Twittishness

I finally succumbed to peer pressure and adopted Twitter a little over a month ago. (And yes, if all my friends jumped off a cliff I'd probably do it too. I'd miss them.)

Since then I seem to have posted there 83 times (84 including one I removed, which ill-advisedly commented on... ah, er, never mind). Assuming the code I cutandpasted has done its job properly, you should be able to view a selection of my recent wisdom imparted through the Twitter medium in the sidebar over to your right. (No, about a screenful from the top. That's right, there.)

[Edit to add: Oh, hang on -- not if you're reading the page for this individual post rather than the Peculiar Times homepage. Which you will be, if you followed my link from Twitter. Try here.]

I'm not going to start tediously repeating what others have said about the differences between Twittering and blogging -- suffice it to say that it is a different, and still reasonably novel, way to organise one's thoughts which is a lot more reactive and context-based. When it's used properly it can also help those stray ideas which wander across one's mind avoid becoming irretrievably lost in the spongy crenellations of undergrowth.

It's also a pretty good way to keep in touch with anyone else who spends most of the day parked in front of a screen, without it interfering too much with one's work. It's also handy for breaking news (although note the inevitable date on that article), and... oh, all sorts of stuff. At its best it's a little like being immersed in a direct-brain-fed gestalt stream-of-consciousness of the kind I imagine our grandchildren participating in almost constantly while they're awake. Provided such a thing supplements individuality (blogging in this restricted instance) rather than completely subsuming it, it has its interest and value.

Admittedly I'm making an effort to follow contentful stuff like daily crossword clues, microfiction and even microbiography rather than all the celebrity cigarette-break guff. (It's true that celebrities can occasionally be spontaneous and interesting -- but their interesting moments tend not to be spontaneous, and the converse applies.) I'm also trying hard not to be tugged into the tweeness of the jargon (whereby "tweeness", for instance, would have to mean the Twitter equivalent of a penis, because it begins with "tw" and rhymes).

...OK, so perhaps I am going to tediously repeat what others have said about the differences between Twittering and blogging. Sorry about that.

Anyway. Some of the stuff you've missed (assuming you're not reading them already on Twitter or Facebook) follows. There's probably a high-tech way to reveal them here, but I'm going to stick with what I know and cutandpaste them instead.

Microfiction (140 characters, to fit the post limit perfectly, seems to be the preferred form):

purserhallard To cheat death, Dr Ebbinghaus slowed time to an asymptotic standstill. Nobody experienced anything ever again, but at least they were alive.
11:29 AM Mar 27th from web

purserhallard Celebrity Exorcism: St Patrick vs Glycon! #sixwordstory
12:42 PM Mar 17th from web

purserhallard Diurnal amnesia is common in incipient lycanthropy. Some women learn of the condition only when an ultrasound scan reveals a litter of cubs.
10:19 AM Mar 17th from web

purserhallard "Eternal life, somatic control – they needed to rebel somehow. Odd though, the young hobbling down the streets, wrinkled and silver-haired."
9:00 AM Mar 16th from web

A handful of random pieces of what one might charitably call microcriticism:

purserhallard Actually: everyone, I love The Wire. Its humanity, empathy and rage at an obscene world make it everything The Sopranos should be and isn't.
6:51 AM Apr 1st from web

purserhallard ponders the eschatology of Desperate Housewives.
10:22 AM Mar 21st from web

purserhallard Modern art, n. Term used by lazy, unoriginal people as a byword for laziness and lack of originality.
9:53 PM Mar 19th from web

purserhallard thinks Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is more like Bagpuss than Scooby Doo. When he goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too.
10:30 AM Mar 5th from web

Puns:

purserhallard resists the temptation to add "Abraham van Hesling" and "Buffy Summers" to the list of stakeholders.
11:41 AM Mar 23rd from web

purserhallard Tachycardia, n. Medical term for overexposure to Hallmark products.
9:30 AM Mar 9th from web

And a crossword clue:

purserhallard , in self-directed anger, betrays fellow agent with steel (8).
5:56 PM Mar 31st from web

Most of those are the kind of random rubbish I wouldn't dream of posting here -- which makes Twitter, where the scrutiny's less intense, the ideal repository for them.

