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Preamble (you can skip this) /r/plotholes is one of my least favorite subreddits, mostly because there simply aren’t that many plotholes in popular films and books. What the sub gets filled with instead, as often pointed out by commenters there, are questions that seek explanation or clarification of the plot, or questions that point out […]

What’s serial fiction? Serial fiction is any form of fiction that’s published serially, rather than all at once. Technically speaking, any long series of books is serial fiction, but here, it mostly means something that’s put out chapter-by-chapter, and usually written chapter-by-chapter as well rather than being done before the first chapter goes out. This […]

Note: I plan on publishing this as it’s written through fictionpress.com or some other platform, so if you want to be surprised, this is your cue to leave. Characterization I have occasional problems with keeping characterization consistent, especially if I don’t start with a clear idea in my head about who they are. This is an […]

Note: I plan on publishing this as it’s written through fictionpress.com or some other platform, so if you want to be surprised, this is your cue to leave. Magic I love magic, mostly because I love things that break the universe in various ways. Magic is a fairly difficult thing to get right though. Sanderson’s first […]

I’ve done National Novel Writing Month for the past few years, which results in a lot of writing but not much that’s usable. I’m totally fine with that, since writing is a muscle that you have to build up over time, and this coming November I plan to take the challenge again. In the hopes […]

Sometimes I wish that I’d taken more stats, so that I could do some better plotting of data. Either way, the sample of books I read in 2011 is probably too small to be meaningful. However, just for kicks, here’s some data in chart form. Authors This graph by nationality is pretty unsurprising, as all […]

This is the third part of a three-part series. Part one, part two are available for perusing. I finished up the last book of the year at 10:20 PM on 12/31/2011, just barely meeting my self-imposed goal of sixty books for the year. I did National Novel Writing Month for November, which slowed me down […]

Alright, so I was cruising reddit the other day and found a python script that mines through your comment history and pulls all that information into a text file. I immediately did so. One small downside of this is that only the last three months of comment history are stored for access from your comment […]

First, some definition of terms. When I talk about brain uploading, I mean making a copy of the brain with virtual neurons, virtual chemicals and virtual chemical receptors. I’m also starting with the premise that this virtual copy contains that nebulous quantity I’ll dub “youness”, though obviously that’s up for debate. I consider it to […]

Superman has always bugged me. The idea of dressing up in a special outfit and going to fight crime I can sort of understand, but it makes more sense for Batman than for Superman. Batman devotes nearly his whole life to fighting crime; even those token times spent as Bruce Wayne serve mostly to provide […]

I’ve gotten through another twenty books since last time. This puts me about a month ahead of schedule in my reading, which means that I might just have time to read Infinite Jest after all. The Magicians by Lev Grossman – Cynical and somehow still wondrous, and offers a nice variety of emotional impacts. Bossypants […]

Let me be upfront: this whole blog post is about how much I hate the phrase “Life begins at conception”. The problem is twofold. First, it’s incredibly ambiguous. “Life” can mean a whole bunch of things. I believe when pro-life people use the term, they mean it in the sense of “continuity of identity”. To […]

Okay, so this year I’m trying to get through 60 books, which I think it a reasonable goal that will keep me reading without getting sick of it. At year-end, I’ll throw the list up along with some graphs about what my genre tendencies tend to be, authors I read, etc., but for now here […]

I keep having this same dream where there’s an alternate ending of Pulp Fiction which everyone hates and I find absolutely hilarious. The actual details of this alternate ending aren’t important, because like most dream stuff, they don’t actually make sense in the context of reality. Just imagine me laughing my ass off in a […]

So I’ve been checking out a lot of the the videos and commentary on Adobe’s new Content-Aware Fill. I find several things about the online discussion to be fairly amusing. Firstly, there are the people who claim that this is fake. I can sort of understand this, as it was originally posted around April Fool’s. […]