Great idea taken

I had a brilliant idea a while ago. I could write a nonfiction book on MMO guild management. It's a hobby I'm quite familiar with, and I had never seen anything like it in bookstores. Turns out I was beaten to the punch by a self-pubbed author whose entire text is available for free on Scribd. Back to fiction for me! Instead of doing Script Frenzy, I'll be doing a mini-NaNoWriMo for myself to finish out the YA story I've been working on for a while now. I've been getting about 1500 words done a day at work (I love my job) so I should finish the approximately 40,000 words without much problem.

Good writing trumps all

Over the last few months, a surprising fandom has formed for the latest My Little Pony series. The TV show, which is headed by the venerable Lauren Faust, has gained a following among young men aged 15-30. They formed on the notorious website 4chan, which is most known for its spinoff group of hacktivists Anonymous, and were more or less wrestled off the website by angry moderators for flooding the site with captioned pony pictures.

They call themselves "bronies" and have fled to a new home, ponychan.net, where they are free to spread the pony love.

I admit, I was skeptical about the new MLP series. I have made the mistake of re-watching 80s cartoons and learning how horrible the animation and storytelling was. But I figured that hey, why not, it's a Lauren Faust series.

I was frankly surprised. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a testament to the importance of solid characterization and good writing. Good writing trumps everything - genre, intended audience, animation, even generational and gender prejudices. The characters are unique, genuine, and believeable, and each offers a positive role model. A major overriding theme of the show is to embrace your own natural talents, rather than try too hard to be good at things you're not really suited for. To that end, there are tomboy ponies, fashionista ponies, bookworm ponies, at least two small businesswoman ponies, and a pony who loves to party whose sole job seems to be catering and coordinating parties for other ponies.

If you have a girl under the age of 12 you can get away with watching this show with her, and she will probably enjoy it and you will be shockingly delighted at how good it is. If you don't have a girl under the age of 12 handy, then watch the episodes on YouTube, alone, if you are afraid of anyone seeing it.

As a female anime fan I brazingly watched it in the living room on YouTube, much to the consternation of my husband. I also went and bought ponies for the first time in twenty years.

Thanks, Hasbro, for bringing on Lauren Faust. Good writing really does transcend all.

Busy bee

It's a good thing I snagged that new laptop when I did, because my faithful old desktop system is on the fritz. Poor thing. It's had a hard life.

My day job is in an IT support company, so when my computer at home breaks, I know how bad the issue is and usually I know what to do about it. Well, the issue on this desktop is severe IRQ interrupts, an issue I had with it on its original Vista install about three years ago. That was actually the major reason I downgraded it back to XP and only re-upgraded it back when Windows 7 beta and RC came out.

So there's a few things I'll be doing to it, but if they don't fix it, the only solution is a whole system rebuild. And at that point, I might as well just buy a new DIY kit and start from scratch. Reinstalling Windows is always the last resort, but for XP systems the best practice was to do a clean rebuild every six months, and for Vista it was once a year. It's been about a year and a half for the Windows 7 install on my desktop. Perhaps that'll be the benchmark for 7 installs.

DIY kits are the cheapest option for getting a brand new system, but they are not for the faint of heart. Even I've only applied thermal paste to a processor heat sink a few times in my life. On the other hand, it will be excellent practice - I've been putting off the A+ exam for a while now because I've been scared of the practical. The practical entails being handed a table of parts and being asked to build a computer. Well, if I can do it at home with a DIY kit, surely I can handle for a test. Right?

DIY kits also don't come with an OS. My copy of Windows 7 was purchased independent of the hardware, and my licensed copy of XP is sitting there collecting dust, so I can drop 7 on this theoretical new system and plop XP onto the old dying system and use it as a media center computer.

What does this have to do with writing? Not much, except that computers are a writer's primary tools these days. When they start messing up, I start counting myself lucky that everything is safely stored in Dropbox.