links for 2007-05-24

“Fighting off Ninjas is easy” – Microsoft does have a sense of humour

Ninjas

Everyone knows Ninjas are awesome – indeed, after Godzilla, they’re Japan’s number #2 cause of unexpected, unexplained death – but they take skill to deploy. You can’t just plonk them down anywhere, so all the more kudos to Microsoft and its well written ad campaign for Forefont (click the image to see it full size). The supporting website doesn’t nail the joke quite as well, but it’s still better than many promo-sites.

(Ad seen in the latest issue of PC Pro.)

links for 2007-05-22

Flickr definitions: is an image worth a thousand words?

Definition of Homer

The phrase ‘in the dictionary, next to X, there’s a picture of you’ (where X is a negative term like stupidity) is a bit of an old comic standby – there’s a brilliant Simpsons episode based around it – and it works so well as a joke because it recognises the truth of another old saying: sometimes an image is worth a thousand words.

One of the interesting things Flickr has pioneered has been tagging; allowing users to label their photos. Flickr’s users (myself included) use these to not only describe what an image contains but also to describe what that image means – so if I check out the full list of tags I’ve used over the past couple of years, there are vague adjectives, adverbs and adjectives such as ‘contemplation‘ and ‘creepy‘ along with definite nouns like ‘London’ and ‘staircase‘.

I’m not the only one using tags for more than nouns – and given Flickr has millions of users and images, what this means is that you can use it as a visual dictionary. So, just for a bit of fun, I thought I’d put its powers to the test and look up Flickr’s top images for a few quite hard-to-define terms: FREEDOM, FEAR, PUNK, CONFUSION, IN LOVE, POWER, LONELINESS, HAPPINESS, EXCITEMENT and GOD.

I searched using tags only, and ordered my results by interestingness (i.e., the photos Flickr deems to have been most successful in terms of views and comments). I then thought I’d make this into a bit of a quiz to see how good Flickr is as a dictionary; I took the top photo for each search*, and they’re displayed below; when you roll your cursor over them, you can see what word they define.

* I used the top image, except where the Flickr user had disabled image downloading (as then
I couldn’t put it on this page with the nifty rollover answers), and I
also skipped any image that had the actual words in it.

Anyway, without further ado, let’s see how good Flickr is as a dictionary! Below are the ten terms I searched for, followed by the top image results – the first one on this page, the other nine after the jump. Just mouse over the pics to find out the answer. Let me know how you do!

FREEDOM, FEAR, PUNK, CONFUSION, IN LOVE, POWER, LONELINESS, HAPPINESS, EXCITEMENT, GOD


View the original image on Flickr.

Continue reading “Flickr definitions: is an image worth a thousand words?”

David Mitchell on writing

Black Swan Green

Unlike a lot of novelists, David Mitchell doesn’t do a lot (if any, actually?) journalism, so the lulls in between his novels can be hard for rabid entirely reasonable fans of his like myself. Having just finished his latest book, Black Swan Green, I’ve been ploughing the interwebs to see what’s out there, and it turns out Mitchell does give interviews to a very wide range of magazines and websites, and he seems generous with his time and thoughts; I thought I’d put together a list of some of the interviews of his that I’ve enjoyed recently:

First up, a piece by Mitchell himself that seems to have been written around the time Ghostwritten was published, when he still lived in Japan; it focuses on the country’s influence on his writing:

“When I was a kid, my main talent was sulking — spectacular, multi-day sulks. I don’t think I sulked to manipulate: the point was to isolate myself. I sometimes believe that my real motive behind living abroad is to enjoy the same fruit. This lack of belonging encourages me to write: I lack a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it. To compensate, I stake out a life in the country called writing… a mental state (mental is the
word!), where characters and plots in the head achieve the solidity of people and lives outside the head… For me, my ability to compound inner-skull reality is a direct result of my life away from where I ‘belong.'”

BBC Nottingham’s interview with him dates from the Cloud Atlas publicity tour; it’s short and to the point, but worth it for the list of five books he recommends to reading groups, and his five tips for writers at the end.

The Morning News has a great, meandering, post-Black Swan Green discussion which focusses on the craft of writing:

“I think all novels are actually compounded short stories. It’s just the borders get so porous and so squished up that you no longer see them, but I think they are there. And I do structure my novels in that way.”

Finally, worth a listen is a recent podcast/interview with Mitchell by novellist Ian Hocking. It’s an engaging half hour which covers Mitchell’s current project, along with a lot of stuff about Black Swan Green.

First Lines over Twitter

TwitterLit: the first line of a book, sent to you via Twitter (or RSS), but with only an Amazon link to the title, so you can try and guess where it’s from. Found via the excellent blog of writer Ian Hocking. Lovely idea, since first lines are such a compelling topic to think about. Although I love the opening to Orwell’s 1984, and of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the opening to Neuromancer, I think my favourite first line is the one from Toni Morrison’s Paradise:

"They shoot the white girl first."

Simple, short, stark and yet stacked with questions. Interesting tense, too.

UPDATE: There’s now a UK version of Twitterlit, which links to Amazon.co.uk, here, and you can also get updates via Email, in addition to Twitter and RSS.