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"The Coming Thing"

So I have just watched, on DVD, the entirety of the one and only season of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

I was a fan of the show when it was first run, back in 93-94, but I hadn’t seen a single minute of it since. So I’d forgotten how really cool and just damn fun it was. (I also hadn’t realized I’d missed so many episodes the first time though.)

Perfect by any means? Of course not. I thought it went a little downhill after they wrapped up the Orb mythology, for instance. But overall? That was a damn fun show, and I’m more sorry now that it didn’t get a second season than I was at the time.

If you’ve never seen it, and if you enjoy shows with more than a touch of camp–but also some real story and character–and you aren’t offended by a touch of sci-fi sprinkled in your westerns, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

I write like Ari Marmell

So there’s a "Who do you write like?" meme making the rounds. You paste a chunk of text into the analyzer, and it tells you whose work your own most resembles. It’s supposedly based on word choice.

It is, in fact, based on something that comes out of the back end of a bull in all sorts of fascinating shades of brown.

I just ran the analysis several times, on different samples of my writing. Each was multiple pages in length. And I got a different author almost every time. Apparently I write like Margaret Atwood and Leo Tolstoy and Rudyard Kipling and Vladamir Nabokov. Five samples, four authors. (I got Atwood twice.)

These are all samples from the same novel.

So, yeah, I think I’m quite content saying that

A) I write like me, and

B) This "analysis," even for a silly little Internet gizmo, is more than a tad flawed. 😛

Pet Peeve

I’ve been seeing a certain phrase used online a lot lately, and it bugs me.

People are saying "Oh, I read the audio version of [Book Title]."

No, you didn’t. You listened to it. You didn’t read it.

There’s nothing wrong with listening to an audio book; I’m not denigrating that at all. But use the proper verb. You didn’t "read" an audio book, any more than you "heard" a printed book, or "watched" a song on the radio.

CSI: Nibenay

It may be the sleepiness talking, but I’m suddenly feeling the urge to run a Dark Sun campaign in which the PCs are templars and other servants of one of the Sorcerer Kings, tasked with keeping the peace and investigating crimes in their home city-state.

And for whom failure to close a case is potentially punishable by death, either in the arena or as sacrifice.

I shall put it in the stack with the other 24,917 campaigns I want to run "at some point."

Hear me blather!

I recently did an interview with the folks at the Darker Days and Darkling podcasts; you can listen to it here.

Topics of discussion include D&D, World of Darkness, fiction writing (both past and future), and appliances.

My thanks to everyone involved for the invitation and opportunity. And to you guys for sitting through it. 😉