"You know, I grew up in Wales, and when I became a writer and could choose to live wherever I wanted, I ended up going back… to Wales. I think we spend a lot of our adult lives trying to go back to where we were happiest as children."

Of all the insightful, delightful, and refreshingly honest things Jasper Fforde said this evening, in a quiet, little intimate talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, this was probably the one thing above all that hit home for me. For obvious reasons, I guess.

I said when I blogged about Terry Pratchett that he was like an uncle (an old one), and Neil was like a rockstar, as he has so often been called. Jasper Fforde? Is very… dadlike. I don’t have any uncles like Terry (and I certainly don’t know any rockstars personally so can’t compare to Neil), but Jasper Fforde was so uncannily like my dad, in his offbeat sense of humour and devoted geekery towards a subject. If you’d replaced the games with books, the stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards and multi-sided dice collection with the huge plywood painting of the Cheshire Cat that hangs, grinning, over Jasper Fforde’s desk at home as he writes (he painted it himself, he told us with a gleeful childlike glint in his eyes), the likeness would have been even more remarkable.

And what an absolute treat and privilege it is to listen to one of your favourite living authors talk about one of your favourite dead authors – and talk about his work with an assurance that showed he knew his stuff while at the same time always staying accessible. I didn’t agree with every single thing he said about Alice (e.g. he thinks Alice is bland and almost a secondary character, while I think Alice is the most important character because she represents the reader wading through Wonderland), but much of what he said had me, and many others, nodding fervently: the wondrous meta-naming White Knight scene in Through the Looking Glass, how brilliant it is that the illustrations of Alice going through and coming out of the glass are on the same pageleaf, how important absurdity and nonsense is not only to comedy writing but to the whole of English culture, how, when he came to the books at five, re-read them at 13, and re-read them again at 31, they were completely different experiences, how he had hoped to layer and texture his own books so that his readers could re-read them and pick out different things each time – and much much more than I can write about.

"I was in Oxford filming Quills and decided to make a pilgrimage to the museum there to see the dodo that Tenniel and Carroll would have looked at themselves, as the models for Tenniel’s illustration. So I stood there, in front of the dodo, standing by the case and looking at it like you do on a pilgrimage – you know, you think to yourself ah, they would have stood here, and you (shifts position) kind of stand there yourself… anyway, so I wondered, what if you had a Dodo Home Cloning Kit? And I walked over to the shop, and asked if they sold Dodo Home Cloning Kits. And because this was Oxford, and the lady there probably had 18 PhDs or DPhils or whatever they call them, she calmly said to me: ‘Come back in 20 years.’"

And voila, the dodos in the Nextian world were born.

Interesting info from other questions that were asked:

• Melanie Bradshaw wasn’t inspired by anything in particular, he just liked the idea of an inter-species love story
• His favourite Nextian invention is the translating carbon paper (he also likes the rice and lentils Entroposcope)
• It was deliberate that the libraries in Shades of Grey are all empty, as a counterpoint to the Bookworld Library which has every book in the world, he thought it fitting that his new series had libraries with no books at all
• In the original drafts Acheron Hades’ hideout was in a high-tech zeppelin floating in the middle of nowhere; his (also Welsh) wife complained that this was too sci-fi and geeky, and Fforde’s response was something along the lines of "oh, all right, let’s make his hideout in some remote cottage in Wales then, you… you… Welsh socialist!" – which is, apparently, the true story of why Wales is a Socialist Republic in the books
• The reason Jane Eyre was picked for the first novel was because, starting out, and wanting to be very accessible, it was the only novel he could think of that he was sure everyone would know something about, even if this knowledge was limited to "it’s a musty old Victorian book"

And finally – an unexpected bonus!

Jasper signed my book, and threw in a couple of extras as well :)

Only 2000 of them postcards in the world! Though, I must say, I wish I had got the Spoon Ishihara one.

Host: It is my great pleasure to introduce Terry Pratchett, who, in case you didn’t know, is the unbelievably best-selling author of the Discworld series –
Terry (in exaggerated, loud whisper): I think they know that.

Terry Pratchett is awesome.