The Archetype Ark

This morning a Facebook application reminded me: "Valentine's Day is just around the corner! Send a cuddly anima".

Clearly the timekeeping processes at work here could do with some attention, but given the existence of fluffy microbes and plush subatomic particles, the idea of cuddly Jungian archetypes seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable.

They'll probably branch out into Freudian psychic apparatus next. Here, stroke my ego.

66 out of 149 out of 1000

I missed blogging about it at the time, but a few weeks ago The Guardian, ever hungry to add value to their news coverage, started publishing a series of supplements which between them make up a list of recommendations for 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.

Inevitably the category of this list which most interests me is the rather impressive Science Fiction and Fantasy section. The whole thing's online:

Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Sidebar: The Best Dystopias
Sidebar: Radical Reading
Sidebar: Imagined Worlds
Sidebar: The Best Gothic Novels
Sidebar: The Best of JG Ballard
Sidebar: Novels that Predicted the Future
The Full List of 1000

As those sidebar headings make clear, the net's cast fairly wide here, which I approve of -- it's far better that the Guardian's readership be educated to see the continuity between Asimov and Heinlein on the one hand and Rushdie and Self on the other, than that they be encouraged to believe in S.F. as a ghetto literature. It's lovely to see the fantastical and science-fictional elements in such non-genre novels as Cloud Atlas, Ada or Ardor and The Handmaid's Tale embraced in the mainstream press rather than explained away.

Admittedly there are one or two occasions when I think they've been too inclusive -- the authors' other work notwithstanding, it's difficult to see The Wasp Factory or Kavalier and Clay, for example, as fantasy or S.F. -- but I'd far rather that than the alternative. Similarly, I don't agree with all the choices -- in Banks's case again, Consider Phlebas is probably his least good S.F. I'd have preferred a Philip K. Dick Top 3 to a Ballard one and in particular I don't think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick's best, rather than his best-known, work. (The Man in the High Castle's an excellent choice, mind you.)

Nevertheless, many of the right books and nearly all the right authors are listed, and the selection as a whole gives an excellent overview of the history of the novel in these genres -- in English, at least -- from their origins to the present day. The people who put the list together are literate, knowledgeable, intensely well-read and deeply respectful towards the genres they're writing on. Which of course is entirely as it should be, but still, it isn't altogether the sort of thing we S.F. readers have come to expect.

However, this is the internet, so let's skip over the detailed analytical discussion and dive straight for the tickable booklist. (I presume there are people on the web memeing up the entire list of 1000, but frankly I have too much lust for life.)

I've separated out the sidebar entries and stuck them on at the end (except for the "Novels that Predicted the Future" list, which doesn't seem to count). Books I've read are in bold, books I own are underlined, books I want to get around to reading are italicised and books I have no interest in whatsoever are struckthrough. Is that reductionist enough?

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W. Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
7. Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
11. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
13. Poppy Z. Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
25. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
29. G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
30. Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
32. Michael G. Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
36. Samuel R. Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
37. Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
38. Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
39. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
48. M. John Harrison: Light (2002)
49. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
59. P.D. James: The Children of Men (1992)
60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966) [I own and have read the short story, but this is a list of novels.]
64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)
66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
80. Walter M. Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970) [Not entirely sure I own this one -- if I do, it's in the loft.]
89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
90. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932) [I sincerely tried -- it's just so huge...]
96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) [My wife owns this one, but I disown it.]
102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
110. Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
118. H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
119. H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
120. T.H. White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

125. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) [Yes, they did get the title right.]
126. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
127. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
128. Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
129. Thomas M. Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
130. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
131. Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

132. Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
133. Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
134. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
135. Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

136. C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
137. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
138. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
139. Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
140. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) [Well, nearly all of them.]
141. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990) [Edit to add: I've just realised that I've only read the first trilogy, not the more recent supplemental volumes, so this one might strictly be a "no".]

142. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
143. William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
144. M.G. Lewis: The Monk (1796)
145. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
146. Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

147. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
148. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
149. J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

Why they stop at 149, I've no idea. (Or maybe I've left one off -- do feel freel to check.) Never mind.

By my count I've read 66, which comes to a moderately respectable 45%. What about you?

Recent Products of My Brain

Forecast, adj.: Having a bifurcated bottom (cf fork-tongued).

