J P Smythe’s Website.

I’ll get back to proper updates next couple of days, but for today, here’s a look at some Wordles that I made. The first one is of the first novel, Hereditation, and shows the top-1000 words in the novel:

I love that the names are the biggest thing.  

And here’s one for John The Baptist, currently at 30 thousand words…

This one looks like a fingerprint.  Hmmm.

I’ve updated the template here, and I like this, but I’m still shopping around.  Regardless, this is a little easier on the eye.  There are some broken links, so please ignore those.  Normal service will be resumed sometime. As previously stated, add jpsmythe.tumblr.com to your feed-reader for stuff until then.   

This place may look really odd for a few days – Many apologies for any inconvenience caused.    

I promise, only a couple of weeks until we’re back to normal here: my Viva is on Feb 15th, so to say that I have little time at the moment is an understatement…Also, I am planning a redo of this site, freshen up the place a bit, add some colour.  You know, Spring cleaning and all that.    

I read a lot of blogs, and by ‘read’, I mostly mean ‘scan’. I have a lovely tabbed Netvibes page set to appease my every blog need, to let me see when Slashdot has updated itself with some invariably useless information or when wired has posted an article about bionic toes. And one of my favourite blogs is the Joystiq Gaming Blog. This weekend they posted about ARGs from the SXSW festival (which I love, incidentally: rock music and technology are a marriage made in Heaven, Texas). The article talks about the roots of ARGs, and the commonly held perception that the ARG is something that almost solely exists and survives through the internets. Not true, says Joystiq, and I agree.

I think it’s a dangerous attitude, this idea that something starts and end with the internet. Let’s us look at this lump of technology – and I feel, compared to what we’ll have in ten years, calling it a lump is not unfair – for what it is, and what people seem utterly desperate to avoid calling it at the moment: it’s paper, only its on a screen, but everyone can read it. And it has all the trappings that that definition entails. People get all high-horsey about strictly linear definitions such as this, and then scream “Yea! But Youtube!” at people when they suggest things like this, but it would be foolish to suggest otherwise, right now: the majority of content that I get from the internet comes from words that people write, not the videos that they post or the flash-games that they try to persuade me to play.

But here’s a horrible example (and yes, it really is overused, but stick with me) concerning content and quality controls: imagine that you went down to your newsagent and bought your newspaper one day to discover that they had thrown all editorial policy out of the window, and allowed reader submitted articles, filled with dubious writing, content and ego. Alright, so maybe that’s harsh: imagine walking into your locals Smiths, or Borders, and looking for your favourite magazine when they have suddenly decided to allow anyone to take up shelf space with their own publications. Still too harsh? Imagine searching for something (and I cannot remember how people did this before Google, or at the very least Alta Vista, so use your imagination) and finding hundreds of other articles before you stumble on the information that you were after, only the articles were, for the most part, poorly written, researched and full of split-infinitives (or such). Imagine buying a board game from your local toyshop and discovering that the questions were poorly written, some had no answers and half the pieces were missing.  WELL, WELCOME TO OUR LIVES!

Of course, I’m being ridiculous to emphasise a point (which has wandered away from my original topic somewhat). The internet is only as good as what we put into it. Simple fact. And I think that there’ll be a streamlining of the information flow at some point as we progress, as previously print-only magazines start shifting to the web in droves and either destroying their html equivalents, or truly suffocating under the weight of the competition. Those shelves at your local newsagents only hold 100 magazines, and if you aren’t on them you aren’t being sold, but the internet holds a million times that number, and judging whether you are still on the shelf is an infinitely harder proposition.

[Incidentally, there was an article in The Guardian last week about magazine numbers in the UK suffering, and publishers folding titles and such. I think this is totally premature: fine, most magazines can shift to the net, whatever, but I still buy print magazines simply because they are so much nicer to read. Sure, these mags have to adapt (who doesn’t, nowadays?) but to think that they cannot exist as a lovely piece of design print - see Edge, Wired, GamesTM as examples - is just a little foolish, methinks.]

Back to the ARGs, anyway. To think that they are something that requires the internet to play is insane, and to think that they are made better by the internet… Well, that’s slightly more subjective. Personally (and for someone who deals in this whole ‘New Media’ bullsh, this may sound peculiar) I would far prefer to be playing it through actual tangible media. And I think that the above point about quality would ring far truer were the the case: if something is tangible, people seem to put far more effort into it.  The difference in quality between something that you would submit to a magazine for publication and something you’d find on the interweb is huge.  With fiction its even more so: in print, the only time you find Vanity publishing is in… well, vanity publishing.  On the net?  Everything is vanity. 

Imagine: you buy your newspaper, and there’s an advert for a product that sounds odd. You google it (I didn’t say that the two were mutually exclusive, mind you) and you find out that it is made by an inventor, who offers to send you a sample. You then receive a package in the post with a panicked letter form him telling you that you have to help him, blah blah, add some cliché to simmer for 20 minutes. What you end up with is something that takes the form and format of the ARG (looking at Perplexcity alongside it) but with genuine ‘game’ playing involved, as opposed to the puzzles presented by Perplexcity and its ilk (which have made them mass contact board games, I think). I want the real more than the imaginary with these things. I want to feel that what I am doing is affecting somebody or something tangible.  There are virtual ways around this, of course, ways to promote that feeling: feedback.  If the ARG is a successful conversation between two people that is more than possible.  However, the sheer amount of time required to have a two-way conversation if more than five people ’play’ your ARG would be hell.  It would be a full time job.  So, how to get around it?  Selective replying.  But how can everyone know that you’ve replied?  Oh!  What about a comments section?  It amazes me that people don’t use this.  Character-based fiction blogs seems to stop at the post itself, letting the commenters ramble on about this and that, never trying to maintain the fiction above and beyond where they absolutely have to.  Why not try and promote replies that assist the story?  Hell, why not let them drive the damn story!  If a suggestion in a comment makes you think of somewhere cool to take your tale, then dammit, just go with it!  We don’t live in an age where I could set up an ARG and afford to send everyone who subscribes to it letters and presents and have great chats.  However, we can reply to comments, and we can think outside the box to find new and inventive ways to present our writing, and to read.  We don’t need to stick with this idea of cyber-fiction – we should be thinking of ways to let this technology help us make our writing better.  Otherwise, I think the traditional publishing route is one that writers shouldn’t really stray too far from.  Don’t get published?  Maybe there’s a message there.

***** 

Remember last post?  I wrote something about Cloak & Dagger, two Marvel comics favourites?  Well, a Pitchfork Writer wrote something as well.  It’s very good: you should read it.

For the purposes of my PhD I am keeping a blog of my thoughts, the things that I find when I’m reading and researching the formats that I am looking into. This blog will be a source of information, a way for me to organise my thoughts and ideas into one place as both an aid for my critical companion, and an appendix for the project as a whole. Ideally, the people that stumble across this blog will find reason to comment on it, and help promote healthy debate about the topics presented here. These aren’t final ideas; rather, they are instead just my thoughts and opinions as I write the creative pieces of the PhD. Thanks for reading this, and I hope it provides you some interest.

Incidentally, if you ever do comment, be aware that I might use your comments in my thesis.  I’ll credit you, of course, so let me know how you’d like to be credited, or if I can’t use said comment.