chuggnutt.com

Over the year I've seen a number of domain names that I was interested in get picked up by someone else and often wondered what's to stop someone or some bot (perhaps at the whois/registrar site itself) from scanning people's searches for domain names and registering them. After all, those searches at minimum appear in server logs, so somewhere there's a record of the domain names you're interested in, and these could be weighted based on how often you check them—so a domain name that might seem "hot" could get grabbed before you get your chance.

Sound paranoid? Tonight this Slashdot article outlines this very scenario. The original article that Slashdot points to calls these people(?) "domain tasters" and claims that there are severe leaks in the domain name system. And that's it's been going on for quite awhile.

Slightly more paranoid than me. Something to think about, though.

On a slightly related note, does anyone else have a hard time taking ".info" domains seriously? (Or any other non .com, .net, .org domains, for that matter...) Right now GoDaddy has them available for $2.99, which is killer cheap, but it seems almost like... I don't know, like giving up, maybe. Or am I just being elitist?

I promised to post fiction and get this blog "revitalized". I will! I'm working on it! It just got busy during the holiday time, as it tends to do.

Part of that revitalization is redesigning the site, cutting out the needless stuff and going with a more minimal design. Really minimal. Basically I want to get the focus on the content and make it as clean as possible. That means cutting graphics and viciously culling the sidebar down—dropping the Amazon link, the "Random Link", changing the archive presentation format, minimizing the Google ads impact, to name a few things.

(Oh, I'll still have ads. Just less on this site, generally. I do like those graphic buttons for my other sites, Obsidian Stock and Pegasus Books—I created 3 of those 4 and I don't get any revenue from them. Free advertising, baby. So those'll stay.)

Plus I'm doing some stuff behind the scenes to make things work better. Tell the truth, I'm kind of getting sick of my own blogging system and coding, and I've considered switching it all over to WordPress and letting other people sweat the technical details so I can just write... meh. It's a thought.

I plan to throw the switch on this new design on or around January 1st. That's nice and symbolic, I think. Things should pick up from there.

First there was a full moon on my birthday and then there was a fireball on Christmas Eve. (Wish I'd seen that.) I hope everyone's Christmas was nearly as eventful.

Merry Christmas!

Interesting to note that today is the full moon... my birthday. I don't remember having a full moon fall on my birthday before, though I'm sure it must have at some point. It's also the northernmost full moon of the year. Besides that, we (Earth) are passing as close as we're going to get to Mars right now until some time in 2010. So Mars is high in the sky, very near the full moon tonight.

Not that I think there's anything astrologically significant about it... I just like neat coincidences like that. Plus I wanted to mark the occasion, being my birthday and all.

Carry on.

We popped the DVD of "The Incredibles" in for the kids tonight, and I swear, I can't not watch it when it's on. "The Incredibles" is pretty much at the top of my list for the best superhero movie out there. While it's tough to pin down exactly what makes it so good—I mean, they did pretty much everything right—I think one of the strongest points to the movie is that they don't bog it down with origin stories. They just present it to you with, "here's their world, they have superpowers, it doesn't matter how or where they got them."

They don't let the origins get in the way of the story, in other words. Almost every other superhero movie I can think of does.

I'll grant the exception to "Batman Begins." The whole point of that movie is the origin of Batman, and it's done so well that it's also on my list of top superhero movies.

Speaking of which, I watched the illicit trailer for its sequel, "The Dark Knight," online today. Even bootlegged, grainy, shaky-camcorder style footage doesn't stop me from thinking, Hot damn I want to see that movie. It's gonna be a really good Joker, I think.

What else is on my list? Um, "Mystery Men," I think. The first "Superman" movie. "Unbreakable" too, I think (it was so unconventional).

As for others, I'd have to weigh them carefully before I commit. You'll notice I'm not talking about "comic book movies" here—I'm considering the superhero genre, and some of them are based on comics, some aren't. At some point I'll compile and post my full list.

