I don’t think I’ve made any secret of the fact that I’m a pretty big Fallout fan. It’s up there on the same list as Simcity, Sims, Baldur’s Gate, and Elder Scrolls series. Sadly, my world has thus far remained decorated distinctly non-fallout related paraphernalia. If these Nuka Cola machines ever go up for sale that much just change. Then all I have to do is find some Mr. Pibb to stick in there…
I’m in two fantasy football leagues this year. The second of the two has an autodraft, so I’ll just have to make due with the players I get. Team #1 just had our yearly draft. I’m feeling pretty good about how it came together.
QB: Aaron Rodgers
WR: Larry Fitzgerald
WR: Santana Moss
WR: Lance Moore
RB: Steve Slaton
RB: Marion Barber
TE: Greg Olsen
K: Ryan Longwell
DEF: Dallas
Bench QB: Matt Cassel
Bench WR: Donnie Avery
Bench WR: Michael Crabtree
Bench RB: LenDale White
Bench RB: Jamal Lewis
Bench RB: T.J. Duckett
Aaron Rodgers of Green Bay should be a pretty solid quarterback. With all the Favre controversy swirling around it’s hard to remember that Green Bay has an up-and-coming QB that might be just as good. For the bye weeks or if he doesn’t cut it I have Matt Cassel, Tom Brady’s understudy-turn-damn-good-backup. A few years ago he was the lowest rated player in fantasy football. This year he’ll be on the starting lineup for plenty of teams.
My starting WRs are all kind of meh. Larry Fitzgerald is obviously top-notch. (He was my #1 pick. I was the 8th team in the queue), but I’m not massively thrilled. The other WRs are all solid, if uninspiring. The sole exception is possible Michael Crabtree. He’s a rookie and almost went to Seattle (Go Hawks!) this year. He’s likely to be a starter and if he does well than he will have a definite shot at my 3rd WR spot.
I have 5 RBs. That’s probably too many, but I want to see how everyone performs the first few weeks. T.J. Duckett is a seahawk and they run a platoon system. If he overperforms or turns into their red zone guy he could be useful, but I have fairly low expectations. The only current benefit is that I’ll hopefully be immune to injuries.
TE: Greg Olson. I had him last year and he was exceptional. There happen be a handful of very good TEs out there, so it wasn’t as impressive a pick as in previous years, but I was happy to have him return.
K: Ryan Longwell. He’s as good as anyone out there. I tend to mix and match kickers based on who they’re facing each week, but he’s a solid starting kicker.
Def: Dallas. Like kickers I’ll trade Defenses in and out. I could do much worse than Dallas.
By and large I’m happy with my team. I have less big names than last year, but I have less really awful players as well. I could see the year being either pretty good or rather atrocious, but I’m confident I’ll be in the top half of the bunch. Throughout the season I’ll be posting my progress.
Go Hawks!
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is T.W Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) notes and autobiographical memoir of his time served as a liason officer during the Arab Revolt. Way way back in the day I reviewed a book called Eastern Approaches, the story of Fitzroy MacLean, one of the first SAS officers and an english member of diplomatic core that explored Soviet Central Asia. I mention both of these books because they’re similar: heroic individuals who explored the harshest parts of the world during war time and then wrote about their story with singular humility and deference.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not a general history of world war 2 or even specifically the Arab Revolt that ended Turkish dominance in the middle east. There are enough blanks in the narrative to greatly encourage further study. Presumably Lawrence was writing for his contemporaries who already knew the political details of the causes and aftermath, but after almost a hundred years there’s a lot lacking.
What it lacks from the air, it makes up for on the ground. Lawrence nearly maps the entire desert for the benefit of his readers, remarking on the snakes, the various wells visited, the character of the various people and towns. He follows the revolt from the Arab position and in that capacity is near flawless.
As a story, the best part is Lawrence’s own transition. He begins as a rather reluctant staff officer who nevertheless is eager to help the Arab cause. As the revolt progresses he becomes increasingly disillusioned by his own place in what is likely a fraud. England’s support for the Arab revolt is hardly an act of generosity with Turkey a German ally. As the tolls of war grow Lawrence finds himself the near leader of a revolt he’s lost his own position in.
It’s a rather terrible story, but it’s phenomenal reading. The writing is rather archaic and Lawrence does spend a great deal on details, the texture of the land for example, that most readers would probably rather do without, but as a complete work it’s a rousing adventure story of the finest calibre.
A note worth mentioning, there are a handful of different versions of the tale. Lawrence himself repeatedly revised his work, mostly to edit down it’s original length. I read a version stored for free here. (The book is out of copyright.)
Final note: I’m still editing. It’s going tolerably well, if only very slowly. I’m hopeful that I get it all together this year.
I finished Michael Stackpole’s Age of Discovery series about a month ago. Predictably enough it got lost in the shuffle. I’ve started to edit my novel (le sigh!) so I haven’t had much time to skim my notes.
