I mentioned the Eragon books a few weeks ago. They did make a movie out of the book. I liked the movie enough, but it has some weaknesses. The director's leather fetish for the young male actors was not one of them. This is worth seeing if you enjoy fantasy, dragons etc. The effects were done well and Jeremy Irons always adds some gravitas to what he shows up in. And the bad guy is played by John Malcovitch. Check it out.
This is a 7 book series. It is also a complete classic, though most people are only familiar with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. (Book 1 in published order)
There has been a long debate amongst fans of what order you are supposed to read the books. This single volume version puts the story in chronological order, instead of published order. It makes a lot more sense this way.
The books Chronologically:
The Magician's Nephew
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
They are a pretty quick read and if you've never taken the time, they are well worth it.
Welcome back to the weekly Anthology Flashback. We'll start up again with cool thoughts from Winter 2011 as summer starts to heat up everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
I thought I would swing around to Clubs again for this Tech Tuesday. Clubs are semi-private groups here on Gay Authors. We have a few different clubs available currently, and you can find them under the Club Link on the main red menu.
I strongly encourage our authors to join the Writer's Circle. There are a lot of ongoing discussions in there, and our friend @BHopper2 has been nice enough to start his own ongoing topic discussions each Tuesday which have brought forth some great discussions on writing and interacting in the community.
The Pit, of course, is where you can talk about politics. For the Fantasy Writers out there, there is a fantasy writing group. Same for Sci-Fi and Poetry. If you are just a general tech and science geek, there is a club of that. There is also a health group where folks are discussing health and fitness stuff.
Getting into a club is easy. Just hit the Join Club button and someone will approve you within a day, typically.
When you've joined a club, and you go to the Club page, you can see which clubs you are a member of and the latest updated topics.
When you're in a club, theres a button on the home page of the club that allows you to follow the entire club and see the latest activity with notifications.
If you are on the Main Forums page and you scroll to the bottom, you can see all of your Club Forums in one place.
If you haven't jumped into a club yet, now is a great time!
So I mentioned I am Number Four series of books by Pittacus Lore last Friday in my book blog. They did manage to make one movie of the series. It was a decent adventure with some nice eyecandy. Special effects were good and the movie was decent.
I Am Number Four is an interesting book. Human looking aliens are amongst us and they are being hunted by some really bad aliens. It's quite the romp and an enjoyable book. It's the first in a whole series that has a follow up in the pipeline as well. I enjoyed it and I really need to spend some time to finish reading the whole series. Check it out!
So, there are times where I want to read a little lighter fare that is still good. Alex Rider series definitely fits this niche for me. His adventures are all over the top. He's pretty much a teenage James Bond.
The author is good across multiple genres as well. I've read a few different things. He's also written a well-received James Bond novel and two Sherlock Holmes novels.
Anyway, if action-adventure is your thing, the Alex Rider series of books (11 and counting) is worth a read.
So, I mentioned the book for this in the blog last Friday, so I thought I'd mention this movie. The release kind of sucks as for some stupid reason, they haven't released a widescreen dvd or a Blu-Ray. It is a cute little action movie with a lot of familiar British faces. It's a quick romp with nice eyecandy. There are worse things out there.
I've just enjoyed, and I use the term loosely, an Internet free weekend. This was not my desire in the least. The several-year-old network interface board for Verizon FiOS decided to die Friday afternoon. The tech was able to replace it fairly quickly, thankfully. Unfortunately, it wasn't until Monday morning that they got around to getting here to do it. The only internet access I had over the weekend was through my phone. That means that time I would normally have for taking care of stuff around here was totally zapped. This includes being able to write one of the more detailed blogs that show up here on Tuesdays. I'm writing this as I'm overdue for bed because like Winter is Coming, so does Work.
To our authors, if you've noticed the "Respond to Review" option now showing up on reviews... don't use it. Stories doesn't know what to do with it yet so, you'll just get an error when you submit whatever you write. I've reported it to our programmer, so it should be included when we roll the next version out. It's currently going through bug squashing. The weekend without internet, when I actually had time to work on it, didn't help. Anyway, I will hopefully have more a more helpful blog next week
With my internet down for 3 days except for phone, I've had some time to catch up on other things. (oddly enough). I got around to watching this finally and I enjoyed it. Ezra Miller in spandex.... mmm.
