FRIENDS: I've been doing a lot of research about so-called Friend Of A Friend systems lately. The main ones; Friendster, Live Journal (a sort of hybrid weblog/FOAF from what I can see), and the one that has spawned the most talk recently, Orkut, all seem to have a lot of problems and don't seem to work that well. The have huge amounts of users though, which means the idea is one that people like. These sites are one of those internet things I just don't see myself getting into. I was never much into chat rooms or instant messaging (even though before I'd heard of ICQ I was thinking over how to implement instant messaging. If I hadn't seen an early beta of ICQ I probably would have written my own client and might have ended up inventing IM). I'm not social, so these types of applications just don't appeal to me (no matter how much grief I get from people for having been on the internet for so long and not being a chat room or MUD user).

The reason for all my research is that I have an idea for a social network system based on finding knowledgeable people. It used to be that if you had pretty much any question you could ask on an appropriate Usenet newsgroup and somebody would know the answer. That's a lot less true now. It's pretty much all Google now. I very rarely ask questions on newsgroups because A) there's too much crap and B) I can probably find it with Google. But sometimes you can't find a good answer, only a question. That's what got me thinking about using social networks to be able to find people with an answer. It's partially based on the main idea of Global Frequency and the reputation system of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. If that means anything to you. I hope to have time to work out at least a beta that I can get other people to help me work on. It's going to be more than just a website and even if I don't have time to code it myself, I'm going to detail the spec and see if I can't get some people to work on it. It's a good idea I think. Of course being that I know only a bit about the FOAF/social network "scene" this could be another instance of me "inventing" something which has already been thought of and implemented outside of my sphere of interest. I haven't found anything like it yet though. If you're a venture capitalist and want to hear more in exchange for money, please feel free to email me. :)
- posted by Matt @ 10:01 PM permanent link |

 
THINKING: Thanks to Warren for this: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. I just printed this out and put it up on the wall next to my computer. If you're at all interested in creativity, this is something you have to read. Finding new ways of pushing yourself creatively is not just something that artists should do. Everyone should endevour at all times to be as creative as possible. Most people abandon creativity when they "grow up," get jobs, have kids, etc. This is the time when you should be running forward, not standing still. I encourage you to print this out, tape it up somewhere and read at least part of it every day. Challenge yourself. Don't just get by. Do something new. Your mind should be racing at all times. People ask writers "where do you get your ideas" all the time. You should be having so many ideas all day long that you have to stop and write them down as they pour out of your head. It doesn't matter if the ideas are a story to write, an image to paint, a special scrapbook page to make, a comic book to publish, a new path to ride your bike, a new way to do some process you've been doing at work for years, whatever. Make 2004 The Year Of The Idea. Grow.
- posted by Matt @ 12:06 PM permanent link |

 
FUTURE: Welcome to the future ladies and gents. Scientists in Denmark have developed genetically modified flowers that change color in the presence of land-mines.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

It'll be things like this that define the future. There are already people working on projects like plants that eat toxic waste and cotton with built in resistance to wrinkles. Something like wrinkle resistant cotton doesn't seem like much but it's like when I read about screen-savers on cell phones. You know you have a handle on a piece of technology when you start doing small, seemingly pointless things with it. A screen saver on a cell phone is pretty pointless but the idea that you have a phone with the screen and processor enough to even do that is big.

Building plants in a lab to solve very difficult problems like land-mine detection is a sign that we've entered a new period in history. We're building living things to help us achieve our goals. Next up is engineering improvements in ourselves. I can't wait. - posted by Matt @ 11:48 AM permanent link |

 
BOOKS: I've decided to combine my personal pledge to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf with this '50 Book Challenge' from Reality Fuel. Since I'm confident that I could never remember how many books I read at the end of the year I've added a new box to the weblog as a running list of all the books I read this year. There's a seperate list for audiobooks and I'm not going to include most comics or graphic novels (too short) or computer books (usually don't read the whole thing straight through) or books I just skim through (The Dictionary of Troublesome Words). I'm also going to try to do weblog entries for all of them, as per the 50 Book Challenge. Good luck to me. If you're going to do your own list, please put your URL in the comments so I can check it out. There's no better way to find new books to read than from other readers.

