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I Could Solve This in Five Minutes

So, at the moment I’m sludging through Sherry Thomas’ latest, & first Contemporary, “The One in my Heart”.
There’s lots to not-enjoy about it. (Like the character lamenting the lack of timeless marriage, at the same time as looking at her phone during lunch with her partner). Whatever. The bigger issue for the Romance Novel here is that there’s [...]

Posted at April 28, 2015 | read more

You Know You Should Be Using VCS For That

It’s kindof cute that all programmers, if they’ve worked on any project for a long enough time before learning about VCS, surely all take the same approach to novice “version control”. e.g. Keeping folders/copies as snapshots of how the code looked at that time. – We weren’t all born knowing how to use VCS. (Though, maybe those who didn’t bother [...]

Posted at March 29, 2015 | read more

Case Study of Conflict in Narrative

Maybe in my previous postings on this topic I’ve come across as a little harsh on RASalvatore, and perhaps it seems that I think all Romance Novels do character well. Okay. That’s obviously not going to be true.
But I’d still like to consider Katherine Ashe’s novella from the “At the Billionaire’s Wedding” anthology with regards to conflict in [...]

Posted at March 28, 2015 | read more

Devil in Winter

So. Recently I re-read Lisa Kleypas’ “Devil in Winter”.
Not the first time I’ve re-read that book. There are some less-than-stellar parts of the book. (Notably, an awkward sequel-setup, which then doesn’t get follow-through in the next book besides “oh. that. haha. oops.”.).
But it’s such an amazing, fantastic book! I can’t believe there’re those who don’t think [...]

Posted at March 27, 2015 | read more

On Women in Tech

So. This is a topic I see come up at various times.
Broadly, tech/STEM/etc. has many more men in it than women, and so naturally there we need to make efforts to remedy this. This post has also been a post which has been sticking around in my “Draft” pile for a while. Figured I should get it off [...]

Posted at March 27, 2015 | read more

Conflict in Narrative, RE: Genre

I rambled recently about some genres, romance and action/adventure, particularly that one genre did characters well and the other was strong in plot.
I wondered whether romance genre was inherently worse at plot. A tool which would help this thought would be the notion of whether conflict is ‘internal’ or ‘external’.
Gunfights, explosions and whatnot would be ‘external’.

Posted at March 22, 2015 | read more

Silly Things to Say on International Women's Day

It was International Women’s Day a couple of days ago. A knee-jerk response seen on social media was: When is it ever International Men’s Day? This is a stupid thing to say.
Do you want an International Men’s Day? Grow up, I’d reckon. Saying “What about International Men’s day?” on International Women’s Day, when sure as shit you’d not [...]

Posted at March 10, 2015 | read more

Rambling on Genres, Romance and Action

Lately, I’ve been reading lots of RASalvatore. Specifically, his Legend of Drizzt series. I’ve read the first 11 books so far. I enjoy them well enough. They’re sword-and-sworcery stories, falling roughly under action/adventure and scifi/fantasy genres.
What I don’t enjoy is RASalvatore’s characters, for the most part. And so generally any monologue Drizzt has, or any morality consideration (usually [...]

Posted at February 25, 2015 | read more

Highlights of Emma Approved & LBD

Ah. So. Lately my reading has been more about sword & sworcery fantasy.
For a break from that, I thought it’d be good to go back & look at some of the highlights from Lizzie Bennet Diaries & it’s sister show Emma Approved.
(I tried watching some of their other shows; Frankenstein and Little Women, but they’ve just [...]

Posted at February 24, 2015 | read more

Eclipse Woes: Import-Plugin

Eclipse Plugin Development, I’ve found, has been fraught with with “learning experiences”. They say it’s easy to create Feature projects & Update Sites for Eclipse.
Turns out when the exporter gives an error saying “I can’t find Installable Unit for your plugin”, something is wrong with your plugin project’s build!
– It’s possible for a PDE project to [...]

Posted at February 18, 2015 | read more