I’m sad to report that cleaning up my preferences and stuff last night did not help as much as I hoped, and actually made things, if possible, worse.
Here are my Top 12 Hobbies and Activities according to Facebook right now.
… because naval warfare is not a spectator sport.
But really what offends me, as a former airman, is finding Infantry listed under “Education”.
Maybe dropping out of the frigging Facebook is not a bad idea after all.
OK; a moment of utter silliness…
Last night I saw a piece in New Statestman – you can find it here – about Facebook and what Facebook knows about us.
The basic idea is, you click “Like” on Facebook, their computers collect and collate the data, and they build an in-depth profile they use to aim their advertisement at you.
Yes, Facebook advertisement… those weird ads about stuff you couldn’t care less that pop up once in a while.
So, basically, you log in on Facebook, and then direct your browser here
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences
and start laughing.
Because, admittedly, you realize how far we are from artificial intelligence – and how close we are to artificial dorkness. Continue reading
Last night I completed a long and heavy writing job (because sometimes insomnia is good for you), and to celebrate a job well done I invested 49 eurocents in a 1200 pages ebook.
Because I’m cheap.
But who said that expensive ebooks are better?
The book I gave myself as a good job, old man! gift is called SCIENCE-FANTASY Ultimate Collection: Time Travel Adventures, Sword & Sorcery Tales, Space Fantasies and much more.
Which seems to be just the sort of stuff I like.
And sure is, because the guy that wrote all that stuff was Otis Adelbert Kline – pulp writer, amateur orientalist and frequent contributor to Argosy, Weird Tales (of which he was the editor for one issue) and Oriental Stories.
He was also Robert E. Howard’s literary agent.
Great catch! Continue reading
Davide Pringle interviews Angela Carter in 1979 – beautiful!
I’ve devoted a lot of space recently to my writing, which I realize is boring to a lot of people out there.
Sorry ’bout that. This is my last writing-related post for a while.
Fact is, you know, that talking publicly about what I am about to do forces me to stick to my guns, and actually do it. It’s good motivation.
So here is what I am about to do: I am about to spend tonight revising the last bits of Hope & Glory – the plot point campaign called The Flight of the Ostrich in particular.
Then I will drop everything else for two days and spend those 48 hours doing a short story about Aculeo & Amunet.
I have a few ideas I need to sort out, I can do that tomorrow morning while I am queuing at the tax office, and then I’ll start writing, and in two days I’ll have a 6000-words story, and I will submit it to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress 32.
I learned too late that the submission window for the anthology closes on the 14th of the month, that is this Sunday. And on Saturday I am away for a job, probably.
So I will have to do a sprint-writing thing, and by the evening of the 11th at the latest I need to have my story.
The anthology guidelines specify
Stories should be the type generally referred to as “sword and sorcery” and must have a strong female protagonist whom the reader will care about.
Will the reader care about Amunet, when she is usually so keen telling us she does not care about anybody but herself? Hopefully so.
I’d really love to get into the Sword & Sorceress anthology – apart from being an excellent market, it is also an excellent showcase for an author.
And if I’ll get tangled in some other thing and I’ll miss the deadline, because it is a well known fact that we must expect the unexpected, well, I’ll have another Aculeo & Amunet story, and I will look for other markets.
The good bit about writing is that nothing gets wasted.
But enough talking about writing!
Wish me luck.
I’ve been asked by a friend a few suggestions about setting up a pulp-themed scenario for a roleplaying game.
And who am I to deny the masses my wisdom?
Especially when the masses acknowledge me as a pulp guru?
So here’s what I wrote him…
Writing pulp means pleasing your audience by giving them what they do not expect while promising them what they expect.
In roleplaying, your players are your audience, so the first thing is to know your players, their tastes and expectations. And then surprise them.
Easy, right?The balance between familiarity and surprise is mainly achieved through the manipulation of clichés and tropes, with a few gimmicks to put the pressure on. Continue reading
I mentioned planetary romance, yesterday, and one thing led to another and I ended up browsing Amazon, using “planetary romance” as a search string.
And I chanced upon a fat list of Dray Prescott/Alan Burt Akers novels set on the planet Kregen, orbiting Antares, in the Scorpio constellation. The series was originally published by DAW between 1972 and 1988, and that’s how I remember it: thin books with yellow backs and garish covers.
The digital omnibuses are pretty expensive at 9 bucks per shot, but I was happy to see they are still available: when first published in Italy in the ’70s, the series stopped at volume 3 – that is exactly 49 volumes before the end of the series, or 2 books away from the closing of the first story arc. The readers were not amused, and the availability, forty years on, of the electronic texts had been saluted, by those that still remembered Dray Prescott’s exploits, as a welcome opportunity to learn how things ended… or how they went on, actually.
Continue reading
Karavansara 