Jason Arnopp's Blog: Jason Arnopp's Blog, page 11

There's a new rabbit-hole in town, begging us to dive right down it.

New rival iOS apps Periscope and Meerkat offer the same fundamental experience.  They allow us to watch live streams as they're filmed by individuals' smartphones around the globe, and post our live comments.  As Periscope puts it, it's somewhat like teleporting yourself inside other people's heads and looking out through their eyes.

The implications of these free apps feel huge, and admittedly not just in a good way...

On March 26 2005, Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back to BBC1 with the episode Rose.  A story which remains a masterclass in (re)establishing a format across the space of 45 minutes while absolutely keeping the narrative rocketing along.

On March 8, a couple of weeks before the big return, there was a Cardiff Bay press launch.  Here are some never-before-seen pictures, taken by me on the night, complete with occasional demonic red eye possession....

This event was relatively low...

I'm a big fan of Scott K Andrews as a writer and a person.  So when he asked if I fancied interviewing him at February's British Science Fiction Association meeting, I didn't hesitate to ask how many hundreds of pounds he would pay me to do so.  Sounding rather hurt, he explained no money was involved at all and so I fired a torrent of expletives his way, then begrudgingly dug up my Journalist Cap, dusted it down and prepared for battle.

It should be a pretty easy job, to be honest,...

Hello!  This cold, together with the meds I've been taking for a week now, mean that my head is too spacey to write with anything approaching flair.  So I'm going to keep this year-review post minimalist and largely pictorial.  Which will come as a relief to you, as you have 3,401 other year-review posts to skim through.  So here are 10 examples of the many things I loved about 2014...

1) SWANS BY THE PIER
I was walking back from a cafe one Spring morning, along the seafront...

This week, it's been 10 years since Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell was murdered during a live show in Ohio.  To commemorate one of metal's all-time great guitarists, here's an article I wrote for Rip & Burn magazine soon after the 2004 tragedy.


IT'S ENTIRELY POSSIBLE THAT, when a gunman swiftly approached guitarist 'Dimebag' Darrell Lance Abbott on the night of December 8, 2004, some of the audience laughed. After all, their hero was standing onstage playing a guitar. His band Dama...

Okay, so it's not a particularly auspicious birthday.  It's not a round number or an even number.  But the 51st year of the show which kickstarted my childhood imagination and has given me plenty of writing opportunities is certainly worth celebrating.

So I've written about my favourite Doctor Who stories for the BT website.  It was tough to assign actual numbers to these stories - especially when it came to the Number One slot.  I'll also admit to having gone easy on...

Welsh WallaceHello!  I want to lead your eyes towards a GoFundMe campaign by the blind artist Welsh Wallace.  That's not her real name, funnily enough, but when she shares her true identity online it makes it all the easier for people to verbally abuse her.

That's what a minority of confused, frightened, frustrated people do these days: they "call out" disabled people who they believe are fakers.  The government and The Daily Mail have done a scarily efficient job of demonising...

We're halfway through the year.  How'd you like them apples, Charlie?

To mark the occasion, I asked Twitter-folk to tell me the one best 2014-released fiction novel they've read so far.  It's clearly an imperfect science, canvassing opinions like this.  Depends on who happens to be passing by on Twitter, instead of getting work done.  But when someone takes the time to enthuse about someone else's novel, even in the breath of a tweet, it's surely worth checking out.

So here...

Twitter has been around since 2006 (yes, I know, terrifying), but it still holds small mysteries.  Little quirks that some folk miss out on or misunderstand.  You might very well know them all, but if just one blows your skirts up then my work here is done.

1) HOW TO NARROW YOUR AUDIENCE
If you start a tweet with a username, then only people who follow you both will see it.  I still see relatively seasoned Twitter users do this.

For instance, if I tweet the following...

@john...

I enjoy the editing process.  The knowledge that you’re boiling your work down to its bare bones; that every nip and tuck improves what you have.  After a few passes, though, it becomes hard to see the words for the trees.  You lose perspective.  You know that typos, logic problems and awkward sentences still lurk on these pages, but you can no longer see them.  Your eyes have become so accustomed to these words that they’re overlooking what they need to zero right in...