6:39 PM (6 comments)
At long last, all the pictures from my Thanksgiving Turducken Adventure have been uploaded to Flickr.

6:37 PM (5 comments)
Rez. Area 5. 100% of enemies shot. Video. If you have any clue what I'm talking about, you've already clicked that link.

4:43 PM (0 comments)
"How can anyone watch The Dukes of Hazzard special features and not be convinced that this is the most important movie of the 21st century? The 30 minutes of deleted scenes make it obvious that, like Orson Welles, director Jay Chandrasekhar had his masterpiece defaced by a spineless studio."

The Super Special Features of the Dukes of Hazzard DVD.

1:43 AM (3 comments)
Though I am not typically prone to self promotion, I'm excited to announce that a project that's been in the works for nearly two years is headed toward game stores--Legends of the Twins, a Dragonlance sourcebook to which I contributed a hefty chunk of text a while back, can now be seen emerging from the editorial and layout gauntlet. You can even check out some of my work--"Kingpriest Ascendent", one of the 'alternate Krynns' I designed for the book, was last week's web preview.

1:22 AM (0 comments)
"Sometimes, however, even the Universal Plot Generator breaks down. You may find, in the course of hacking forth your masterpiece from the living pulp, that none of the plot devices hitherto catalogued, none of these little enemas to the Muse, will keep the story flowing; that you can think of no earthly reason why the characters should have to go through with this absurd sequence of actions save that you want them to, and no earthly reason why they should succeed save that it's in the plot. Despair not. If you follow the handbook, you'll find there's a plot device even for this -- when the author has no choice but to intervene in person. Obviously, this requires a disguise, unless you're terribly postmodernist. The disguise favoured by most writers, not unnaturally, tends to be God, since you get the omnipotence while reserving the right to move in mysterious ways and to remain invisible to mortal eyes.

As if there weren't enough to glean from The Well-Tempered Plot Device (the origin of plot coupons!) and "Economy and efficiency as motivations in fiction", writers and those interested in looking beneath the hood at how fiction works would do well to read the fantastic discussion going on where I found those links over at Making Light. At least three posts from that thread went straight into my quote file, including this from John M. Ford:

"...Which sounds better as a motivation for being exposed to tiger prawns and rye-crazed moose:

"At the end of your journey lies fabulous wealth and power, and vengeance on those who have wronged you!"

or

"At the end of your journey you'll feel a lot better about yourself."

Don't answer at once, think about it for a few chapters. The point being that the story (the force of nature) is about what happens to the characters, good, bad, hench, and comic-relief. The plot (the mechanical device) is just the excuse for being up to your keister in Heavily Armed Objectivist Space Bats in the first place.

1:21 AM (0 comments)
Feltron: 2005 Annual Report.

1:21 AM (0 comments)
Listen to great speeches (many from their original authors) by downloading or streaming from American Rhetoric.

1:41 PM (0 comments)
You've seen Manos, the Hands of Fate, right? Now you can learn the truth behind the horror in Growing Up Manos (via Metafilter):

"My father is Tom Neyman, who played The Master," Jackey (Neyman) told me over the phone. "When my parents told me they were making this movie and Hal Warren needed someone to play his daughter, they said, 'It's okay, honey, if you don't want to do it, we can always find another little girl.' And I was, like, 'No way! No other little girl is getting my part!'"

The project became quite a family affair. Her father, an artist, made the "Torgo thighs," the appliances that bulked up John Reynolds' legs, out of wire coat hangers and foam, as well as painting the self-portrait of "The Master" and making the iron sculptures of hands that decorate the film. ... And Jackey's dog, Shanka, played the devil dog from the Lodge of Sins.