Weekly Wipe

Ah Mr Brooker is back again. He's got a new series in the same vain as his previous “wipe” shows. It follows the same format, using the same talking heads. The only real difference being a short comment segment with “real” celebrities. This involved Richard Osman and Susan Calman discussing Django Unchained. Quite why they decided to do this I don't know, but it was enjoyable.

I've been a fan of Brooker for many years. I remember watching the original Screenwipe on BBC4 back in 2006. He has refined his art over the years but certainly hasn't lost any of his acerbic whit and savage criticism of the media.

The new series is good. I look forward to the rest of the run.

Radio 4

Isn't Radio 4 brilliant? I mean really brilliant. You can start the day with Today, get an update with World At One, see how things have developed with PM and then round off the day with The World Tonight.

Radio 4 has a rhythm, a tapestry to which you can set your day by. I don't get to listen to them all every day, that would be a bit excessive, but I do try my best. It's very informative and you do get some good political interviews.

Radio 4's other great bastion is comedy. It has the strap line, “Home of Radio Comedy”. I'm not sure whether there are any other places to listen to radio comedy, but Radio 4 does it very good. There are a raft of fantastic comedies, sitcoms and panel shows. I'm currently listening to “I've Never Seen Star Wars” with Jenni Murray, funny and interesting. That's what you get with Radio 4 comedy, funny and interesting. I heard the “Unbelievable Truth” earlier, amazingly good listening to David Mitchell rant about tomatoes.

I hate the Archers though. Can't stand that at all, despite my girlfriends best attempts to rectify that fact.  

Twitchy

The internet is a wonderful thing. You can find all of human knowledge on it if you look hard enough. The problem is that it's very distracting. How are you supposed to concentrate on a single thing when you can find out anything, or just look at cat gifs.

My vice is esports. Thanks to the fantastic Twitch.tv there is virtually no end to the games you can watch. Normally I'd only watch Starcraft II tournaments but recently I've found myself watching Dota2 and even League of Legends.

I know there are people that don't take professional gamers seriously. Suggesting that these young people are wasting their lives, that they should apply themselves to something worthwhile. To be honest I think that's a rather narrow view. I mean the same can be said about professional footballers, or indeed any pro sport.

Esports are just the latest evolution of an age old function. If someone is a good at a game be it football, tennis, snooker, or chess then there will be people willing to pay money to watch them. There will be companies willing to pony up money in the form of sponsorship or prize pools to get a bit of advertising.

I've played the computers games I mentioned above. I play them badly, I'm just no good at them. The pro gamers that stream or take part in tournaments, they are fantastic. They play at a level I can never hope to achieve. So I enjoy watching them.

I should probably be writing instead. I will....after I watch one more game...

Home Again

Well that was a long, tiring, but enjoyable weekend. I mentioned before going down to Frome with my girlfriend for the weekend. She was attending a writing workshop down there, she is also a writer, so I went with her. It went very well, very valuable.

We spent a lot of time on the road, travelling all the way down there from the Yorkshire coast. It's quite telling that slowest part of the whole journey was the 40 odd mile stretch of the A64 between York and coast. It desperately needs to be dual carriageway.

Transport links are a real problem on the Yorkshire coast. They are terrible. It takes forever to get anywhere. Don't get me wrong, I love living on the coast. It's a beautiful part of the world but it suffers terribly. Being hard to get to there isn't much investment in the area leaving it under developed.

Oh well, you don't need good roads to write good books.

Still no, Prime Minister

Following on from yesterday's piece I had a few more thoughts on Yes, Prime Minister.

During the original run of the series we went on a journey with the characters. When we first met Jim Hacker he gets his first ministerial posting, the Department of Administrative Affairs. We then follow his journey through the trials and tribulations as a minister and then Prime Minister.

The new series throws us in at the deep end with a Jim Hacker at the top and under siege. It's very hard to empathise with this Hacker. The name might be the same but he is very much not the Hacker portrayed by Paul Eddington., the same is true for Sir Humphrey and Bernard. You need time to properly introduce these re-imagined characters.

