Saalon Muyo

Awesome.  NSFW language ahoy, but awesome.

After a weekend in my undisclosed writing bunker, I emerged with about 70% of a novella and 1/3 less of a bottle of scotch than I began with.  Neither was quite my goal (I wanted 0% scotch and 100% novella) but all in all, not too bad.

The novella should be done this weekend.  The scotch?

Well, we’ll see.  It is some very good scotch, and I don’t intend to drive much this weekend.

After much deliberation over the suggestions of my peers, I have settled on the following beverage for my weekend writing retreat.

If I could write on a typewriter without wanting to shoot myself, I’d bring my worst white tank top and a pack of cigarettes and do it like a good Depression era writer did it.  Instead, it’ll be me, a laptop and a Robotech t-shirt.

I’ll see you all on the other side.

How did I miss this on the first pass?

But damn it, doesn’t anybody know how to write an ending any more?

I’m just gonna let that one stand without further comment.

Well, turns out his response was even less insightful than I feared.

George R. R. Martin made his brief case for why he hated the end of Battlestar Galactica, and he reverted to the overused “God did it” complaint.  It’s unfortunate, especially because he framed his complaint as a “Writing 101″ error, which, as you can imagine if you read my – ahem – impassioned post about my frustrations with A Song of Ice and Fire,  I took as somewhat ironic.

Leaving aside the fact that a deus ex machina is not always, in every case, a bad way to end a story – certainly the narrative foundation of the Western world is built on poems and plays rife with them – I think the “God did it” criticism is just shallow.  The finale sucks because a character gives a speech you don’t like that takes up 2 minutes of a 3 hour finale? That’s all there is to say?

Not that the ending is a deus ex machina, anyway.  If you didn’t see the mystical overtones coming years ago, starting all the way back in season 1, you were constructing your own ideal version of Galactica that did not exist.  Much like as I didn’t see A Song of Ice and Fire expanding endlessly starting with book 2, it’s probably my own fault for being so frustrated now.  We see what we want to see, no?

I was challenged by @aimeesblog to help her prettify the Planet Money chatter page she had built onher blog. Needing some more experience in PHP and mostly just liking a challenge, I accepted.  Below is the code I came up with after reading through the work of people much smarter than I.

There’s still one problem with it: any replies that are followed immediately by a comma are not turned into links.  Also, I should probably make this more generic to allow a search term to be passed into it and the appropriate feed to be returned, but with it being built to be a Wordpress plugin and not really knowing their API very well, this was what I settled on for the first version.

As you might have guessed, I’m calling it PlanetTwitter. Oh and if you aren’t already, listen to Planet Money.

You can find the code here.