In the past week, while preparing for more freelancing and ways to maximize my productivity (and feeling of contact with the outside world), I’ve started using a host (a host, I say!) of new programs and applications for everything from blogging to blog-reading, to writing and outlining. Some of these are temporary (that is, demo) solutions or experiments. Others are, fingers crossed, more long-term.

Here’s what I’m using and why you should be trying them, too:

Firebug for Firefox gives you a startlingly informative look at the HTML and CSS of any site you visit. I see this as an educational tool, more than anything, so whether you’re experienced with the internet language or are just a curious noob, do get this free thing.

Scribefire for Firefox lets me write blogs in a little window that overlaps my various tabs and stuff. It’s awkward insofar as it does not feel like WordPress’s interface (which I use for serious blogging), but is good for little notes and quick updates. Also, for this one.

NetNewsWire is now free! (Thanks to Adam Emo for the notice.) This is the only feed-reader I’ve ever really liked, but I didn’t want to shell out for it. No worries, now. In general, I actually don’t like feed-readers that much, ’cause I like to go and see site designs and get the whole local experience, but this is great for letting me know when to go and take a look at various sites. If you’re using some other feed-reader, do give this a shot now that it’s free. Free! It’s free. By the way.

I’m experimenting with Scrivener again, and liking it better than I did before. My gut reaction is still that I’d rather use real note cards and stuff, but also that I am not using this software to the best of its ability. I’m just on a free trial of it right now, but if it helps me with the comic script I want to work on, or the short fiction I’m writing currently, then it may be worth the $40 at some point down the line. As I’ve said before about this software, though, do give the free trial a shot.

Celtx, meanwhile, is totally free and quite nice for scripting of various sorts. You can keep your Final Draft and its hideous expense — this free software more than makes up for any absent features by being, you know, free. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I dig free programs. Like, a lot.

Music: Soul Coughing, “$300″

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Another new page design for the blog on the new site is now up. I expect to be moved to this blog full-time in a day or so. Prepare to update your bookmarks and RSS readers, both of you.

The new look is, uh, really brown. I don’t expect this one to last too long, but at least I’ve gotten this layered-letters look out of my system for a while. Opinions? You know I love them. Give them here.

See the new site here: http://thegist.wordstudio.net

Notice, please, that it’s wordstudio.

Music: Andrew Bird, “A Woman’s Life and Love”

My first DVD review for CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under Development) has gone live. This time out, I take a look at the third-season DVD set of NUMB3RS. Do check that out, if you care about such things. At least two more reviews in this vein are coming soon.

Having recently changed hosts for wordstudio.net, other things are on the move in its wake. For one thing, I’ll now be hosting The Gist on my own site, with my own (precious, precious) MySQL databases. This means I won’t be hindered by the restrictions of the (still magnificent) free hosting at WordPress.com. This also means it’s time to redesign all the sites of the Wordstudio family. re:Paper just got a new look. I spent most of this afternoon cutting and lifting the face of this blog, too. Only, not here.

Check out the rough sketch of the new blog over at the future home of the new blog:

thegist.wordstudio.net.

(Note: That’s wordstudio, not wordpress.) Don’t update your bookmarks yet, though, because I’m not settled on that look yet (I’m not sure, but I think I may actually hate it) and might go through a dozen more changes before I settle on something.

Opinions are mandatory. What do you think of the new look?

Music: She Wants Revenge, “First, Love”

You know me. Any one biplane is usually enough to get me in front of a movie. With Lena Headey and a hundred biplanes (plus triplanes, plus zeppelins), the forthcoming German film, The Red Baron, is now engaged to be married to my money. (It’d have to be pretty bad to keep me from buying the DVD. I own Flyboys.)

Oh, and that logo? Indecipherable, perhaps — my wife thought it said “The Hed Barm” — but I love it anyway. If you’re still on the fence (traitor), look at this glorious effects reel from the film and listen to yourself say “wow.”

Music: Clem Snide, “Evil Vs. Good”

Alas, not a poker post. Instead, I’ve been tinkering the last few days with spiced and roasted nuts, both sweet and savory. (I’m at home, I figure I should be in the kitchen at least part of the day.)

They’re super-easy to make, very forgiving in their recipes, and then, after all the spicing and the cooking, you get to eat them. Good stuff. That said, for all that they’re easy, I burned the hell out of the first batch. Burned them black and brown, straight through. The batches since then, though, have each been good in their own ways.

