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Memeing: I like to…

May 15, 2008 – 11:58 am

Taking up the mantle from the gorgeous Anna, some of the statements I find upon Googling “Scott likes to”…:

  • Scott likes to watch movies. Scott likes to listen to music. Scott likes to read books. Yes, yes, yes. Things are going well. This is clearly a good game that indicates how representative of all people named Scott I am.

  • Scott likes to work out, play golf and go boating. No, no, no. This is clearly a stupid game and has no value in determining personal taste whatsoever.

  • Scott likes to display Random Acts of Kindness to his listeners. Well, I’m a misanthrope who nobody listens to, so this one’s not going to turn out well, is it?

  • Scott likes to keep his expectations modest. “That way,” he says, “you never take anything for granted.” Nice sentiment. But when I do have occasional flashes of optimism, they do tend to be quite extreme, and I do like to hope that things will turn out 100% peachy. Maybe that’s why I’m so often disappointed…

  • Scott likes to dress up like Waldo. Erm, no. (Hides red and white striped jumper and bobble hat)

  • Scott Likes To Do Toes. No. Comment. Whatsoever.

Scott likes to pass these things on, but is too lazy to do so.

By Scott | Posted in None | Comments (0)

Five depressing words

May 12, 2008 – 1:56 pm

Golly, is it that long since I last posted? Whoops. I’ve been quite busy over at TV Today, as well as implementing quite a few technology infrastructure changes at The Stage which nobody else will notice (other than a substantially faster web server with — touch wood — no regular outages). And lots of other stuff which I can’t talk about for various reasons.

Any way, I just wanted to post that the most depressing thing I read this morning was in an otherwise enlightening interview with Stephen Daldry in this mornings Guardian:

Sydney Pollack is seriously ill.

Terribly sad to hear. I can’t find other reference to his illness elsewhere on the internet, so I keep my fingers crossed that it’s something from which he can recover. His roll call of films he’s either produced, directed or acted in is mightily impressive, and includes some brilliant work.

And now as I post this I realise that my last post was about Kev passing away. Gosh, this is a fun subject to resume blogging with, isn’t it?

By Scott | Posted in Film | Comments (1)

Kevin Greening, RIP

December 31, 2007 – 4:55 pm

When it comes to Kevin Greening’s sense of humour, one excerpt from his radio career will always stick in my mind. At the time, he was presenting the mid-morning show on Xfm, and a woman had emailed in to ask if the webcam was working. “She says, ‘When I click on the webcam icon, all I can see is a little pink square.’ … I think it’s working fine.”

Dry, subtle, not appreciated by everyone, but adored by those on his wavelength, Kev was a natural DJ who loved the medium with all his heart. I’d been a fan of his weekend shows on Radio 1, and when he popped up on Xfm in what (if memory serves) started off as holiday cover and just carried on until a new scheduler decided on a permanent presenter for the slot, I was really chuffed to have his humour permeate into my working day.

I entered a couple of competitions on his show — most notably winning a couple of VIP tickets to the Royal Premiere of Die Another Day — and from that started a series of correspondence that grew into laughs and drinks with a man who was as warm and intelligent in person as he was on air.

Sadly, after he moved first to an Xfm weekend slot and then to Smooth FM, and as I also changed jobs out of central London, we lost touch. And to hear now that he passed away this weekend is devastating.

See ya, Kev.

By Scott | Posted in Radio | Comments (0)

The Ghosts of Christmas

November 24, 2007 – 10:46 am

The Ghosts of Christmas cover As I said back in October, my short story, Tell Me You Love Me is going to be included in the forthcoming anthology, Doctor Who Short Trips: The Ghosts of Christmas.

The Big Finish page for the book now includes an image, as well as a free PDF of one story from the collection — Faithful Friends, Part 1, by the book’s editors, Cavan Scott and Mark Wright.

It’s sad, though: my story features William Hartnell’s Doctor and the original TARDIS crew. Characters that were created at least in part by, and wouldn’t be remembered today without the inimitable talents of, the late Verity Lambert, who died on Thursday.

Thank you, Verity, for creating such a remarkable series, and for letting the likes of me play in the sandbox from time to time.

By Scott | Posted in Books, Doctor Who | Comments (0)

Great buildings, simple design principles

October 16, 2007 – 3:04 pm

I’ve really been enjoying the Guardian’s latest freebie series, a series of posters extolling the virtues of some of the world’s most iconic buildings. As well as including original architectural blueprints, there are plenty of features about where each building’s design fits in to a greater scheme. For instance, today’s poster on Arnos Grove tube station makes reference to the 1938 tube train stock, the design of which was inspired by WS Graff-Baker’s five principles of good design:

  1. Will it work?
  2. Is it as simple as possible?
  3. Could it easily be maintained in service?
  4. Can it be manufactured?
  5. Does it look well?

If only all designers used these principles today, eh?

By Scott | Posted in Design | Comments (0)

Why write?

October 16, 2007 – 7:33 am

It may be a tough question to answer, but I love Neil Gaiman’s attempt:

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising (“but of course that’s why he was doing that, and that means that…”) and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

I wouldn’t dare try and compare myself to Gaiman — I doubt I’ll ever achieve anything like one thousandth of his talents. I’m really looking forward to Stardust, my excitement only being tempered by the thought that the film can’t possibly compare to the novel (what film ever does?). That said, I do know what he means. Tell Me You Love Me will be my first published fiction work and a short story, but there were times writing it where I just got swept up and everything came out at speed. It’s happened before with the fanfic short stories I’ve written before; the pleasure increases slightly when you know you’re being paid for it, though.