Pillowcase, n.: The enzyme responsible for digesting pillocks.

A: I just found my wife hiding behind an evergreen oriental shrub.
B: Japonica?
A: Well, something must have.

[Edit 7-2-9 to add:]

A: I think my wife's joined a Japanese organised crime syndicate.
B: Yakuza?
A: No, I wouldn't dare.

The Bat Dome

Yet more fun with predictive text:

"I'll get the cat food"

...is predicted as:

"I'll get the act done"

Or -- if you remember to correct the first time but not the second -- the rather more apposite:

"I'll get the cat done".

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,686

Why isn't a female bulldog a cowbitch?

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,685

RAFFLE is to RATIO as FELAFEL is to FELLATIO. True or false?

(The existence of Aer Lingus has always made me feel that the Italian national airline should be called Aero Latio.)

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,684

Shouldn't "piss-poor" be the opposite of "piss-rich"?

FIRST ROMAN MATRON: Ooh Livia, you mustn't go to that tanner to have your cloth bleached, they're piss-poor.
SECOND ROMAN MATRON: All right, Licia, I'll go to the one round the corner. They've got vats of the stuff.

Pressing Linguistic Questions of Our Day, No. 41,683

How come "linoleum" is shortened to "lino", but "petroleum" abbreviates to "petrol"? Hmm?

Arrrrhhh!

Since 2000 or so I've been using Norton for all my antivirus needs. Recently, however I've found it turning into an elderly prima donna: bloated and slow, demanding of attention, insistent on getting its own way and calling everything else to a halt whenever it deigns to perform.

With my yearly subscription about to expire, I decided I really didn't want to pay any more for the privilege of its company, so I've just been installing the splendidly-named Avast!, a freeware anti-virus application recommended me by friends (thanks chaps).

So far Avast! has been a lot more friendly (I'm running a scan while typing this, which would have been quite excruciating with Norton), though the siren noise it makes when it finds something amiss is a little terrifying.

It's also taken me all bloody afternoon to get it working properly, primarily because Norton simply refuses to work with these amateurs, and deliberately hangs around outstaying its welcome, perhaps in the hope of flowers from the audience. Gah. I think I've got rid of it all now, but it's been a grade-A pain.

And I'm particularly glad I've done it, as I now see from that Wikipedia article that Norton 2007 is completely incompatible with ZoneAlarm, which I'm also using. Bastards.

You're It

Ooh look, I've got tags.

[Edit: Although tagging all my past posts is going to take quite some time, I, er, seem to have done the first year's worth this afternoon. The novelty's beginning to wear off now.]

I gather from the stony silence which met my last post that I'm the only one who finds that video link amusing as well as offensive. Oh well.

I'm still embroiled in novella writing, so I'm still not getting much time to update the blog [Edit: Not that you'd think it from the way I've just spent my afternoon, but never mind]. I can't say much about the book before at least a blurb is publicised, hence the succession of rather dull wordcount figures I've been subjecting you all to recently. I can, however, reveal that the last chapter I completed contained the words "crabmeat", "volcanic", and "quarterstaff", plus explicit depictions of caffeine consumption.

Other than that -- and a certain amount of what we used to call "mindless absorption of pop culture" when I was at Oxford, but which would probably now have to be described using the words "product" and "consumer" -- it's mostly been work of one kind or another.

Pleasant exceptions have included a couple of brunches out with B. (which we deserve, this being the busiest time of her working year as well as mine so far) and the anticipation of Bristol Beer Festival this coming Saturday. Unpleasant things have included being told "I'm sorry, I thought you were young," by someone in her twenties, who went on to imply that I looked over forty. Bah.

I Can See Your Blog From Up Here

Ohh, this is exciting:



You can create your own visitor map here.

...I really should be working, shouldn't I.

Got Up. Faffed. Updated My Blog.

Thanks to hatmandu for pointing me towards these six-word stories by various authors. I particularly like Charles Stross's Bin Laden story, but Bruce Sterling, Stephen Baxter and Alan Moore also manage some impressive work in the space available.

A morning of prevaricating, as usual, has led to me posting various six-fics of my own as comments to Hat's blog entry above. I might as well archive them here for general interest:

"Her dying wish," sighed King Albert.