In point form, because I’m all fluey and keep making typoes and can’t make coherent paragraphs:

• I think the only other author I’ve met before is Neil Gaiman. Terry had a very different sort of feeling from Neil – while Neil is like a rockstar, Terry’s like your uncle. He was very warm and fuzzy. Interestingly, I think this also sums up the difference between their writing.
• When asked about the translation of Nation from novel to play, his pithy answer was that it was of course incomparable because "a playwright has a whole orchestra of people and things to play with – including an actual orchestra (gestures vaguely to orchestral pit) – and all I have is one lousy alphabet!"
• It was heartwarmingly evident how much he loves Nation. He speaks about it with a great deal of affection. And during the Q&A, when people kept asking Discworld questions, he said at one point that it would be nice to have a Nation one (only for the very next question to begin "In the Discworld books…")
• My absolute favourite part was when someone asked him why he chose to set Nation in a parallel universe instead of our world, and his first response was exactly what had popped into my fledgling-writer mind immediately: "Because it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card!" (elaboration: "If I had set it in our world, someone somewhere would have triangulated the location of the cannibal island and it would have been inconvenient if it had turned out to be, oh, New Zealand or something")
• He did go on to give a much more detailed and thought-provoking answer about how parallel worlds, more so than purely made-up worlds, have the power to invoke elements of our own while allowing you to change things enough to turn it upside down – which is what G. K. Chesterton defined fantasy as: looking at our world in a different way. It reminded me of my dissertation work on fantasy and made me a bit wistful for academia…
• His favourite Discworld character is Tiffany Aching (which elicited some cheers from a Tiffany Aching contingent in the circle), because he is writing her right now, and, says Terry, he tends to get under the skin of whoever he’s writing right now – but second after Tiffany is, of course, Vimes (which elicited significant cheers from all over the theatre).
• Response to "which Discworld character is most like you in personality?": "Oh, god, my wife is in the audience, I can’t answer that. Ermmmm. Commander Vimes on a good day."

There’s something to be said for sitting in a theatre with one of your favourite authors and a horde of his fans :) the book geek in me is thoroughly happyfied. And just this afternoon I found out by email that I’d managed to score a ticket for a Jasper Fforde talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, about Carroll’s influence on his work! Could that combination possibly get any more jaw-droppingly amazing? No, I thought not.

My Wednesday and Thursday this week have basically vanished into air (literally), and my body clock is currently in some whacked-out timezone that is neither UK nor Australian, so I’m feeling pretty disoriented. But nothing beats the feeling of being back, of hanging out in my living room with my laptop with my siblings watching telly. Daddy took me out laptop shopping today followed by a trip to the Sydney Botanic Gardens to take advantage of the awesome warm weather, and we had lunch at Masuya, a family favourite Japanese restuarant in town; I also finally managed to satisfy my perpetual xiaolongbao craving with a trip to a new Shanghainese restaurant near our home, and we made plans to hit the beach tomorrow for some good fresh fish and chips, and pancakes later in the day (why yes, I have planned my days around food)!

Speaking of new laptops, I basically presented my dad with my very few specific requirements (must be able to play Dragon Age and NWN2, must have good sound, must have Win 7, doesn’t need to be that light/portable as I mostly just leave it at home anyway, must not be ugly), and he picked out this drop-dead sexy beauty for me:

Toshiba Qosmio X500

This, my friends, has to be the Mustang of laptops or something. It’s clearly built to be a gaming rig, hence its massive size and high-end specs, and I’m just hoping that my back won’t break lugging it back to Singapore and London, but dang it’s pretty. They’ve apparently been flying off the shelves so fast that they don’t even put it out on display in shops because then they’d just perpetually have no stock. We had to ask for it specifically. Thank goodness for the internets.

My dad’s l33t bargaining skills also resulted in us getting a copy of Dragon Age, a new pair of headphones, and a Logitech GX9 mouse thrown into the deal – for less than the RRP of the laptop. w00t! :D

I can’t believe I actually did manage to redesign after all, not to mention whip up something I rather like, though the process was probably made easier by the fact that I knew for sure I wanted this layout to

1) have dark text on a light background
2) be very simple
3) contain the colour red
4) have a swirly embellishment
5) not be based on a lyric

the latter since most of my previous layouts so far have had some element of a song in them, whether inspired by one or with lyrics in the design. So my favourite line from King Lear supplied the textual decoration this time – you can never go wrong with Shakespeare – and the rest of it, given the above conditions, kind of wrote itself very quickly.

After getting this done and dusted, I was going to have a rant, triggered by a mildly traumatic night out yesterday, about the drinking culture here and how I will never ever understand it, nor the practice of clubbing, and/or making friends with strangers at pubs and bars and similar establishments, or thinking it is okay to make out with people you’ve just met just because you’re both unattached. In fairness to the friend who dragged me along on this ill-advised jaunt last night, she is an exceedingly warm-hearted and intelligent person, I know she didn’t mean any harm, and my frustration is no doubt down entirely to cultural and personal differences of opinion. But I just feel like… this is a world I will never get, and so much of England is that world. Especially the drinking. There are a lot of good things I can say about this country, but it has its really ugly sides, like all other countries. This is one of them. The hour, however, compels me to keep this brief and go to sleep, and so this has to be the extent of my rant – which is probably a good thing, as I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.

