jono

Comment Threads

• mikko.v.parviainen commented on An interim report from the coal face
  On some of my more cynical days I wonder whether some variation of this strategy would make money. Computer generate plots You could perhaps hook this up to the TV Tropes website and add a sprinkling of tropes into this. They might even be selectable. "Needs a bit more Applied Phlebotinum, less Ermine Cape Effect." This might go on towards a real AI too much, though....
• Trottelreiner commented on An interim report from the coal face
  * Outsource the writing of scenes to Mechanical Turk in parallel. Give the slaves a style guide to work with and the generated plot so they have some context. That's one of the standard "accusations" against the dime novel variety of e.g. science-fiction. But then, the historiography around specific authors undermines this somewhat... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._H._Scheer...
• zhochaka commented on An interim report from the coal face
  I suppose the universe of Neptune's Brood could support a long-running space-opera series but it would be as much Charles Stross as would be something like the "Tom Clancy's Op-Centre" series is Tom Clancy. Though if his ghost writer were Diane Duane I would not complain much. I am not sure that the post-crash world of publishing is so devoted to that sort of book, but I can see how Kindle-like tech could open a market for that sort of series-fiction. I've seen some not-very-competent Kindle things which would fit the Perry Rhodan model, a regular novella, but the quality...
• Billy Pilgrim commented on An interim report from the coal face
  All that having been said about the effort of life as it is for you, I am on the receiving end of your efforts. It is a Friday morning in Houston and I have taken the day off to spend 3 days reading and am half way through Apocalypse Codex and I am as happy as a pig in mud to know that I am going back to that world in a few moments. I learned of you in Ken Macleod's Wikipedia page and now I find that I can go back and read 3 other Laundry novels as well...
• RDSouth commented on An interim report from the coal face
  I know nothing about your editing task, but there's a cool free program called WinMerge and maybe you haven't heard of it and maybe it would be usefull to you. It lets you select any two documents that are in electronic form and sets them up as parallel as it can on a split screen, highlighting differences in different colors and making it real easy to transfer left or right and so forth....