back and flip through my cards (and my hand will fill quickly anyway with cards I’d like to “save” for later use). Once I reach the hard cap, I turn off the game.
If you’re an Internet company, having people always on your website is the name of the game. (It’s probably not limited to Internet companies, but that’s the type of company I know.) People are always harping about user engagement. Pageviews are fine and dandy, but it’s engagement that wins the community, because it is engagement that keeps your users loyal and clicking all those pages. Oh, your servers will take a hit with all that traffic and usage. Your servers might go down. But you know what? That’s the kind of problem that’s great to have. Your users love you! They can’t get away from you! They try but they keep checking back!
How cool is that?
Unfortunately, this particular user’s engagement with the game is slowing down.
The monetary angle
One thread of thought that has surfaced in the discussions about this change is the subject of Fate. Fate keeps Echo Bazaar afloat. Users can buy Fate, which allows them to do some special things, “premium” things, which are not necessary to play the game. One of those things is to get extra actions. If I’m out of actions, or I can’t wait for my actions to trickle in, I can buy Fate and get actions. We all win.
(Yes, I bought Fate for actions when I was relatively new to the game and the honeymoon period was in full swing. I don’t know how much I’ve purchased, but it probably rivaled my World of Warcraft yearly subscription. And I bought for two accounts. *nods sagely*)
Edited to add: I’ve just done the math, and yes–I spent around 60% more on Echo Bazaar than on WoW on a monthly basis (i.e., total Fate purchase divided by number of months I’ve been playing Echo Bazaar).
One line of thought in this Fate thread is that with a hard cap, people will buy more Fate because they can’t get any more for the day. That seems like a sound conclusion. But as I’ve gone through a day of playing with the new mechanics, I feel–and some others feel the same–that it’s giving me the opposite effect. There is no reason to buy Fate while I have my 70 actions. But after that seventy actions, if I’m not even on the site, how will I be compelled to buy Fate to get to that very tempting storylet/card?
I have a feeling that the sort of people who will be “reliable” Fate-buyers would be the same people who would spend on a monthly subscription to play a game (*cough*). But if I’m a gamer who sits down on a specific time each day to play games, and then get up afterwards and forget about it–I’d be less likely to need to buy Fate. I would be more likely to buy the “second candle” feature that was rolled out in the same time, so I suppose only time will tell if purchases of the second candle will be enough. Having no knowledge of how things are, I have no idea how “popular” Fate-buying for actions is. Maybe it just wasn’t enough, and the second candle just might do the trick.
The game has changed
Time will tell if the good things outweigh the bad. I can only comment on how it’s affected my gameplay and my view on how it may affect Echo Bazaar from a web professional’s point of view. Not all games need to have hardcore users that will stay on it almost 24/7; not all games need to take over the world.
I finished Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay the week it went out. Mockingjay is the third and final book in Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, which follows Katniss Everdeen in the dystopian country of Panem. The Capitol forces the twelve Districts to obedience, and one way they do this is to force each of the districts to send a boy and a girl each year to take part in the Hunger Games: a fight to the death in an arena filled with horrors (as if having 23 other people hunting you for sport isn’t horror enough).
The verdict
The book is gripping and well-written, and I found myself nodding emphatically at some phrases and events that happen in delight at just how Collins pieced together the story and brought her characters to life. However, the epic scale of the war going on, and everything that is happening all around Katniss, soon detracted from the book. I enjoyed the first part immensely; the latter half, I felt I was just barreling along to get to the next scene, and the next scene, and the next scene.
The things that I loved about Katniss changed, necessary changes for the story, but this–along with the limitations of the first person narrative–detracted from my enjoyment of the latter half of the book. So many things happened, especially in the latter part of the book, that I felt more and more distanced away from the characters. I also felt that some story threads didn’t end right: I don’t have a problem with endings that don’t go the way I would like them to be, but if it’s right, I still enjoy the ending. These didn’t feel right.
Mockingjay certainly won’t be my favorite book of the series: I think that the first book, The Hunger Games is still the best book of the series, hands down. I always finish what I started, though, and Mockingjay does deliver well.
So what exactly went on?
There were two things that harmed the latter half of the book for me: Katniss, and Gale. Yes, separate, not together: I agree it was right that Katniss should have ended with Peeta. But that’s about it in terms of what was right about the ending.
Katniss did not feel like Katniss when I needed her to be Katniss. Who is the Girl on Fire? Brave and courageous, maybe reckless; someone who did things, who made things happen, who didn’t roll over and play dead. But where was she, in the last part of the book?