I’ve been fairly liberal in my mentions and praise of Mr. Stackpole of the last few months. His series on writing. “The Secrets” has been interesting, helpful, and inspiring. I felt a near obligation to read a few of his books since I was tossing his name around so cavalierly without having read anything of his since the Rogue Squadron Star Wars series a decade ago.
I do not have much of a review prepared and I’m working off of memories that are already starting to fade. Age of Discovery is trilogy. (A Secret Atlas, Cartomancy, A New World) The series was entertaining by most reasonable measures, but for whatever reason I did not find them as compelling as others I have read in the last few months. As the last books on the list, I may have suffered from book fatigue, or perhaps I’ve grown out of his writing, or maybe I’ve simply moved away from fantasy in my interests. I still read George RR Martin and await his next book eagerly, so I haven’t left it completely behind, but in this series the spark of magic held less of an interest for me than in the past.
I found many of the characters a bit too ‘in the know’. Their indecisiveness and hesitation when faced with titanic revelations came across as overly quick and flippant. They managed to adjust themselves to the consequences of the world within a chapter or two. I admit there were long stretches of the book that were pretty fascinating, but the catharsis of seeing the character’s resolve their struggles was just too quick for tastes.
I’d be remiss if I gave a bad review. They do not deserve that, per se, certainly not for me. Age of Discovery is nothing if not a creative adventure. Had the books been shorter I’d call it an amusing jaunt, but at 600 pages each in my edition they started to become a slog. Again, 1800 pages does tend to bring on a bit of fatigue.
Unfortunately I don’t have any books new books on the horizon for a bit. Editing is my highest priority. I do, however, have an upcoming review of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the list. I’ll probably manage to get that down later in the week.
A bit of blog spam today.
50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills
Call me nit-picky, but part being an effective writer is cutting out the wasted words. ‘50 Free Resources for Better Writing’, ‘50 Free Writing Resources’, ‘Improve Your Writing: 50 Free Resources’…
I’m nearly the completion of my novel. I’ve got a last few chapters to finish up before I have a rough draft done. From there the long editing road starts, but the ‘hard work’ is done, at least, that’s what I tell myself. (I don’t think anyone considers editing easy.) Lately I’ve been emailing chapters here and there to friends to look over. Gmail has taken the opportunity to flood me with advertizements tailored to me: mostly self-publishing houses and vanity presses.
The tag lines are always so appealing: “Get published now!’, ‘Have you book read by a professional editor without the agent’, ‘Become an author’. As I get closer to needing to find a publisher or an agent these ’services’ seem so great, but, aside from largely being scams, they also defeat the purpose. Anyone can write something. I’ve written hundreds, thousands, millions of words. Very few of them are worth being published, worth being given to the world, worth asking people to pay money for. I’m not a paid blogger because my random semi-frequent musings aren’t up to that level of quality and most of my stories aren’t either. A few are, I hope anyone, and I intend to prove it by getting them published in an editing medium. I want them to complete against all the other author’s out there, in my genre, and be of a higher quality. It is that competition that validates my writing as being worth being read and what makes publishing both so hard and so worthy a goal.
Vanity presses are a shortcut and a dangerous one at that. Publishing is a business built around selling books. Vanity publishers are built around reading fees and editing contracts. They have no stake in selling the book, so they don’t. They play on the best intentions of a eager author and leave them something that is by and large unsellable, unmarketable, and disappointing.
http://www.aeonix.com/vanity.htm: an article on why they’re scams
http://everything2.com/node/606645: another one with a short list of vanity presses.
http://www.sfwa.org/BEWARE/vanitypublishers.html: another great list with resources for researching publishers.
http://selfpublishing.suite101.com/article.cfm/avoiding_selfpublishing_scams: Avoiding publishing scams
Hope these help! Wish me luck in getting published!
These have probably been around for ages, but I just found them.
Medieval Demographics Calculator
Sometimes, you just want to know how many furriers the average medieval big city had. (Answer: 160 for a population of 40,000.)
Does anyone know of any similar ‘culture’ demographic calculators? These things are pretty invaluable for setting up worlds that make sense.
Enjoy!
I read Laser Space Communications as part of my Lonetracker research. It’s pretty technical overall, at least for me, but it was an interesting read. It seems to be fairly expensive to get a hold of so if someone is looking around for it I can lend it out. *I wish I was better at physics.
Stick fast food on some fancy plates and add some presentation and you almost have something that looks edible. I could actually go for some Tacobellini, but the McSteak & Potatoes still looks gross.
A month ago I read: The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel as research for when I edit my story. It’s a little bit dated (published 1989), but sadly it’s not as outdated as it should be. Cool book, well worth skimming over and it keeps the math light for the non-physics majors.
© 2010 Servusamanu.com