Show, don't tell! Advice that is repeated frequently throughout the worlds of author blogs, writing advisers and reviewers. Yet, periods of discussion, real interaction between characters, stories are dull. Today, then, some thoughts about the role and advantages of dialogue in stories.

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Topics: entertainment/storytelling

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No, I'm not going to tell you a story. Instead, I want to try and write down some of my thoughts about effective storytelling in various mediums. Each piece is going to be based around a particularly effective (or ineffective) example I've seen recently.

Generally, I'll try to write in a spoiler-free fashion, as far as plot points are concerned. Obviously, by talking about style and presentation, some of the mystery will be revealed, but hopefully only enough to pique your interest if you aren't familiar with the work in question.

First up, my impressions of the storytelling in Heroes...

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Topics: art/design, entertainment/storytelling

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It's been quite a few months since I've played Battle For Wesnoth. It's too addictive to play every day.

Today I was getting very frustrated trying to debug something, so I threw in the towel. Downloaded the latest development version of Wesnoth and lost three hours trying to get better at the game. Boy, it's a well designed system. Rules aren't too complicated, but there's a lot of brain work needed to play it well (although not so much that you can't get anywhere starting out).

So everybody should rush out and download Battle for Wesnoth now. There are versions for Windows, Macs, Linux... all those funky systems people use. Zero cost .Much fun.

Topics: entertainment, software

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Sappiness follows. Read at own risk...

I like New York city. I may have mentioned this before. I know I've tried to capture some of the things I like in photographs, but it's hard to photograph a feeling.

At the moment, NYC is probably the city I would most like to move to for a year or two to work and live and I try to visit there whenever I'm nearby.

Today's Brotherhood 2.0 episode brought back good memories of past visits. John Green's opening speech about what he will miss about New York is lovely and the walk he takes in the last two thirds of the video brings back a lot of memories of visiting New York in the spring and summer.

Some background for those who don't know: Brotherhood 2.0 is a series of daily video blogs between two brothers — one a dedicated EcoGeek, the other a seriously good Young Adult author. They've made a deal to have no textual communication for a year. Only daily vlogs, phone calls and personal meetings. Since both brothers are good communicators, it's an experiment that is fun to watch. John — the New York-based writer — is moving to Indiana this week, so today's episode was his last from NY.

Topics: entertainment, travel

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On a flight from Auckland to Los Angeles yesterday, one of the movies available was Wordplay, which I had heard about but not yet seen. About the New York Times crossword puzzle, the puzzle editor for the paper, the guys who create the crosswords and the people from all walks of life who solve them. Highly recommended.

It's a well put together movie/documentary which doesn't lead one to think of crossword puzzle solvers as a fringe society. Of course, this is made easier when the people they interview as "solvers" include Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart.

By comparison, Word Wars, a similar movie about Scrabble players, did not make me want to start playing competitive scrabble when I saw it last year. To be fair, though, I suspect if somebody made a similar movie about "everyday" chess players — my left-field hobby of choice — it would look like a pretty strange group of people, too. The fact that Wordplay did not have this result is one of the reasons I liked it (plus, it wasn't an interest group I knew much about).

Topics: entertainment/movies

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