tim_pratt

I love sitting out on the balcony watching the sailboats on the weekends and the kayak/canoeing/rowing classes and/or teams practicing during the week. Drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, surrounded by flowers (thanks to Heather's diligent gardening), or drinking some wine at night. It's a little beautiful pocket of peace in our lives.

This week I revised my Simulation story ("Unexpected Outcomes") one last time and put it in the mail to a magazine. I haven't written much, except for freelance obligations. Starting to feel that itch to write more strongly. I have some story ideas, so on my day off I picked one and just hurled myself against it. Did about a thousand words. It's the superhero idea I got when I slipped out to watch The Dark Knight last week. It's... odd. The superhero never actually appears in the story. We'll see how it turns out. The idea is promising, but I don't think it should overstay its welcome, so I may attempt to keep the piece short. Trying to decide if I want to explicitly set it in the world of "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters" or not.

I contributed to another SF Signal Mind Meld, this time about worldbuilding. I don't so much build worlds as insinuate weird things into the real world, so some other answers are more interesting than mine...

In other news I cannot friggin' WAIT for our trip to Hawaii.

scottedelman

Jim Starlin: "I always turned in things as late as possible so they wouldn't have time to change anything."

Mike Grell: "Did you ever take something back, sit on it for awhile, and then send it back without the changes? I did."

Len Wein: "I'm looking for artists who are better than my best artists, not my worst artists."

Mike Grell: "I do—only I'm shorter, fatter, older, balder, and uglier. But on the inside ...

http://windling.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/i-have-an-exhib.html

theinferior4 [lizhand]

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way.

http://www.mangablog.net/?p=1737

The Eisner Awards were presented last night at SDCC, and despite a number of nominations in a variety of categories, the only manga to win an award was in the Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Japan category, which was obviously all manga. That honor went to Taiyo Mastumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, so congratulations to the folks at Viz for breaking the usual format and taking a risk on that title. While it was disappointing not to see any recognition for manga in other categories, the fact that both Japanese and global manga were nominated in a number of other categories is a good start, at least. For those who want to feel like they were there, Heidi MacDonald liveblogged the ceremony at The Beat.

Yesterday’s big manga news is that Viz will be publishing 20th Century Boys and Pluto, both by Monster creator Naoki Urasawa. Fans have been anticipating these series for a long time, but the word was that Urasawa wanted his work published in chronological order in the U.S. He must have changed his mind, because both series are set to debut in February 2009. Other new titles, according to ANN, are Dogs, by Shirow Miwa; Ikigami (Death Paper), by Motoro Mase; and a slew of VizKids titles: The Legend of Zelda (yes based on the game), BakeGyamon: Backwards Game, Dinosaur Hour, Leave it to PET, and Happy Happy Clover. Gia liveblogged the Viz panel, which included lots of info about upcoming books that are already on the schedule. Deb Aoki has Japanese cover images and more info on plots, and at Japanator, God Len has the 20th Century Boys trailer and lots of enthusiasm.

Viz also held a Shonen Jump panel, and Stan Lee dropped in to promote his comic Ultimo, which he is creating in collaboration with Japanese artist Hiroyuki Tatei. New titles include Wāq Wāq, Nora, and Tegami-bachi (Letter Bee). I like ANN’s description of that last one:

Tegami-bachi centers on a boy who has become a Letter Bee, a courier who delivers special messages between the different areas of a land in perpetual night, all while fending off armored insects.

Sounds like a winner! Once again, Gia liveblogs and gets lots of extra details.

There were no new announcements at the Broccoli panel, but Gia captures some interesting analysis of the manga market, as well as the company president’s comment that “one of their better-selling recent titles (My Dearest Devil Princess) was panned by reviewers.”

Timothy Callahan has nice coverage of Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga presentation for Comic Book Resources.

Lori Henderson has the view from the floor, which is a very different perspective than the rest of the bloggers out there.

http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com/blog/archives/2008_07.html#000647

My amazing publicist Janice Kaplan has marshalled her unholy myriad of Uruk-Hai publicity flacks and scored me all this press, like

• The Washington Jewish Week has a profile on my indubitable Yiddishkeit
• The Sun-Gazette interviewed me and will be running something sometime about the upcoming reading next Friday in Falls Church
• Tomorrow this profile of me (registration required for that link) will run in the "Sunday Source" section of The Washington Post.

I boggle. (I'll update this entry with the rest of the links when I got 'em).

The interviews were a lot of fun to do. The Gazette reporter was a high school intern who was very diligent and infectiously excited. The Jewish Week reporter seemed, over the phone, like an old pro who was amused by my freakish surreal ideas ("I've never said this to an interviewee before," he said, "but you're really weird." It was clearly meant as a compliment).

