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Paul

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Posts posted by Paul

  1. The Epilogue to Colin's Baxter is posted but not directly linked. You need to click the link to the story on the Codey's World home page, which takes you to the chapter index where there's a link to the Epilogue.

    (I posted this here because for some reason I don't have the option to either reply or start a new topic on the Codey's World Forum.)

  2. 7 hours ago, Nigel Gordon said:
    In Gay Authors there are two buttons A+ and A- they are in a bar at the top of each chapter. A+ increases the text size. The other buttons allow toggling between light and dark background and adding paragraph indents. If the text is tiny you probably have it set to A- so just hit A+ several times until it is big enough. 
    • Yes but the formatting goes haywire making the text unreadable. Could only see half a line of text at a time then had to scroll right. The scroll left to see the start of the next line.
    •  

    On my 27" iMac running OS Mojave it works just as Talo says. The text gets larger, but the area in which it appears doesn't, so no horizontal scrolling is necessary. Same on both Safari and Firefox, and also works this way on iPad/Safari.

    text.jpg

  3. 11 hours ago, Cole Parker said:

    I hate to see a discussion of Mike Arram's stories go by with several having been specifically mentioned without jumping into the fray by citing my favorite: The Chav Prince.  Wonderful story. 

    C

    That was my favorite part of the Peacher series until Son of the Chav Prince came along. I enjoyed many of the other stories, but my interest waned as the supernatural angle became more central. A not-my-cup-of-tea kind of thing. But Arram is a master at characterization, and Son of the Chav Prince is both very funny and extremely touching. Both should be read together to get a full appreciation of both characters and their connection in the later story.

  4. 9 hours ago, Cole Parker said:

    ...  Colin would never in this or any other imagined universe write such a character.

     

    6 hours ago, Camy said:

    Why not?

    Because Kevin is quite obviously Colin's alter ego. He's thoroughly organized, methodical and uses all the latest digital tools and devices with expertise to aid him in being so. How is that not like Colin?

  5. 1 hour ago, Rutabaga said:

    I battled the user-hostile search function for quite a while trying to find an earlier thread, and in between spells of locking me out, it insisted there was none.  

    Useless. 

    R

    There's something about those words that seems to confound the system. Searching for the title here, even omitting the question mark, gets me zero results, regardless of what options or boolean operators I use. When a site's search function is cranky I usually have luck with a Google site-specific search (e.g., to search here you'd enter site:forums.awesomedude.com after your search terms) which, among other things, accepts full phrase searches when you use enclosing quotation marks. But  for Who Is It I came up blank on Google, too. But with any other thread title, I had success both here and with Google.

    Update: Additional testing. Searching here for who is it by graeme got this thread as the first hit. Searching the same terms, both with and without quotes and/or question mark comes up with nothing. Doing a regular, non-site Google search for "who is it by graeme" gets hits for the story on the main site but nothing from the forums.

  6. We didn't have any fun like this on our class trip to the California State Capitol in 1960.

    A group of primary school children toured the Houses of Parliament this week thanks to their guide, Watford MP Richard Harrington. The children had an opportunity to grill Mr Hamilton before lunch.

    I would have preferred fricasseeing, but that's just me.

     

  7. 23 minutes ago, PeterSJC said:

    Wow! Well, I can't take credit for bringing it back. The "What's New at Codey's World" part of the AD home page currently shows it, under the Featured heading. I happily followed that link: it was a fun story to read.  Since you are obviously not Codey, I would guess that you were his editor, or one of them. I would love to hear any other anecdotes from those times. Anyway, thanks for writing the story and for providing this background.

    Oh, ha, sorry, my thanks were aimed rather sloppily. I had desired to thank you for enjoying my story and Colin for calling attention to it. No, I wasn't Codey's editor, just a user of the site and participant in the forum. When Corey, another user, posted that list of words it gave me the idea of seeing if I could work them all into a story.