It might have been better have set the story immediately after an election, with Hacker becoming Prime Minister. This is so we follow Hacker into the world of Sir Humphrey. Instead we get an adapted stage play which feels a bit too much like a critique of New Labour under Gordon Brown than a reflection of the current government.

Oh well.

There will be no post tomorrow as I'm away for the weekend. Going down to Frome in Somerset with my girlfriend for a special weekend. Back Monday.

No, Prime Minister.

I was really looking forward to the revived series of Yes, Prime Minister. I love the original series for its urbane wit, subtly and powerful acting. Sadly the new version is rather lacking in these departments.

I know it's been on for a couple of weeks now but I only just got an opportunity to watch it today. One of the biggest problems was that it felt like a stage play. I know that this series is adapted from the currently running stage play, but its as though they've literally just filmed the play.

That can be a strength it wasn't in this case. You need different filming techniques and acting to really capture the dynamism of the stage. Trying to recreate that with cameras in a studio is very hard. In this case they failed. It just felt stodgy.

The first episode was OK. There were some funny moments. At first I didn't realise there was an ongoing plot, rather than the fairly stand alone episodes of the original run, so the rather abrupt and open ending jarred badly. It didn't feel like a natural end, more like it was just where they had to put a break into the play.

The real problems lie in the second episode. This episode sees the one female character, played by Zoe Telford, spend most of the episode in a revealing little black dress, meanwhile the men get to stay in their suits. They trot out the tired old cliché of lecherous foreign dignitary trying to feel her up almost as soon as the two characters sit next to each other at a dinner. Spin on to after dinner and the whole thing is used as fodder for some pretty lame jokes. She doesn't react in the way that any sane woman would.

I was watching this with my girlfriend and she was disgusted by this deplorable depiction of a female character. I have to agree with her. I don't expect this from a sitcom made in 2013. You didn't see it in the original run. You'd never have had Dorothy Wainwright dismissing wandering hands with a lame quip. I really don't understand the decision to take the series in this direction.

I'll give at least the third episode a try but I don't hope for much.

The Power of Story Telling

There are many ways to tell a good story. You can do it through books, poetry, television even song. A modern medium is to tell them through computer game cinematics and cut-scenes.

One of the masters of this art is Blizzard Entertainment. They practised this with the cinematics for their Warcraft franchise. They were pretty good for Warcraft 3 and really progressed through World of Warcraft, especially the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Few people would question the quality of the Wrathgate cinematic, or the Fall of the Lich King trailer. These are great pieces that tell a story in an interesting and engaging way.

It was, in my opinion, with Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty that they really started to excel. This is where the whole story was interwoven fully into the cut-scenes between the played missions and the missions themselves. One particular one from near the end of the game really stands out. Called “Fire and Fury”, is probably the best cinematic I've seen in a game. Heck it's better than some films and TV shows and it's only about three and half minutes long. There is something about the writing, visuals, music and performance by the voice actors that just makes it shine. It's so emotive and powerful that it still sends shivers down my spine.

This only comes to mind because Blizzard released the trailer for the new Starcraft II expansion, Heart of the Swarm, today. Unsurprisingly it tells a story and helps to set up the whole new expansion. I wasn't that fussed about Heart of the Swarm before, I am now though.

And that's a bad miss.

OK so I missed a blog at the weekend. On further thought I'd decided to keep the posts to just weekdays. Doing six in a week was a bit much.

The Masters snooker has been on recently. I always enjoy watching snooker. I'm not sure why but I find the sound ball hitting ball rather relaxing. I like writing with it on in the background. I know it's daft; but I like to think that the gentle patter of applause at a good shot is actually directed at me, people cheering me on.

Back at university I wrote a lot of my essays to the sound of snooker. I would have it on all day, including the late night highlights. I don't think my dissertation would have been finished without the boys in the baize.

Snuff

I know it's been out for a while but I've just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Snuff. I received it for Christmas and was looking forward to reading it.

I'm a long term fan of Terry Pratchett and especially of Sam Vimes. He is a great character; well developed and still interesting despite having a staring role in many books so far. I imagine it is quite difficult to achieve this but Pratchett pulls it off with aplomb.

