My Favorite Fictional Heroes and More: Liebster Award

liebster-award

Jubilare has semi-illegally nominated me for a Liebster Award, mostly, I gather, to hear my answers to her questions. I am honored!

1. If you could walk into a book and make a home there, where would that home be, what would it be like, and what sort of people/creatures would you try to befriend? Specifics would be fun and you can give more than one answer if you like.

There are a lot of book places I’d like to visit (Lothlorien, Narnia, Neverland, etc.), but few I’d actually want to live. The first place to spring to mind is Twombly Town (The Elfin Ship). The world has enough danger to be exciting without being terrifying.

  • I would run a bookshop there and carry plenty of G. Smithers novels, so when master cheeser Jonathan Bing came in I could trade him books for a marble cheese, or perhaps one of his raisin cheeses. I have never been a big fan of raisins and don’t see why anyone would ruin a perfectly good cheese with them, but Jonathan Bing’s raisin cheeses are famous even with the Elves all the way down the River Oriol as far as Seaside. So that’s worth a try.
  • I’d accompany Professor Wurzle on the occasional scientific expedition
  • I’d talk my way into at least one adventure on Theophile Escargot’s submarine.

If not Twombly Town, I would have to live in Mitford (At Home in Mitford), the sleepy little mountain town where Father Tim serves his tiny Episcopal parish.

2. Name a food you have read about, but never eaten, that you have since wanted to try. It doesn’t have to actually exist. What, in the reading, piqued your interest?

Cap’n Binky’s perpetual pot of coffee from The Disappearing Dwarf. The first load of grounds went in thirteen years ago. I literally have a copy of this page framed:

It was so rich as to be almost creamy, and there were a hundred unidentifiable flavors in it. Just when he’d come to the conclusion that it was almost chocolaty, he couldn’t find any chocolate in it at all. And when it seemed, after the second sip, to resemble one of those dark stouts made with burnt barley, that flavor disappeared too, only to be replaced with the unmistakable essence of strange spices…as he took another sip, the faint promise of weedy river water appeared momentarily. Not in such a way that when he drank it he thought, this tastes like river water, but as a sort of strange, half-lost memory of wide, deep, cool rivers that mingled somewhere deep in his mind with the waters of the sea.

3. Do you have a favorite plant? If so, what is it and why do you like it so much?

I wish I was the type of person who could write about alders and poplars and so forth, but I’m not as versed in plant lore as I should like to be. That said, I have fond childhood memories of honeysuckle and mint. I’m a big fan of lavender as a mosquito repellant, and wisteria has to be the prettiest plant I’ve ever seen.

4. What fictional character is your favorite hero (male or female), and what villain really scares you and why?

My top five heroes:

  • Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: He is not glamorous or handsome or terribly clever, but he is true and decent and that, to me, is what ultimately defeated Sauron.

 

  • Rudy Steiner, The Book Thief:
    • The boy who painted himself black and ran around a track in the middle of the night (in Nazi Germany) to emulate his hero, Jesse Owen
    • Jumped into freezing water to rescue the book of the girl he loved
    • Crawled onto the plane crash of an enemy pilot to give him a teddy bear as he died

 

  • Hans Huberman, The Book Thief: Another page I have framed:

To most people, Hans Huberman was barely visible. An un-special person. Certainly, his painting skills were excellent. His musical ability was better than average. Somehow, though, and I’m sure you’ve met people like this, he was able to appear as merely part of the background, even if he was standing at the front of a line. He was always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable.

The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its complete misleadance, let’s say. There most definitely was value in him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel Meeminger. (The human child – so much cannier at times than the stupifyingly ponderous adult.) She saw it immediately.

His manner.

The quiet air about him.

When he turned on the light in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Huberman was worth a lot.

  • Reepicheep, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: He is the smallest of the Dawn Treader’s crew, but the most valiant. When they encounter an inexplicable darkness ahead, and decide not to sail into it:

“And why not?” he said. “Will someone explain to me why not?”

No one was anxious to explain, so Reepicheep continued.

“If I were addressing peasants or slaves,” he said, “I might suppose that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark.”

“But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that blackness?” asked Drinian.

“Use?” replied Reepicheep. “Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.”

  • Sydney Carton, A Tale of Two Cities: Alcoholic genius who gave his life so the girl he loved could be with the man she loved.

Runners up: Hermux Tantamoq (Time Waits for No Mouse). Phileas Fogg (Around the World in 80 Days). Jeeves (various Wodehouse books and stories). Ahab (not the sea captain: Jonathan Bing’s dog).

Two villains scare me the most:

  • The Unman, Perelanda: In his spare time, he dissects live animals with his fingernails.
  • The Crooked Man, The Book of Lost Things: He steals innocence.

