2000 History

Autumn in Spanish

Otoño is a Spanish Language translation of the final story in the Seasons series "August". Once again, I must thank Guillermo Riquelme Valenzuela for his work.

PL3 - Square Nose - A new paper Airplane!

I've added instructions for making another new paper Airplane. This square nose design is fast becoming my new favorite.

Yellow - Chapter 5

It's not much, but I've added a short chapter to Yellow. Yes, there is more to come.

Paper Airplanes!, 2000

I've added a new Index page for the Paper Airplanes. Now you can see 'blueprints' each of the planes. Yes, there are more to come!

KAXE

I've discovered a new radio station, but unless you happen to live in north central Minnesota you're going to need a fast internet connection and real audio to listen

KAXE plays an eclectic mix of music -- from sea chanteys to Scriti Politi. Did you ever wish for a radio station like KBHR? Northern Exposure KAXE is it. (03.12.05 - Rotted KBHR Link Replaced)

PL-4

A New paper Airplane!

The Future of Publishing

For the past ten years I've been trying to track down a story by my one of my favorite authors; THIS DARKENING UNIVERSE by Lloyd Biggle Jr. I've found used copies on the web for over $100, but I'm not a book collector, I buy books for the stories, and with most of the other Biggles selling (used) for well under $20, It was clear I was looking at a huge 'scarcity' premium. I deceided to continue to haunt the used bookstores.

I've recently found it, in an unexpected place. Wildside Press is re-printing THIS DARKENING UNIVERSE, along with many other of Lloyd Biggle Jr's wonderful science fiction stories. What's more, WildSide Press is a 'Print to Order' shop -- the books are kept electronically, then printed as needed. This is SO COOL that great books that no longer fit the economics of big publishing houses are again (and hopefully forever) available.

P.S. My favorite Lloyd Biggle Jr. book is MONUMENT, which can (Thanks to Wildside Press) now be found at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. (Search for Lloyd Biggle Jr.)

I'd love to see MONUMENT as a Hayao Miyazaki anime! This story has all the elements that would make it a great anime. In fact, why not put off your next Anime VHS purchase and spend the $15 (Cheap!) on a copy of MONUMENT, then find a nice comfortable chair and snuggle down with a story filled with wonderful characters, ideas and locations. Do like I do, read it slowly, crawl in with the characters, feel the tropic breezes caressing your skin, listen to the wind, taste the punch -- It's better than any movie.

Is this a Weblog?

Is this page a weblog? Well, perhaps. It depends on what you definition of "is" is. I'm going to try the weblog experiment -- regularly adding bits of content and links to my home page to see how it works out.

I've long been a fan of Scripting News which is perhaps the great-grand-daddy of all weblogs. I don't always agree with Dave Winer, but over the years I've learned a lot about the web by following the flow on Scripting News. Thanks, Dave.

XHTML errors?

If you click on the W3C logo on the left, the HTML Validation service reports an error in for the page. It's not an error. The checker is complaining about a string within a URL, something I can't change, and it shouldn't care about.

(Update 2003 -- I was wrong, they do care about the character entities in the URL, which means that anytime I find an "&" I have to replace it with "&". This is really annoying, since so many content managers like to use the "&" in URLs.)

Yoko Tsuno

On a recent trip to Germany I came across this Yoko Tsuno comic in Rothenburg. We'd ducked into a bookstore to look around, and the cover art caught my eye. The fellow in the shop was quite excited about it because the story was set right in Rothenburg, and in fact the story started right outside his shop! He's right. Take a look below at the scan from the book, and the photo I took on the street just outside the bookstore. It's pretty clear the the author/artist was working from photos taken in Rothenburg. I wonder if some of the street scenes we see in manga might be done in a very similar way. By the way, Yoko Tsuno is published by Carlsen Comics.

Courtney Love does the math

"We suffer as a society and a culture when we don't pay the true value of goods and services delivered.

-- Courtney Love

This artical in Salon examines a lot of issues about artists, the web, and Napster that I've been thinking about. It's the best thinking on the subject I've ever seen.

(Update 2003 - I was unable to locate any backups for this period) Date July 21, 2000

Status Report.

I'm writing again, slowly chewing back into "Yellow". Expect part 6 soon.