I try not to get too geeky here (and have often contemplated forking geek posts to a new blog altogether because I often feel like I have a lot of geeky things to say regarding Linux and software that will alienate 99.9999% of my current audience – to fork or not to fork?), but that said, I feel like I have to be all anarchic and go against the tide of Google Chrome OS posts out in the blogosphere today, and say that I… am really not all that excited about it. Yet.

The thing that strikes me about Google Chrome OS – and what I’m sure a lot of other regular Linux users have also realised – is that it offers nothing radically new enough to warrant all the hype around it. If you want an OS for your netbook that boots up really quick and does nothing except go online, there’s already Jolicloud, and the upcoming gOS Cloud that boots directly into a browser, which is what I imagine Google’s OS will do. There are literally countless Linux distros optimised for netbooks. And if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty (it isn’t as hard as it sounds, I’ve tried it!), you can always roll your own Linux OS with something like Arch Linux, which basically starts you off from a command line and lets you install whatever you want on top of the veryVERY basic framework.

In fairness, I’m not techie enough to know how to wrangle the Linux kernel such that my OS boots directly into a browser, but I’m sure other people are. And if I had a netbook, nothing would be stopping me from using one of the already available distros that do something similar. I think I just don’t see right now what Google could do, other than add their brand name to the project, that could truly revolutionise netbook computing. On the bright side, I’m guessing a LOT more users will be converted to Linux netbooks if Google throws their weight behind it – and as it will be open source, I’m sure it won’t take long for intrepid developers to fork it into all sorts of yummy variations.

I don’t really subscribe to the “Google is evil” theory, and I still feel that they have the potential and know-how to really pull out something brilliant, so… more of the waiting game for now, I guess. Right now, for the life of me, I can’t imagine what it could possibly be. This is probably why I don’t work for Google (creativity fail)!

Because when it is slightly past midnight and I am insomniac from having slept nearly all day but I can’t concentrate on anything else for more than 5 seconds at a time – I like to pointlessly prettify my desktop.

Running: #! CrunchBang Linux, yay! And uberminimal Pidgin + Firefox (yes that is Firefox) ♥

Also, “Transatlanticism” is an awesome song. I am too lazy to upload it, but you can listen to it via YouTube.

New layout! Yay! (Look at it, if you are using Google Reader or somesuch!)

Wow, only redesigning (and Blogathon. and essays, now a thing of the past) can keep me up till… 2:24am? and still leave me unaware of the time. Although now that I realise how late it is my eyelids suddenly feel very heavy.

I’m really, really happy with this layout because with it, I’ve finally managed to implement a lot of things that I’ve been wanting to for ages, but just never got round to doing. Most of the nifty changes are under the hood and you probably won’t notice them, but trust me, they made me a very excitable little puppy. Things I’m particularly proud of are:

• COMMENT THREADING. Which was a pain. Actually, to be specific, the comment threading itself wasn’t a pain (though it was very finicky work)… but the new PHP function that Wordpress 2.7+ uses to output comments is a huge pain! There’s almost no documentation for it because it’s so new, it’s completely inflexible, and hellishly difficult to customise. I can’t figure out how to style author comments differently. It ought to be very easy, but it isn’t.

• Comment notifications – i.e., if I (or anyone) replies to your comment, you get an email – should be enabled. I say should be because I’ve installed a plugin for that purpose but I haven’t tested it. I suspect I will run into glitches because I’ve never had one of these plugins work for me before. This one has a good track record though.
• The sidebar is now fully widget-ised! For the first time ever! Where it used to be fully hand-coded. This is an upgrade that means a LOT to me (and surely other Wordpress users will grasp its monumental significance) but almost nothing to almost everyone else I bet :P It’s much, much easier to maintain and update now though. I went a little widget-happy, as you might be able to see. It could have been worse.
• Little bits of CSS that I think make the placement of items very much more aesthetically pleasing. It’s not much, but it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. I’m really happy with the styling of the post titles and dates. I mocked it up in Photoshop and then decided there was no way I would ever be able to style it that way, but CSS is more flexible than I realised!
• The colour scheme ♥ A while ago, a desperate urge to do something with grey-white-purple came over me. It didn’t go away. For months.

By the way, if anyone still has no idea how to get an avatar to show up when you comment, you can do so at Gravatar which is very handy and allows you to use that avatar on a whole bunch of other websites as well.

