I admit I am still something of a Linux novice. Nevertheless, I have always preferred my web servers run on the LAMP stack. My solitary experience running a Windows web server was a nightmare I’d not wish to repeat. However, today was one of those days where I would have liked that same ease-of-use. For a program I wanted to use, I needed to install ImageMagick. No big deal, right?

This is an unfinished book I worked on back in early 2005. I actually found it very promising, but as I got into it I wondered who would want to read such a relentlessly grim book, especially when I wasn’t planning on any kind of happy ending. In fact, the very process of writing it and planning it was depressing me, and I considered it an altogether unhealthy experience. I have thought about going back to it from time to time, but then I look at my notes and what I had written down, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

In honor of the 10th anniversary of the computer game Homeworld, I am reposting an essay I wrote on December 27, 2006. Enjoy! Homeworld. Released in 1999, it is still probably the best 3D real-time strategy game set in space ever made. Others have come and gone, but I always go back to Homeworld. Aside from being a good game in general, its story and atmosphere really sell it. I would dare say that without its intriguing, mystical ambiance, it would not be nearly as interesting a game.

This is one of my early versions of what would become Shatternity. It is, in fact, the earliest incarnation I still have: it’s from 1996. Shatternity itself goes back to 1989, roughly, but I have virtually nothing on paper (or in electronic form) until 1996, sadly. I wrote out several hundred pages and then tore them up because I was unhappy with it. Most of the elements–technologies, alien races, etc.–managed to make it into later incarnations.

This was the first bit of Body of Evidence that I wrote, back on August 4, 2003. Yes, I have the exact date recorded. I was somewhat annoyed when the TV show Lost came along and did something very similar, but what can you do? I ended up cannibalizing elements (and characters) from this project and it become part of Magnetic Gecko, so at the very least, this stuff is worthwhile to get some insight into the world that MG would eventually uncover.

Don’t say I never did anything nice for you! Here is an all-new original short story from me. It’s a concept that I had rolling around in my head for several months, and I decided to finally get down to the business of writing it. I hope you find it enjoyable. Comments, as always, are welcomed. I may post some commentary on it later. Since I just wrote it, I’m not really in the mood to pick it apart just yet!

Some background on this might be helpful. I originally began The Journeyman with issue #1, back in 1999. It was after issue #25 that I went back and wrote #0, as a prequel to #1. Since I wrote The Journeyman in something resembling a comic book format, doing a #0 as a prequel seemed like an interesting idea. At some point, maybe I’ll go back and do a #-1! You never know.

This story came about as part of a writing contest. I wanted to write a short, self-contained time-travel story that nevertheless left some puzzles for the reader to work out. In the end, it was my unhappiness with this story that led me to write The End of Civilization instead, which is a starkly different kind of story. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one. It’s just one of my more obscure, short pieces.

After using basically every BBCode plugin available for WordPress–and finding every last one of them lacking–I decided to write my own. This one does not use shortcodes, as shortcodes apparently freak out when you want multi-line enclosed tags. My plugin applies filters to six hooks: * the_content * comment_text * the_excerpt * the_content_rss (strips BBCode) * comment_text_rss (strips BBCode) * the_excerpt_rss (strips BBCode) The following tags are supported:

Further posting of my writing is on hold while I work out technical issues. My entire writing archive uses a subset of BBCode for formatting, and it appears none of the BBCode plugins for WordPress actually work. The newest one, which uses shortcodes, seems to have exposed a limitation of the shortcode system. So, I will write my own plugin to introduce a shortcode to include an external file and parse anything that looks like BBCode, all in one shot.