I felt that in Snuff quite a bit of the early book was retreading old ground. Did we really need reminding quite so often that Wilikins is rather blood thirsty for a butler? I already know Vimes' backstory so I was left waiting patiently for the meat of the story to start, but I appreciate that you have to make allowances to people just picking up the series.

Due to this it was a slow burner. However I really enjoyed it. Taking Vimes out of his comfort zone is always a great way to get the best out of the character. Upon finding out that Vimes was going to the Ramkim family estate in the country I was afraid we'd end up with “Vimes at Downton Abby”. Fortunately this was avoided and we got a much richer story.

I love reading Pratchett novels but I'm always left slightly depressed afterwards. If I went to write for a hundred years I doubt I'd be half as good as he is. I'd settle for a tenth though.

The Pitfalls of Sci-Fi

Writing sci-fi is trickier than it looks. There are benefits of course, freedom to do pretty much whatever you want being a main one. However there are many problems. The first and foremost is the rapid technological advances we see in our everyday lives.

Do you remember during the last decade when sci-fi shows used to have people running around with bluetooth earpieces? They were considered high tech and futuristic at that point. Now though they just date the shows horrible because bluetooth earpieces have become a technological dead end.

Star Trek suffers as well. Apparently they no longer have email in the 24^th Century because Starfleet officers are forever passing vital information to each other on hand held devices. At least these are vaguely similar to a modern tablet computer but seem to lack the same sort of versatility.

These problems come about because the writer is doing their writing in the now. It can be very difficult to distance yourself from that to occupy another time frame. I struggle with it myself. Despite my current novel being set nearly 400 years in the future I had a character thinking it pretentious to use voice commands to a computer. When my girlfriend read it she pointed out how strange that was. Surely if this character has grown up surrounded by this technology it wouldn't be pretentious at all.

She is right. There wasn't really anything in the story, or the character's background, to warrant him thinking it was pretentious. I'll have to rewrite that bit now.

Yeah, snow, whatever.

It comes to us all at some point. The dreaded “writer's block”. It can be an infuriating blight on any writer. Some people consider it an illusion, a mere excuse for not working hard enough. Others see it as a real problem that can effect a writer.

In the past I've believed I suffered from writer's block. For a long time I was unable to do any writing of note. I grumbled and blame the dreaded block for my predicament. Recently I've come to realise the real issue behind that dry spell. I didn't have the block, I lacked conviction in what I was writing. The inspiration and drive to push on weren't there. If you don't really believe in what you are working on you'll never be able to write it.

Thankfully I haven't been struck down with the block on my current project. Despite slogging away for many months on it I still have the passion and drive to work on it. I feel lucky in that regard.

This isn't everyone's experience. The fickle nature of the muse waxes and wanes in different ways for different people.

Guess what?

Yep the snow is still here. Shocking I know but there you go. I resisted the urge to go out and make snow angels and snowmen today. Instead I settled for clearing snow from cars and our yard. Fortunately it wasn't too cold and the sun managed to get out for a while.

I noticed an eerie scene last night. Despite living in a rural area I'm still near a main road partly illuminated by street lights. The orange lights were reflecting off the low cloud and freshly laid snow. The orange glow spread out far into the nearby fields, much further than normal. It made the whole area look a little spooky. It sparks the imagination, just what could be happening under that orange light?

Snow is an interesting thing. It can be viewed in so many ways. For children it's, by and large, a wonderful thing full of potential for play and closed schools. For adults though it's a terrible pain that causes travel chaos, burst pipes and slipping on pavements. I think what we should all want is to retain that child's love of snow.  

Snow!

Snow! Cor blimey, what a lot of snow! Actually I bet you don't care. Of course you don't. You have no need for me to tell you it's been snowing the the UK. This is the great problem with social media. It's much worse on Facebook or Twitter but blogs suffer as well.

People feel the urge to inform the world of the weather in their local area. This despite the fact that the majority of people they'll know on social media are their friends in that same local area. In the finest tradition of internet hypocrisy I'll give you my snow story.