The flower brush in the header graphic is a Photoshop default. Bet you didn’t know that.

Other highlights of my day include this conversation with my brother, the purchase of a very charming blue dress I’ve had my eye on for ages and ages (on Steffy’s advice – thanks!), snapping up two cropped jackets on sale from New Look, finally getting a bunch of errands done, excellent afternoon weather, and most of all feeling better :) (though a tickly cough which is turning chesty still stubbornly persists)

I’ve consciously taken the four days of Easter holiday off from job applications and the like – so it does feel to me like I’m going back to work tomorrow, though I’m technically going to be lounging around at home same as always. It’s been a really good break. And I’m hopeful, starting anew, when I wake in the morning.

(Where did the week go?!)

Having had an absolutely manic week at work, a great deal of which was spent fielding a million phone calls, emails, stacks of paperwork, and other such exciting administrative tasks in the absence of my supervisor who is on tour, I wish I had the energy to write a longer post but I am exhausted. It was with some degree of horror that I realised this feeling was probably going to be permanent once I start proper full-time non-intern work – which I need, and soon, as my bank balance is very alarmingly low. It is kind of deflating; I wish I could genuinely say I do what I do for the love of it, but I am passing on job ads now that I would love to do but just can’t because they don’t pay (or don’t pay much – £5400 for 12 months, seriously, guys).

On the way back home today, I was on a Northern line train that didn’t budge from Old Street for the longest time. I hadn’t actually noticed because I was (predictably) drifting in and out of sleep as best as I could sandwiched between two armrest-hoggers, but then suddenly a voice came crackling over the intercom to say “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your driver speaking. There is a passenger in the first carriage playing very loud music. They may not be aware I’m speaking to them. If you will please turn it down, this train will be on its way.”

Sometimes – only sometimes, really – I love London. It’s especially charming at night, when there aren’t quite as many harried people around. It’s easy to think, walking down Regent Street from Oxford Circus to Piccadilly at 10pm, that the lights are rather beautiful after all.

Other (very geeky) exciting event of the weekend: today, in a fit of bleeding-edge madness, I nuked my entire Linux Mint system in order to try Fedora 10… for no reason really other than to have a clean, shiny new OS to play with and the enticing promise of speed, sleekness, flexibility and maturity. It’s like that oft-quoted quip “Why do people climb Mount Everest? Because it’s there” – Fedora was there and I was simply itching to try it. The jury is still out but a perverse part of me enjoys re-learning how to tweak, configure and use a new system. Fun times!

I also re-watched Pleasantville yesterday. It’s one of those movies which I really, really love but for some reason haven’t watched that many times. Since its Singapore release in 1999 (yes it has been that long!) I’ve only seen it twice, once in the cinema 10 – ten! – years ago, oh my gosh, and once in 2004 when I watched it for GP film screening along with the classes I was teaching back then. I’d forgotten how good a movie it is. Watch it if you haven’t.

NEW LAYOUT, handily linked for everyone reading this from an RSS feed. I demand you come revel in its colourful awesomeness.

…seriously this layout was very difficult. It’s like I splashed paint willy-nilly all over the previously harmonious monochrome; you can count at least 4 or 5 colours which figure prominently, which is really odd but I wanted to experiment. The link hovers are really odd too (they are, however, growing on me in a strange way). There was lots of playing around with CSS and getting to know the 3-column liquid layout better. I am particularly fond of the yellow dot comments!

I am still not 100% happy with the header image (the red is weird) but, having worked on this layout since morning, I am too lazy to tweak it any more for now. I was also too lazy to restyle the comments section and probably won’t be restyling it as it looks adequate to me, at least (unlike the header).

And and, tangentially, I love the changes in Wordpress 2.7! The admin panel is now a thing of beauty and a joy to use.

I was going to entitle this post “Yay Penguins!”, then decided that perhaps a less cryptic title would be appropriate to something that’s going to be kind of long and rambly and unattractive to read anyway. Actually I don’t really know if anyone would be interested, but I really wanted to document this somewhere for myself at least.

My pet project over the past week has been to finally attain Linux mastery, or at least the ability to use it without stumbling every step of the way; I’ve been very intrigued by the increasing usability and popularity of Ubuntu and I’d been wanting to give it a go for a while.

Having run Linux for a week now, without booting into Windows the entire time (except once when I really wanted to use Photoshop), I am convinced that now is a better time than ever before for the average computer user to make the switch. Screenshots and a VERY long post – you have been warned – after the jump.

(I apologise now, by the way, if anyone reading this via RSS sees the entire post instead of an excerpt. I have no idea how it works.)