  8. Oddsbodikins, I'd completely forgotten about that! My file copy shows that it was almost exactly ten years ago, March 2007. The Codey's World Forums were a fun place. In fact, my naming my protagonist "Sir Yea of Verilyforsooth" stemmed from a good-natured contretemps Codey and I had there over whether "yeah" should be spelled "yeah" or "yea." He favored "yea," and I countered that there already was a word so spelled and was pronounced as in the phrase "yea, verily, forsooth." He wasn't convinced, and I hit on this name as a sort of gentle tweak. Thanks for bringing it back!

  9. Makes Jamie's character growth plausible. Some of that we - who have read the earlier SS stories - can infer from his merely having gained a couple years since we first heard him as a non-stop potty-mouth. But the set-up for his bigger epiphany was great plotting. More than that gets into spolier-land, but I think if you've read the story you'll know what I mean. And lots of funny and clever by-play along the way.

  10. I disagree. In both your examples, the character is the one using the swear words. If the narrator tells us what the character is thinking or saying, it's still the character who's thinking or saying it, not the narrator.

    I think I confused things by using quotation marks; ignore them. Neither example is character dialog; in both it's the narrator speaking.

  11. "Well #$*!*#*, that there old inner tube just blowed up right in Jim Bob's face."

    "Imagine that, Jim Bob thought after he picked himself up off the ground. The #$*!*#! thing had blown up right in his face."

    In the first a voice is being established for the narrator; we can tell there's a close cultural relationship to the character.

    In the second, the narrator is paraphrasing the thoughts of the character, yet doing so in an objective, if explicit, way.

    So I think it comes down to how you want your narrator to come across and what kind of relationship, if any, there is between the narrator and the characters and/or story/situation.

  12. Good luck with Roku and Netflix subtitles. Very often they're not producer-supplied but rather something that's farmed out by the streaming service and seem to be done by Joe and Jane Nobodies who obviously just listen and transcribe what they think they hear. Worse for UK shows because the subtitlers show themselves to be pretty unfamiliar with commonplace UK idioms, word usage and reasonably well-known individuals and place names. Not unusual to see "speaking indistinctly" or "unintelligible" when they've just thrown up their hands. Even worse are frequent instances when misinterpretations completely change meanings. Poirot episodes, for exmple, rarely go for more than a minute or so without a head-slapping foul-up, or at worst instances that totally reverse what's actually being said. Honestly, I often have to wonder how people who have to rely 100% on the subtitles can figure out what the heck is going on. And all this is for reasonably standard stage or acting British English, not dialect. Of course, some subtitles are "official," and then you're lucky. If you're like me and like to use subtitles to help deal with unfamiliar accents, actor mumbling and sound effects overkill, you'll quickly notice if you show is one with the "whatever" variety of subtitles. I have to admit, sometimes they're kind of amusing in their bone-headedness.

  13. The "info dump" is often rightly criticized in both pro and amateur writing, but sometimes it's necessary, especially in a short story. Here is a way to do it right. It set the tone, drew me into the story and made me eager to keep reading.

  14. Note, though, that at their last meeting, Quin's mother does exhibit a degree of self-awareness and in effect owns up to her failures to him. Not nearly enough to make it up to her son, and way too late, but you do get a sense of the immature girl who suffered a tragedy early in life, wasn't able to handle it, and as a result never grew up. We see so many one-dimensional horrible parents in amateur gay writing that it's refreshing to see one depicted with more complexity, and hence believability (for all her wackiness).

  15. As long as we're assembling our personal Dabeagle hit parades, I'll put in a word for "Boy, Bus and Key." Endearing protagonist dealing with issues of self-esteem, isolation and a vintage VW microbus camper. Also, a dog. Then the little-known charmer "A Matter of Time" on his site's short story section.

  16. I've just watched and listened to Cole's "Beethoven - Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 67 - Thielemann".

    Another thing I noticed with this really superb performance; I didn't spot any female musicians which is quite rare these days.

    Rick

    That's because it's the Vienna Philharmonic, a privately-held organization that maintained a strict males-only policy until a few years ago. I just read a forum article from someone who reports having seen four women in the orchestra during the broadcast of their traditional New Year's Eve concert the other day.

    BTW, I have the Blu-Ray disc that video comes from, and my only gripe is that Thieleman plunges headlong into the opening before the applause stops, which kind of vitiates the impact of the da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaah.

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