She was fainting in the middle of action.
She was being prodded along the wave of the war, doing this and doing that.
She was almost completely zoned out in the end. In the end! Where we needed her!
We had to come to terms with her choosing Peeta when we only had Peeta with us for half the book, and the real Peeta for only an eighth of the book.
I mentioned earlier that the first person perspective of the book harmed the ending for me. I understand why Katniss was zoned out and unable to Get Things Done. But coupled with her numerous fainting/zoned-out moments in the rest of the book, us having zombie!Katniss during the ending just didn’t help things along for me. How do I associate wife!Katniss with Girl-on-Fire!Katniss? There is nothing to bridge the two together; they are very different people. “Reader, I married him” endings are tricky, and this just failed to end the book with the right note for me.
Second, Gale Hawthorne. Oh, Gale. It’s alright that you didn’t get the girl, you can have me instead because you are awesome as you are, anyway. I didn’t agree with some of the things Gale did and pushed for in the book: his take-no-prisoners attitude was certainly troubling. But it was war, and nobody is perfect–I like my heroes and heroines that way. Did it mean he was a abhorrence? Not at all.
But the way Gale’s storyline ended–could you have emasculated him even more?
Gale said that the only thing he had going for him was his ability to keep Katniss’s family alive. He doesn’t get the girl, but he doesn’t get even that? Not one shred of dignity left? If it’s to be a “lesson” against having “fire, kindled with rage and hatred”, it was ill done. Making harsh decisions during wartime does not make you a monster.
Also, he was given such a high profile throughout Mockingjay; he has a lot of page-time, and he really shines clear and bright through the pages. And then, in the end, what do we have of him? A cop-out of an ending. A brief cameo of his emasculation. And then a gossipy mention by Greasy Sae about him “in a fancy job”. There is nothing else. I could almost see the scorn dripping from the pages. He wasn’t even given death: death was too good for him, he should have a “fancy job”.
I agree that Katniss and Peeta together was the right ending. If both boys had to live, then Peeta was the right man for the job. But Gale being written off the way he was, and Peeta not being Peeta for most of the book, coupled with the less-personal feel of the latter half of the book just dragged the book down for me in the “like” factor.
(Disclaimer: I like Peeta. I think he is a dear, sweet boy. I was distraught about his hijacking, and if he had ended up not reclaiming his right mind, I would have been just as indignant about his storyline as I am about Gale’s storyline.)
What about you? Did the book end on a high note for you, or did you feel as I do?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said that I’m “getting back into blogging” and then failing. I’d have to succeed at some point! Where that particular point is, I’ve yet to find: but recently I’ve come across various articles (starting from Smashing Magazine’s Blogging for Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides) revolving on having an editorial calendar for your blog, which have served as inspiration to train myself to write on schedule.
As a child, I used to write stories, or parts of stories, every day. That changed when I got into college, and ever since then I’ve been struggling to write. As an adult, there are so many things that get in the way: jobs, responsibilities, chores, and the fear of failure. So I either never get around to writing (non-journally writing, that is), or when I do, it feels like nothing more than a chore.
I’ve read something a long time ago, from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, which I haven’t really done: writing on demand, on schedule.
The important thing is that at the moment, on the dot of the moment, you are to be writing…
There is a deep inner resistance to writing which is…likely to emerge at this point…. This will begin to “look like business” to the unconscious, and the unconscious does not like these rules and regulations until it is well broken in to them;… If you consistently, doggedly, refuse to be beguiled, you will have your reward. The unconscious will suddenly give in charmingly, and begin to write gracefully and well.
- Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer
Most professional writers (journalists, authors, professional bloggers, what-have-you) probably do the same thing–they have trained themselves to write on demand, to write according to a specific schedule. I’ve never really done this before, although I keep a journal I write regularly in.
It’s time to try and take this to another level, and train myself to write on schedule about other things other than my life (heh). It’s not exactly creative writing, but it’s a start!
Enter Whimsical.nu’s editorial calendar!
The current week in my editorial calendar plugin!
So that’s my blog’s calendar week, using the WordPress plugin Editorial Calendar (with the CSS slightly hacked). I’ve decided to plan out my blogging schedule, and since my blog has five main topics, they fit nicely into one week’s worth of posts (weekends kept free-for-all, but likely to be quiet unless there are time-sensitive things to be written about). Jonathan Thomas’s post at ProBlogger on How to Develop a Niche Blog Content Plan was a good read when I was coming up with this schedule.