Link courtesy of Bookslut.
- posted by Matt @ 11:41 AM permanent link |

 
WRITING: This editorial in The Guardian could really help me with a semi romantic comedy script I'm writing so I don't want to lose the link. - posted by Matt @ 10:31 AM permanent link |

 
FUTURE Thanks to one of the free gifts I recieved after becoming a subscriber to Salon.com, I'm again a subscriber to Wired magazine after a few years absence. I stopped subscribing when they were purchased by Conde Nast and became more of a high fashion magazine than a high tech one. Now, they seem to be back to their old form, minus the odd color choices they used to make for page layouts and a few hundred pages. I'm glad they're back in the "future ideas" and gadgets business though, as recently I've found myself sorely in need of a connection to the future.

Albuquerque (and New Mexico in general, really) is not, to put in mildly, a forward looking place. Almost everything about it points to the past. The dominant style of architecture here is based on the millenia old adobe style invented by the local indian tribes. People here don't even try to do anything new with adobe, they either use it to build houses that any tribe member from 3000 years ago would be at home in or, even worse, they use modern materials to copy the look of the 3000 adobe home. Architecture is, of course, an asthetic choice that each person has to make on their own but here it always strikes me as another symptom of this city's absorption with the past.

I grew up outside San Diego and even though I was born in Boise, Idaho I will always think of myself as a Californian. Even when I was a kid growing up in what amounts to a small town in Southern California I knew things were happening. People were doing stuff that meant something, things that were going forward. I miss that. In Albuquerque I feel like I'm looking in the window on the future, not really participating in it. No matter how much I read or do I'm still outside looking in. We're hoping to move back to California next year and I cannot imagine how freeing it will be to my mind and personality to be back where people are concerned with moving forward. Here I can't help but feel that if I let up on the mental accelerator pedal for even a minute I'll slip and be living in an adobe looking house reading basically the same stories in the newspaper every week. Being in a place where I could do more than read about the future is immensely important to me.

So I figure that the subscription to Wired is either going to be one of my lifelines to people who are moving the culture forward and I'll treasure it, or it's going to kill me. There are two conferences advertised that I would give non-pointy teeth to attend but I have little actual hope of being able to go to. Both the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and Wired's own NEXTFEST are I'm sure going to be filled with the people and ideas that would get my mind whiring for months afterward. If I were published I could probably tell myself that attending would be great for my work but since I have yet to make money from writing, that would just be an excuse to spend money I dont have on two great vacations. From Albuquerque, a trip to either conference would be a short, expensive plane ride or long, cheap drive away, on top of the fees for attending. So I'm left with once again looking in the window and reading about the conferences as opposed to attending. This is what I meant by killing me. At least if I didn't know about the conferences I wouldn't long to go so much.

- posted by Matt @ 8:46 PM permanent link |

 
COMICS: I've got a bunch of tradepaperbacks and graphic novels up on Ebay at the moment in an effort to both clean house and raise some money to fund my comics publishing goals. I have a bunch of different kinds of stuff up there; from Metabarons to X-Men to Powers to Batman.

Click Here To Check It Out. Thanks! - posted by Matt @ 12:59 PM permanent link |

 
BOOKS: My quest to read everything on my To Be Read Shelf had an important milestone yesterday, I actually passed up borrowing a new book I want to read from the Library in favor of reading something from The Shelf. I found the book The Watch by Dennis Danvers and I actually left it on the shelf and on my Books list on my Visor. I can't remember where I saw the book or what made me put it on the list but it looks interesting. Sort of a time-travel anarchy story.

