Results matching “wikipedia”

It's come to my attention, over the past few weeks, that we hold an unusual position in the community.

Specifically, I'm told that we have a certain obligation -- nay, duty -- to speak to issues of vital concern. If something significant appears, regardless of whatever else might be happening that day, we need to be examining it closely and bringing you the information. If something monumental is achieved, we need to be discussing it as soon as is humanly possible. We owe this to you, at the very least.

It's our job. Our calling. And when we don't address these matters, we fall down both as writers and as people.

So, having said that, I feel that I should tell you this right away, as a representative of and participant in the Discourse:

Pepsi Max Cino. What the hell?

America gets the Black Cherry Vanilla soft drink wars this season. However, Britain and the Continent are getting the coffee-flavoured soft drink wars. France has just seen the introduction of Coca-Cola Blak (and I swear to God that's spelled the way it is on the bottle, which makes me sad), which manages to contain some actual coffee and is said to froth in a cappucino-like fashion. Great, fine, no problem. Whatever.

Britain? Has Pepsi Max Cino. As usual, this is totally the bitch country when it comes to soft drinks.

Pepsi Max is pretty much Pepsi One, only slightly different and a few years older. Instead of getting the complete line of flavoured Diet Pepsis, we, uh, get Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max. A few months ago, we also got Pepsi Max Twist, which had something claiming to be lemon/lime flavouring. It was drinkable. It didn't resemble floor polish. Much.

This? I don't know. "Coffee flavourings," they're telling me. I think that that's coffee flavour the way that cherry-flavoured things are cherry-flavoured, which is to say they asked someone once what it might be like for a thing to taste like another thing, and then they didn't even listen. Moreover, I think they might have asked someone: "Someone, what does Starbucks Coffee Liqueur taste like?"

And, in fact, this might taste nice with Starbucks liqueur in it. (I'm not pretending that it won't instantly transform anyone consuming it into the femmiest femme that ever wore high-heeled mules, of course. And I'm not responsible for your subsequent dysphoria.)

But... yeah. So this tastes like, uh, Cino. Which is about "pushing the boundaries of innovation," says some guy at Britvic.

Unfortunately, it's not a damned thing like coffee. Or coffee-flavoured things. Or innovation. This is the Coffee Liqueur fanfic of soft drinks. This is the fanfic where someone took a look at coffee, took a look at Pepsi Max, thought, "I would like to see them entwined in a desperate clinch," and wrote something bearing only a superficial resemblance to either character.

Not that it's undrinkable, mind you. It's just completely unrecognizable.

I've had other questions sent to me about this most Scots of nights. Well, as it turns out, the Wikipedia entry on Burns Night has a good solid grounding on formal and informal Burns Night revelry.

For me, Burns Night has always been about Whisky and Poetry. I remember a truly wonderful, drunken Burns Night back in my Ithaca days where we sat about, getting drunker and drunker and scouring my copy of the Norton Anthology for any poetry we felt like declaiming in a drunken rant.

Tonight, I will indeed read a poem or three, potentially reciting them to my cat. And I have rather a lot of Scotch on hand, including a wonderfully casky Bowmore I got for Arisia. I got it because it came with a hip flask, actually. But the scotch turned out to be superior, which is a nice thing.

So, imagine me if you will, tippling of the water of life and reading poetry to my cat and to all who come in spirit.

And imagine me not having Haggis, because honestly, that shit be nasty.

(From General Protection Fault. Click for sheesh.)

Jeff Darlington's extensive game of snail chess has been known to rely upon the Idiot Plot. (This is part of Roger Ebert's extensive lexicon, and refers to "any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots." And, as we've said quite recently, the Trish situation is a key example of this. Ten minutes of googling, people. Ten minutes. Or less; the distinctions between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder are right there in each of the relevant pages on Wikipedia, if that's your thing.

(I'd just like to reinforce this point, guys: these are super-hyper-übergeeks who haven't thought to punch two strings into Wikipedia's search engine. It's not always desperately reliable, as recent events have demonstrated, but it's a place to start. If nothing else, as of this writing, the ICD-10 codes for schizophrenia and multiple personality are correctly cited in their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Multiplicity doesn't merit any significant writeup, but schizophrenia is well documented.)

As it turns out, the only non-idiot is Patty, a distant and secondary cast member without all that much accumulated street cred. There's not really much reason to trust her if she pops over to one of the beloved gang and gives them the skinny. And, really, what does it gain her at this point to explain it, anyway? The wedding party is already so very hung up on the symmetry issue (even Nick thinks that this is ultimately the right thing, for some reason, bizarre chocolate-as-benzodiazepene episode aside) that they were willing to have a highly unstable bridesmaid to begin with. So she's unstable and dishonest now? She can wear a dress, right? That's more than Patty's willing to do. I'm sure Fooker can get hold of enough tranqs to make any little episodes a nonissue. Or a taser.