There were a couple of spots that were a little slower and superman, as ever, is an overpowered hero. I'd say about 8/10. well worth watching and keeping in my collection.
I really enjoyed Eragon when I read it years ago. I liked the sequel as well and then I was so tied up I never finished reading the series. I have them in my giant pile... but I still haven't gotten back to them. I really need to, since I did enjoy the book so much.
As we roll ever closer to Armeggedon... er.. the go date for GDPR, Invision, the software company for the forum software is releasing another update to specifically address the ongoing concerns of pretty much anyone running anything on the Internet. We will be rolling the update ASAP. It is set to release Tuesday (Today).
Some features in it:
Downloading personal data. One of the requirements of GDPR is to be able to provide what personal data is tracked. They've added a feature to create an export file of personal data.
Deleting Members. We now have the option to anonymize data when we delete a member. As a reminder, in most cases where users have content posted, we delete your account and leave the content per the Terms of Service you Agreed to upon joining and re-agreed to if you are logged in and reading this. As a general rule, deleting content causes community disruption and we avoid that wherever possible. But we can now easily strip said content of anything the EU considers to be personal data.
The Privacy Policy page gets more updates as well. Currently, there are a lot of third-party services that integrate with the forum software and any of them that are used, have their own privacy policy. The system will now automatically display said policies and thus allow us to simplify our own.
We are also working through the bugs on the new story update as well. This is the update that will put all the sorting and filtering right at your fingertips. I leave you with a current image:
As you can see, we have the theme working on the test server. This shows Stories I follow sorted by word count (most)
Of all the times Batman has been in movie form, the first two movies in Chris Nolan's reboot top them. Batman Begins gives the gritty, more realistic and most important of all, less campy version of Batman. This movie hit all the right notes and was only really topped by it immediate sequel, the Dark Knight. (And then pissed away in that god-awful mess called the Dark Knight Rises. I swear Nolan purposely trashed that movie so that no one would ask him to make another)
Anyway, Batman Begins set the stage. Well worth it.
If you have somehow stumbled through life and not read this, you really should. I just loved that the history department head at my school, assigned this book. Far too many of the current generation indoctrinated on BS need something to wake them up.
A few weeks back, our tech guru extraordinaire, A.J., compiled the reading stats to date for me. I poked them around to see what I could see and I made a little pie chart for everyone.
Now, any math person will tell you that you need context to understand what that means. So here are the relevant details:
Data is compiled based on "reads" from Jan-April 2018. This is about one quarter of the year.
The data shown here represents 2.89 million views, which compromised the top 717 stories. The cut off for that number was 1000 views in the time period.
Stories can (and do) have more than one genre listed on them.
The displayed data was compiled this way:
Stories were ranked by most views Jan-April
All stories with more than 1000 views were left in.
We counted up the number of times a genre was tagged in those stories.
The pie shows the proportion of stories so tagged.
As you can see, people are reading Romance and Drama in high numbers. Though, to be honest, many of the stories on the site are tagged with Romance in addition to whatever else someone wanted to be listed. Western is not shown but is half the size of Paranormal.
Enhanced story stats will be part of a future update to Stories.
I forgot to set this to post this morning... oops.
This is one of those late 90's action movies full of one-liners. And it features Samuel L. Jackson doing his thing as a BAMF.
If you haven't seen it and you like action movies and one-liners, this is a good movie.
This is an oldie but goodie. The visuals in this movie are stunning, especially when you consider it came out in 1984. It has long fueled my thoughts of space and space exploration. It is also a much tighter story, unlike the very plodding 2001. Sci-Fi movies suffered from long, slow scenes to soaring music in the 1965- 1980 timeset. You can see this in the first Alien movie, the first Star Trek Movie (The Motion Picture), and to a lesser extent Star Wars. I think Star Wars was the one to start breaking towards action faster.
Anyway, someone beat on Arthur C. Clarke to get him to cough up some explanations for the weird near acid trip of 2001: A Space Odessy. I'd like 2001 a lot more if it cut out about an hour. 2010, probably over-explains, but it makes more sense.
Anyway, I strongly recommend this movie, just for the cool visuals of Jupiter, though it is also well acted.
This is another coming-of-age story by Mercedes Lackey that she does so well. This story is powerful and emotional, like so many of Mercedes Lackey's first book in a new series. (This is a pattern with her. Pretty much every first book in a series she does is a powerful coming of age story). The dragons in this story are fairly unique compared to others. They are characters in their own right, though not speaking or human intelligence. They are definitely not stupid either.
