A new reel for BlueDot
Having gathered footage all summer for our latest projects, many of our friends and associates have asked us what the heck we have been up to.
Realizing we hadn’t updated our reel in (gasp) 2 years, we thought it time to cut something new and exciting! A big thank you goes out all the people that are within its frames, on camera and off.
The Making of History, Writing, and You
The poet is to memory what the hero is to action. It is the poet, writer, and storyteller who memorializes the actions of the hero, considers things good and bad, and brings them to future generations.
Despite his military and political accomplishments, Napoleon wanted above all to be a writer. He wrote memorials, histories, dialogues, even a short novel. When he wasn’t writing, he talked of writing as when he addressed his troops after Waterloo, “…that I may further serve your glory…I shall write of the great things we have done together.” Why would a man who so thoroughly directed the course of history want so badly to record it, and even more strangely, to write fiction; to record a world which doesn’t exist?
Napoleon knew that his actions would end, but that the memory of them would continue in the hands of writers and storytellers. He was ambitious, and not content with the transience of his heroism, he wanted the longevity, nay, the immortality which only the poet can offer.
Deactivate Visual Editor – Wordpress
I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.
The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/
Writing: Foreign Mistakes
We can learn a lot about the importance of proper word choice from the mistakes of foreigners.
I was in a Chinese restaurant in Spain and as if their troubled translation of the menu into Spanish wasn’t bad enough, they had also translated it into English. Next to some of the menu items there were asterisks. I looked to the bottom of the menu were the asterisks were explained and expecting to see the word spicy or vegetarian I read this: “These dishes are no longer in existence”.
Ok I’ll admit there’s nothing really wrong with the grammar here. It’s just so outlandish. What is most compelling to me (nothing to do with writing) is that these people reprinted their menu and rather than take the items off, they chose to memorialize them. If the phrase had read, “these dishes are no longer served” it would have been very pedestrian, very normal. But “existence” balls us over; it elevates the phrase to the level of poetry.
As writers we should employ strategy in the use of our words. There are times to be very clear even predictable and other times when it is nice to surprise or shock. The element at work in the phrase on the menu is surprise and the effect is humor. What makes the word “existence” so powerful is the context. If it had been in a speech about lost lives the word would have been merely factual. But existence for a menu item – it’s hilarious.
Writing: An Introduction
I want to help people to write better.
My desire to write this 5 part blog on WRITING comes from an awareness that despite our highly technical and visually oriented culture things still seem to pivot on the written word. Even for something non-literary like a TV show someone has to write the script or cue cards; someone has to write the advertisement and promos, the legal contracts, the emails, the memos etc.
When needing to communicate with a prospective partner, a high tech software company is reduced to making sure there are no sentence fragments, or dangling participles in their mission statement. In the legal world I recently read a quote stating that, “more litigation results from bad drafting than you can imagine.”
Another reason for this blog is the need to address a shocking barrage of mediocre and incompetent writing in supposedly professional forums. With regularity I have seen run-on sentences and fragments in the London Times and I have seen just about everything on the internet. The prose on the blogosphere, as one feisty blogger puts it, tends to be “slapdash, fragmented and drearily prolix.”