I also finished The First Five Pages from the library and decided that buying The Dictionary of Concise Writing would be much more effective than trying to read it on loan. I'll definately have to buy it though, along with another book by the same author, The Dimwit's Dictionary, because just reading the first part has really opened my eyes to a new way of editing my work. I think it will be very helpful. - posted by Matt @ 12:41 PM permanent link |

 
WORDS: The About Last Night weblog has a great essay by regular columnist Our Girl in Chicago today about the creation of Word Wars, a movie about competitve Scrabble and the people who play. She also talks about Spellbound, a movie I really want to see, which is about the kids participating in the National Spelling Bee and also mentions Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control which is one of my top 5 favorite documentaries of all time, and I've seen a lot of documentaries. One of these days I'm going to rent Spellbound and I'm really hoping one of the small theaters in town gets Word Wars. I have serious doubts about the later but hope springs eternal. The new Madstone theater here even got Stone Reader (which was great if a little slow in places) which I never would have expected to see in the theaters.
- posted by Matt @ 10:26 AM permanent link |

 
COMICS: Once again, Dirk Deppey lays the smack down on the pro-superhero, pro-Direct Market forces in comics. Responding to Stuart Moore's response to Dirk's response to Stuart's column (damn, weblog attributions and explanations are hard), Dirk goes after the idea that superhero/X books (superhero/crime, superhero/detective, etc.) are the Way Forward for the Direct Market. Moore tries to make the point that more creators should throw away the idea of making non-superhero comics for the Direct Market and go for superhero/ books (superhero/crime, superhero/mystery, etc.) because nobody will read your non-superhero book.

First, as a writer I have a problem with anybody telling me that I should be writing one type of story or another. If I want to write Terrorism Stories (the example Moore gives in his essay) that's what I want to write. I don't want to have to dilute and really, insult, my story by adding The Flash for pete's sake. If I write Terrorism Stories minus the ridiculous Flash character and the Direct Market won't buy it (which they wouldn't) I'll sell the story somewhere else (which is what's happening). All adding superheroes to everything in the DM does is further marginalize the DM. People who want to read Terrorism Stories wouldn't want The Flash and wouldn't read it if it did have The Flash. Superheroes are, to the world outside the Direct Market, an old-fashioned, ridiculous, and childlike storytelling device in most cases. This doesn't mean that all superheroes are for kids but it does mean that most adults won't read them. Does anyone think it's an accident that Smallville is about Clark Kent and not Superman? The episode of Smallville that shows Superman in his tights and cape is going to either be the last or second-to-last episode, depending on whether it's a dramatic choice or a ratings one. It's hard for a lot of people in comics to believe but most people do not want to read about superheroes. The Way Forward for the Direct Market is not superhero/mystery, it's mystery.

Warren Ellis recently recently sent out a note on his mailing list simply saying that maybe comic book shops are just for superheroes and I think he's right. Fighting for the Direct Market is pretty pointless since it doesn't seem to want to be saved. If things keep going forward like they are, you'll be able to buy your single issue superhero comics are the local comic book shop (if there is one) but the vast majority of comics are going to be sold in bookstores. And most of them are not going to contain any trace of superheroes. Really, in the long term I don't think it matters what the DM does with superheroes because they're the only ones who are going to be messing with them. Nobody else cares. Fighting for space on the deck of a sinking ship is not exactly the most productive way to spend your energy from the point of view of the people on the life rafts but apparently nobody's told most Direct Market proponents that. The only reason to argue about the content of comics sold in comic book shops is sentimental attachment to comic shops. Really, it all comes down to this: The shops that want to get off the boat and into the life rafts will adapt and carry other stuff besides superheroes and the ones that just keep trying to change around the superhero genre won't and they'll drown.
- posted by Matt @ 12:15 PM permanent link |

