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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Other Starcasters

Just for fun, I Googled "starcaster" and came up with some matches.

The coolest match was the Fender Starcaster Guitar. Check it out:

 
I don't play the guitar, but I am a musician, so I appreciate the fact that the title of my novel has such a cool synonym. 
StarCaster is also a traffic control system used by radio and television stations. I rather wonder why they came up with "starcaster" to describe a traffic monitoring system. The interface looks a bit dated, as if it were a DOS program. And indeed, they appear to have been around since 1986. Still, they just put out another release over the summer. And -- sigh! -- they own the www.starcaster.com domain.

There is also a whimsical craft shop called Starcaster Crafts. They sell things like dreamcatchers and wands. The website looks really dated, so I wonder if they're still in business.
And then we have the StarCaster Automatic Terminal Information Service. It doesn't look very interesting, which is why I'm not linking it.
The Star Caster Network appears to be just what it sounds like, a company that casts stars. In movies, that is. And television shows, too.
Oh, and let's not neglect the StarCaster Text-to-Speech system. It's not very interesting for our purposes, but I do find it interesting that I found no fewer than three software packages called StarCaster.
And I'm done with this rather silly topic. In a day or two, I hope to post my blurb, which I am now perfecting with the help of the folk over at Absolute Write. No matter what writing community I try, I always end up going back to Absolute Write. They have the best mix of published and unpublished authors, plus a good portion of the users there write science fiction or fantasy, so I don't feel like some sort of interloper at a literary fiction party. If you're not a member, I highly recommend it.

3 comments:

  1. I've heard good things about Absolute though when I was fooling around with the idea of writing I used Forward Motion and loved the community there.

    Looking forward to that blurb!

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  2. I loved Forward Motion for a long time, but some unpleasantness that I no longer recall drove me away. It got rather clannish. And for a long time, the graphics on the site were awful, and made loading it a pain.

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  3. I did the same thing for "The Ninth Avatar" and "Thomas Redpool" but didn't come up with nearly as entertaining results. Ninth Avatar refers to a concept relating to Buddha, as it turns out, and trumps my little book venture on the Google search. Thomas Redpool is NOT an actual name (thank God for that one) and usually my searches find my own posts about how I'm progressing with the novel.

    I'm well past annoyance googling my own name, since I share it with a game show host (do a wikipedia search for Todd Newton and you'll see what I mean). Gonna be a tough road if I ever really reach for fame.

    ReplyDelete

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