Category Archives: Writing
One retirement project of mine involves going through lots of boxes containing work stuff, hardware and software design stuff, and decades of writing stuff. It’s kind of amazing and weird how much stuff I’ve generated in well over 40 years of active stuff creation. Among all that stuff — the bulk of which turns out to be dead weight I can eject — are a few worth saving and recording here.
The writing stuff, especially, varies from short notes to, in a few cases, short stories or scripts written long ago. Here is a note that seems as relevant today as it was when I wrote it circa late 1980s.
It’s about violence…
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5 Comments | tags: force, means to an end, terrorism, violence, violence against cops, violence against race, violence against religion, violence against women, violent society | posted in Writing
Here’s something that caught my eye: Researchers at the University of Vermont, in the Computational Story Lab (!), did an interesting word content analysis on 1,700 stories downloaded from Gutenberg. Each story had been downloaded at least 150 times by readers.
The researchers used “sentiment analysis” that measures the positive or negative emotional impact of words. Using a sliding window, they attempted to characterize the “emotional arcs” of each story. Their goal was to see if there were common patterns.
Turns out, there are!
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26 Comments | tags: emotional arcs, printed word, seven plots, stories, story plots, storytelling, text, words | posted in Books, Writing
Five years. (And 602 posts.) Literally a handful of years. (And a heartful.) There is a theory that the Roman numeral V represents a human hand, and the numeral X symbolizes two V hands set point-to-point. It seems obvious that “prisoner’s hash marks” — counting the days in groups of five — owes much to our five-fingered hands.
Five is a human number. Small enough to seem fundamental; big enough to be interesting (two and three are so boring; four is kinda square). Five puts the prime in prime! It’s also part of an easy trick for making large right angles (for laying out fields and building pyramids), and it’s the first substantial anniversary gift (paper, cotton, leather, silk, wood).
Five years ago I started this blog…
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9 Comments | tags: Anniversary, blog, blogger, blogging, Followers, July 4, meta | posted in Life, Writing
When I was a college film student, one of the first classes putting theory into practice divided the students into groups of three. The class goal was for each group to make three films. The group would rotate among themselves the key positions of Writer, Director, and Cinematographer. This allowed everyone a chance to experience those roles.
Our group produced one that was silly fun, one that was weird and off-the-cuff, and one that was interesting and affected people.
Sadly, I have only memories (so I might be making this up).
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16 Comments | tags: An Unconditional Value, college, student film | posted in Life, Movies, Writing
I don’t often crack up over internet gags, but when I do I crack up over ones like this:
As an added bonus, back in June (during their slump) I wrote a little blues tune for my Minnesota Twins…
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9 Comments | tags: Darth Vader, funny, funny images, humor, Minnesota Twins, puns, Twins 2015 | posted in From My Collection, Writing
“Four score and seven…” (Ahem.) Excuse me, I meant… “Four years and seven (or more — it’s gotten hard to keep track) lifetimes ago, I brought forth upon this WordPress (dot com) a new blog, conceived in lunacy, and dedicated to the proposition that all blog readers would subscribe eventually.”
“Now I am engaged in a great deal of introspection, questioning whether that blog, or any blog so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The truth is, the world will little note, nor long remember what I write here. It is for us the bloggers, rather, to be dedicated here to adding a few more drops to the ocean. Tiny cries of small critters in a very large wilderness.”
And at this point, I’m way off script¹…
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54 Comments | tags: Anniversary, blog, blogger, blogging, humor, July 4, wry | posted in Life, Writing
This blog is nearly four years old (I started on July 4th, 2011). This post makes it exactly 500 posts here on Logos Con Carne. To commemorate it, I’m giving myself the 500 Odometer Award (which I built myself from various electrons I had laying around).
As part of the party, this post consists of miscellaneous odds and ends that have intrigued me lately. I’ll leave it to you to decide which are the odds and which are the ends.
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22 Comments | tags: All of Me, Comic Sans, George Winston, Jon Schmidt, light, light speed, Linus and Lucy, Minnesota Twins, Monty Python, NASA, SDO, skydiving, The Piano Guys, Tom Scott | posted in From My Collection, Life, Music, Science, The Interweb, Writing
I was tempted — just for a moment — to call this The Lost Oeuvre, but it really doesn’t rate such a highfalutin title. (And until just now, I had no idea “highfalutin” was a single, hyphen-free, word.) Considering that “works” can refer to drug-taking gear, that word seems just right.
Going through some old stuff, I came across typewritten copies of a few scripts from my film student college days. Not just film, but television production, too. I ended up becoming a computer programmer, but for a while I aspired to be the next George Lucas (or more likely, Quentin Tarantino).
For fun, I thought I’d share one of the ones I’m not too embarrassed by all these years later.
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16 Comments | tags: Angel, college, dead, elevator, fantasy, Fiction, film student, FINCH, heaven, Heaven and Hell, hell, humor, Peter Finch, Purgatory, script, Stanley, teleplay | posted in Writing
Well, it’s that time of year when WordPress generates our Annual Report, and we find out how many sold-out Sydney Opera House performances we earned. My first full year (2012) as a blogger I didn’t even rate one! That year visitors were compared to Mt. Everest climbers, and I’m sure there was no intended connection with oxygen deprivation.
This year — identically to last year — I managed to fill the House “about” five times. That’s page views; I’m up just shy of 500 views from last year (not quite a 4% increase). Visitors is another matter. Over 2,000 more visitors stopped by this year (a 140% increase).
But I really wanted to write about the posts…
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17 Comments | tags: 2013, 2014, 9-11, blog, blogger, blogging, Laurel Coppock, Leon Wieseltier, Mr. DeMille, NCIS, NCIS:New Orleans, Rick O'Shay, Stan Lynde, Toyota Jan | posted in Writing
Gourdians are an earthy and generally shameless lot.
It was originally posted here in 2011. It was technically a re-post — I copied the text and photos from my 2008 article in an older social media site that’s since gone to seed. (First rule of Older Social Media Sites: No one talks about Older Social Media Sites.) This one is only interesting if you want to see the first appearance.
I re-posted it a year later, in 2012. Again I copied the text — it was a re-post, not a re-blog. As a bonus, I added some new pictures and an introduction that explains the piece. This is a good one to read if you only read one.
The following year, in 2013, I re-blogged the re-post. Combination of curiosity and laziness. I didn’t love the results — re-blogs edit like comments, not posts. There is some new content there, but you have to also read the re-blogged article. Still, it’s the recommended course of action.
So go read this one. Happy Kiss A Gourdian Day!!
See ya next month!
4 Comments | tags: dirt, Gourdian, gourds, humor, Jack-O-Lantern, kiss a Gourdian, orange, pumpkins, re-post, vines | posted in Writing
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