Steve Pemberton's Links

PvP is set in the offices of a small computer gaming magazine. Like most office comedies, the cast never seem to get any work done. The major characters are all quite likeable - even when they're being nasty to someone, I often think the victim deserves it. Although nothing essential changes, there is something of a continuing story, in that something that happened many episodes ago will sometimes have an effect later.

This strip gave me an important insight into the interaction between fiction and reality. In February 2004, Cole (the boss) got dragged into court, because another magazine alleged that he'd published a game review that was copied from them. He couldn't afford a good lawyer, and so Skull (his intern, who just happens to be a 400-pound blue troll) offered to defend him. Many readers, who presumably had no difficulty accepting the existence of this imaginary creature within the strip, nevertheless emailed the artist, wanting to know how it is that he could practice law without having passed the bar exam.

The lesson I drew from this was: when your reader can't prove you wrong, your story can have whatever weirdness you like, as long as it's self-consistent. But when your story intersects the real world (or something like it), you have to play by the real world's rules.

A free, full-featured office suite. (Yes, the ".org" is part of its name. Apparently "OpenOffice" was already trademarked by someone else.) It runs on Windows and Linux, amongst others. I mainly use the wordprocessor and, occasionally, the spreadsheet. All of my more recent stories and screenplays started life in it. The HTML that it generates is a little antiquated, but perfectly usable. I generally strip out most of the formatting that it inserts, as this is relevant only if you want to import it back into a wordprocessor.

In my view, OpenOffice.org is a serious contender to Microsoft Office. In theory, there are some things that MS Office does that OpenOffice.org doesn't, but I have yet to discover them in practice. It is very good at dealing with the MS Office documents that benighted individuals occasionally send me.

A free encyclopedia that is being built collaboratively through the Web. Anyone can create new articles or edit existing ones to improve them. You don't even have to register for an account to do this, although it makes things easier for you if you do. One of my favourite features is the random page selector, which has started me on many fascinating journeys through the whole gamut of human knowledge. If it picks an article that doesn't interest you, or that doesn't lead anywhere, just select "Random Page" again from the list of links on the left-hand side of the page.

Wikipedia is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. I've made several contributions: this is a list of the main ones. Mostly, I just fix typos and grammatical errors. This is a full list of my edits.