inverarity (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inverarity) wrote2010-01-16 02:54 pm
inverarity) wrote2010-01-16 02:54 pm
Movies, Fan Fiction, and Random Saturday Rambling
The latest from my Netflix queue: X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Meh. It was an okay superhero movie. Not great, like Spider-Man or Iron Man, but it didn't totally suck, like... well, most superhero movies. I'm glad I didn't bother going to see it in a theater, though.
I could go into everything that annoyed me about the movie, but I think the things that bother me are not the things that bother most people.
(Seriously? You're a cheap Nightcrawler knockoff -- you can teleport, but you've got nothing else -- and you think you're going to box Sabretooth to death? I knew the expandable black guy was a dead man walking the moment he was introduced -- oh please, that is not a spoiler -- but I hate when characters do unbelievably stupid things for no other reason than because the writers couldn't think of a better way to kill them off.)
Right. So large chunks of the three chapters I just wrote need to be rewritten, because I realized several characters need to be switched around and in different places, and that's set up a whole chain reaction of differing causality that needs to be fixed. If you thought 13,000 words in three days meant I was going to be done in a week, sorry -- that's how writing goes.
So, that Family Tree Builder I used to create the Thorn family tree has an option to automatically back up your data to its online site. I didn't turn off the default, silly me. Obviously, myheritage.com's real goal in providing free software is to sell services, so now I'm getting "reminders" like this:
Which is kind of amusing, but I think I will opt out now...
I've been dabbling with the idea of producing fan fiction ebooks. Not just for my own works -- I have this vague idea of writing an application that would turn an archived story into an epub document automatically. I've been playing with Calibre and Sigil, and turned a couple of my stories into epub documents, but the workflow is a pain, and the results are less than stellar. I've got a Perl script now that turns the badly-formatted HTML produced by Word or Open Office into something a bit cleaner and more conversion-ready, but getting the Table Of Contents right still requires hand-editing of the source XML, and images? Forget it. It will, no doubt, be easier once I finish the learning curve, and maybe I'll find an easier way to automate the process, but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. Maybe I should just wait a year or two until the technology is more mature and there's more of an indication of what direction ereaders are going to go.
[Poll #1512463]
Someone asked me what my favorite fan fiction stories are, so I may post a list next. However, my tastes are all over the map. You can see a few of them by looking at my fanfiction.net profile, but I haven't updated my favorites list in forever, and half the time I don't remember to add a story to it even though I liked it.
Meh. It was an okay superhero movie. Not great, like Spider-Man or Iron Man, but it didn't totally suck, like... well, most superhero movies. I'm glad I didn't bother going to see it in a theater, though.
I could go into everything that annoyed me about the movie, but I think the things that bother me are not the things that bother most people.
(Seriously? You're a cheap Nightcrawler knockoff -- you can teleport, but you've got nothing else -- and you think you're going to box Sabretooth to death? I knew the expandable black guy was a dead man walking the moment he was introduced -- oh please, that is not a spoiler -- but I hate when characters do unbelievably stupid things for no other reason than because the writers couldn't think of a better way to kill them off.)
"And when I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind."
Right. So large chunks of the three chapters I just wrote need to be rewritten, because I realized several characters need to be switched around and in different places, and that's set up a whole chain reaction of differing causality that needs to be fixed. If you thought 13,000 words in three days meant I was going to be done in a week, sorry -- that's how writing goes.
Birthday and Anniversary Reminders from the Thorn Family
So, that Family Tree Builder I used to create the Thorn family tree has an option to automatically back up your data to its online site. I didn't turn off the default, silly me. Obviously, myheritage.com's real goal in providing free software is to sell services, so now I'm getting "reminders" like this:
Which is kind of amusing, but I think I will opt out now...
Fan Fiction Ebooks
I've been dabbling with the idea of producing fan fiction ebooks. Not just for my own works -- I have this vague idea of writing an application that would turn an archived story into an epub document automatically. I've been playing with Calibre and Sigil, and turned a couple of my stories into epub documents, but the workflow is a pain, and the results are less than stellar. I've got a Perl script now that turns the badly-formatted HTML produced by Word or Open Office into something a bit cleaner and more conversion-ready, but getting the Table Of Contents right still requires hand-editing of the source XML, and images? Forget it. It will, no doubt, be easier once I finish the learning curve, and maybe I'll find an easier way to automate the process, but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. Maybe I should just wait a year or two until the technology is more mature and there's more of an indication of what direction ereaders are going to go.
[Poll #1512463]
Someone asked me what my favorite fan fiction stories are, so I may post a list next. However, my tastes are all over the map. You can see a few of them by looking at my fanfiction.net profile, but I haven't updated my favorites list in forever, and half the time I don't remember to add a story to it even though I liked it.