Today I was at the Dalby Forest visitor centre when it started snowing. It was beautiful. Last night's snow was still hanging heavily on the tall trees, the whole place had a sort of magical feel to it. That sort of environment can be very inspiring. Using my writer's eye I could almost see a character running through the the pristine snow; they were being chased by something, exactly what I'm not sure as there was too much snow.

It's interesting how the smallest, or in this case largest, of things can inspiring.

Faster Than Light!

I didn't intent to have any sort of schedule for this blog. However I've now decided to only do one on a weekend and that one will probably be about computer games.

I mentioned FTL last time as a game I enjoyed a great deal last year. It's a strategic based spaceship simulator where you command a ship on the run across the galaxy. It's also a Rogue-like game so if you die you die and have to start over.

At first glance it comes across as a fairly simple game. However the more you play the more you get to appreciate the complexity. Each decision you make has consequences. Do you risk attacking that pirate ship on moral grounds or leave them be?

It's a fun game with a lot of re playability given the range of ships available to use. The game also has a fantastic and distinctive art style and a catchy soundtrack.

I have been both annoyed and delighted by FTL. Sometimes it feels like the game is deliberately conspiring against you and to a certain point it is. This style of game isn't meant to be easy. There is meant to be a good solid challenge. FTL has that in spades which makes it all the more enjoyable when you beat it.

The Past

We had some science last night so lets consider one of my other passions. I love history, I find the past fascinating. I really do believe that the only way to understand the present is to study the past.

I have a lot of history books. Some are left over from the history degree I did but I've bought a lot since then. The last time I did an audit there were about 140 of them. Storing them is a bit of a pain, but I'll need them on day to fill out my own library.

So what parts of history are of interest to me? Would it be annoying to say all of it? Probably, but I am interested in pretty much everything. My main focus though tends to be British imperial history. It hard to not be drawn to the world's largest empire. Not only that but it's a really interesting story, how a small damp island on the edge of Europe went on to achieve so much.

Recently I've also been intrigued by the Eastern Roman Empire; popularly, but inaccurately, known as the Byzantine Empire. This is another riveting story of power, corruption and decline.

My interest in history does inform my writing somewhat. I know I tend towards big stories with big scope. All too often in my stories there are great empires hammering away at each other. I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea but it is mine.

Space: The Final Frontier

Isn't space terrifying? I mean it is fantastically amazing but also terrifying.

Perhaps I should explain. I write sci-fi so I'm naturally interested in space; stars, planets, nebula, galaxies, the whole thing. I'm a rank amateur when it comes to astronomy but I like to look up at the stars. I can identify some of the constellations; at this time of year we get a pretty good view at Orion from my house.

The problem comes the more you read about space. Everything is so huge! And the distances are so far. The first thing you have to try and get your head around is a light year. The distance it takes light to travel through a vacuum in a Julian year. That comes out at 5,878,625 million miles! That is a mind shatteringly huge number.

The nearest star to our dear Sol is Alpha Centauri about 4.4 light years away. That's a lot of miles. Betelgeuse, the bright red star at the top of the constellation Orion is 640 light years away. 640! It just gets worse after that. Bigger and bigger numbers that you can't possibly comprehend properly.

So where does the terror come from? Well it just makes you feel insignificant. The universe is so massively huge and you are just one person. It's rather overwhelming.

That doesn't stop me looking up though. I still remember the excitement I felt when I first saw the Orion Nebula. That joy overrides any terror. Now I want to see the Milky Way, sadly I've never been able to spot it from my house. A more immediate goal is spotting the Andromeda galaxy, I know roughly where it is in the night's sky. Just need a good clear night.

It's raining right now so that put a bit of dampner on it, guess I'll just have to make do with the BBC's Stargazing Live tonight.

Where do you write?

It's an interesting question. Where do you write best? The atmosphere of where you write has a great impact on what you actually produce. Do you prefer solitude or do you need to be surrounded by the hustle and bustle of other humans?