 
WRITING: Elmore Leonard has always been one of my favorite authors. Here is an essay he wrote about writing practices that I'm mostly putting here so I'll remember where to find it. It also introduces me to a great new word, hooptedoodle.
- posted by Matt @ 1:08 PM permanent link |

 
BOOKS: Distraction by Bruce Sterling
I'm not sure I have much to say about this book. I liked it, mostly for Sterling's always imaginative view of the future. In this book, America is basically broken and the characters are trying to feel their way through. It's all very political and feels real. That's the only problem I had with it, I'm not too into imaginary politics. If I want to read about crazy politics, I'll read the news. I really started getting into the book at the end, when the politics part ends and the science-fiction takes over. All in all I liked it but it's a pretty thick book so it'll probably take awhile to sink in completely. I've got a few more Sterling books on the To Be Read Shelf so I'll have more of a comparison once I finish those. I'm really looking forward to Schismatrix Plus which seems like what Sterling was writing when he was in the more cyberpunk mode that I find interesting.

I'm most of the way through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which is turning out to be another Life Of Pi, which is to say it's a book I knew nothing about but is completely blowing me away. The audiobook I listened to before this was Anne Rice's Blackwood Farm (no link because I don't want you to buy it) and within 5 minutes of listening to The Curious Incident I knew it was going to be on a whole higher plane of quality than that thing. I'm not even done with it but I will already wholeheartedly recommend it.

I just started The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester which is one of those classic science fiction books I just never got around to reading before. My memory pretty much guarantees that as soon as I go into a bookstore I'll forget the list of books I wanted to buy so I was glad to find this and Man Plus by Frederick Pohl last time I went to my favorite used store, Page One Too.

I keep looking at my To Be Read Shelf and questioning my sanity at buying that many books and not reading them. There's 40+ books on that shelf as of right now and I'm making a rare New Year Resolution to read all of them by the close of 2004. I'm not one of those people who just likes having books around, I have to read them eventually. Of course being an incurable book hoarder doesn't help with my desire to read everything I buy that doesn't turn out to be total crap. Having them all on shelf will help me seperate ones I bought pre-Resolution and ones I'll no doubt buy from here on in so that'll help. Good luck to me.
- posted by Matt @ 10:42 AM permanent link |

 
LIFE: I'm officially jobless as of today, for the first time in quite awhile. I left my job as System/Network Admin at Spinn.Net, an ISP here in Albuquerque. I pretty much built the whole place so it's weird to not be going back there but it's for the best. I was pretty sick of my job there at the end and it had sucked away a lot of my love of computers. Being the only one who was on call 24x7 and had to make sure nothing broke because the business pretty much rested on it is tough. I learned almost everything I know there though so it was a very valuable 5 years.

The really strange thing I've experienced is the return of the excitement I used to have with messing around on my Linux boxes. Just since I've been preparing to leave I've gotten one of my old servers back up and installed Fedora, a new Linux based on RedHat. It's very nice. I've also installed BackupPC, a cool free backup software I found that lets me back up my laptop, windows machines, linux machines, everything. I'm also messing around with the Squid proxy/cache software and I've got in mind a cool project to build a turnkey wireless hotspot out of free software (NoCat and Squid are the two big ones I'm planning on messing with). It's nice to be excited about messing with computers again rather than dreading have to fix anything.

Now I just need to find a job. I was hoping I could find a position doing Perl programming but that's a pretty limited market, especially in Albuquerque. I've got two Perl leads though, one that pays about twice what I was making at SpinnNet, so I hope one of those works out. If not I have enough networking knowledge that I can probably find a job doing that. I never bothered with any certifications so even though I know the stuff, some people are stuck on having the piece of paper, which makes things hard. I'm not opposed to getting a low-level tech job if it comes down to it. I could easily be a computer repair guy at CompUSA if needed so I'm not too worried. It would be nice to just be a guy who punches a clock and has little responsibility. :) In any case I've got two more paychecks coming so I've got a little time.
- posted by Matt @ 9:25 PM permanent link |