The colors should be self-explanatory and correspond to the colors I’ve always had for my blog’s major sections:
Miss Monday – for posts about life, living, and various other personal odds and ends
Tech Tuesday – geeky rambles about the web and tech subjects
Writing Wednesday – musings about my writing pursuits
Thursday Text – for posts on reading and books
Fun Friday – what better way to wrap up the week with games and fun things?
Yes, those are very cheesy weekly names ;) I won’t be renaming my categories or anything, they’re just a cute (uh…) moniker for my blogging week. Based off from Jonathan’s post, Mondays and Fridays are light days, so I’ve reserved the Girl and Gamer posts for those days. The Writer category for Wednesday just felt right, I put Reader on Thursday because I like having a backup plan using Booking Through Thursday, and, well, Tuesday was what’s left for tech posts. ;) It’s just a nice coincidence that I found good topic-related words to pair up with the day of the week (okay, except for the Writer category).
Initially I thought of going by post type–such as a review every Wednesday and a list every Friday–but as I started to work on the calendar itself, it just made a lot more sense to do it by category as there’s less resistance: I don’t have to re-acquaint myself with a different color legend. That said, posts for each category will run the gamut of types from reviews, tutorials, and even simple photo posts.
It will be challenging to keep to the schedule and have a post for every day of the week, but a challenge I’d like to start. I already have a couple post ideas for some of the incoming weeks, and none for some categories–so it seems the challenge will come early!
As they say–it only takes two weeks to build a habit. Let’s see how far it takes before this becomes a habit for me. ;)
I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. There’s too little of Singapore to fall off of it already ;) I’ve been journaling and twittering, but hardly ever blogging for the time being, and my falling-out-of-love with my older layout just made it worse. So, a new layout! I’ve experimented with 1.) customizing other people’s layouts and 2.) not bothering with customizing other people’s layouts, but somehow nothing ever sticks. Maybe pre-made themes and layouts is just really for my journal, eh?
That said, this layout has been around three months in the making! I have had two other layouts that I’ve tried to work with, but I haven’t gotten to coding it up when I got tired of them; let’s hope this one sticks for a good bit. It had better stick–this is probably one of the most involved themes I’ve done, on par with–probably exceeding–my last theme for Indiscripts.
So of course I will have to point out just what I loved about making this theme!
Slide-out tray. That “+” you see on the upper-left? Yes, that slides out (okay, it widens out…I spent half a day trying to figure out how to make it slide out but then I couldn’t be bothered) to reveal site menu and a couple of things you’d usually see in a blog sidebar. Not a lot, because it’s all just noise and clutter. Some menu items also expand.
Category menu. If you’re looking at the blog index, you won’t see anything, but browsing through a category or viewing a single post page will replace the category menu item on the left with a HUGE tab. *pets it*
HTML5. I don’t fancy feeling like such a beginner all over again, that’s for sure. I’ve started to familiarize myself with some HTML5 tags, but I fear this might be a repeat of 1998: Angela bungling along putting weird tags in weird places.
Whimsical.nu logo! It’s not very inspired, I know. I’m not a logo designer person. But I like it anyway.
Comments form! Come on, I know you want to click it. I’ve never really changed out the WordPress comments form layout before (except for *drum rolls* that last layout in Indiscripts), but doing this was quite fun.
Single post next/previous link toggle. My, that was a mouthful. Now, if you wanted to cycle through previous and next posts in the same category while looking at single post pages, you can click on the placement indicator in the paginator at the bottom of the post, and change the paginator to cycle through the category instead of the chronological next/previous post. This needs a bit more work: a way for the setting to be “sticky”, for example.
Simpler category link. Now you can get to each major category by going to whimsical.nu/category-name instead of needing to use whimsical.nu/category/category-name. This makes it much easier to share my top category links without it needing to be within the context of the whole blog: whimsical.nu/gamer, for example, looks like a standalone link than whimsical.nu/category/gamer.
Archives page! Now, I know it looks quite plain, but I ended up hacking my WordPress a bit for wp_get_archives to show headings for the monthly archive and the alphabetical archive. So it may not look like much, but it’s much shinier now!
In line with the revamp, I’ve gone through all older posts and pages and removed a number of them: script-only updates, “website revamp!” posts without any other content, and scripts documentation. Script-y things will stay at my scripts archive, which will soon get a little sprucing-up; it seems things are b0rked at the moment.
Let me know if you see anything amiss (IE issues may still be skulking around, but feel free to let me know!), or have questions/comments/weird trivia on the revamp ;)
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