There is the stereotypical image of a writer hunched over a laptop in the corner of some café. They are either so enthralled in their own work that an asteroid could land on their head and they wouldn't notice, or they are hawkishly observing everything and using it as material. At the other end of the spectrum you've got the solitary writer holed up in a cabin in the woods, or possibly the mountains, where they can be alone and commune with their muse.

I am somewhere in between, as I imagine most writers are but those stereotypes are a useful frame of reference. I have a dedicated writing space at home. I have a desk with my computer on where I do the majority of my novel work. It's where I'm comfortable and can have music on as loud as I want. I find music very helpful when I sit down to write. It can't have words though, they just distract me so I need instrumental music. It can be classical or “epic trailer music” like that produced by Two Steps From Hell, you may not have heard of them but you will recognise Heart of Courage if you listen to it.

I can work in cafés, I'm writing this in one, but it isn't where I work best. I find the noise of other people rather distracting. Plus it always feel a little pretentious getting my netbook out and tapping away. I know it's a daft thing to think but there you go.

It's each to their own really. My girlfriend, who is also a writer, loves working in cafés, anything to get out of the house. She thrives in that environment. I don't mind tagging along because it means I get to have lots of tea and cakes. Only occasionally do I need to chip in with an idea or two if she asks for them. It's a lot harder to get delicious cakes at home.

Rise of the Cyborgs

Cyborgs! From the Borg to the Cybermen these sci-fi staples have been terrifying people for decades. I think they are fantastic villains that play on deep routed fears. The mixing of man and machine leads to some very troubling questions for the reader, or viewer, are you still really human?

The rapid advances in computing over recent years has brought this more into the real world. With wi-fi enabled smartphones and tablet computers we are all much more interconnected. It isn't that far of a leap to think that in a few years these devices will be patched into our brains.

Many would see this as the first step on a very slippery slope. I would question that though. Is it really all that bad? Is there a problem with helping people remember things? To think a little quicker?

A few months ago I caught a part of a documentary on Radio 4 discussing a similar topic. One of the contributors mentioned that humans were outsourcing their memory to the internet. Why bother learning anything if you can look it up on Wikipedia  It's a crude way of putting it, but still an interesting thought. It certainly got me thinking. Haven't we, as species, always been outsourcing our memory? After all how different is Wikipedia from a book? They are both methods of storing information for later consumption? Wikipedia is just much more accessible.

The same can be said of a simple address book. I have a smartphone with all the contact details of people I might need to contact. I don't remember any of those numbers myself, it took me long enough to memorise my own home number, so this is an invaluable tool. When I was younger my mum had an address book with all the contact details of friends, family and all sundry of other people. She couldn't remember it all so she wrote it down. I know that some people can easily remember lots of numbers. That's great but not everyone can so we outsource that information to another medium.

It's something that humanity has always done. I don't think it's something that we need to fear. We just have to embrace our nature.

Still with the name thing.

I appreciate that I didn't actually explain why I named this blog The Invictus Nebula in my post the other day. I know it's my own fault for getting distracted so easily by other thoughts.

To an extent this is where the name comes from. My thought process is sometimes rather chaotic. It can be like a huge cloud with dozens, even hundreds, of ideas whipping around at breakneck speed. It's a daunting thing to try and tackle, to actually draw out the good ideas from the background noise.

In the past I've equated this idea cloud to a nebula. The great interstellar clouds of dust and ionised gasses that populate parts of the Milky Way. Some, like the awe-inspiring Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, are star-forming regions where new stars are born. That's similar to the idea cloud in my head. One makes story ideas the other creates huge luminous spheres of plasma held together by gravity.

So that's the later half of the name dealt with but what about the first half? Invictus is Latin for unconquered. I like to think that the idea cloud in my head is unconquerable. There is no way that I'll ever be able to tame it. The best I can do is hang on long enough to extract as many good ideas as I can.

And that's where the name comes from. It makes sense to me if no one else. I just hope my idea cloud turns into another Pillars of Creation and isn't just a dull cloud of boring dust.

The Enemy Unknown

I finally finished XCOM: Enemy Unknown the other day. I know it's been out a while but I kept getting distracted by other things. Playing games is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Whenever I do, I sort of feel bad like I really should be writing instead.

