John August

News

NPR on Twitter and The Variant

Follow Up, News, Projects, The Variant

NPR’s All Things Considered has a piece tonight by Alex Cohen about how artists use Twitter, including me with my short story [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant).

If you missed it, you can catch the clip [in the archives](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105620633), or download it [here](http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2009/06/20090618_atc_08.mp3?dl=1).

The “test screenings” I did with The Variant were hugely helpful, and led to some significant trim and changes, including the title and the very first sentence.

If you’d like to read that early feedback, I’ve unlocked the password protection so you can see their comments on [the first draft](http://johnaugust.com/variant/the-egyptian-variant) and the [revised version](http://johnaugust.com/variant/the-variant). (Obviously, both links are chock full of spoilers.)

Scrippets 1.3

Geek Alert, News

The unstoppable [Nima Yousefi](http://equinox-of-insanity.com/) has updated the [Scrippets](http://scrippets.org) [plugin for WordPress](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-scrippets/) to version 1.3.

The update fixes a rare compatibility issue with the new WordPress 2.8. If you have Scrippets installed, the update notice should show up on your plugins page.

Terminated

News, Television

Josh Friedman recounts the [cancellation of his excellent show](http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/boy-in-bubble.html) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:

> Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I’ve been dead before and at least when you’re dead you don’t get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it’s like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it’s YOUR friend or family member and even then it’s mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

> Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

Josh’s post are so long and so infrequent he’s more an essayist than a blogger. Still, we should cherish what we get. [Read the whole thing.](http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/boy-in-bubble.html)