Crazy Copyright Claim

Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:

Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’

I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.

If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.

I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.

2017 in Bitface Blogging

Well hello. It’s been a while. That daily posting thing didn’t work too well in the latter part of the year, and was particularly weak in the last couple of weeks. Weak weeks.

In fact I posted 261 times in 2017. It’s surprisingly hard to find that kind of thing out from Wordpress itself. I had to dig into the database and run some simple SQL:

select count(*) from devilgate_posts
  where  post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%';

261 is 72% of the days of the year, which is not too bad. Certainly the most posts in any year out of the past fifteen(!)

Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month Posts
Jan 32
Feb 33
Mar 33
Apr 18
May 27
Jun 15
Jul 21
Aug 17
Sep 18
Oct 18
Nov 23
Dec 6

A strong start, tapering off in the middle, with a rally in November and then a complete collapse in December. I suspect the last is from a combination of post-nano slump and the festive season.

If you’re interested, here’s the SQL that got me that table:

select
  date_format(post_date_gmt, '%b') as Month,
  count(*) as Posts
  from devilgate_posts
  where post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%'
  group by date_format(post_date_gmt, '%m');

As to this year, we’ll see how it goes. I hope at least to keep the frequency reasonably high. And improve both code and table formatting.

Mouse Takes Fox

The news that Murdoch plans to sell 21st Century Fox and Sky TV to Disney is interesting for how it will reshape the media landscape. But it’s good from my point of view for a number of reasons, some relatively trivial and to do with content consumption; and one big.

  1. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four will come under the control of Marvel Studios. Just in time for Infinity War. Well, of course, far too late — even, I would imagine, for Infinity War Part 2. I expect that’s at least planned by now.
  2. Even more trivial, Lucasfilm can put the Fox fanfare back at the start of future Star Wars movies (and add them in to future reissues of the recent ones).
  3. It will become ethical to watch Sky TV. More of which below.

Above all: better Disney than Murdoch.1

Will Disney own too much? Hell yes. But see above.

On the ethics of watching — and paying for — Sky TV: see this blog passim for my thoughts on that. Like here and here. If Sky had not been owned by Murdoch we might conceivably have got it in the past. But I feel we’re highly unlikely to get it now. Buying a dish in 2017 would just be weird, and our side of the road is not cabled, by some odd historical aberration. But there’s the online version, which I think is called Direct TV. If we had had that I would have been able to watch the new Twin Peaks when it was actually broadcast, instead of now, on DVD, as is actually happening.

Loving it, by the way. And managed to hear no spoilers whatsoever, surprisingly.

  1. I mean, better almost anyone than Murdoch. ↩︎

Burn it With Fire (Stick)

I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in the Black/Cyber/Whatever sales, because I thought it would be a good way to watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and so on, on the telly, without having to plug a laptop in, as we do at present. Tonight I tried to set it up.

Amazon have decided to use replaceable batteries like it’s the 90s, instead of using a rechargeable like it’s today. I found it literally impossible to open the back of the remote.

The very fact that there are multiple YouTube videos explaining how to open the thing should be a giveaway. Unfortunately they all say, “It’s easy enough now because I’ve opened it before; it was really hard at first.”

The Apple TV may be several times the price, and the remote has its critics. But you just know you’re not going to have bollocks like this when you try to start using it.

Right now I’m planning to send the Fire TV Stick back. I’ll have another go when more of the family are around, and maybe we’ll get it. But I can’t help but wonder, what about someone who’s a bit older and maybe has arthritic hands? This is incredibly bad product design.

A Five and Four Zeroes

Actually it’s 50,069 words in total, as of a few minutes ago. And the last 5000 or so were not in the novel that I finished the other day.

Instead I wrote a new opening to the previous novel, which I hope will have moved it towards a submittable state; and a whole load of notes towards the next one, which I intend to start more or less right away.

As soon, at least, as I’ve got the skeleton of a plot, and a vague idea of the ending, so that I don’t go wandering around for years again.

Anyway: I declare myself a NaNoWriMo Winner.

Finished

I have finished my novel. Hooray!

Stats: 121,304 words. 44,107 of them since the 1st of November.

There is, of course, a great deal still to do before it will be ready for anyone else to see, but I’m going to put it away for a couple of months before starting rewrites.

There is one little downside: that 44,000 word figure, while by far the most I’ve ever written in a November (or any other month) does not quite reach the 50,000 required to “win” NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t really matter, as the whole purpose of the thing is to encourage us to get the words down, get a first draft out onto the solid-state drive.

But I’ve come this far. It would be nice to hit the 50,000 mark. Luckily there is a solution.

The publisher Angry Robot has an open submissions period running until the end of December. That means they accept and will read manuscripts from writers, instead of requiring all submissions to be via agents as normal.

Now obviously I’m not thinking about the just-completed first draft for this. But the one I finished before is ready. Except for two things.

  1. I submitted it the last time Angry Robot had one of these.
  2. I’ve never been happy with the beginning.

Point 1 would bar me from resubmitting, except it wasn’t rejected the last time. I just never heard back from them. So I asked on their comments page, and they said I could assume it got lost, which allows me to resubmit.