5. There is a crossroad at your feet. Behind you lies the path back to home and hearth (wherever that might be). The road directly ahead leads to a city, blue in the distance, settled among hills and on the edge of a bright inland sea. To your right lies a steep climb into old, low mountains clothed in forest and fern. To your left is rolling farmland that eventually flattens out into broad plains dappled by the clouds overhead. You can go as far as you like on any of the roads (even farther than you can see), including back home. There’s no wrong answer, only the where and why.

Home is my favoritest place, but I’ve just come from there, so I’m not going back yet. Considering I do not yet know much about the lands before me, I’d turn toward the town, spend a few nights in an inn gathering information about the nearby wildlands, and then purchase supplies for a proper adventure in whichever direction sounded most interesting from the city folks’ stories.

As far as whom I would nominate: all the InMonsters. Though many of them have too many subscribers to be nominated, and many have probably already received the Liebster, they are all worth reading. I encourage any of them to answer the above questions (you can make up your own questions for your nominees, but I like Jubilare’s just fine. Check out her blog for full guidelines).

Find the InMonsters here.

And thanks again to Jubilare for being so interested in my ramblings (and for always having something interesting to say in the comments here as well as on your own blog). I’d really like to know your answers to your own questions, too. That may also be against the rules, but we’re already rebels, right?

 

What if Star Wars Episode I Were Good?

I worked late tonight and lacked the brain power to finish this week’s post. But I won’t leave you empty-handed! A commenter, Chris, recently shared this video on my post about George Lucas. Michael of BelatedMedia narrates his version of The Phantom Menace, which, frankly, is better than what we actually got.

Enjoy – and tune in next week, ’cause we’ll be talking about censorship in honor of Banned Books Week!

 

Review: Ginger Software

After my Grammarly review, another proofreading software company offered me a premium trial to do a review. This one I’d never heard of – Ginger, a startup out of Tel Aviv. This video shows it best:

Ginger specializes in helping people who are learning English as a second language). According to the website, it uses “patent-pending technology to decipher the semantic meaning and context of text input, by comparing it to billions of similar sentences from the Web.”

Ginger’s emphasis on semantics and context, combined with its home country of Israel, made me interested right away – as I understand it, Hebrew is a language even more complex than English, in that a single word can have many meanings (mah-kor means both “origin/source” and “bird beak”!) – therefore Hebrew-speakers are even more dependant on context than the average English speaker, and therefore presumably specially qualified to create a software like this.

AT A GLANCE

Ginger beats both Grammarly and Writing Dynamo right out of the gate for two reasons:

  1. Pricing model.
    • Free version (not sure the difference between this and basic)
    • Basic version = $4.90/month OR one-time payment of $39
    • Premium version = one-time payment of $89

What??? Nobody else is doing a one-time payment model! That’s awesome.

  1. Integration with MS Word

No cut/paste, no uploading documents. No restricting yourself to a few thousand words at a time. Download Ginger and it becomes a convenient yet unobtrusive button at the top of the window when you open Word, and reviews all your text in-doc with a click. FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS MY NEEDS! (This is currently available on Windows only. They are working on a Mac version.)

THE NITTY GRITTY

I ran the same tests I ran on Grammarly (which I stole from blog Grammarist):

  • Obvious Spelling Errors – Ginger catches them all, beating Grammarly.
  • Less Obvious Spelling Errors (like “form” instead of “from”) – Ginger catches all, beating Grammarly
  • Grammar and punctuation mistakes – Ginger is split. It makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did, but fails to catch some problems, including dangling modifiers.
  • Questionable Style Choices – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly.
  • Commonly Misused Words – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did.
  • Commonly Confused Words – Ginger catches two out of five, which is two better than Grammarly.
  • Redundancies – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections.
  • Troublesome Compounds – Better than Grammarly, but a little strange. For instance, for the sentence “We are already to go” instead of suggesting “We are all ready to go,” Ginger suggested “We are already going.”
  • New Words, Colloquialisms and Nonstandard Variants – Ginger loses to Grammarly by just a little – suggesting “computer mice” instead of mouses.
  • American English vs. British English – Ginger wins for being adjustable between US and UK English, though while it catches “odor/odour,” it failed to catch problems with some other examples. I ran a few more of my own tests for comparison – it caught four out of six issues. Not bad.
  • Grammar Myths – Ginger ties with Grammarly.

 

EXTRA NOTES

PRO: Ginger did catch some mistakes neither I nor MS Word caught.

CON: Instead of proofing all at once and showing you the problems all at once, it proofs one sentence at a time while you watch – you can see the sentences flash at the top of the screen – and only stops when it’s found something wrong. The proofer automatically shuts off when you click to another window, so you have to wait while it works, and you can’t do anything else on your computer in the meantime.

PRO: Since they gave me a Premium trial I got to try out the text-to-speech reader. While it lacked the inflection of a human reader, it did offer the options of male or female voice, US or UK accent, so I had a lot of fun hearing my words read aloud by robot Emma Thompson.

WEIRD: Ginger also has a “Sentence Rephraser” which suggests different ways you can say things (usually synonyms). Sometimes its suggestions were helpful, other times troubling. For “She wondered if they would invite her to play with them” Ginger suggested “She wondered if they would pay for her to flirt with them.” What?!?

