Category: Movie Reviews

Blog: Back to the Future

This week: Social Networking website dev and RDF, Lord of the Rings radio series, review of La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf biopic).

No sneak preview this week. God! Another week when I haven’t a clue what to write. I will just have to wing it!

Social Networking Site
This week’s blog title is due to my first tentative steps into the AI world of Web 3.0. For the last two or three years – since stumbling upon an article about Resource Description Framework (RDF), I have been championing the whole idea of large data sets of triplets describing resources in a meta-data kind of way. Tim Berners-Lee – inventor, if you like, of the World Wide Web – has pronounced it as the precursor to and foundation of Internet Artificial Intelligence. I believe him. Without some way of aggregating data and meta-data there will soon be just too much information around to be used by humans. We need an intermediary, an intelligence that can filter it for us. For that we need large data stores of meta-data. That is where RDF comes in. It has been around for many years but, like HTML, it has been adopted by developers in a role for which it was never intended. It’s simplicity is probably it’s main virtue, and asset – as with HTML. Continue reading “Blog: Back to the Future” →

Writer’s Block-Gravity’s Rainbow, Spartacus

This week: writer’s block and how to overcome or avoid, guest post on LOB Blog, Gravity’s Rainbow and Kirk Douglas.

Writer’s Block

There is no sneak preview this week because I haven’t written anything. I have also broken my own traditional use of Film Titles again because writer’s block is such an important subject for all writers and I want to make this article as easy to find using search engines as possible. I have a few tricks to share.

To be truthful, I don’t think I am actually suffering what we call the ‘classic’ writer’s block; I simply need a short break from writing. I have written three complete novels this year, two short stories and contributed to three more as well as also editing the novel The Journals of Raymond Brooks and completing my term in a prominent IT role at a London Science Institute. It’s a lot for anybody to take on and only natural that I need a break once in a while. If you read Tip 1 you will see that I simply need to take it easy and get some input from my favourite sources; movies, books and simply thinking. The last for me is something I have always enjoyed. One of the great Greek philosophers once said, if you want to experience please without pain, try philosophy. My thinking more or less involves reflecting one what I have achieved recently including any mistakes I have made, thinking about what I want to do, thinking where all my endeavors fit into the world and my aspirations, and sometimes listening for that illusive ‘voice of the muse’. Continue reading “Writer’s Block-Gravity’s Rainbow, Spartacus” →

Carnival of Souls and Hammer Movie Review

This week: a story’s soul,  Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Strunk & White: The Elements of Style.

A Story’s Soul
This week I have returned to another incomplete work, December Radio. The story is a sci-fi WWII whodunnit of sorts. So far I haven’t written much, although I have spent many hours thinking about it. The problem is that the story’s soul as I last envisaged it may be too obvious. The problem has been compounded by the recommendation by a friend, based on my description, to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I am on page 50, and so far I have very little idea what is going on; a British Agent is investigating V2 rockets amidst a chaotic kaleidoscope of disjointed feelings, weird characters and disparate locations. What is clear is that the main story is uncomfortably close to mine.  A battle has begun for the soul of my story. Attack Hitler’s Bunker was a simple story; men fighting against immense odds for Good. Its soul was born without hiccups on page one. The Ordo Lupus series have their origins in my own private obsessions with the darker side of Religion and more specifically, Faith, God, the Devil and luck. However, both Escher’s Staircase and December Radio have been born of the nebulous (to quote William Shatner) inspiration of a relationship; they have neither a beginning or end. I think the former title has now settled into a comfortable childhood, but the latter may lack something to distinguish it from its distinguished competition. Once I have the soul, the story will tell me what to write. This probably probably sounds kinda whimsy and not a little bit pretentious, but I believe it! If a book doesn’t have a soul it can’t live. Continue reading “Carnival of Souls and Hammer Movie Review” →