Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • Fan fiction

    Checking out Wikipedia’s excellent (as always) article on fan fiction today, I ran across the site FanFiction.net, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s a comprehensive directory of fan fiction, organized by TV shows, movies, cartoon, games, books, and much more.

    The amount of fan fiction out there is truly astounding; I’ve known this, of course, but I just never guessed at the sheer depth and breadth it covers. Let’s take a little stroll through the site for some examples.

    • The combined number of Star Trek stories: 9240. Wow. They actually split the Star Trek stories up by each TV show, but that doesn’t really matter.
    • X-Files: 5393 stories.
    • Lost (the TV series that debuted just this season): 1462 stories.
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 26,567. Holy shit!
    • Law and Order: 2037. Like Star Trek, they split out by the different subseries.
    • Star Wars: 11,828.
    • Lord of the Rings: 37,136. Good grief.
    • Harry Potter: 190,077! If I’d been drinking something when I read this one, I would have done a spit-take. This is beyond comprehensible!

    Those are kind of the usual suspects in fan fiction, what you’d expect… but there are seriously hundreds more different topics people are writing about. Here’s a sample of some of the oddball ones:

    • All in the Family: 4 stories.
    • Bill Nye the Science Guy: 6 stories.
    • Lazytown (a kids show, our kids watch it): 16 stories.
    • Diff’rent Strokes: 2 stories.
    • Saved by the Bell: 13 stories.
    • Moulin Rouge (the movie musical): 1466(!)

    You get the idea.

  • A Fire Upon The Deep

    The latest book I’m immersed in (one of them, anyway) is A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. So far I’m hooked (I’m about a quarter of the way into it), it’s totally compelling science fiction. And it’s a refreshing reminder that there’s really no limit to what you can do, story-wise, with well-done sci-fi.

    Ah, it’s always nice to have the “summer vacation” from TV and have time to catch up on my reading :).

  • blogfringe

    monkeyinabox: “Are blogs really as mainstream, as some of us thought?”

    No. No they’re not. That’s easy to forget for those of us “on the inside,” but blogs really are still a fringe phenomenon.

    They’re getting there, though. The Journal of Accountancy just ran an article called “Would You, Could You, Should You Blog?” which is a decent introduction to blogs for accountants. Now that’s getting mainstream.

  • 10 years of PHP

    The PHP programming language is 10 years old today. A large part of what I do these days is PHP development—I’ve got it running web sites, parsing web server log files, running command-line batch processes, and more. Thanks to Rasmus and the PHP community for making it all possible!

    For a good roundup of the 10 year coverage, go here and here.

  • It only seems like I’m burned out on blogging…

    But I’m really not. If I’m burning out on anything, it’s work and the daily routine of it. As a consequence, blogging takes a backseat and even though I have things I want to write about, when I’m finally at the computer at a point where I can, I just don’t have the energy or ambition to do it. Which is ironic, since what I’d really rather be doing is blogging/writing full time instead. But alas, I haven’t yet (figured out how to) (gotten to the point where I can) make enough money doing that…

  • Podcasting

    So I dunno, I’ve been thinking about this whole podcasting thing lately… and while it sounds like it might be fun to do (and people used to tell me all the time that I have a perfect voice for radio… but not so much anymore… I wonder why that is?), I really just don’t have the time or energy for it. Besides, what would I talk about? I already have my blog for incoherent rambling, there’s no reason to clutter up bandwidth with large audio file of that…

    That’s the other worry: bandwidth issues. Last thing I really want to deal with is hosting large media files and getting hammered.

    Any Oregonians podcasting? I know Jack Bogdanski was experimenting a bit with it. Anyone else?

  • My semi-annual TV rant

    Now that the TV season is mostly over I thought I’d post one of my self-indulgent rants on the various television shows I watched and how I’m still a slave to the tube. So, even though everything is over and everyone who was going to watch has watched, there will be spoilers. Click through to read on.

    (more…)

  • Jake’s influencing the news

    …Jake of UtterlyBoring that is. He posted an item today about our local Wal-Mart being open 24 hours, mentioned it to Barney, and a story showed up on the Z21 news NewsChannel 21 this evening. Barney confirms it in the comments.

    That’s hot.

  • June!

    June already? Geez, where’d the time go? It’s not like May wasn’t a full month… some highlights:

    • Put together a monster swingset
    • Dental cleaning… with novocaine. I had two back teeth that needed periodontal work and scaling. Nasty stuff. My mouth was sore for days afterward.
    • The end of the TV season (I have another post on this sometime)
    • Beautiful, 80-plus degree weather… dampened (no pun intended) by massive flash flood inducing thunderstorms
    • We were more socially active than normal… we went to at least three barbecues, which is a lot for us

    Hmm, that’s all I can think of right now. June promises to be a busy month, too. There’s a potluck at work tomorrow, a neighborhood BBQ on Friday, a kids birthday party on Sunday, our anniversary, a friend’s college graduation, and more I’m sure.

    Perhaps we should do a blogger get together this month?

  • This Memorial Day weekend…

    Sunray Premium Playground 2005 (AKA swingset monstrosity)…I’ve been tasked with putting together this monstrosity of a swingset. I’ve had help, my father-in-law yesterday and today, and tomorrow my dad pitches in. We may finish tomorrow.

    Happy Memorial Day to everyone else. I’ll likely be cursing before the day is out.