Beat writer’s block and meet deadlines with AI writing apps
28 July 2022
Far from usurping writers of fiction, AI writing programs, such as Sudowrite, could aid authors, particularly those bogged down with writer’s block, and facing looming deadlines, says Josh Dzieza, writing for The Verge:
Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test.
In other words, AI writing programs could act as ghostwriters, of a sort, who are paid — in kind at least — but never acknowledged for their contribution.
RELATED CONTENT
The 2022 Booker Prize longlist
27 July 2022
The 2022 Booker Prize longlist was announced overnight, Australian time. Thirteen authors including Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, and Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout, are among those included.
It includes the youngest and oldest authors ever to be nominated, as well as the shortest book, three debuts and two new publishers receiving their first ever nominations. Chair of the judges Neil MacGregor said ‘The list offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, meditation and thriller’.
The shortlist for the Booker Prize, which celebrates English language novels published in Ireland and the UK each year, will be unveiled on Tuesday 6 September 2022.
RELATED CONTENT
Booker Prize, books, Elizabeth Strout, Graeme Macrae Burnet, literary awards
A trailer for The Princess a documentary by Ed Perkins
27 July 2022
Directed by British documentary maker Ed Perkins, The Princess, trailer, which opens in Australian cinemas on Friday 12 August 2022, looks at the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Made up mostly of archival footage, in a similar style to Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna, The Princess also examines the lasting influence Diana’s life, and death, had on the British monarchy.
RELATED CONTENT
documentary, Ed Perkins, film, history, trailer, video
Dumpster diving, finding food when prices are rising
27 July 2022
Inflation is back. Prices are rising — sharply in some cases — adding to the cost of living. My go-to — highly anecdotal of course — inflation indicator is the price of a large sized takeaway cappuccino. While rises in the price of coffee have been on the cards for some time, I paid A$5.20 for a cup in Kogarah, a southern suburb of Sydney the other week, the first time I’ve seen the cost exceed five dollars.
But the price of household staples, not just coffee, have also been rising steadily in recent months, imposing financial hardship on many people. Despite this, some Australian supermarkets are engaging in what is surely the unconscionable practice of disposing of food products before their use by date, or fruit and vegetables that simply don’t look saleable, without even offering them at a reduced price beforehand.
But savvy consumers, including Sydneysider Brenden Rikihana, are countering this wasteful process by taking to dumpster diving. That is, going around to the dumpster bin area at a supermarket, and sifting through them for food that is still safe to eat. And if Rikihana’s Facebook page is anything to go by, dumpster divers are truly spoilt for choice at the moment. In fact Rikihana collects so much usable food, he gives a lot away to others.
Dumpster diving can’t be without its hazards. There’s obviously a danger to sifting through waste bins. Broken glass, other sharp objects, not to mention who knows exactly what’s been put in the dumpster. Then there’s the legalities. Some of the bins are probably on private property, so trespass may be a factor. I doubt few people rummage through dumpsters out of choice though. And that’s the problem at the moment. For many it’s not about choice, it’s about necessity.
RELATED CONTENT
The extended trailer for House of the Dragon, a GoT prequel
27 July 2022
If you can’t do without Game of Thrones (GoT) in your life, then there’s good news. A ten episode prequel series, titled House of the Dragon is set to go to air on Sunday 21 August 2022.
Based in part on the 2018 novel Fire & Blood, by GoT creator George R. R. Martin, House of the Dragon is set two hundred years before events of Game of Thrones, and centres on the “Dance of the Dragons”, the name given to the war of succession within the House Targaryen of Dragonstone.
An extended trailer for House of the Dragon was screened at Comic-Con last week, too much excitement from GoT fans, but that’s probably no surprise.
RELATED CONTENT
George R. R. Martin, trailer, video
For short work breaks fast fun cross platform puzzle games
25 July 2022
Cambridge based British software engineer Simon Tatham, creator of PuTTY, which I once required the services of, has also made available a collection of puzzle-like games, designed to be played for two to three minutes at a time.
I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing.
As Tatham notes, few of the games were actually invented by him, but he has made them playable across several computer platforms, notably Windows, Apple Mac, and Unix.
RELATED CONTENT
A no hook-up city: Sydney not the place to Netflix and chill
25 July 2022
Out of fifty-three cities across the world, Sydney, Australia’s most populated city, ranks as just about the worst when it comes making friends — particularly if you were born outside of Australia — and hooking up, say the results of the Time Out 2022 Index.
When it comes to making friends, if you’re not born in Sydney, forget about befriending Sydneysiders. I’m sure that’s not the experience of every last new-comer, but somehow the finding doesn’t surprise me. Some years ago I read a guide for students coming from India — I think it was, I cannot track down the webpage right now — for degree courses in Australia. Long story short, they were told to expect the going to be tough when seeking out Australian born friends.