If you want to try something similar, here’s what you do:

Sweet Cashews

4 cups unsalted cashews
4 tablespoons butter
a little shy of 6 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon crushed/powdered ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground orange peel
some nutmeg
some salt

Mix all those spices, except the salt, in a little bowl and set them aside. Don’t lose them.

Get a saucepan, something with a lot of surface area, and put it over medium heat. (Don’t use a wok — I tried that, and not enough nuts were hot enough at the same time.) Better to use too little heat than too much. Cashews toast fast.

Put those cashews into the saucepan. They’re start to smell good almost immediately. You could pop a few out of the pan and into your mouth, but they’re, you know, in a saucepan over medium heat, so be careful. Stir them around for four or five or more minutes, and toss some salt in there with them. Even better: grind sea salt on them. Sea salt’s great. If some of the cashews are getting a little (or a lot) browned on the sides, I think that’s a good sign, because that is genuine toasting, and those cashews are going to taste great.

But it’s time for butter. Put the butter in the pan and stir it all around. A good measure for time I found: Put in that half stick as a stick and keep it all moving until there’s no more stick, just buttery cashews.

Next, sprinkle on that mix of spices. Do it in a few batches, maybe thirds, so you can get the cashews into the brown-sugar glaze that’s forming. Stir like crazy. I didn’t stir enough and I ended up with a bunch of brown-sugar goop all over, which sounds like it would taste great, and maybe is, if you like to just in front of the TV and eat brown sugar. (Looking at you, wife.)

Oh! You know what? If you got a good lid for that saucepan, put it on and toss those cashews like you were stir-frying shrimp or something. That ought to work.

When they’re done, pour them onto a cookie sheet with or without aluminum foil. (How will you know when they’re done? My experience has been that they’re done about 60 seconds before I stop stirring them.) Spread them out into a single layer. Eat a few. Remember: they’re hot. Also, at this point, they’re probably gooey. Scrape out any excess brown sugar goop. Maybe give some of that to the dog, if she’s good.

Let them cool about an hour. (Good luck not touching them for an hour.) You should end up with tasty, sweet cashews with a soft glaze and uneven coating of spiced brown sugar. These isn’t the kind of recipe that yields a lethal, teeth-splitting candy shell. If, through the delicate alchemy of the process, you end up with something unexpected, don’t look at me. I pretty much just cross my fingers and put in cinnamon when I don’t know what to do.

Savory Cashews

about 2 cups unsalted cashews
2 tablespoons butter
roughly 2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon crushed/powdered ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon or so jerk seasoning
too much garlic
several pinch-fulls of herbes de Provence (which you know I love)
a whole bunch of sea salt

The first time I tried these, I dressed them all up and then roasted them on the grill. Smelled great. Were ruined. I also made my classic mistake of putting a little bit of every damn spice I like or like the name of, which created a taste with no particular flavor. It was okay, but it wasn’t exactly compelling eating. My mouth was all, “Uh, okay, but I don’t know what this is.”

This time I just mimicked the sweet recipe but tossed in a bunch of savory junk. I’d read a recipe for rosemary roasted cashews that also used brown sugar, so I figured what the hell. Everybody likes brown sugar, right? Or, rather, my wife likes brown sugar, right? I put some in, and thought of it as insurance. Plus it helps the spices stick, and keeps stuff from getting too hot. (I love it when you eat something, and it’s sweet, and then it’s spicy, so you go back for more to get the sweet back, and get caught in that delicious cycle.)

The jerk seasoning I used was McCormick’s, which is mostly sugar, red pepper, thyme, allspice, salt and onion. All the sugar in there, combined with all the brown sugar I put with it, ended up with these savory things still being pretty sweet. Also, I only used about two-thirds of the spices and brown sugar I listed. It seemed like too much brown sugar. So, to counterbalance the spices that didn’t get added because they were mixed in with the brown sugar I didn’t add, I put in a bunch more garlic and jerk seasoning.

Anyway, the routine here is the same as above: medium heat, toast, butter, spices, stir, stir, stir, spread out, cool. If it doesn’t come out looking like the picture, or tasting any good, I don’t know what to tell you. I pretty much just cross my fingers and put in lots of garlic when I don’t know what to do.

Music: PJ Harvey, “The Devil”

Whew. After a rush to get it done in time for the fall festivals, I’ve finished the redesign of Sara’s website for re:Paper. (That, you’ll recall, is her hackbooking and photography operation.) The new site has its very own URL (www.re-paper.net), a newly modified WordPress theme, Etsy widgets, and everything. For the little time I had to spend on it, I think it turned out all right. (Though I still have a lingering commenting problem to sort out.)