If you haven't read this story, and you like fantasy, this is definitely worth a read.
There has been a lot of news lately about Privacy and information breaches all over the place. Combine that with the new EU law, GDPR, going into effect on May 26th, and every internet company on Earth has been bombarding you with alerts, messages, and requests for re-agreements. The amount of regulation that you have to deal with as a small business is frankly crushing. As the laws were written by technical half-wits (and I'm being generous), the law is written in such a way as that everyone is in violation of the law in some way or another unless you have a large team of well-paid lawyers making everything more complicated and messy. The USA wasn't to be outdone and passed a moronic Anti-Sex Trafficking Bill... that basically puts every company that operates on the Internet in harm's way....unless you have an army of lawyers. Expect more changes as we make adjustments to make sure we are well inside what's allowed by these laws.
In the meantime, you can find our most up-to-date Privacy Policy linked at the bottom of every page:
You can find the Rules/Terms of Service/Guidelines for the site under the Help Menu as Guidelines:
The Terms of Service Short form is here: https://www.gayauthors.org/terms/
It links to the full Guidelines as well.
Opt-in for Site News
We have the capability of emailing members from time to time via the system. This is a strictly opt-in system and we had people cycle that some time ago. If you wish to change your current status for on-site email contact, you can go to your Notification settings here: https://www.gayauthors.org/notifications/options/
For people that Subscribe to the Read! Write! Enjoy! site newsletter, there will be a new opt-in going out soon so that we comply with the new EU GDPR law. Keep an eye out for that.
As an engineer, I have always been fascinated by how things work. You can boil down most engineering to "Problem Solving". Problem solving is a skillset. The most popular problem solver in popular culture when I was growing up was MacGyver. Lock the man in a room with some spare parts and a knife and he'd make an airplane. The people that make the world work are real-life MacGyvers.
In our world, there are not a whole lot of people that fall into this category. Atlas Shrugged is a book that asks the question, what if the people that make things work suddenly stop and disappear?
This book is absolutely despised by 'progressives' because it torches socialism like the dungheap it is. It's maligned by the left because it torches their sacred cows and it is maligned by social conservatives because Ayn Rand wasn't too fond of religion either.
The big concepts are great. The romance in the book is cheesy at best. There is a cool bro-mance thing going on too. And there is a tendency to monologue, at least by John Galt.
If you've never read it and only heard it's evil or some 'progressive' snowflake melted over it, it's worth your while to educate yourself. Enough people out there that make the world work, feel as the characters do in this book.
We are actively developing a change to the story system that will go with our forum software upgrade. There are a lot of things going on under the hood, but there is a fairly sizable visual change coming as well.
Clicking on Newest Stories currently shows you this:
Our still-in-development software update shows you this:
A couple of notes here on the image:
This is a work in progress and subject to change
This is in the default color scheme and has not been updated to GA colors yet
The idea with the interface is to put all the story sorting options right in front of you and have the listing update as you make changes.
For example, if I wanted to list all the stories by either @Cia or me, I can do this:
Or maybe I want to see the Premium Stories?
We are working hard to make things easier for everyone. The Stories Archive software offers some really powerful features, but they are a bit fidgety and in out of the way places. The idea of the new update is to put the power right in front of you.
Like... show me just the stories that I follow:
Do you think this sorting method will be easier for you? Do you think it will be helpful to find specific stories?
Now is a great time for feedback!
I must admit that this movie is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. It is very well done and the actors do a great job all across the board. It has gay characters and that are really in a hard spot in the movie.
The reason for my guilt is because this movie is clearly a propaganda piece by someone that doesn't understand history at all. This movie is what a 'progressive' thinks a 'conservative' is. While in reality, it is projection on the part of the writers.
The movie is interesting and important to watch, as well as entertaining.
I love these spoons! They are so handy for cooking and they clean up really easy. If you are still using a wooden spoon, for all that is holy, try one of these spoons!
I had fun last week posting the movie on Monday and the books on Friday, so I figured I'd do it again this week.
This book is a fast read and enjoyable. I am someone that enjoys science and science fiction. This is the more interesting science fiction in that it is in the realm of "could happen". "hard Science"-type sci-fi is the most difficult, of course. But I think it makes it all the more powerful when done right.
Have you read the book? seen the movie? both? What do you think?