The Post guy, Dan Zak, was very hip and a really great interviewer, seizing on things I would say and asking intelligent followup after followup, drilling down until I was saying things that surprised me. He also did not ask any of the questions that I'm used to hearing (like "why genre?"). It was a two hour conversation, and he did a fantastic job synthesizing a coherent Q&A out of those two hours of intense ramble -- stitching together comments taken from wildly disparate parts of the conversation and managing to preserve the sense of it. (Though I do look, in the photo, like I am indeed single-parenting on a jet-lag-filled international trip, and there are the usual little content quibbles (like I would never say "Sam", as opposed to "Samuel R." or "Chip", Delany... :-) ))

Note also the reference to the blogospherical greatness discussion (I want y'all to know I did namecheck Nick, but that got cut).

http://shirleyjacksonawards.blogspot.com/2008/07/ellen-datlows-photos-of-kgb-shirley.html

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sachac/~3/346535249/

http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/07/26/want-to-subscribe-to-a-subset-of-my-blog/

I write a lot about Emacs. I also write a fair bit about Drupal. Both are rather geeky topics that may not interest you, or they might be the only things you want to read about. If all the posts you want to read fall into a specific category (example: emacs, drupal, sketches), you go to the category page and subscribe to just that category in your feed reader. If you want to exclude posts in a specific category, here are six ways to filter RSS feeds. Try out http://www.feedrinse.com.

I might occasionally go into firehose-mode, but at least you’ve got a way to control it! =)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sachac/~3/346518818/

http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/07/26/yet-another-snippet-mode-for-emacs/

While reading gnu.emacs.help, I came across yasnippet (yet another snippet extension for Emacs). It provides interactive templates for text or code entry. It’s similar to SkeletonMode, but with TextMate-type syntax, simpler prompting for information, and more focus on expanding mode-sensitive text in the buffer.

Here’s what I did to get started with it on my system:

1. Download http://yasnippet.googlecode.com/files/yasnippet-0.5.5.tar.bz2 and unpack it as ~/elisp/snippets.
2. Download http://yasnippet.googlecode.com/files/yasnippet-bundle-0.5.5.el.tgz and unpack it as ~/elisp/yasnippet-bundle.el .
3. Symlink lisp-interaction-mode to emacs-lisp-mode with the command

   ln -s ~/elisp/snippets/emacs-lisp-mode ~/elisp/snippets/lisp-interaction-mode
   </pre>
   </li><li>Add the following lines to <i>~/.emacs</i>:
   <pre>
   (require 'yasnippet-bundle)
   (yas/initialize)
   (yas/load-directory "~/elisp/snippets")
   ;; I don't like using partial words for completion
   (setq yas/key-syntaxes '("w_" "w_." "^ "))
   

So far, so good. M-x yas/minor-mode lets me use TAB as the completion key, and I can use TAB and S-TAB to navigate between the fields of a snippet as well. I think it’s a decent snippets mode if you don’t need the complexity of skeleton.el.

After some experimentation, I see how this might make me even happier working on Drupal. I’ve put together this first try at a template for Drupal modules. Drupal code has a lot of repetitive typing and/or search-and-replacing because all the hook functions need to start with the module name. With yasnippet, I can type in the module name once, and all the other functions will be updated. I often find myself looking up the argument lists for the hook functions, too, and the template includes the hooks I tend to use. I think this snippet will save me a lot of start-up time.

You know what would be even cooler? If I could create snippets that dynamically calculate values using Emacs Lisp. Then I could create, for example, a hook_user abbreviation that automatically picked up the module name from the filename or from the other functions. Wouldn’t that be cool?

david_de_beer

Originally published at Once upon a mellow noon. You can comment here or there.

Saw this meme on Jen West’s journal.

Well, if I must continue to have gender confusionz then this is not a bad pick at all:devil:
You are Dark Phoenix

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sachac/~3/346472910/

http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/07/26/things-i-can-do-to-make-progress-on-my-book/

• Switch my development environment to Emacs


• Put together the existing book chapters I have so far


• Process the tech reviews I’ve gotten back


• Work on one outline item


• Work on a different chapter


• View and explain a random person’s .emacs file


• Have regular release schedules


• Work on the outline


• Just write


• Hang out in #emacs


• Read Emacs-related blogs


• Read random wiki pages on emacswiki.org


• Post tidbits


• Dig through my old Emacs configuration


• Answer Emacs-related mail


• Monitor help.gnu.emacs and other Emacs-related newsgroups/mailing lists


• Learn about a random Emacs symbol


• Write for 10 minutes


• Brainstorm ideas


• Upgrade my packages