Of course, all of this is a way to further drive home the point (in case you've forgotten over the duration) that Trish is a bungling, incompetent operative who can't be bothered to do any research for her own cover story, let alone get into Nick's laboratory or pants. Therefore, the situation will explode. This point has not been handled with any subtlety whatsoever.

Then again, with snail chess, you can't afford to be subtle. Your readers might forget.

If you come to these stories in larger chunks, the pacing surrounding Trish the Sloppy Fake Schizo-Multiple almost starts to make sense. Almost. Sort of. You get a big establishing story at the start of year six, and the beginnings of a resolution for year eight. That's enough time to cram a couple of wacky Trish stories in over the intervening years, in between other story clusters. If you read straight through, it doesn't seem quite so bad.

(I say "quite." I'm not claiming that the strip transforms into a rollercoaster ride if you read it all in one go, not by a long shot.)

Keenspot Premium subscribers have one advantage here: the weekly presentation option. Seven strips on one page. This is far closer to how Darlington scripts the comic (multiple rough comics on a single page), and it reads just a little better; each non-Sunday strip tends to flow into the next one. I suspect that the books are the same way. The flow of Stuff You're Supposed To Remember makes more sense in seven-comic chunks.

But this is a daily strip. Designed to be read as a daily strip, despite Darlington's occasional exhortations to go away for a while, come back, and read any given arc straight through instead. You have to pay money not to fight against bandwidth bottlenecks, render time and (depending on resolution and browser window size) scroll irritation. And, if you're keeping pace by the week, then you have seven days between each tiny drop of accumulated information necessary for The Big Reveal. And, make no mistake, these are tiny drops; sorting the strips together into logical units mostly serves to minimize the padding.

There is a difference between a slow, gradual build and the style of storytelling most often found in GPF. Plot chunks reach 85% resolution, only to have someone wander off into the land of This Will Be Dealt With Later. More often than not, a shadowy figure who seems Awfully Familiar makes ominous pronouncements or communications at the end. (Either that, or one of the unresolved plot threads pops back up out of nowhere.) The threads call attention to themselves, so that you know they will be resolved Later! When you're not expecting them!

This is not a "twist." This is soap opera.

Soap opera doesn't exist to have resolution. Soap opera exists to keep the reader persistently on tenterhooks. Apart from that, it's not really goal-oriented. As fictive BDSM goes, this is arhythmically flogging your bottom with about a third of the force they need, then going off to find a snack just as they start to get into it. Then, after cookies, the scene restarts abruptly with a completely different implement. The D/s goes by, same as it ever was.

(I can almost hear Alisin now: "What, that's all?")

If GPF sold itself as soap opera, that'd be fine. But overt promises of eventual resolution, if only you would be patient, run counter to this form of presentation. Any attempt to wrap things up begins to collapse under the weight of its own detail, of things we're supposed to remember. The energy isn't being channeled, so much as partitioned and reassembled when we reach certain goalposts.

So, we've waited two years and change for this anticlimax. In the process, common misconceptions of two mental conditions -- misconceptions which, in the popular culture and consciousness, have served to stigmatize and antagonize people with those conditions for years -- have been used as a tenterhook. (Never mind what those misconceptions do when applied to fictional antagonists in general.) And it's all going to end in tears, because a group of super-skilled geek geniuses couldn't be arsed to do a bit of reading about a colleague's ostensible issues.

It's as though the point was to have Trish appear and screw up her part of the wedding, and everything else about her story had simply been working backwards from that goal. Following the checklist. "Rubber flogger? Done. Red star clapper paddle? Here y'go. Yawn. Hair pull? 'Kay..."

Getting the buttons pushed in order, so that we can get to the main event.

Marking time.

For those of you playing along at home, Wikipedia just put Checkerboard Nightmare up to votes for deletion.

It's official. Wikipedia is officially worthless for webcomics. I can't speak to any of their other subjects, but if you ever hear of someone going to Wikipedia to look up webcomics information, gently redirect them to Comixpedia.org.

Chaobell, who once wrote and drew /usr/bin/w00t/, which is one of my favorite webcomics in the vast history of webcomicka, has suggested that whenever a person uses the phrase batshit insane they should link to Jack Thompson's entry in Wikipedia. Of course, this is to build the proper corrolation between Thompson and the phrase batshit insane in Google.

I can't speak for Weds, but I'm entirely behind this concept.