High IQ will kill your startup

Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

So don't believe that the brilliance of your idea is what will make you successful. What will make you successful is when you are out there every day, doing something new, challenging yourself, trying new methods, studying new ways, having a lot of small failures, then getting better every day.

Creators of 'Lost' say they won't tie up all those loose ends

"There's a lot of little questions that unfortunately we just don't have time to answer in the amount of time that we have left," co-creator Cuse told the uber-fans.

What with trying to keep all the intertwining story lines straight, it's probably slipped his mind that the "time we lave left" was determined years ago by Cuse and Lindelof themselves, which would seem to suggest that running out of time was something they had, um, planned.

Back in May of 2007, ABC and the creative team behind the weedy tangle of a series announced the show would end in the spring of 2010. Nearly three years later, at the Paleyfest, Cuse said of any unresolved plot issues: "Ultimately, the way we look at it is that if the characters don't care about that question, then we as storytellers don't care about that question."

Of course, what the characters do and do not care about is decided upon by . . . well, Cuse and Lindelof, come to think of it. Because the characters are, you know, not real people.

"We feel like the show should stand on its own," Cuse said. "We're actually not going to comment on the show after the finale. We want everybody to basically be able to continue the dialogue. . . . We don't think it's really appropriate for us to say, 'Oh, here is the official definition for what we meant by any particular moment on the show.' "

Let's recap, shall we? The show's creators say it's not appropriate for the show's creators to give the "official definition" of what they, the show's creators, meant by any particular moment on the show they created.

Escaping Tolkien clichés

Everyone sees them, but no one does anything about them. They are the silent menace, stalking after the unwary fantasy writer like wolves after a lamb.

Tolkein is not to blame for the way that people have taken his books as the model for fantasy. His own writing on the subject of fantasy recommends "mining the past" for useful story-writing tools, not taking the pattern that someone offers you unaltered.

Most of the time, those imitations are themselves imperfect, ignoring a lot of what went on in the beginning story...

HOWTO: Read more books

The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV. If the average reading rate is 250 words per minute and the average book is 180,000 words, then that’s 142 books a year. To my surprise, I wasn’t reading nearly enough books.

A Kindle or Sony Reader helps too, so you can carry a stack of books with you.

A Boke of Gode Cookery

A Boke of Gode Cookery is James Matterer's collection of medieval recipes which he has translated and adapted for the modern cook. James has been preparing medieval food since 1979 and has been working from period sources and creating his own contemporay redactions since 1989. Each recipe here is derived from his own personal experience in the recreation of that dish.

Each recipe contains the original documented medieval version, followed by James' modern translation and redaction, along with notes and a bibliography of the period source.

I think I'll have the Frytour of Erbes, Salat, Makerouns, Funges, and Buttered Wortes, then Apple Muse or perhaps A Potage of Roysons for dessert.