The guide explained Australians have “posses” of friends that seldom, it seems, mix. Old friends, school friends, uni friends, work friends, sports team friends, the list goes on. Aussies apparently go from one such group to another, but members of each group rarely meet anyone from other groups. Short wonder people from elsewhere have a hard time ingratiating themselves with the locals. If you work with an Australian, you might see them at Friday night drinks, but that’s about it.
The difficulty of befriending locally born Sydneysiders is something Kim Solomon, who moved to Sydney from South Africa in 2004, recently related to Sydney Morning Herald writer Michael Koziol:
A well-travelled 41-year-old who has also lived in London and spent time in the United States, Solomon finds Sydneysiders difficult to engage with on a personal level, whether they be strangers on the train or parents in her daughter’s school community. ‘It’s very hard to break into established groups of people who were born and raised in Sydney,” she says. “I’ve developed a good group of friends, but they’re all from South Africa and the UK.”
I don’t see too many people randomly striking up conversations on the trains in Sydney, so expecting to make friends on public transport might be hoping for a bit much. But the parents of her kids’ classmates? Sydney, what have you become?
When it comes to being more than friends though, people also felt frustrated, with seventy-one percent of Time Out 2022 Index respondents describing Sydney as a hard place to hook-up.
Sydneysiders are also starved for more intimate connections, it seems, with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying Sydney was a hard place to hook up, although Singapore, Stockholm and Porto, Portugal’s second city, all ranked lower when it came to Netflix but no chill.
Here’s a situation where place of birth doesn’t weigh so much I suspect though. If you click, you click. I get the feeling if people spent less time inside, and more time looking at what was going around them when outdoors, instead being focussed on the screen of their smartphone, they might not find hooking-up quite so difficult.
RELATED CONTENT
The first year in the life of a mango tree time lapse video
25 July 2022
Incredible time lapse video footage of the growth of a mango tree, from being planted as a seed, to a year later, from the people at Boxlapse.
I once lived in house that had a mature mango tree in the back yard. It was sizeable, three metres, maybe a little higher, planted on the fence line. Now I know what I missed earlier on.
RELATED CONTENT
Applications open for the 2022 Heyman Mentoring Award
25 July 2022
Sydney based author Kathryn Heyman is offering Australian writers aged twenty-six and over, from backgrounds of social and economic disadvantage, the opportunity to be mentored by her for a year, and have their manuscript appraised, and possibly published, by HarperCollins.
Heyman, who founded the Australian Writers Mentoring Program, has written seven books, including Keep Your Hands On the Wheel in 1999, Captain Starlight’s Apprentice in 2006, and Fury, a memoir, in 2020.
Applicants, who should also be writing a book with issues of class and economic disadvantage as themes, have until Tuesday 20 September 2022, to apply. Read more about the Heyman Mentoring Award here.
RELATED CONTENT
Australian literature, Kathryn Heyman
Where the Crawdads Sing adaptation fails to impress critics
23 July 2022
Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 debut novel of North Carolina based wildlife scientist Delia Owens, was a hit on Bookstagram, but the recently released film adaptation is not faring quite so well.
Both the major film review aggregation services, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, score the Olivia Newman directed feature forty-two and thirty-five out of one hundred, respectively. In other words, readers of the book loved the story, but film critics are far from impressed by its big-screen counterpart.
Carlos Aguilar, writing for The Wrap, described the adaptation as bland and mediocre:
Submerged in the muggy waters of the North Carolina marsh — which per the voiceover, is not a swamp — British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones tries to save “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the film adaption of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, from drowning in its own bland mediocrity.
Rachel LaBonte, film writer for Screen Rant, notes that while the adaptation is largely faithful to the novel, much of the book’s tension fails to transpose to film:
Additionally, in its attempt to bring as many book moments to life as possible, the movie finds itself grappling with a few awkward moments that, while reading fine on the page, don’t exactly translate well to a visual medium.
Meanwhile, Leigh Monson, writing for The A.V. Club, was more positive, lauding Daisy Edgar-Jones’ portrayal of protagonist Kya, the so-called “Marsh Girl”, although she found the pacing of the film at odds with the novel:
The weakest link in the cinematic adaptation is the courtroom procedural that feels crowbarred between bits of Kya’s history. In a novel, chapter breaks can signal a natural demarcation between disparate story beats, but in a two-hour film, the transition between scenes should feel more natural, or at least thematically interconnected. Courtroom scenes pop up without warning, and they only function in parallel to, and never in conjunction with, the flashback scenes that proceed or follow them.
The consensus among critics mirror LaBonte and Monson’s thoughts, the film closely resembles the book, yet doesn’t quite excite in the same way. A case of so close, yet so far, perhaps. It seems there are some novels that are simply best not adapted to film.
RELATED CONTENT