 
COMICS: Matt Maxwell over at Broken Frontier has a good column up about caption boxes in comics, of all things. Caption boxes are something I've been thinking about also, trying to work out the best way to use them or not in my writing. Warren Ellis has talked about not using captions in his comics. Don't quote me but I believe he has said he did away with captions because he feels they slow the work down, which I can see. The main problem I have with the current trend of getting rid of captions is that you lose a very important aspect of fiction, narrative voice. The voice, attitudes, believablity, etc., of the narrator is a very, very important part of prose fiction and it's something that a lot of comics lack. Most comics just tell the story flat, you don't have a narrator at all. And I don't know that a narrator would help most comics, since the stories are pretty flat to start with. Not to say that it's stories are flat at all but I don't know if having a narrator in say, Queen & Country, would benefit the story any but without one it's hard to judge (of course Greg Rucka is writing a Q&C novel which will almost certainly have a narrator to deal with so we'll see what the difference is). Matt Maxwell is right, a narrator in comics who isn't just explaining the images is hard but I think more writers need to at least look at the benefits.

My favorite examples of the benefits of a narrator are A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Alex, the narrator of A Clockwork Orange makes that book. Without him, it would just be a story about a bad kid who gets caught by the government and reformed. His voice and attitudes about what are going on are what the story a classic. The invention of the 'nadsat' or the slang language that Alex and the other teens in the book use is enough to get Anthony Burgess a place on my pantheon of authors. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is maybe a better example of the difference not having a narrator makes because the book has a narrator (Chief Bromden) and the movie doesn't. They tell essentially the same story but the removal of the Chief as the narrative voice in the movie takes away quite a bit of the power of the book. In the book, the Chief is clearly mentally ill and it colors everything he says. He has paranoid delusions about machines in the walls and of The Combine, a conspiracy of everyone in power that is dedicated to keeping people stupid. The movie takes all of that away and you get the flat story of McMurphy, a born rule-breaker who comes to the hospital and fights with the head nurse. None of the nuance of the book is left because it was all in how the Chief saw McMurphy. In the book he's a man who has been able to keep away from The Combine and that's what gives him his power. In the movie he's just a fighter who doesn't like authority.

It's hard to describe really so if you have any interest in this topic at all I would recommend reading the book of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then watching the movie. Pay attention to how the Chief's illness provides another important layer on top of the story and how that's missing in the movie. This is the difference I see between comics with and without a real narrator. Captions are the way you can provide a narrator in comics so I wouldn't be quick to dismiss them.
- posted by Matt @ 11:19 AM permanent link |

 
BOOK REVIEW: Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice
I have no shame in admitting that I used to read, and very much enjoy, Anne Rice's books (I also read Tom Clancy books for awhile in my late teen years as long as I'm getting embarrasing reading habits out in the open). Unlike most of her readers, I always liked her Mayfair witch books a lot more than the vampire books. The last Mayfair book ended on a real cliffhanger so for years I waited for her to move away from the vampires, which had gotten horribly repetitive and in dire need of a strong editor to trim the fat (right when she got a huge book contract coincedentally), and finish up the witch story. A few years ago I read that Anne Rice had said she wasn't going to write any more witch books, which pissed me off I have to say. After not paying any attention to her books for a few years I happened to find out that her two newest books are the continuation of both the Mayfair saga and the vampire books. Yay! I said. Then I read Blackwood Farm (or rather, listened to it as an audiobook). Yikes! I said.

