I'm actually familiar with several fanfic writers who have made the leap to commercial publishing. One of them with a recent publication is Maria Lima ("Matters of the Blood").
The reason a lot of people read fanfic is because it tends to be better written and, often, more interesting, than the crap that passes for "professional fiction" nowadays. In case you've somehow missed it, I'd point you to the craptastic yet (somehow) critically acclaimed "Voyage of the Narwhal" by Andrea Barrett. From a purely technical standpoint, for example, in one chapter she spends 3 paragraphs in the cook's point of view in order to tell (not show) the reader what the captain is feeling. This is not only bad writing, it's lazy. My 12 year old could write three paragraphs from the captain's point of view and "show" me what he's feeling without having to resort to a singular, unnecessary, and rambunctious point-of-view shift.
Yeah, forgive me for hauling out the Nazi parallel, but the Holocaust was a result of a bunch of regular (nice, cultured intellectual!) people doing the best they could.
They have odd sorts of selections. Two Tragically Hip albums (Men@Work and Live Between Us) but not In Violet Light. A lot of Our Lady Peace (CLumsy, Gravity, Naveed, Happiness Fish); BNL and some Bruce Cockburn; one Great Big Sea (Turn), but no Headstones, no Art Bergmann or DOA. And no RHCP.
No Queensryche; Filter (Short Bus, the Amalgamut, Title of Record); 81 songs by Anthrax; no metallica.
And other weirdness: The Strokes, This Is It; one Hives; no Whitestripes at all.
Phish, yes; Zappa, no; Tom Waits, yes; Aimee Mann, yes; Counting Crows, yes; the Boss, yes; U2, tons; the Cure, the Clash, Depeche Mode, all yes; but very little Elvis Costello.
Have you tried Camino? I downloaded it (0.7) last week while trying to track down an @import problem in Mozilla 1.3 and it's absolutely astounded me. I used to have to use IE 5.2 to do my online billpay (didn't work with Safari or Mozilla 1.0 - 1.3), and Blogger Pro didn't recognise Safari, so I had to keep Mozilla on my system to post to Blogger. Camino executes both flawlessly, has pop up killer and tabbed browsing, and has become my default browser of choice. I haven't run across a site yet that it hasn't processed/read correctly, even Java-heavy sites like PopCap.com or my webmail. Give it a try - you can get it from a link at Mozilla.org.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. $4 a month for 10 "burnable" tracks, sure. I'd probably pay that. But $18/month? Way overpriced. I buy 2-5 CDs a month, but mostly from either Canadian sites or Amazon, and I don't pay $18 for 1 CD. I'm wondering why this is so overpriced? Or is it because AOL Time Warner thinks AOL customers aren't savvy enough to use P2P software...
I agree that there must be a balance, but his real point is that spammers can send spam for free, while even bulk mailers have to pay the USPS some (small) fee in order to have access to our mailboxes. Is the answer some kind of limit on # of emails you can send - like, the first 5000 a month are free? Or even a daily limit? It seems that if the illegitimate usage numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, setting a threshhold such as 250 per day would encompass most users' needs. Anything above that incurs a 10-cent fee.
I don't know. I'm just brainstorming. But I tend to agree with Barry Shein because I receive spambombs some days (last Friday I had 47 identical spams hit my mail server at the same time) and I was asking myself, even then, "Hello? What possible ISP/relay could think 47 identical requests were legitimate?"
They should donate the time to something like the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu) or the protein folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu), both of which use distributed computing and neither of which need to be concerned with security.
It can also depend on the construction of your house. I live in a ca. 1890's brick house with plaster and lath construction and it's my understanding that the chicken wire used in plaster-and-lath construction can affect the signal adversely. Newer houses use/d drywall construction that doesn't have any wire in it, so if it's an old house, that could be part of the problem.
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I'm actually familiar with several fanfic writers who have made the leap to commercial publishing. One of them with a recent publication is Maria Lima ("Matters of the Blood").
The reason a lot of people read fanfic is because it tends to be better written and, often, more interesting, than the crap that passes for "professional fiction" nowadays. In case you've somehow missed it, I'd point you to the craptastic yet (somehow) critically acclaimed "Voyage of the Narwhal" by Andrea Barrett. From a purely technical standpoint, for example, in one chapter she spends 3 paragraphs in the cook's point of view in order to tell (not show) the reader what the captain is feeling. This is not only bad writing, it's lazy. My 12 year old could write three paragraphs from the captain's point of view and "show" me what he's feeling without having to resort to a singular, unnecessary, and rambunctious point-of-view shift.
Yeah, forgive me for hauling out the Nazi parallel, but the Holocaust was a result of a bunch of regular (nice, cultured intellectual!) people doing the best they could.
They have odd sorts of selections. Two Tragically Hip albums (Men@Work and Live Between Us) but not In Violet Light. A lot of Our Lady Peace (CLumsy, Gravity, Naveed, Happiness Fish); BNL and some Bruce Cockburn; one Great Big Sea (Turn), but no Headstones, no Art Bergmann or DOA. And no RHCP.
No Queensryche; Filter (Short Bus, the Amalgamut, Title of Record); 81 songs by Anthrax; no metallica.
And other weirdness: The Strokes, This Is It; one Hives; no Whitestripes at all.
Phish, yes; Zappa, no; Tom Waits, yes; Aimee Mann, yes; Counting Crows, yes; the Boss, yes; U2, tons; the Cure, the Clash, Depeche Mode, all yes; but very little Elvis Costello.
Hope this helps somewhat.
Have you tried Camino? I downloaded it (0.7) last week while trying to track down an @import problem in Mozilla 1.3 and it's absolutely astounded me. I used to have to use IE 5.2 to do my online billpay (didn't work with Safari or Mozilla 1.0 - 1.3), and Blogger Pro didn't recognise Safari, so I had to keep Mozilla on my system to post to Blogger. Camino executes both flawlessly, has pop up killer and tabbed browsing, and has become my default browser of choice. I haven't run across a site yet that it hasn't processed/read correctly, even Java-heavy sites like PopCap.com or my webmail. Give it a try - you can get it from a link at Mozilla.org.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. $4 a month for 10 "burnable" tracks, sure. I'd probably pay that. But $18/month? Way overpriced. I buy 2-5 CDs a month, but mostly from either Canadian sites or Amazon, and I don't pay $18 for 1 CD. I'm wondering why this is so overpriced? Or is it because AOL Time Warner thinks AOL customers aren't savvy enough to use P2P software...
I agree that there must be a balance, but his real point is that spammers can send spam for free, while even bulk mailers have to pay the USPS some (small) fee in order to have access to our mailboxes. Is the answer some kind of limit on # of emails you can send - like, the first 5000 a month are free? Or even a daily limit? It seems that if the illegitimate usage numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, setting a threshhold such as 250 per day would encompass most users' needs. Anything above that incurs a 10-cent fee.
I don't know. I'm just brainstorming. But I tend to agree with Barry Shein because I receive spambombs some days (last Friday I had 47 identical spams hit my mail server at the same time) and I was asking myself, even then, "Hello? What possible ISP/relay could think 47 identical requests were legitimate?"
They should donate the time to something like the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu) or the protein folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu), both of which use distributed computing and neither of which need to be concerned with security.
It can also depend on the construction of your house. I live in a ca. 1890's brick house with plaster and lath construction and it's my understanding that the chicken wire used in plaster-and-lath construction can affect the signal adversely. Newer houses use/d drywall construction that doesn't have any wire in it, so if it's an old house, that could be part of the problem.