 

CONCLUSION

This is a tough one, especially since, as a native English speaker, I’m not in Ginger’s target audience. I do think Ginger would be helpful for someone who struggles a lot with spelling and major grammar issues, thought they shouldn’t depend on it solely. Compared to what else I’ve seen, the price and the functionality are the best. In its current condition, it’s not much use to me, personally, but I would keep an eye on it for updates.

Grammarly Prices and Review

I recently got an email from the affiliate marketing manager at Grammarly.com. She’d seen my Writing Dynamo review and was offering me the chance to become an affiliate marketer for Grammarly.

That means I’d promote Grammarly on this blog with ads and/or text links,* and for every person who clicked an ad and signed up for a subscription, I’d receive a commission.

Affiliate Marketer Commission

  • $20 for a one-month subscription
  • $30 for three months
  • $50 for one year

Before replying, I did some research. The Grammarly site has an excellent landing page full of information – except the prices. You have to give them your name and email address just to access the price list. Of course I displayed it here for your benefit:

Actual Grammarly Subscription Price (2013)

  • $29.95 for a one-month subscription
  • $59.95 for three months
  • $139.95 for one year

{{ UPDATE: The Grammarly rep has informed me that the prices do appear in the FAQs section of the site. I’ll note that it is still difficult to find: you  have to scroll all the way down the very long homepage to find a small text link. Better than I thought, but still. }}

There’s a free 7-day trial, but you have to select one of the above subscriptions and give them your credit card number to access the trial.

So I wasn’t surprised to find negative reviews of Grammarly around the web: people who’d been charged before they could cancel after using their trial, or who said they’d tried to cancel, but had still been charged. Whether or not Grammarly intentionally charged these customers against their will, it’s still Grammarly’s fault for setting up the subscription system that way.

They were very kind, however, to set me up with a free one-month trial without asking for a credit card number.

So I tried it out.

First, I read a detailed review on Grammarist that had run a series of tests on the program last year. Their tests faulted Grammarly for (unless I miscounted) 42 errors, and praised it for 17 successes. Many of these errors were overcorrections, suggesting changes for all instances of passive voice, personal pronouns, and contractions, all of which are acceptable in creative writing (though passive voice should be used sparingly). Grammarly’s other faults were largely mistaken words it failed to catch.

I ran all the same tests for 2013. On the first run through, I counted seven former errors Grammarly had corrected in itself. They still had 35 uncorrected, and added two new errors.**

Then I noticed something: hover over the “Start Review” button, and you get a drop-down menu for the type of writing you want reviewed (Grammarist either didn’t have that in the 2012 version, or didn’t notice it).

Options!

Options!

Most of Grammarly’s overcorrections disappeared when I selected “Creative” vs. “General” writing, but then it missed even more actual mistakes.

I do like the way Grammarly separates the errors into categories, like Verb Agreement, Punctuation, etc. And how, for certain categories, it provides long and short explanations.

Long and Short

Long and Short

The worst thing I noticed was its “Commonly Confused Words” section. See below. Since when is a synonym a “similar word with different meaning”? I believe the word they are looking for is homonym.

What?!?

What?!?

So I clicked on the question mark beside “sent” and discovered this:

Srsly?

Srsly?

Am I crazy, or is that first definition actually for the word “cent”?

How does it hold up against Writing Dynamo?

  • Does not have the super cool repeat-word catcher
  • Handles more text at one time – 20 pages, which is about 5,000 words
  • “Upload Text” button works
  • “Add to Dictionary” seems to work
  • Wishy-washy on British spellings (allowed some in the Grammarist test, but not in my further tests)
  • Didn’t flag em dashes – yay!
  • Writing area still not adjustable

Conclusion:

I chose not to become an affiliate marketer. In some ways, Grammarly is better than Writing Dynamo and MS Word. I like the option to tell the program what kind of text you are editing. I like the way the reviews are organized. But it still has too many bugs to be worth the price. Thirty bucks a month, and two-thirds of that goes back to the person who told you to buy it? With significant programming updates (and changes to the subscription system), it may be worth our attention in the future. For now, I think good ol’ MS Word will suffice.

* You’ve already seen some Grammarly ads on this site because I have Google AdSense, which scans my blog for keywords and automatically places relevant ads. I get paid a few cents per click. I do not get a sales commission, and I do not personally endorse any of the products advertised.
** Take these numbers with a grain of salt; I did disagree with Grammarist’s assessment for a few of them. 

You Tell Me: Best and Worst Books into Movies

I’m out-of-pocket this weekend, being in a wedding, so I’ll just leave this question for the comments:

Having taken our first steps into the Hobbit and Hunger Games movies, Great Gatsby just out, Ender’s Game coming soon and The Book Thief still being cast, what are your thoughts? What movies did you think captured their books well? What movies totally ruined the books? What movies might have improved the books?