If I didn't have a unread shelf the length of both my arms, I would reread one of the old Rice books I enjoyed so much (I read The Witching Hour in almost one sitting, a feat for such a huge book) to see if it is as bad as this new one and I didn't know any better. I feel about this book the same way I did when I finally accepted the fact that The Simpsons had gone downhill in quality so severely. Now I see what everybody has always said about Anne Rice's books. It hurts me to think about how terrible this book was. The characters are annoying, even Lestat. The whole book is basically backstory and I would have skipped half of it if I had been reading the book and not listening to it. And just to rub salt in the wound, the cliffhanger from the last Mayfair witch book is basically blown off and the character shows up to be the lame love interest of the narrator. Bleh. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that this book was really written by a bad Anne Rice fan-fiction writer and she just put her name on it. Every stereotypical item on a Bad Anne Rice-style Slash Fiction checklist is here, even a hermaphrodite vampire and gay sex with a ghost (which I just realized turns out to be incest as well) for god's sake.

Anne Rice fans have probably already read this book so there's no helping them but if you haven't decided about it, please run away from this book. If you want to read some good Anne Rice books, read the Mayfair books and even some of the vampire books (I don't remember the titles but the ones from the third one to Memnoch the Devil were great). Then after you've read those, stop. Don't even look at any of the "vampire biography" books from the past few years. What makes me the most angry about how damn lame this book was is that the sequel is supposed to wrap up everything for both the vampires and the witches. I can't stand that my literary completist nature means that I'll probably read the sequel just to get the end of the story and I'll probably be suffering every minute of the way.
- posted by Matt @ 2:03 PM permanent link |

 
PRANKS: I love a good prank. I'm not talking about the mean-spirited crap that passes for pranks on TV shows like the new Candid Camera or Scare Tactics, I mean things like this. This guy's friends wrapped everything in his apartment with aluminum foil while he was away. I mean everything. His books, CD, spare change, even the toilet paper was wrapped in foil and rolled back up. This is awe-inspiring in its creativity and sheer detail. His foil-wrapped appliances still work and they left "Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends" as the sole unwrapped book, for pete's sake.
- posted by Matt @ 11:11 AM permanent link |

 
SPACE: As you should know, the Mars lander Spirit is now on Mars and sending back pictures. Nova had a great show a few days ago about building the landers that I really liked. It was a great look at all the work and science that goes into a huge endeavor like this.

One thing the show pointed out to me, unintentionally, was the problem with the NASA/government science way of building projects like this. The engineers from the JPL were very proud of the fact that they built every single part of the landers themselves. To me, this is a colossal waste of money and engineering. If you build everything yourself, you have to test everything yourself and then test everything in conjunction with everything else. Buying parts from people who already know how to build motors or parachutes means that they can use their expertise in that area to get you a product that works. And they'll do it for a lot less money probably. Of course that deprives you of the right to say you did everything yourself, which for a lot of scientists is not something they are willing to give up.

As big of a fan of this project as I am, I wish they were doing things quite a bit differently. Instead of building 2 very expensive, very overbuilt robots I would love to see NASA go for the "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" plan espoused by MIT robotics wizard (and Roomba vacuum inventor) Rod Brooks. Brooks's idea was instead of building 2 irreplaceable $5 million robots (for example), you build 100 $100,000 robots. Then you can use a less over-engineered landing strategy and spread those guys over the surface of the planet. Even if you lose 25 or even 50% of the robots, you've still got 50+ robots roaming around. Even if each one is only 1/10th as powerful in terms of science ability, you have many times more overall scientific capacity, and its spread out over a greater area. Since we're just at the beginnings of scientific exploration on Mars, it makes more sense to do a shotgun approach to exploration than the laser-like focus of the current system. When we have initial data and we've used cheap robots to find better landing strategies, we can send the super-powerful robots and really get into the hardcore science.

