Sean Rodman's Blog, page 8

nypl:The last Mustache Monday for the month goes to Orson...

nypl:

The last Mustache Monday for the month goes to Orson Welles, who on October 30, 1938 performed one of the most traumatizing hoaxes in America. He performed the “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, based on the novel by H.G. Wells, which caused widespread panic when listeners took this realistically performed news report of an invasion from Mars to be true. 

Stop by the Library to listen to the "War of the Worlds" broadcast, originally written by Howard Koch.

Happy Mustache Monday!

Image: NYPL Digital Gallery

neil-gaiman:surrealchamber:Neil Gaiman, author of things,...

neil-gaiman:

surrealchamber:

Neil Gaiman, author of things, explains All Hallow’s Read, a Tradition that was just waiting to happen. Full Details at www.allhallowsread.com. Nobody was actually killed during the making of this video.

And give someone a scary book at Hallowe’en.

For the puzzled…

"Zombie teeth…incredibly important." Neil starts a new Halloween tradition.

Photo

"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read."

““Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.””

- Groucho Marx (via elizareads)

"There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."

“There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”

- Lon Chaney

"The Web is growing older, and its authoring tools seem increasingly unsatisfactory to larger numbers..."

“The Web is growing older, and its authoring tools seem increasingly unsatisfactory to larger numbers of people. Much of the writing on the early Web was short, ephemeral, weightless. Bloggers would write about where they went, who they saw, what they ate. Content creation tools evolved to support brevity, with Twitter and Facebook as the logical end point for that style of expression. In contrast, entrepreneurs like Winer, ­Williams, and Brown are building tools for reflective thought. They expect their users to contemplate, revise, collaborate—in short, to work more the way writers historically have written, and as the pioneers of the digital revolution expected people to continue to write. What all these new tools for thought must prove is that there are enough people willing to give up the quick pleasures of the tweet or Facebook post and return to the hard business of writing whole paragraphs that are themselves part of a larger structure of argument.”

- Paul Ford reviews a variety of new composition tools in Technology Review, and muses about their common cause: http://bit.ly/H1ECWh (via jasonashlock)

laughingsquid:Popular Book Covers Altered With Click Bait...

laughingsquid:

Popular Book Covers Altered With Click Bait Titles

Only a few people on Wikipedia are trusted with sockpuppet investigations.

Only a few people on Wikipedia are trusted with sockpuppet investigations.

"Games are just like dreams. If we treated them like dreams, we would do a lot more interesting..."

“Games are just like dreams. If we treated them like dreams, we would do a lot more interesting things with them.”

- Susan O’Connor, Game Writer for BioShock and Far Cry 2 (via)

No Plot? No Problem!: 3 Things to Keep In Mind While Brainstorming

lettersandlight:

September is officially the start of NaNo Prep: this month the blog is all things inspiration. We’re excerpting what some might call the NaNoWriMo Bible: No Plot? No Problem! by founder Chris Baty. Today, he shares three things to keep in mind while you storm up ideas for November:

We’ve got some good news and some bad news about your novel.

The good news is that, whether you realize it or not, you already have a ton of great material for your book. The juicy, hilarious, heartbreaking ideas that will eventually form the core of your novel are all around you now.

Read More