Point 2 gives me the ideal thing to work on for the rest of the month: rewrite the beginning of the previous novel.

So it’s time to jump back into the world of The Accidental Upgrade (though I may try to think of a new title).

Jerusalem by Alan Moore (Books 2017, 5)

Yes, it’s halfway through the second-last month of the year and I’ve just finished my fifth book. Five in a year. That’s very poor. But this book was a large part of the reason for that.1

At over 1000 pages of very small text — close to a million words, I’ve heard — this is a mammoth work. It’s also really, really good.

As befits such a large work, it is a whole made of many parts. It’s split into three main sections, with each of those having eleven chapters; along with a “Prelude” and an “Afterlude.” The first is a series of short stories or vignettes, most of which are not obviously connected. They are all set in and around an area of Northampton called the Boroughs, at various times in the past and present.

In the second we find out what happened to Mick Warren, the closest thing we have to a protagonist, after he died aged three, before he came back to life again. The third brings it all together, after a fashion. Moore has always had trouble with endings — just consider the mighty Watchmen, whose ending was actually improved by the movie.

Did Alma Warren’s pictures save everything, and stop the destructor? Of course not: it always happened that way and always will. That’s the central thesis of the novel, the idea of eternalism, that time is static, and we only experience change because we happen to be moving along that axis at one second per second. This is of course similar to the viewpoint of Dr Manhattan in the aforementioned Watchmen, so we could suppose it’s a worldview that Moore has had for some time, though in his acknowledgements he suggests that he came to believe it during the years he was writing Jerusalem.

There is a chapter in book three that is written in the style of Joyce in his Finnegan’s wake days. It’s hard work to get through, but well worth it (though with hindsight if you were to skip that chapter I don’t think you’d miss much of the plot). Anyway, it’s a monster work, and well worth the time it takes to read.

  1. To be fair, spending a lot of time reading on the web, plus some reading comics, etc: these also need to be considered. ↩︎

Rock and Death

I appreciate this piece about AC/DC and Malcolm Young’s legacy. I never really cared for them myself. I was on the other side of the punk/metal wars, of course, and screechy vocals always put me off.

I completely understand the spirit of that piece, though, and feel the same way about The Clash, the Velvet Underground, probably others. But there is one telling line in it that says something about the different attitudes of the different sides in those not-really wars. I don’t know, maybe not; but this:

But we thought we were gonna live forever. The music too.

is not how things were for me, for us. We didn’t think we’d live beyond the eighties. The nineties at a pinch As Queen put it, we were the ones who:

grew up tall and proud
Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

But so too did the author of the AC/DC piece. He’s a decade older than me, but that still means he experienced the cold war.

Maybe it’s not generation, but location. I lived a few miles from the Faslane naval base, where the Polaris submarines were based (and where the Trident ones are still). We knew we’d be one of the first places to go.

Generations are too abstract, too arbitrary to make sweeping statements about in any case. But I still sometimes find myself surprised to be here, now, in this century.

Missing Dates

I’ve just noticed that this WordPress theme I’m using, Independent Publisher, doesn’t show dates and times of posts. And as a side effect it doesn’t have permalinks for posts without titles (the datestamp should be the permalink in that case).

How can this be? Has it always been like this and I just haven’t noticed? I hate sites that don’t have dates on posts.

One way or another, this will have to change.

To Nano or Not?

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I still haven’t quite decided whether to throw myself into it this year or not. I’ve taken part several times in previous years, but never completed the 50,000 words. And this year I still have the novel that I’ve been working on intermittently for about four years, that I’d like to finish off.

Maybe it would be better, and more in the Nano spirit, to start something new. But I think if I were to do that, I’d never finish this one, and it would sit there forever, haunting me. Maybe taunting me too, who knows.

I should have a better chance of getting the word count up this year, as I have a longer commute, and I usually get a seat at or near the start of the longest part (Dalston Junction to West Croydon, if you’re interested). So it should be entirely possible to get two free blocks of writing time each weekday. But I have found it to be strangely offputting to write in that environment, when there’s a person sitting on either side of me.

Sure, they’re probably not in the least interested in what I’ve got going on, but as Stephen King says in On Writing, you’ve got to write the first draft with the door closed.

Still, I have recently been looking at the novel again, and I think I’ve worked out how to end it. That has always been the problem for me: I don’t do a detailed plot, but I need to know how a story’s going to end if I’m going to have any chance of finishing it. If I just start writing with only an idea, maybe a setting and some characters, I tend to meander around all over the place and never get anywhere. Or at least, not to a sensible end.

I don’t have to know much about the route, but I need to know the destination, in other words. So as I now know the destination — or at least have a much clearer idea of it — I think it’s time to take one last run at this thing.

But this is me declaring that I’m throwing my hat in the Wrimo ring. I’ve signed up, and even given it a working title1 — by raiding that fount of quotes, The Tempest.

  1. Another problem has been and remains that I don’t have a title for it. Why are titles so hard? ↩︎