Category: Literature

The written word, or writing the word, for pleasure.

Scary movie

I had been out, watching a new horror movie at the cinema. It had got very good reviews, so I just had to go. Didn’t regret one bit. The move really pulled me in, kinda realistic in building up the story and making it believable, despite its rather simplistic theme: Basically, a city where the streets were full of vampires at night, a small army of vampire slayers arrived, they fought each other with stakes, guns, crossbows, hunted each other by car, by foot, any means possible.

Blood and carnage enough to be a splatter movie, enough humour to relieve us from the worst tension now and then, but also pulled us in enough to really scare us. The movie ended with the good guys winning of course, with a little cliff hanger. A followup in the works?

I guess the best sign that it scared me and almost made me believe it was real, is that when I walked home I was a bit anxious when I couldn’t avoid the shadows. Maybe that slayer that got away would appear and drive a stake throuh my heart…?

Why extending copyright is bad

Looking back, I have mentioned DRM a few times, and how I don’t like it – it’s only there to let other people be able to control what we can do with stuff we buy for ourself. And to extort as much money from us as possible.

While the thought behind DRM may be well meant, all I’ve seen of it is misuse. One other thing that is good, but made bad, is the misuse of copyright. How long should the copyright period be? 20 years? 50 years? 50 year after the death of the creator? The age of Mickey Mouse + 50? Infinite?

The companies that owns copyrights seems to want to constantly extend the copyright period, both to protect their old work from being used (and appreciated) and to prevent others to create new work that may use bits and pieces of their copyrighted work, intentionally or not.

Now, the best stuff I’ve read about this problem with copyright, is an old short story by Spider Robinson, Melancoly Elephants. Best of all, it is now available on his web site, for free! I recommend you to go read it right away.

“Murder, he wrote”

Authors have tried experimenting with publishing their books in different ways on the web. Some put their old book(s) on the web, some put their new book out. Some serialise the book, some put it out all at once. Here’s a new way: The blook!

Tom Evslin is trying a new twist with his work, the murder story hackoff.com: He’s blooging his book! The web site is complete wit a faus company site (the company in he story) a wiki, forum and the unfolding story, so that readers can take part in it. I think this is an exciting experiment – it will be interesting to see how it develops.

The updates here are going straight into my feed reader! 😉

Hamlet as Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction – or old fashioned adventure games if you want – may not be particularly visible these days with the commercial interests mostly being in other genres, but it’s still thriving. Also on the web.

I have no intention of writing a lot about IF this time, but the classic Hamlet by Shakespeare caught my eyes just recently. Not the book as such, but a little reworked into an IF story. So instead of encouraging you to read the book, I propose that you try to play Hamlet.