- Well, in some places that was as bad as everybody thought it would be. Oy, that picture of seawater flooding into the PATH station — impressive. A lot of phony photos of Sandy have been circulating, though. I’m not sure this one of a Niagra of seawater flooding into the World Trade Center construction site is real; it’s credited to the AP, but there so much to sort out yet.
- Is anybody hereabouts planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month? I’m thinking about it, but the idea scares the bejabbers out of me.
- “The Island Where People Forget to Die.”
- Hoplophobes: If the Second Amendment offends you, no problem. You can always try and kill the First. (H/T J)
- Camille Paglia’s been awfully quiet lately. But the lady with the great gift for words shreds Obama from the left.
- The WikiWeapons folks are back at work.
- It’s kinda funny. In the last desperate days and weeks before the election, “right wing” commentators are doing elaborate analyses of poll numbers and concluding (e.g. here and here) that Romney’s got it in the bag. While Dems insist that the polls don’t matter one bit because Obama has 270 electoral college votes in his pocket. Meanwhile someone who was there as George HW Bush blew his re-election says he’s hearing the same-old, same-old. So who’s it going to be, people? Not that it matters, but who’s it going to be?
National Novel Writing Month is the time to bring out your ghost story, Claire.
…
I was just reading “The Island Where People Forgot to Die” last night. Very interesting. It reminded me again of “The Omega Plan” – http://www.amazon.com/The-Omega-Plan-Medically-Nutritional/dp/0060182814 in the late 90s, the first serious mention of the value of good fats and Omega-3’s – because the author was from Greece, and in her scientific studies discovered the best diet for health was from her own homeland.
I found these before and after pictures of a New Jersey beach on Reddit
http://i.imgur.com/0nSON.jpg
🙂
I’m doing nanowrimo again this year, as usual.
Woody, thanks for the laugh. Oh if we could get such a cleansing storm thru DC….. a volcano maybe?
I’d love to do NaNoWriMo again, but not at the expense of the book I’m already working on. Will be shutting myself in a hotel for 5 nights starting Thursday to finish the first draft. Then the real work begins.
If anybody’s interested in the perfect first-draft tool, by the way, it’s an AlphaSmart Neo. 4-6 lines of text plus limited edition capabilities. No network connection, 700 hours (really) of battery life. If you sit down with it, you can’t do anything but write. For those of us who are easily distracted, it’s even better than pen & paper.
Here in the DC area, we got 20mph winds and some rain. Appears to be over. Gov’t & mass transit & day care are all shut down for the second day in a row. It’s…entertaining, I guess.
Limited editing capabilities. Wow, fingers are weird.
You think fingers are bad, David, you should see what brains can do. 🙂
Whilst crawling inland from the beach, maybe, and with eyestalks in need of trimming. Cool.
I wish I remembered who said it first recently, but the winner of the 2012 Presidential Election will be….
George W. Bush.
Because the only two running, who would be allowed to win, will of course do exactly the same vile things he did. Just the way the incumbent has for the past four years.
They just tell different lies about it.
Amen, Victor. So damned true.
Funny how all the candidates are terrified to even mention GWB because they’re afraid of being identified with his failures and his evil. But all of them emulate him in every way.
Venting: I was on a forum where somebody posted about Paul Ryan being this huge laissez faire libertarian who wanted — or horrors! — to cut-cut-cut government to its very bones. I about hadda cow.
From where I sit the election will break down:
47% – Obama
10% – Romney
37% – OMG NOT OBAMA, so Romney
16% – Anybody but Obama and Romney
= 110% – Are you surprised?
All of which helped me realize, before the last election, that I didn’t care who won or lost or even contended. I’m much happier this way.
I suppose not coincidentally, Linux Journal has a mention of Plume, a GPL writing tool, targeted, I guess, at people who like Scrivener. I hear from time to time from writers about how word processors have too much cruft, and not the write toolset for writing novels.
I won’t be trying my hand a nanowrimo. Back when I was in terrible financial straits, I would write the 1st paragraph of what I think would be a good story, in my head, while trying to get to sleep. But I could get it right only under those circumstances, and I really don’t like being in that mental frame of mind; it’s far too depressing.
jed — I had just noticed this a.m. that there’s a Linux port of Scrivener — and even a .deb file I could try on my Mint machine (no .rpm I could find for the Mandriva machine I usually use, however the instructions for the .tar.gz file seemed pretty lucid by Linux standards).
I’ll probably go ahead and try the Scrivener .deb. It’s good to know that somebody’s developing a native Linux book-writing platform, but Source Forge … ugh. Everything there is always too beta-ish and too confusing for me. That site assumes hardcore geekhood.
I know exactly what you mean about getting great novel openings in your head then not having anywhere to go with them. Yeah. That’s me, too, and I’m thinking of trying NaNoWriMo just to see if I can get past that problem.
Just as well, in a way, that you didn’t get further. If I understand where you were coming from, writing a novel, even a great one, is about the worst way I can think of to try to get OUT of, rather than INTO, financial troubles. Sigh.
I started using the Linux version of Scrivener a little while back. So far I like it…encourages writing synopses of each scene & seems to help me think about the story/novel as a whole. Plus the full-screen view would be good for first-draft work. But using it to its capacity definitely requires some “extra” effort….
My guess is the incumbent evil will win. Gas prices are DOWN. When gas prices are down before an election, the incumbent wins.
Yeah, SourceForge is a mixed bag, but the Plume project has a .deb. Pretty easy to install/uninstall, as long as you have the dependencies on hand. Granted, no quickly available info on what version/distro it was built against.
But if he can do it, so can you? (Well, looks like a he to me.)
jed — I found and installed the .deb file of Scrivener. I also found an .rpm for my other machine. Installed and opened really smoothly. Then — whoopsie! — wouldn’t even recognize any files I might want to import.
So if Plume’s also got a .deb, maybe I’ll give it a try. But for now, for NaNoWriMo, I think I’ll just write the old-fashioned way, with LibreOffice. Maybe once I get over my initial writing panic I’ll go see about that Plume installation.
But … I’m not counting on being as smart as a cat …