thedeadone.net » blogging

Wordcount

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:53:51 +0000

One of the positive things for me that has come out using Google+, was when I was complaining about my inability to make time to write, between early starts, a full time job and two kids, my wife and myself are pretty exhausted by the time they’re in bed.

It was suggested by some¹ to stick or target a word count per day, post about it regularly and so build up the habit of writing. Once that suggestions was out in the open I had no choice but to try it.

A few other things have been percolating in my mind as well. I’m sure many of you have already seen the “sitting is killing you” infographic where it extols the terrible dangers of sitting. Made me think of how sitting in my favourite chair (which I loving now think of as my seat of DOOM!) in the evening, my body just turns off, leaving me, at best, to watch TV, or at worst, troll the internet from my laptop. I can’t write when I hit that seat in the evening, I’ve tried.

So, for my first experiment, I took the laptop to the kitchen table, turned off the wireless (the internet is nearly a bigger danger than my seat-of-doom) and started writing, resulting in about 1000 words and taking a reasonable amount of time, about an hour and half. So that became my target. Afterwards I retreated to my seat-of-doom and let my brain switch off for a while before bed.

And so far it seems to work. Sure there has been up and down days where I’ve written less than 800 words and other days where I haven’t written anything (I think falling asleep at the laptop is a good excuse). I haven’t slavishly stuck to the word count metric though, because sometimes starting a new section means pulling in notes and organising them and planning how to attack the section, so few words are actually written but the same amount of brain-space used. In that case the amount of time becomes important. I do post on Google+ about my word count but not every day, noting why I failed if I did.²

I think I’ve hit a good rhythm with the word count. It’s about long enough to get something done but not that long that I start to steer too much into brain-shutting-down-for-the-day. So I don’t have much re-writing when I read back over the words. I’ve also focused steadily on one project, which has made it easier to just sit down and start writing. This blog post is an attempt to use up some of that word count to do something else, such as blogging. And more importantly, I’m starting to get an “itch” when I get home, grabbing the laptop and bringing it in the kitchen so I can write while the kids play.³

But there is a downside. First, I’m not playing any computer games at all. I was really getting into Oblivion: Elder Scrolls, but now I’ve stopped. I have an not-yet-played copy of Portal installed. I haven’t made the time to play. I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a great evil, but still playing games exercises other parts of my brain than TV and books.

I read less. Much less. This is a greater evil! I have two books out from the library that need renewing, not a normal situation for me. I’m also spending over an hour, in the kitchen, by myself, leaving my wife in the living room by herself and sometimes left waiting because there is some show we like to watch together.

But so far, having a word-count target seems to have worked for me for getting over procrastination and other excuses. In fact, this post counts to 832 words of my word count for today. Yea!

And finally and probably the most important thing in this post, do you think footnotes work in a blog post? Are they distracting? (I have a tendency to want to read the footnote within the text of other people’s posts myself).

¹ Not sure what the right protocol these days for naming names or linking to profiles. The discussion was on a “Limited” post on Google+. One of the strength of Google+, at least early on, was connecting with people of the same interests, writers (both with stuff published and not) in Ireland.

² It seems folks on Google+ either don’t mind such posts or like to see them because they think it’s neat or even inspiring to see someone start a new habit. So there you go, another +1 for G+.

³ Doesn’t often work that well, spending 15 minutes writing one sentence because my wonderful son wanted to draw beside me and kept wanting me to look at what he was drawing is frustrating because of the context switching my mind was doing. Sometimes it’s better to shut the laptop and draw with my son instead.

Forgetting about it and moving on!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:37:15 +0000

You probably don’t know this about me, you probably don’t care, but I don’t like gangster movies. I’m not saying I think gangster movies are bad movies at all and I really shouldn’t have to say that either. It’s just my simple opinion, which is generally meaningless in the sea of opinionated blogs.

Now if I said I’ve never watched the Godfather and really am not bother to do so, what do you think now? I mean, I said I don’t like gangster movies, but now we’re talking about the Godfather. A modern classic. I said I didn’t like gangster movies, I’m not interested in them. You probably think I’m weird but hope you would leave at that. My tastes do not mean the Godfather is a bad movie, I suspect it’s great movie. And certainly Francis Ford Coppola wouldn’t give a crap about my online opinion. (BTW I loved Apocalypse Now).