98TH LEGION UNDER QUINTUS TAKES TENOCHTITLAN

"Hi. Meet my wife and husbands."

My other head plots against me.

Nanoterrorism is so passé these days.

IN THE beginning, Satan created God.

And, moving uncharacteristically away from SF and religion:

Jane Errs: "Reader, I shagged him."

Oulipo, fixing wilful limits, cramps author.

Accurate haiku
need heptasyllables and
pentasyllables.

(NB: Those last two I've altered slightly to stand independent of their original context. Which makes the whole "archiving" pretext rather flimsy, really.)

Returning to more traditionally constructed fiction... my copies of Collected Works and Time Signature arrived this morning, for which many thanks to the nice people at Big Finish. They look, as I've mentioned, really rather neat with their minimalist white covers. (Not that that's the nicest thing I can think of to say about them, it's just the first thing that occurs to me as I look at them now.)

I'm pleased with my work in both, but also with the company I'm keeping between -- as it were -- the covers. Time Signature includes work from Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel and Marc Platt -- three of the best of the Doctor Who novelists of the 1990s, and indeed of the original T.V. programme's scriptwriters during its last years -- as well as from some of the most interesting short-story writers to emerge from Big Finish's Short Trips anthologies. Collected Works similarly includes work from an impressive number of the most impressive Doctor Who novelists to emerge during the 2000s, all of whom I admire greatly.

I'd read most of Collected Works before publication, and it's a really strong collection, with a coherent through-story and some outstanding individual pieces. Nick Wallace (one of those emerging novelists, and indeed the last to slip under the bar before the new T.V. series made the Doctor Who novels a closed shop) has done an excellent job, his first as a editor. I'm also very pleased with my own contributions -- five short pieces (though these are more like six pages each than six words), and one longer one co-written with Nick, all based around a group of visitors from the far future.

Time Signature I've yet to read all of, but I know that Simon Guerrier had an equally strong ongoing story in mind and made some excellent editorial choices, so I anticipate being impressed by that one as well. Certainly I'm just as happy with my story, a "condensed novel" about William Hartnell's original Doctor exploring a world where time is rather literally in short supply.

Ah, well. I'm going to stop plugging these here now, doubtless to the relief of most of you (although I reserve the right to link to reviews, if there are any). You know where you can get your own copies if you want to.

Putting the Cartography Before the Horse

I've spent most of this past week worldbuilding -- creating a setting for a potential novel (not one I've actually got anyone interested in yet, I hasten to add), in painstaking geographical, historical, political and social detail.

I'm told this is one of my big strengths as a writer... and I'm inclined to agree that Of the City of the Saved... would be a considerably lesser work without the 20,000-odd words of notes I'd made on the City before I started writing it. I've tried to do similar work (to a lesser degree, obviously) for my various short stories, "Minions of the Moon" particularly, and I think it's paid off. It certainly led to my being asked by Nick Wallace, the editor of Collected Works, to design some background for that book.

I don't want to go into detail about this new setting, because it's a neat idea and I don't want people being "inspired" by it. But for most of the past week I've been painstakingly constructing (in Microsoft Paint, perversely enough) a map of Britain in the 22nd century, after some serious changes to the political landscape. It's not an approach I've used before, but I've found that as I've filled in the changed place-names and coloured in the various political entities, I've found a whole history unfolding in my head.

Of course, I don't actually have a story, plot or characters yet. But I've got a very exciting world to put them into when I manage to come up with some.

And -- if it should happen to become a bestselling sequence of novels and spawn a series of blockbusting films -- I'll have the licensed tie-in Risk board all worked out ready.

Phil explained abstractedly.

I've been having fun playing with Word's AutoSummarize feature. As the online help explains, this would appear to work by counting which words appear most often and then extracting in their entirety the sentences which contain the highest proportion of high-scoring words. As this response suggests, it's probably a better tool for checking a document's linguistic biases than for actually writing anything resembling an intelligible abstract.

