Podcast | 1. Pigs and Hitler

EDIT: Due to the rubbishy rubbishy rubbishness of PodcastMachine's limited file traffic, or something like that, the player for the podcast isn't working at the moment. To fix this problem, I've put a link at the bottom of this blog post where you can download the podcast as an MP3. Then you can put it on your Ipod or phone or whatever and listen to it on the go, or just listen to it from your computer. Easy peasy.

It's been a busy month for me, and I don't really have time to go through what's been happening. NaNoWriMo, I have to say, was a bit of a failure all things considered. What I do have for you today, however, is the first episode of the new Not Entirely Incoherent podcast! Give it a listen and see what you think. This week's episode is hosted by me and my friend Mark.




This week, for our pilot episode, we review all three episodes of the excellent crime drama 'Sherlock'. Plus, Mark interviews our brand new podcast host, AND a mysterious guest. Then there's our very first Who Would Win In A Fight argument, and a prank call that doesn't go exactly to plan...

Please visit me @KingOrokos and Mark @Marcus_1963. Don't forget to leave comments below!

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The BBC 'Big 100' Book Challenge

I haven't had much time to do anything other than write recently, what with the continuing threat of NaNoWriMo (I'm pretty far behind, actually, but I'll talk about my trials and tribulations some other time). But this is one of those copy-and-paste memes that are pretty easy to fill in, and this one in particular appealed to me because it's all about books. Therefore, I thought it would make a good, easy blog post to see you on until the next time I get a spare chance. So here's the meme, and I hope you can go on to fill it in for yourself.

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Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:

• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shaskespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor HS

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So I got 8 out of 100, which is slightly above average. Interestingly, a lot of the books on this list are books I've always wanted to get round to reading - Catch 22 and 1984, are two examples. Maybe I'll repeat this meme again next year and see if and how I've improved.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully I'll talk to you again soon.

A Month of Writing

Blog posts are probably going to be a little lacking this month, I'm afraid, because this is a month of writing. I just have so many things that need writing down or typing up over the course of this month, so blog posts are going to take a bit of a back seat.

First off, the big one is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every November, the founders of NaNoWriMo set a challenge; to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This year I've decided to take up that challenge. It's pretty straightforward really - you just sit and write, and if by the end of the month you've written your novel, you've succeeded. It doesn't have to be publisher worthy, so it's a great way of getting a first draft done if you're terrible with procrastination. At this precise moment in time, I have about 3,500 words, and I need another 1,500 by the end of tonight if I want to keep on target. So that's going to be sucking up a lot of my spare time for the whole of November. If you want to check NaNoWriMo out, they have a website, though obviously you're too late to take part this year.

While that is the big writing thing I'm doing this month, I also have a lot of other projects that are lagging a little. There's a brand new article on video games that I've been working on, ever since I put up that Map Mechanics post, because that sparked some of my interest in video game design back up. There's also another reason I'm writing the article, but I'll tell that story some other time. I've also got a short story I was planning on writing, but haven't had time to get round to. And of course there's the usual work for Re-Incarnated, editing and writing stories for that always takes up time.

I just wanted to make a short post about how the blog might be a little less active over the next month. Just letting you know. So there's all of the things I've been working on recently. I'll try and keep you updated on NaNoWriMo, but apart from that don't expect too much. Thanks for reading.