I generally try to keep the inflammatory stuff to a minimum, I don’t have the energy to exercise on flames and trolls and it does tend to burn my sanity. And if possible, forget about it and move on. Patrick of SinisterForces blog decided to post about it and forget that way. Each to his own. But which provoked me to write this post…

Part of what he’s complaining about was because of the reaction his blog post and my comment on it caused. Both of us were just sharing our tastes, not criticising any particular product or the people who make them. I think Patrick got the brunt of the mini-twitter-shit-storm, simply because he was online at the time. I was sick in bed and only got it hours later, where it seemed to have already burned itself out. I made the mistake of reading back through it when I did get back online and it didn’t make me happy. Normally I just “walk away” as defending or justifying yourself and throwing accusations only makes the matter worse and lowers you. And really, in the big picture, it’s only a blip. But it’s hard to hold back or divert the web-fury anger that this sort of thing creates.

All I can say is, please remember that the internet is a public place and saying something in a public forum like a blog or the comments on a blog, or on twitter etc. can be read by anyone. I’ve certainly learned this, because I thought only Patrick and few others would have read my comment. It again has re-enforced the idea that you have to be careful what you say. I don’t hold anyone to blame or have any grudges against anyone (and hope the same is true of anyone that knows me). But sadly, it adds a few things to the list of things I won’t enter into discussion of when online. In the end it’s destructive to the (roleplaying) hobby.

(For those who need a little context, here is the original blog post on sinisterforces.com, my comment is still there for the moment: Why Haven’t I Bought The Dresden Files RPG Yet?).

Crossposted: How nasty do you want your Demons?

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:29:53 +0000

I know, I haven’t been blogging. Many excuses that no-one cares about. To fill the void that is this blog, here is a recent post I made on lostheroesrpg.com. Enjoy!

I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)

The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.

It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.

Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.

And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.

One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.

Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:

Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?

Which it later got imported into Google Buzz where some discussion occurred.

I have no conclusions so far. I’m going to keep tapping away at this drop, hoping in the end that the bits will fall together. What do you think?

3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:56:55 +0000

And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

Roleplaying and Blogs?

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:52:09 +0000

Long time back, I setup a WordPress blog to support our roleplaying games (you can see the site here if your really interested). The tech-savvy players and GMs used it store copies of their characters sheets, write-ups, house rules, etc. I did some hacking of WordPress to do this, mostly so that each campaign we played had it’s own webpage and look and feel and that you could browse the site by game. It was all a bit ad-hoc structure, with each game working out differently with different degrees of use. Now WordPress has evolved and my plugin-fu is much greater that can build some dedicated plugins and features for that.

So I’m curious, what web-based tools do you think are useful or could be useful for roleplaying and gaming, be it tabletop, LARP or even for play-by-blog?

Oh what is the internet coming to!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:20:06 +0000

I know I bullshit a bit (okay a lot). I mean that’s part of the fun of this blog-conversation-web2.0-social-networks isn’t? But I don’t see how it affects my intelligence or performance in bed? Do you?

LAW of BULLSHIT BLOGGER IDIOCY: The more dumbasses that get on the internet, and then create their own blogs like “thedeadone.net” and then go around judging things, some of which they haven’t even watched, and then type a bunch of bullshit onto their blog and onto the internet thinking that everyone else can’t see right through it, the more the dead one blogger bullshit factor increases.

Corollary: A blogger’s bullshit factor increases, as his IQ decreases. And is proportional to the amount of bullshit they repost in their own blog that they got from reading some other bullshit blog on the web and thinking that if somebody posted it on theirs, then it must be true, when in actuality, it’s simply geometrically spreading blog bullshit like thedeadone here by idiot blogsters sitting at home in their old underpants who dont know wtf they are talking about.

Probability of thedeadone blogster being an idiot and that his wife gets bored with his own lack of plot in the bedroom within about 2 minutes, an apparent certainty.

This lovely piece of constructive criticism comes from a “Randall Brougham, Ph.D.” I assume the Ph.D. is important here. (The original comment here). Perhaps he felt the need to indicate that he’s educated. Certainly I found no grammar or spelling mistakes in his comment, which is impressive for a troll.

I know I should just laugh about this, delete the comment and move on but I didn’t. It upset me, left me annoyed for the rest of the day. I followed up the comment, but the guy is probably troll so I don’t expect a response. He left his email and I’ve very tempted to contact him directly, however I’m also tempted to just ban his IP. I did some sniffing but I couldn’t find anything on google about this “Randall Brougham, Ph.D”, not even where he found the post (I checked my logs). It reads a little like a bot but his insults directly use the content of the post, so it’s not.

I’ve been trying to find the right analogy to sum up how it felt. It’s like a stranger hears your conversation in a public place and then decides to shout insults at you for five minutes before running off and not giving you the chance to respond. I did briefly pull the post, but then, part of me said, no, fuck Randal Brougham, Ph.D., I can’t let the trolls win. Even if Randal Brougham, Ph.D. is just some random asshole and it means nothing, its still disturbing to think that some stranger that I’ve never meet or talked to can be so venomous towards you.

