Hidden Short Stories

Short stories seems to have become newly fashionable. Long a staple of starting-out writers and the American creative writing scene, they are becoming so in vogue that established novelists are re-learning how to write the form.

And it is very different from the novel, which is as little appreciated as how different a short film is to a feature. You could start with Checkov, Chinua Achebe, Tolstoy, Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Dahl.... or my dear friend Victoria Taylor Robert's Hidden & Other Stories.

It's an awkward and difficult form, and Vicky is completely in control of the effects it can achieve - the time spent in the company of very different, often very difficult characters - their situations, their outlook, their place in life, but especially their view out and towards the 'life' that's generally swirling around them in careless and damagingly carefree ways. In her hands, the story tends to creep up on you, you are in a mind, and as the gloom slowly dissipates, you perceive clearly a life, a person you thought could never imagine being, but now are fully imagined within, the contours, shapes and feeling of that life clear, in sparse, carefully controlled detail.

And the endings? Vicky controls her endings with clarity and economy - never the cheap, over-obvious reversal, but a sly dig, a ping back into the story that led up to it, a re-shaping or re-casting of the story in a subtly different light, giving a resonance beyond the end, causing the life to reverberate just a bit further and longer than you expected.

Of course there are some stories I didn't take to, some that left me cold, but more that left me slightly shaken, slightly disturbed from the main flow of 'life' as most of us live it. And that's where her characters come from - the edges, the margins, the lost and forgotten, and are the more powerful for that.

Highly recommended.

Motion text design I wish I had designed #99

... and it doesn't hurt to have the voice of the great Mr Stephen Fry narrating it. It almost makes me wish I had a good start up idea. That's not going to happen any time soon, but in the meantime, I'm looking forward to the commission that enables me complete design work like this.

A couple of useful camera sites...

Just to share - excellent Sony EX1 set of tips from Sony here

... and very useful forum for the XDCAM series.

and here's a 3d view

What the F**K is Issuu?

I feel obliged to try this out, now that I've accidentally sent an invitation to everybody I know, everybody I've ever been spammed by, and everybody I don't know, plus a few random services thrown in for good measure.

I can only say SORRY SORRY SORRY.

If it makes you feel better, I invited myself at least three different ways and posted an automatic facebook status update.

So, ahem, Issuu. It makes stuff like this possible:

... and it might be a possible tool for sharing documents. So far the content on it is pretty pants. But then you can embed your own stuff, they share their API so if it takes off people will build interesting applications on the top of it (is the theory). You could use it for a private archive of important documents, you can use it to design your own documents (so far untested by yours truly). So - maybe some good points.

Or alternatively, it's just a home for sad people to self-publish to themselves and their mums.

One person has already put up their whole archive of punk / post-hardcore fanzines. Great effort. And how many subscribers have they got so far? None. Bless.

I can't find anything useful to read on it (though would be very happy to be proved wrong), but I can see great potential in it.

So - either curse me for the spam email, or, remember it was me, when it really takes off and helps you share documents in a stylish and effective way. Here's hoping it's the later.

In praise of Karen

"In praise of Karen" OR "How do I keep all this stuff safe?"

Karen is female. Apparently.

Ok - not the most earth shattering statement on the face of it. But at the deepest recesses of my geeky side, there's something delightfully, elegantly well designed, useful and thought-through about Karen's Power Tools and I was curious about the name.

If you don't know them you are missing something highly useful to you, and that's any 'you' who uses a computer. This isn't specific to video.

Her tools do seriously useful stuff under the bonnet of a computer in an elegant, safe, clear and easy to use way. They are for anyone who's ever wanted a computer to just work, dammit. Or who wants and easy way to copy and archive stuff. or move large amounts of data around. or - why can't I just have a list of those files to print out? Is that website working (yours or any other)?

Ok - so we're talking hard-core teckie stuff? So is that unusual coming from a woman? Is that what's surprising about Karen being, er, Karen?

It's not that unusual to have female about in nerdy land. not these days, so that's not my first reaction.

It was more like you can see that where Karen is coming from feels like a female point of view. Maybe I'm imagining something here. But can there be something specifically 'female' about a bunch of computer tools?

It feels like she's looked at her Windows computer and wondered why it doesn't just do stuff that are blindingly obviously stupidly necessary.

So you want me to keep backups - why doesn't it come with a good utility to do just that?

So, she seems to be saying - I could do that - make some utility that will do that solidly and well. And, hey - I've got a good idea - why not throw in a way to keep a check on two different changing sources and work out what needs to be copied between them to keep both up to date, without wiping anything useful? Neat.

Want to keep track of stuff? Why can't Windows just print out a list with all the files on the computer, or on a particular area or folder of the computer? Hey, why not be able to customise that list?

Ok, ok, I'll quit with the list before your eyes glaze over. Those are my two favourites. Net monitor is pretty useful. There's other stuff. Snooper is classic Mom keeps an eye on the kids stuff. On the other hand, I have no idea what Hasher does. Have a look for those and more.

So is there something clear, practical and female about that? Do Gates et al need to get a bit more in touch with their feminine side?

There's inconclusive research to explore about gender and styles of learning, preferences for right and left hemispheres and modes of perception, language or communication strategies, multi-tasking, subject area preferences, 3d perception and manipulation. All that kind of stuff. Perhaps at most it adds up to a random pattern of tendencies that just about remain just about discernibly constant between cultures and through history?

If there's anything in those kind of differences, I don't know. I'm reluctant to stray into essentialist explanations, as I think you can tell. ;-) They probably have a quality that's also shared by a lot of men.

Whatever - it's a useful suite. And free. Which is good. And here's the lady in question. All hail Karen. Praise Karen.



Which reminds me.

I'll have to sing the praises of the delightfully named CCleaner at some point in the future. Yes that's "Crap Cleaner", and no, it's not one of Karen's tools. I can't see her choosing that name, somehow.

Dreamed up by one of the lads, then. ;-)

And sure enough - it does what it says on the tin, without fuss, in a straightforward way. Just like a man. Also free. Also highly recommended. And this one does it's share of the housework. In fact, that's exactly the point of it. How's that for surprising?