Summarising my Guardian article in ten sentences produces the following:

On first reading a Philip K Dick novel, many people wonder what kind of twisted mind could come up with such ideas. The answer is a very twisted mind indeed - even when writing science fiction, Dick wrote from experience. Dick's insights into the true nature of reality were spectacular and varied. A break-in at Dick's house in 1971 – not altogether surprising given the proclivities of his recent house-guests – took on great personal significance. Now, for all we know, Dick might have been predisposed to such delusions whatever his lifestyle, but the drugs can't have helped – and Dick realised this. That March had been an eventful month for Dick. For the rest of his life, Dick was obsessed with explaining these events. Dick based his final novel, The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer, around his extraordinary life.

Dick's interpretation of his visions changed on an almost daily basis. It's not a theology that more conventional Christians would recognise, but Dick worked it through in detail.

The trouble with this is that it's deceptively coherent: it appears to be telling a connected story, but misleads in at least two important respects (The break-in didn't happen in March, and Transmigration is based around Bishop James Pike's life, not Dick's).

The tool isn't very good at avoiding section headings (to get the above I had to cut out the title and the sidebar), and it seems to have a strong bias towards short sentences. Trimming "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants" to 20 sentences comes up with:

Jason frowned. ‘Jason has library books?’ Bernice asked, puzzled. Bernice frowned. This copy must be Jason’s own, she guessed. Benny closed the book and sat down gingerly on Jason’s rumpled, sweaty duvet.

‘I’ll tell you why I ask,’ Benny told Jason later. ‘Benny, I can explain,’ Jason protested weakly. ‘Of course you can explain, Jason,’ she retorted. ‘You faked your academic credentials once,’ said Jason sulkily.

Bernice subsided, fuming.

‘Snotty-nosed cow,’ Jason said now. Benny rolled her eyes. Benny asked him. Jason appeared hurt. Jason told her.

Jason Kane

Jason was standing up. ‘To full Jason Kane standard, natch.’

‘Yeah, well,’ the nearest Jason concluded miserably.

...which is actually surprisingly fair, although I'm not sure how some of those sentences scored as highly as they did.

Annoyingly, the feature seems happy to repeat entire sentences. An attempt to put Of the City of the Saved... through it mostly produced a string of chapter headings reading "The City".

Summarising "The Long Midwinter" in 20 sentences gives us the hauntingly Beckettian:

II. Samson

Samson Griffin’s suit itched.

‘Well then, Kebalau,’ the Doctor said. Samson’s eyes bulged. ‘Happy Midwinter Festival, Kebalau.’

The Doctor crossed his arms. It was my idea, Doctor. The Doctor frowned. Samson muttered.

Gemma frowned. V. The Doctor

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. The Doctor nodded sadly. Heskiu pulsed assent. The Doctor smiled softly. Trees of life, trees of knowledge, trees of good and evil... not to mention a midwinter festival. The Doctor struggled to understand. Heskiu began.

‘Nonsense,’ the Doctor said. Time passes.

Again, I'm not sure why "nimbus", "manyfold" and "Yesod" aren't in there, although at least it's correctly identified the main characters.

My favourite, though, is "The Ruins of Time" in 20 sentences:

Ian considered. ‘Ian!’

Barbara smiled. ‘Barbara!’

Susan asked. Barbara asked.

Ian protested. Ian sighed. Susan?’ said Vedirioi. Susan pouted. Susan looked back. Vedirioi spat. Susan shuddered. Ian groaned. Vedirioi paused. Susan was shocked. Horrified, Susan stood.

Ian demanded. Susan gasped. Ian muttered.

Or even better, in ten:

Ian considered. Susan asked. Ian protested. Ian sighed. Susan pouted. Susan shuddered. Ian groaned. Ian demanded. Susan gasped. Ian muttered.

To read the rest of it, you'll have to wait until the book's released. Suffice it to say there's rather more to it than that.

7468

Further to earlier musings about predictive-text messaging... this may well come as old news to many, but I was quietly amused today to discover that "pint" and "shot" are numerically isomorphic.

Phil: My Head, With Nonsense

Occasionally -- generally after partaking too liberally of caffeinated beverages -- I find my cranium invaded by thoughts which would seem more at home inside Colin's head.

For instance, what part of a rat is the zinger? Is it the same as the dinger? And what are the similarities between a rat and a schroe?

(The Head wouldn't have provided the explanatory links there, of course. I should be more disciplined about leaving these things as an exercise for the head-reader.)

Sadly, the River Exe and the River Wye turn out not to be at right angles to one another at all.