This is my reply comment, in case he comes back here some day.

Hi Randall Brougham, Ph.D., thank you for your comment and I will now avoid bullshitting and having opinions and displaying those opinions online. From now I will just write about the pretty little flowers I drew, the new wordpress plugin I wrote or my new baby.

Come on! Yes it’s a little bullshitty. Writing one’s thoughts is mostly an act of bullshit. I obviously hit a nerve but you don’t really elaborate on why, instead you just call me stupid and impotent. How witty of you to rip through my bullshit with such an insult. Seriously, I can just delete your comment now and ban your IP but why bother? The probability is that your just a troll who has some issue with bloggers in general. And if you do reply, I hope you actually say something instead of being offensive.

Yes, I haven’t read Harry Potter and I’ve haven’t seen all of Lost. I’m not even saying that they are crap, only that my perception of them diminishes over time despite how good they are.

And also, this bullshit is mine alone, thankfully. I’m not re-posting it from somewhere else. I doubt anyone else will re-post it either. Cartographer was talking about her feelings about the current Harry Potter and how her view of a good novel has changed from when she was a teenager. The whole of this post is in relation to my view.

Thanks for your attention.

Update (24/08/2007 9am): Google seems to like me. Within a few minutes of this post, I did a new search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D (the troll). Look what hits the number 1 spot:

So if anyone does a search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D. They’ll find this post calling him out as a troll. It was unintentional. I wonder did he really use his real name?

Organising my website/blog… need some feedback?

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:33:32 +0000

Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…

I was using categories to highlight particular entries, ones that I felt formed a more complete article or are, in themselves, for presentation. For example, software I wrote and made available is filed under software but when I write about software, I don’t put it under there. This is probably not a clear-cut example as it makes sense to have a separate category for downloadable software. I better example is roleplaying. This is in the subcategory of writing. Here I put mostly complete articles that I would like to have people find easily. However I’ve written much more about roleplaying that I haven’t put in there because it’s either throw-away or I’m still thinking about it.

What I was thinking of doing, was to be more free with my category usage, breaking up my general category into numerous others but then having a category called “Gallery” which contains a subset of categories. I can assign an entry to multiple categories so I assign under the correct category and if I want to highlight it on my website, I stick it also under the gallery one. Then, from the main links on my webpage you can browse the gallery category for my showy articles and from there then explore the more general categories. In a sense using categories like “tags” and then using the special Gallery subset of categories as the way I have been using categories all along. Is this a good way of doing it? What do other people think?

One of the problems with reorganising my categories is that it changes the url’s of my articles. Which can mean they get picked up as “new” articles by the various feeds such as redbrick planet. I’d like to get this right in one step, so I have to make sure that it’s a good layout. If I do re-orgainse, it’s probaly a good idea to trim back and delete some of my entries, perhaps archiving really old ones that, to be honest, are utter rubbish, mental note to self.

Aside: mental doodle (which is described here somewhere) for this week: “I walk the moonlight path, the stars dancing on infinity. The Devil sings a lullaby while the Angels die on stakes. Far below is Earth, far above is darkness; the dead void of fear and hate, full of the light of madness. Seek the voidless untruth and find the greatest truth of all.”

Update #1: Did a little surf’in and found this and this articles from a wordpress blogger called Lorelle. Seems she’s done much more thinking on the subject of using categories and tags. More food for thought. In a sense, my “gallery” idea could be done using WordPress categories and then I just “tag” all my other posts. However I’m not completely happy with that. It would provide an immediate solution… but that still leaves the majority of my entries sitting in “news” or (worse) I could stick them all in uncategorized. I’d like to be able to categorize my existing entries, just for my own sense of order.

Update #2: No comments yet, so I figure it’s okay to add my thoughts directly to the article. So I did a brief scan of all my previous posts. I’m quite happy to leave them all, oddly, though I may update links and such that have gone dead.

Categories to leave alone

I’m happy enough with these categories. I see no reason to change them. These would have formed the bulk of what I was calling “Galleries”.

Computer Games > Quake; Quake 2; Vampire the Masquerade Redemption;
Drawings > 3D; Alice in Wonderland; Black and White; Character; Chargey Studies; Renegade Art; Sketchs
LJ
Software
Writing > Roleplaying; Short Stories

Categories to remove

There is really only one problematic category. Even from the title, it is obvious the category needs to be split.