Even off-the-shelf robotic components are very powerful and although they might not be engineered to JPL specs, I would venture to say you could build a far more than adequate robot with pre-made industrial components. Switching from the usual monolithic top-down system of the current NASA to a more distributed approach would be a pretty big paradigm shift so I'm not holding my breath. It's something to think about though. If you happen to know any NASA bigwigs, pass along the idea. :)
- posted by Matt @ 8:48 PM permanent link |

 
COMICS: I have to be what seems like the one and only comics weblogger to stand up for David Mack's recent run on Daredevil (#51-55). Brian Bendis has been doing some work on that book recently that matches up to everything I've read of the character from the Holy Revered Godfather of Daredevil, Frank Miller. The end of Bendis's most recent arc had Daredevil soundly defeating the Kingpin, tearing off his mask, and announcing himself as the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen. That's a natural stopping point and if Bendis had just continued with the next issue it would have much less emotional impact. The preview Marvel released for the start of Bendis's run shows that the book has skipped forward a year and Matt Murdock is firmly entrenched as the new Kingpin, albeit without the crime part of that title. Giving us a break from the Matt Murdock/Kingpin story and doing this pretty unrelated story in the mean time is a great editorial decision. Mack's story focuses on the personal journey of a character called Echo that I'd never heard of (not having read any Daredevil before Bendis and Maleev took over) and uses a very different art style. The journey she takes is very believable and beyond a Wolverine that seems a tad tacked-on (but still mostly works in context of both character's backgrounds) I very much enjoyed getting to know this character on a deeper level.

Beyond people not understanding the need for a break in the main story between what are essentially two very different chapters, Mack's art seems to be the main sticking point. What people miss, I think, is that the story essentially takes place entirely in Echo's head. Mack uses a very odd panel placement and fills the page with dreamlike images of sign language, small dialogue asides, and images seemingly drawn by Echo as a child. It's undeniably beautiful painted work but the seeming randomness of the images is throwing people for a loop. I don't know if people are just more used to normal, grid style comic art than I am or what but this fit the story perfectly in my mind. Since it takes place in her head, standard art would be very out of place (as it is with most comic book stories that take place internally to a character instead of externally). It's a big risk for Bendis to hand over "his" title to this different of a story and for Marvel to allow this story into one of it's most popular titles and I applaud them for it.

I think once people see the Mack story in context of the main Murdock/Kingpin story it will make more sense but for me, it's perfect. Sometimes you need the calm to appreciate the ferocity of the storm.
- posted by Matt @ 1:33 PM permanent link |

 
WORDS: A group of linguists at Lake Superior State University has released it's list of so-called banished words for 2004. The press release has the story but no link to the list for some reason. Thanks to Google I found it though: http://www.lssu.edu/banished. While I have problems with their inclusion of some words/phrases, I hope people follow this list and get rid of at least metrosexual and bling-bling, two of the dumbest and most overused words of 2003. Beyond the general problems I have with the word metrosexual, which perports to describe men who like shopping for shoes, wearing makeup, and overdoing their grooming with another word besides effeminate, meaningless media words should not enter the general vocabulary of the populace. The only two places where I can see this word applying are LA and New York (not surprisingly, the two big media towns). Unless you live in one of those cities I would venture to say you do not know any metrosexuals. Don't even get me started on bling-bling.

The ones I don't agree with are LOL, smoking gun, and shots rang out except in terms of overuse and in the case of LOL, use anywhere but in email and instant messaging. In electronic written communication, LOL is a very valuable way of showing important body language that you can't show in the written word. Smoking gun and shots rang out may be cliches, but they did not originate in Iraq as the list seems to say. And shots do ring if you're using the definition of ring that says To give forth a clear resonant sound or To be filled with sound so they're wrong on those. Maybe if I watched the news I'd understand the over-use of these phrases but they're useful so I won't be getting rid of them.

All in all, I'm glad to see people at least giving thought to the words they use. I was given the Dictionary of Troublesome Words for Christmas and even just skimming through it I've gotten a lot more aware of the completely incorrect ways people tend to use a lot of words and phrases. Words are important but people tend to look upon those who try to speak correctly as fussy or picky and dismiss them. Oh well, I say. Words have meanings and our tendency to misuse them and pass it off as unimportant bugs me to no end.
- posted by Matt @ 12:47 PM permanent link |