All of the stories have been recast in xhtml 1.0 with cascading style sheets. The new format should clean up the problems I've been having in Internet Explorer.

xhtml is 'stricter' than ordinary HTML, which means that it should work on all modern browsers, including LYNX and PDAs. If you have any trouble be sure to let me know.

I've moved the Fan Art to a separate page, listed in the Photos and Art, under "Other Stuff" Date August 9, 2000 More Yellow! I've been working on Yellow, and there's some new stuff in Part 6

Cartoon Supplies

Ever wonder where you might find an animation disc, pegboards, or prepunched paper? Cartoon Supplies.com is the place.

Animation Supplies!

Ever wonder where you might find Pre-punched blank Animation cells, or cell paint? chromacolour.com is the place.

Hello Kitty Car!

Yes, if you live in Japan you can purchase a hello kitty mobile (Sorry, Link Rot)

Make sure not to miss the details, like the keys and the doorlocks, and make sure to zoom in on the dash - the icons on the tachometer are precious. (Sorry, Link Rot)

The Penultimate Ranma Fanfic Index

Rakhal Stormwarden has take on the monumental task of sorting, indexing and reading(!) all the Ranma fanfics he finds. The index presently contains 1619 stories!

Joseph Palmer (10 fics, 84 pages)

Is 'eh' your final answer?

You too can win a free copy of Windows ME signed by Bill himself -- as long as you live in the US, (But not US territories) and Canada (But not Quebec -- Perhaps Microsoft thinks that Quebec is a territory of Canada). Oh, and if you live in Canada (as many of my Fanfiction writing associates do) there's another rule that applies just to you;

In the event a Canadian entrant is selected, he or she will be required to answer a mathematical skill testing question as a prerequisite to being declared a winner.

What's that about?

HTML Formatting for Prose

I've finaly finished a project that had been simmering on the back burner for years, a tutorial on how to format prose in HTML so that it looks more like a book. HTML Formatting for Prose

Legal Fictions:

Pointers to two web articals on Fanfiction and the Law. Copyright 101: A Brief Introduction To Copyright For Fan Fiction Writers

Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law

HTML Format Updates

I got some input on HTML Formatting for Prose, and I'm looking into a few issues,

Is it too narrow? -- I'm thinking that I'll re-jigger the stylesheet to 25 or 26 em, which will make the rendered width closer to the 22 line heights of paperbacks.

I'll declare the character set (Latin-1) in the header. (Thanks, Deborah!)

Curly Quotes. They work on windows for IE, and Netscape. Opera and Lynx convert curly quotes to straight quotes, but both Opera and Netpositive on BeOS display garbage for curly quotes. I'm torn between the way that curly quotes look — “GREAT!” — and support for BeOS. How many BeOS users out there read fanfiction? Sigh.

I don't have a modern Mac to test on, will someone on a Mac please let me know how these: “quotes” look?

Actually, if you don't get these “curly quotes” on any platform, please let me know.

Now we’re Styling!

I've re-formatted the Seasons and Colors stories with curly quotes. Actually, It was't so much me, I wrote a perl script that chewed through and replaced single and double quotes, and apostrophes with the correct number representation. I also had to change some settings on HTML Tidy so that it didn't mess them up. (Say goodby to   and say hello to   It's a long story, but it turns out that the entity names for the styled forms are not (Yet) supported in all browsers.

One of these days I'd like to get up in front of the W3 and rant a while about placing common prose punctuation well up into the nosebleed section of the cheap seats. Don't you guys ever read novels?

Jeez.

I've also added a unstyled link at the top of each story so that folks with browsers that don't grok prose styles can go back to plain quotes. (But if you have that problem you should seriously concider changing browsers. This “Styled” format seems to work with Explorer, Navigator 4.7 & 6.0PR2, Opera 4, and, of course, Lynx.

Let me know if you have any problems displaying these stories.

The Most Influential Ranma Fanfiction Authors of the 1990's

Meaningful, insightful, precise - three words that come to mind when Palmer's name is mentioned. Palmer has proved that you can write an absoultely wonderful romantic fanfic without being overly cheesy or fake.

I've been voted one of the top ten most influential authors of the 1990's. I'm honored by your support, Thank you!.

I'm also surprised. I didn't even know that this survey had taken place!

www.josephpalmer.com

"Suppose it's opening day on the internet..."*

Welcome, and thanks for visiting.