News, rants, opinions and general thoughts

Categories to add

This is how I’d imagine breaking down the all-consuming news category

News > Webpage; Personal

I would split actual “news” into two. “Personal” (which is kind of like a blog) and “Webpage” which is about the webpage; new features, changes, updates, etc.

Thoughts

Thoughts, “off-topic” posts and rants. At some point I should review them of course and see if a new category is needed.

Projects

News, rabblings, thoughts, etc. about any personal projects such as RPGs, writing and software.

Tech

Writings about programming, technology, software etc.

Weird

Weird stuff I found. I do try to avoid posting links I find via digg.com and boingboing.net but occasionally stuff passes my way that I find interesting.

Writing > Musings

Thoughts, articles, rabblings and other tit-bits to do with writing in general.

I’d also expand my usage of Writing > Roleplaying. Right now it’s a mix of full articles and adventures. It will now also contain my thoughts on roleplaying too.

Is this a good layout?

Who reads this blog anyway?

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:44:52 +0000

For literally years, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with my web space. At the moment it’s a dump for anything I’d like to keep online or be able to reference online such as my weird and wacky writings, my pleasant amateur art and various pieces of software or code I’ve done. And thats enough for me, I think.

However, I was interested in blogging software before the word “blogging” became hip. I didn’t blog, I just used the software from GreyMatter to MovableType and now WordPress (which now runs this site). So the question haunts me (only a little though)… why I don’t I really blog and who reads this anyway?

My posts are aggregated into Redbrick Planet (which means they get posted to Redbrick) and now they get cross-posted to my livejournal. However comments are few and often come from random web-surfers or those looking for support on my software. Occasionally comments can be found on the Redbrick boards (Redbrick Planet gets cross-posted to the boards) but not that often.

In my mind there is three (possible four) types that most blogs fit into. I’m not saying these are categories that all blogs can be fit into or are strict definitions. They are simply the way I think of blogs when I come across them.

There are the online diaries such as LiveJournal. Unless I know the person, I ignore theses. However I’ve posted several times about personal incidents good and bad. But I do this infrequently. I don’t want to share with the world my problems, I have family and friends to do that. I’m also not comfortable talking about things that might land me in trouble other people’s privacy or work-related stuff. More than one project I’ve done in work has been smothered in NDAs.

Then there are the journalistic type where articles about various topics are posted. If I’m interested in the topics, the writing is easy to read and the content is fairly frequent, great. I’ve written a few articles, mostly on roleplaying, but they are very infrequent and they are truely first drafts. They have the basic points but lack structure and decent prose. I just don’t have the time between family and work to really do proper essays and the research required for them. And like all ego-driven things, the response I get to what I have done is minimal if at all and this discourages me from really put more effort into it.

The last type is what I think of as the tracker or the journal. The blogger in question posts updates and news on various projects like this guy who has managed to swap his way from a paperclip to a house! I have various pet projects I’m working on such as two RPGs, writings and even my “astral projection” attempts. I could certainly write about those but then I’m taking time away from working on them. Also in part I’m rather private about them, I guess I’m little paranoid to be honest. I don’t wear my life choices on my sleeve and I don’t know who reads my blog. Guess that makes me seem a little boring. On top of that, my life-work balance sucks so updates would be even less frequent than they already are.

(There is another type, but is it really a blog? Software, art and other content put online via blog software, kinda like what I’ve done on my current webpage. I don’t really consider these blogs, though they may be part of a real blog. It just turns out that blog software are handy (if simplistic) content management systems too).

I guess a way to look at it is, if I trawl back through my archives, how much would I like to keep or promote on the site. And I’ve already decided that with my layout and categories. I guess I’ll still be haunted by the missing purpose of this space, but I won’t be loosing any sleep.

In an ironic way, this post is reflective of my blog’s current state. It has neither purpose or conclusion. I’ve even failed to really phrase the question.

More, More, More…

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:31:27 +0000

Started playing around with Planet which is this RSS feed aggregator to HTML thingy.

I set up Irish Gaming Planet as a test and people seem to like it. Now if I can only get other gaming sites to have real feeds…

And while I was doing that, colmmacc has set up a Redbrick Planet. I’m helping out too.

I kinda like it a kalediscope look at the blabbering minds and egos of Redbrick.

Urgent Attention: I didn’t win!

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:01:58 +0000

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t win the Redbrick Award (2005) for Best Contributer to the Boards

Maybe next year… (like hell)

thedeadone.net » blogging

Wordcount

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Forgetting about it and moving on!

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Crossposted: How nasty do you want your Demons?

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3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!

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Roleplaying and Blogs?

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Oh what is the internet coming to!

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More, More, More…

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