This is one of the (few) completed stories I've written, and it's mostly polished for my liking, though I tend to tinker with it from time to time. (Bad habit, that.) It's also short, about 2244 words in length. The title? Ah, the title. When I first wrote this (way back in a creative writing class), I had a title that was overly oblique and really had nothing to do with the story; it was more reflective of my trying to be clever with the inspiration for the story. I've since ditched it. It's for the best. Suggestions would be welcome.

As usual, this is freely available and copyrighted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Go nuts.

"How will I know where to go?" the boy asked.

"You will know," his father said simply.

And so he found himself at the edge of the village at dawn the next day. Beyond the oasis of the village lay the vast expanse of the desert, yellow-brown sands glowing red in the rising sun. On the horizon lay the thin, dark line that was the forest. The morning air was silent and dry and filled with the acrid scent of cooking smoke—the boy breathed deep the aroma of spice-cakes.

With a single glance back at the village, he set out into the desert. He carried nothing. He walked in the direction of the forest, as he had seen the adults do.

Continue reading

This article is all kinds of awesome. I never thought I'd see the day.

The Commodore 64 is 25 years old this year. Kind of shocking, really.

So here's the deal. It's blindingly obvious that I haven't devoted much time to this blog in quite a while, even though I consider this site my "main" identity on the web. Part of it is blog fatigue, part of it is all my best ideas these days are related to my other blogs, part of it is inertia.

Whatever, I'm tired of looking at how desolate and empty this site has become. So I'm going to revitalize this blog, and in doing so I'm undertaking something that is—for me—entirely new and radical.

I'm going to start publishing all of my fiction writing here. Mostly old stuff, and whatever new stuff I write. All of it.

My thinking is this:

I talk a lot about being a writer, but let's face it—these days especially—it's mostly talk. Well, that's not entirely true; I seem to be writing a lot on the blogs, but for this exercise I'm talking about being fiction writing. So I talk a lot about being a writer, and wanting to do it for a living, but I also need to be realistic about it: I know myself, and at the rate I'm going (or rather not going), that's just not going to happen.

I've got a bunch of old writing that I haven't done anything with, though only one or two stories are actually finished; it's mostly work-in-progress stuff, rough drafts, like that. Science fiction, largely, though there's some plain vanilla fiction and at least one horror-ish piece. And some Star Trek fan fiction as well.

As for new stuff, well, I've got lots of ideas, but my execution has been lacking. I'm thinking that this will prompt me to, you know, actually write.

So I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is and publish it all online here. Because the reality is, if I don't do it here, I won't do it at all, of which I'm 99.993% certain.

Plus, I get to dabble and experiment in this whole new publishing model, where writers are putting their works online under Creative Commons licenses, for instance. Why not? Stuff published online potentially has a much vaster audience available than traditional printed works with limited runs. It's wide open.

So here's the deal: I'll tag the title of the post as "Fiction" and whether it's a completed piece or (most likely) a work in progress ("WIP"). Much of it will be dreadful, I'm sure—some of this stuff goes back years, and... well. Let's just say a lot of this will be "rough drafts."

It'll all be published under the same Creative Commons license I have on this site—Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike 3.0—which means it can be copied, shared, remixed, mashed up, basically treated how you want as long as proper attribution is given (i.e., credit given to me) and it's all noncommercial (no money is made from it). Otherwise, it's all free.

Comments and criticism are welcome (encouraged!) and on the off chance that someone actually does some sort of CC-related stuff like I related above, let me know.

We went and picked up our Christmas tree today, and ended up getting a seven foot Grand Fir from the Tom's Trees lot downtown, right across the street from the Franklin Crossing building (and next to El Caporal). Good trees—I like Tom's Trees, they always have good ones—but the weather left the experience somewhat less than optimal.

Near-freezing temperatures plus rain/snow mixture plus strong gusty winds equals cold, wet, and cold. Throw a cold, soaking wet tree into that mix, shake well.

All's well that ends well, though. The tree is trimmed and sitting in the living room pretty as you please.

Just to get something on here, jeez...

• Halting State by Charles Stross
• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Collapse by Jared Diamond
• The Way We Ate by Jacqueline B. Williams

No real commentary, though I found all of these to be good. Particularly the Charlie Stross novels.