This site should look and feel a lot like the old location (though I did have to do a lot of re-wiring behind the scenes). If you run across any bugs, please let me know

I'm pretty sure that "www.josephpalmer.com" had been taken when I'd ast checked a couple of years back, but now it's mine, all mine. (heh heh heh!) I'd thought of getting a domain name related to Ranma, or to writing, or to paper airplanes, but such a name just didn't seem to fit the mix of stuff that is this site.

*From a Hollywood story meeting

It's the future, stupid!

Today is US election day. Get out and vote. If you're undecided, I urge you to think about the future. Not just the next four years, but the next forty (Supreme Court) and 4000 (The Environment).

The right thing to do is to pay off our debt. Yes, it's our debt, who do you think is going to pay it off, Canada? We have reaped the benefit of that spending binge, and its up to us (not our children) to pay it off.

I urge you to vote for Al Gore.

The President Defect...

Jeez, what a mess.

If Bush is placed in office because of a defective ballot design, what will we call him? His Accidency? His Illegitimacy? Will the band play Hail to the Thief?

Here in San Jose we use similar ballots, where you vote by punching out little holes in a card. After punching the hole, you have NO WAY to visually check to that you've hit the correct hole.

I can't think of any other action that we (As users of user interfaces) do that is similar. I can easily imagine that an elderly voter might make the simple mistake of thinking that they could undo the first punch by a second punch. After all, there's loads of user interfaces that do just that. The most obvious example I can think of is a blender. If you push 'mix' then the chop button pops back out.

The other mistake I could imagine someone making is to assume that they had a choice on the left card, so they punched one from the left, then they saw they had to make a choice on the right card. That county had something like 19,000 ballots rejected for multiple punches.

Voting should be easier than programming a VCR, no?

New Blood Productions

....Is linked to my new josephpalmer.com URL. (Yay!)

Anyway... Since Lydie-chan has updated my URL, I'm going return the favor with this link to the "New Blood Productions" website.

I like the stories too...

Sumo Senshi --- Make up!

This is too wierd to describe. Link found on one of my favorite Japan weblogs: MisterPants

Bridget & Jamie's Fanfics and Food

Bridget & Jamie have updated their Links of Doom page.

It might surprise you (if you only know me from my stories) that I'm a big fan of high tech thrillers. In fact, I have a collection of over 500 novels by the likes of Dale Brown and Tom Clancy. So... I'm going to talk about one of Jamies stories; Ranma Goes to War.

Now, Ive been pretty outspoken on the subject of [DARK] in Ranma Fanfiction, So a honest-to-goodnes war story cast with the boys of Nerima ought to have sent me scurrying back to my Laserdisks. War? that's not what I go to Ranma 1/2 for. (I have those other 500 books, right?) See, over the years I've become somewhat protective, in that I personally and selectively go to Ranma 1/2 for humor, or for romance or to simply wonder at the imagination of Takahashi-Sensi.

It is perhaps odd then, that while I find within Ranma Goes to War a setting and plotline that is essentually the 'anti-Nerima', at the same time I find characterisation and relationships that so closely mirror what I like best about Ranma 1/2.

I have a theory about writing; good writing tells a truth. There is truth and authenticity in the motives and relationships of the characters in Ranma Goes to War. The characters are no longer in Nerima, but the spirit of Nerima glows in the characters.

So... Click on over and say 'hey!' to the Wildeman family, and check out the recipies, and stories.

Digital Knight Communications

DKC has updated their Authors' Picks page. (Thanks!)

These knights have put together an outstanding and professional looking website, (Love the Graphics on the home page!) and Daigakusei no Ranma is a fun read. Look for it in the DnR/DnU Archives

Ranma & Akane Together 4-ever FanFiction Guide

...gives Seasons and colors three smilies!

Make sure to visit the Home page an check out the cool rotating cube!

How to Draw Manga

Outstanding! The folks who publish the How to draw Manga series have a website!

They sell their most wonderfull books, Manga paper, Pens, and screen tones.

Now all I need is time, talent and ideas.

Happy New Year! (More Yellow!)

Here's wishing you a Happy new Year.

p.s. There's a new chapter of Yellow (Part 7)

Copyright © 2000-2004 Joseph Palmer. All Rights reserved