Comments on: On knowing how to start, and when to stop

By: chris y

chris y — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:22:38 +0000

No one wants to watch sullen, schizophrenic Calvin as a high schooler whose mom is selling real estate while his dad has long since abandoned the family.

He was bullied in high school by Zwingli, which totally messed with his head.

By: Treilhard

Treilhard — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:17:51 +0000

http://www.livevideo.com/video/benhn1/2224F7CE7CB34505A1DEAEC23CE3B963/robot-chicken-calvin-n-hobbes.aspx

By: auntiegrav

auntiegrav — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:17:57 +0000

No one wants to watch sullen, schizophrenic Calvin as a high schooler whose mom is selling real estate while his dad has long since abandoned the family. You know he’d be on Ritalin and probably something stronger . . . like lithium.

By: MR Bill

MR Bill — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:51:31 +0000

I just wish Jon Swift were still posting. Anyone know what happened to a great ‘conservative’ blogger?

And is Satire being killed by reality/a surfeit of material?

By: mds

mds — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:03:28 +0000

Okay, now I feel guilty for sending Salient off after ghost chickens. Apologies.

Is the joke that Ellis sounds sufficiently like a 21st-century Hemingway to pass for him theoretically,

Yes. He’s a stocky, bearded, literary sort whose online persona superficially resembles the sketch you provided. He’s also known for being drawn to internet invocations of his name in vain, so I will no doubt soon be envying the dead.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:06:10 +0000

OTOH if I had taken Goethe’s implied advice maybe I wouldn’t have spent a full twenty minutes bemusedly reading random websites about/by Warren Ellis before giving up.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:03:07 +0000

I give up and confess that googling “Warren Ellis” and “Warren Ellis Hemingway” and etc. is getting me nowhere. Well, I found his blog, under his own name. There’s that. Is the joke that Ellis sounds sufficiently like a 21st-century Hemingway to pass for him theoretically, or has this guy actually created a fake Hemingway blog somewheres?

Goethe once said that genius consists in knowing when to stop.

…says the guy who wrote Faust part II…

By: mds

mds — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:36:53 +0000

But Hemingway would have been the consummate stereotypical blogger. Crash out of bed hung over mid-morning, slam away at Twitter until the train of thought’s pace gets too fast for 140 characters per click, switch over to blogspot and rail the paragraphs away until it’s time to hit the bars, which would bear fruit in the form of live-bloggingheadsed conversations and brawls. [...] More fake blogs by Proust and Hemingway, please.

Salient, I don’t know about Proust, but the Hemingway one has already been done. Just Google “Warren Ellis.”

By: M

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:49:55 +0000

I was amazed, when I switched over to DarkRoom, how much easier writing was. No options! Just you and the text.

By: kid bitzer

kid bitzer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:35:22 +0000

“I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.”

well, kieran, i can only wish you a happy retirement, and thank you for blogging as long as you did.

By: roac

roac — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:53:44 +0000

No, it would be wrong to say Jim Davis should have stopped on date x; he should never have started. Whereas I (like Non-Famous Henry apparently) am old enough to remember when Peanuts really was the best thing in the newspaper.

By: nick s

nick s — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:36:33 +0000

When I wrote my doctoral thesis, using Emacs and LaTeX, the amount of procrastination available from editing the .emacs and tweaking templates really was nothing compared to the opportunities for work-avoidance proffered by MS Word. I suspect that in an office environment, that's a feature and not a bug. Mr. Watterston is clearly thinking of a certain artist who should have stopped sometime in the 1960s, before Snoopy became the Red Baron or Peppermint Patty or the Great Pumpkin arrived. I thought he was referring to a certain artist whose cartoons will be better known to certain generations through versions lacking their main character. (I wish I could say I was surprised that said artist approves of commercial exploitation of the rendition, as long as his byline's up top.)

By: Henry (not the famous one)

Henry (not the famous one) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:27:29 +0000

Mr. Watterston is clearly thinking of a certain artist who should have stopped sometime in the 1960s, before Snoopy became the Red Baron or Peppermint Patty or the Great Pumpkin arrived. It’s amazing to me that comic strip artists, who have to turn out new ideas every day, keep going for as long as they do, but 15 years seems to be the limit (with the possible exception of George Herrington, who never had much of an audience, and Elzie Segar, who died too early to reach that limit); even Walt Kelly tailed off toward the end.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:31:29 +0000

Emacs developers are thus put in a position where their efforts to procrastinate end up extending the editor all the same. Diabolical.

By: ben w

ben w — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:25:00 +0000

The best tool is the one that provides the most options for fiddling Making it somewhat ironic that Pilgrim uses emacs, where you not only have the ability to configure nearly everything, but can always take a break to write some lisp if nothing presently available does precisely what you ~~want~~desperately need if you're going to get anything done.