Looking back at the proof PDF which I was sent last week, those points in the story still stand out as the best bits for me. It’s the portions where I had to include exposition, to write and rewrite and rewrite again to make sure that there was sufficient explanation, that stutter and falter. In contrast, I really love the opening few pages, which are largely unchanged from the very first draft. And reading it back, months now after I first wrote them, I can really detect the influence of Gaiman’s writing style upon my own. Hopefully, as I carry on writing that will develop into my own writing style, rather than an inferior copy of somebody else’s.

I was so scared, too, that as a first time writer, my work would stick out from that of the experienced writers with whom I’m contributing to The Ghosts of Christmas. But I’ve read the whole draft of the book several times now, and am beginning to feel less like the fraud I thought I may be when I was first offered the commission.

Next up, I have to decide if I’m going to have time to devote to NaNoWriMo this year. Other pressures last year meant that I just had no spare time to devote to writing, and I’m hoping that I can spend November 2007 writing 50,000 words of a first draft.

By Scott | Posted in Books, Doctor Who | Comments (0)

Coming soon: The Ghosts of Christmas

October 2, 2007 – 12:08 pm

I’ve mentioned bits and pieces about getting a short story published, without going into further detail. Now, though, my publisher has announced full details, so I can officially go public. My story, Tell Me You Love Me, is going to be published in Big Finish’s forthcoming short story anthology, Short Trips: The Ghosts of Christmas.

I’ve been so excited about this, ever since Cavan and Mark first asked me to pitch. From that point on, really, I’ve had to keep pinching myself to believe that it was actually happening.

Thanks to Mark and Cavan, who gave me some great notes back from my early drafts, I’m really quite happy with the way the story has come out. Since handing it over and getting the final draft signed off, I’ve looked back at it and wondered if I could have done various bits better (I’m sure the answer will be ‘yes’ on all fronts). I suspect, though, that I’d never be completely happy with it.

The Ghosts of Christmas will be published in December. Read More »

By Scott | Posted in Books, Doctor Who | Comments (2)

A 100-word biography

September 28, 2007 – 10:42 pm

As I mention on my About page, I’ve recently been lucky enough to have received a commission for my first professional piece of fiction — a short story for an anthology based around a certain TV show.

The story itself has been approved, is currently being typeset and the (small but historic) cheque has long since been cashed. The book itself will be out in a few months, but today, my editor emailed me asking for a 100 word biography for the frontispiece.

Initially, I couldn’t really think of what to include. My name, of course. Great. Only 98 words to go. Beyond that, though, what? It’s not like I can do what many other writers do, and wax lyrical about their wife, three kids (mention them all by name, it all adds to the word count) and sounds-palatial-but-I’m-a-writer-so-it’s-rather-more-squalid-than-that house somewhere in the Home Counties. And as this will be my first fiction work, I can’t list any previous achievements in that field.

So I figured the best thing to do is to concentrate on what writing achievements I have made (establish my credentials), make a passing reference to the subject matter at hand (signifying that I do, in fact, know what I’m talking about) and end on a joke (so that it’s not completely dull).

So this is what I came up with:

Scott Matthewman is Assistant Editor of The Stage, the British newspaper covering all aspects of the performing arts. In 2004, his website covering gay issues was named Best Political Weblog by The Guardian, and he now contributes on a regular basis to TV Today, The Stage’s blog about British television. He specialises in coverage of Saturday night entertainment, even when it doesn’t involve a time-travelling police box — although he remains convinced that musical theatre reality shows are part of a devious plan for world domination by aliens with jazz hands.

Tell Me You Love Me is Scott’s first published fiction.

Fingers crossed that’ll do.

By Scott | Posted in About this blog, Doctor Who, Published articles | Comments (0)

A curious case of spam traffic

September 15, 2007 – 12:22 pm

Very odd — my web stats are showing a huge number of referrals coming via searches from http://url.com/ over the last day or so. What’s strange is that in each case, the search terms and other query parameters are identical — all that differs is the referring subdomain (e.g., my.url.com, company.url.com, no.url.com) and the claimed IP address of the person doing the searching, which is different with every query. When checked against a geoIP database, most of the visiting IP addresses seem to be allocated to Saudi Arabia or Iran, but the occasional one comes through that claims to be from the UK or USA.

Given the frequency and similarity of the referring URLs for each request, I think I’m probably safe in guessing that the IP addresses are being spoofed.

I just wish I knew why… All the queries are directed to one page, and Akismet’s spam filters aren’t picking up any unusual commenting activity on there.

The only other thing I can think of is that someone may be attempting some form of click fraud activity on the CPC ads on that page. For as long as that remains an option, then for obvious reasons I won’t divulge which page is under attack (and through which search keywords).

By Scott | Posted in Computing | Comments (0)

Just Fancy That! Peter Wilby on quality newspaper prices

September 10, 2007 – 10:15 am

In today’s Media Guardian, Peter Wilby writes on newspaper pricing:

Last week, the Times went up from 65p to 70p. So that, you might say, is the end of the price war that Rupert Murdoch… launched 14 years ago in the “quality” sector when he cut the price of the paper by a third.

All the upmarket dailies (except the FT) now sell, Monday to Friday, at the same price. Or do they?

As with most journalism, when a question mark appears it can be followed straight away by a “no”. In Wilby’s case, he argues that papers offering subscription sales for lower than the cover price are offering a “price cut by another name”.

But there’s another reason why the answer is “no, all the upmarket dailies are not at the same price”. It’s one that is closer to home, and outlined on page 2 of the main section:

The price of the weekday Guardian raises by 10p to 80p today.

Oops!

Readers of Private Eye magazine will recognise the Just Fancy That! feature as one that highlights a paper that can make two authoritative, but contradictory, statements in close proximity to one another.

By Scott | Posted in Media | Comments (0)