To that end I don't play timesink games any more. I just can't justify playing something like World of Warcraft, you just waste so much time. I also got utterly burnt out and bored of WoW after having played it for a couple of years. So I stick to shorter game of the "drop in, drop out" model.

Anyway, back to XCOM. I'd never played an XCOM game before. Back in the day I wasn't interested in turn-based tactical strategy games, I preferred real time strats like Command & Conquer. So when approaching the modern XCOM I didn't have any expectations. My interest in the game was only really piqued by seeing videos on Youtube by TotalBiscuit and Rythian from the Yogscast.

Since I was a pure rookie I started the game on the easiest setting with the tutorial on. I have to say I rather enjoyed it. The tutorial probably holds your hand a bit too much to begin with but it is fun when you get going. It was good fun to pick your strategy, plan out your attacks, choose the right tools for the job and taken down the alien menace. It isn't a perfect game, far from it, but I did enjoy it and I'm looking forward to starting another play through.

I've seen some gaming sites suggest that its game of the year material. I can't agree with that. The main reason is that it's just got way too many bugs. I understand that the higher the difficulty the more game breaking these bugs become. Even on my easy play through I saw some pretty annoying bugs. Ridiculous line of sight issues, alien shots going through walls and maps not loading properly. I don't mind challenging games but the challenge should come from game mechanics not game bugs.

I don't agree with GOTY titles anyway, given how often it gets doled out it's become meaningless. Were I forced to pick one from 2012, it'd be Faster ThanLight. That's a topic for another day though.

The Naming of Things

What's in a name? Well I don't know really. It took me ages to come up with an overall name for this blog, I know that naming things is a problem for me. I eventually settled on one only to discover it was already in use by a Portuguese solar energy blog that updated twice in 2003.

So I was back to the drawing board. I don't know why I find it so hard to name things. As a writer this is annoying. Sometimes I find myself a total lost to think of character names or even book titles. I have yet to find a reliable way of generating these names. I have seen, and used, random name generators online in the past but this doesn't feel authentic. They aren't my names, I don't get a sense of ownership.

When I do finally find a name I like I tend to reuse it; never in the same story of course, but certainly different story universes. Back when I used to write fan fiction I created a character called Sofia Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and used her in half a dozen different stories. The same happened with a chap called James Keffer, he was a particularly persistent name that kept cropping up whenever I ran out of ideas.

I thought that maybe I'd shook this off with my current work. Sofia and James are certainly nowhere to be seen. There are lots of new fresh names that I've never used before. Unfortunately while writing this piece I realised I've got someone called Marcus Hall. I've used Marcus before, and Hall.....bugger. 

Oh well, I guess some habits die hard.

Beginnings

So I've decided to start a blog. I'm not entirely sure why but it felt like the sort of thing you should do. I'm a writer, or at least want to be a writer. I'm working on my first novel; a sci-fi adventure mystery set on Mars in 2397 where a uni student stumbles into a 30 year old conspiracy surrounding her family.

I've read a few articles online, and in magazines, about being an aspiring writer. Invariably the advise includes “develop a web presence”, or something to that effect at least, which more or less equates to get a twitter account and start a blog. I understand the value of 'getting your name out there' but it does seem rather cynical advice. As if simply doing those two things are all you need to do. It gives no real weight to the quality of the material produced, just talking about yourself and your work and you'll get a “presence”. There is enough rubbish on the internet already, we don't need more of it. OK, I'll admit I'm probably being harsh. There are certainly many examples of excellent blogs written by aspiring authors, that are much more than merely promoting their own work.

You can level the same criticism at me. I've started a blog as part of the run up to eventually publishing my book. However I want to fall into that latter category, have a much more diverse blog.

I will be talking about writing, my own and other peoples, because it does comes with the territory. That won't be the only source of material though. I plan to write about whatever takes my fancy. I'm a sci-fi geek, history nerd and a gamer. I take an interest in politics and world affairs. I will pull from all these sources. So as far as I'm concerned anything and everything is fair game.

I can't promise that anything I write will be insightful or thought provoking. At best I hope to be entertaining in some small way.