Here’s something I wrote in the comments on someone else’s post. It’s substantial enough to share here, I suppose. It felt good to get some of this off my chest, though.

So. About Battlestar Galactica:

I certainly don’t think it’s “pitch perfect.” While I enjoy the show quite a bit, and there’s a whole lot that’s right with it, the way the show introduces and then drops threads is frustrating as all hell. The lack of consequences for characters bugs the shit out of me.

Earthlink beacon and deadly disease? Oh, nevermind. Cylon homeworld out there somewhere? Whatever, I guess. Cylons want to exterminate us. Or, no, wait, they want to use us to make babies. No, no, they want peace. So they can occupy us. Unless they want to follow us to Earth. Or something. It’s all about the Cylon God. Or it used to be. But that was just Six. Or something.

What the hell is Lee Adama’s story? Not, like, what’s his background or motivation, but what is his story? When this show is over, I bet it’s just going to be a tangled mess of good-looking emo nonsense (very well played by Jamie Bamber, but still). He resents his father, but really he loves him, but really he defines himself by being CAG, except for all the insubordination, and his loyalty to the President, and all the times he’s pulled a gun on important people, or run off and hidden with them, or killed kingpins, or floated in water and wished he was dead, or become a lawyer. Or something. And gets away with it every time.

(By the way, Romo Lampkin is still a ridiculous, awful, LARP-quality character. Mark Sheppard makes that character into more than he deserves to be. I want more explanation of how these characters came to be survivors of the Cylon attack. And the occupation. You remember all that stuff, right? How do you so utterly forget the inciting event of the series? It should be influencing every character you introduce.)

Lots of good stuff in the show, but this is not a well-planned epic. This is a collection of exciting ideas, doled out in bursts, and threaded together with the appearance of a narrative trajectory. Put it another way: Ron Moore’s making it up as he goes along. And that’s fine, but let’s not celebrate the great genius behind the master plan, because there is no master plan. I reserve my judgment on the presence of genius until the end credits roll on the last episode.

Music: Tom Waits, “Walk Away”

Update!: That was quick. I input the DNS settings right away, and wordstudio.net is already back up and, uh, standing around. You’ll see a lot of changes there in the coming days, now that we have a host we can do some e-commerce through. (Did you see that? That was lingo.) Until then, some links are dead as code and files shift around beneath them like tectonic plates in fast-forward. Or something. The point is, ’sbusted now, but’ll be fixed.

You can still reach me for a short time at my gmail account, which I’ll continue checking for a few days, and will then forget about. Otherwise, please resume using my four-letter first name [at] wordstudio [dot] net as the address for anything you would ordinarily be sending me. Unless it is spam, in which case, you go to hell.

In other brief news, the WordPress theme I used as the basis for this page design is apparently no longer available. So I have to redesign this page from the ground up for its move to the new site. I’ll roll this into the complete redesign for RePaper pages, too. But what should I be doing differently? More colorful? More stuff on the page? A flaming logo? I’m taking suggestions. Hit that “Comment” button.

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Who would have thunk that I’d get the most hits ever to this site just by not having a job. Thanks to everyone who commented or wrote in with kind words. Unfortunately for those of you here looking for dirt, I can’t say much more yet about the future or the past. Not yet.

So let’s talk about writing. Sometimes, when I’m feeling like a pretentious and self-involved writer¹, except I’m not actually sitting down and writing anything, I watch this clip of The West Wing (episode: “Arctic Radar”) in which Toby vets Will’s writing. I like the part where he says, “This is incredibly good, Will.” I close my eyes and imagine I’m there.

But I also like the way he describes something that’s maybe akin to writer’s block, but isn’t quite the same. Writer’s fatigue, maybe? Whatever. The point is this: Toby’s talking about how badly it’s going, but he’s still got his own “500-word stanza on American leadership in a globally interdependent age,” doesn’t he? In this little parable, “the President” is anything or anyone for whom you are writing.

(While we’re at it, I adore the writing and the timing in this clip about the funding available from the NEA.)

If you’re not a regular visitor, I expect you won’t be coming back for long, so let’s save you some time. Here are three of the most-read posts on the site. In most cases, this is because I fell backwards into valuable Google keywords. In one case, I think it’s because the post is sort of good. You decide:

• 300 Reviews
• Roy Batty Has A Posse
• Cylons As Seraphim and Nephilim
• Had It A Minute Ago

^{1. The punchline is obviously, “So, just when I’m awake.”}
Music: The Drovers, “Book of Songs”