.mkv format makes me want to kick the people who upload it.

.mkv, you SUCK!

From ethan_greer.

[01] Have you ever been asked out?
I don't recall, but I think yes.

[02] Where is your default picture taken??
From a still of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's the mighty wizard, Tim!

[03] What's your middle name?
Given: Lance. Chosen: Grey. I do like Lance though.

[04] There is no question 4.
And yet here I am answering it.
Reality is broken.

[05] Does your crush like you back?
Most of the time.

[06] What is your current mood?
Slightly depressed.

[07] What color of underwear are you wearing?
Multicolored boxers.

[08] What color shirt are you wearing?
Mostly white.

[09] Missing something?
Yes. A sense of purpose and meaning.

[10] If you could go back in time and change something, what would you change?
That depends on whether or not predestination exists, whether or not changing one event would change many or if history has some function that would attempt to compensate, and how big the event I changed was and how large an effect the changed item would have.

[11] If you must be an animal for one day, what would it be?
Animal. From the Muppets.

[12] Ever had a near-death experience?
No.

[13] Something you do a lot?
Breathing.

[14] The song stuck in your head?
None right now.

[15] Who did you copy and paste this from?
Ethan.

[16] Name someone with the same birthday as YOU.
Sam Mathers. This girl I went to school and graduated with.

[17] When was the last time you cried?
Don't remember, honestly. Not in an "I haven't in a long time" sense, but in a "I don't dwell on it so I don't know" sense.

[18] Have you ever sung in front of a large audience?
Yes, a number of times as a kid and in high school. I was in theater and choir.

[19] If you could have one super power what would it be?
I'm torn between my desire to see the grand panoply of history unfold around me and a duty to others, so between immortality and the power to heal others. Not sure which I could ultimately do more good with.

[20] What's the first thing you notice about the preferred sex?
TnA. Eyes. Face. From behind, usually hair, body shape.

[21] What do you usually order from starbucks?
Nothing. Never been inside one. Don't have one anywhere in around a sixty mile radius, at least.

[22] What's your biggest secret?
(What? You can't read that? Too bad, now you'll never know...) Seriously, though, what a vague and pointless question.

[23] Favorite color?
Rich, deep blue.

[24] Do you still watch kiddie shows?
I have four kids, what do you think? And yes, sometimes deliberately. Spongebob is awesome; so is Ned's Declassified.

[25] What is a line from one of your favorite songs?
"And I don't want the world to see me, because I don't think that they'd understand, but everything's made to be broken, so I just want you to know who I am." - Iris, Goo Goo Dolls

[26] What are you???
An excellent question.

[27] Do you speak any other language?
A moderate amount of Deutsch and some Ojibwe. Or I used to.

[28] What's your favorite smell?
Lavender, lately.

[29] Describe your life in one word what would it be?
Painful.

[30] What is one thing you would like to learn how to do?
Save the world.

[31] Have you ever kissed in the rain?
Not that I recall. I likely have, it just wasn't some "Oh, Spiderman is kissing me upside down in a wet, dark, dirty alley" kiss. Thankfully.

[32] What are you thinking about right now?
Answering this meme?

[33] What should you be doing?
Writing or working on illustrations, playing with the kids, getting an education, doing charity work, Angelina Jolie.

[34] Who was the last person that made you upset/angry?
I'm married. Guess.

[35] How often do you talk to yourself?
Constantly.

[36] Do you like working in the yard?
Sometimes.

[37] If you could have any name in the world, what would you want?
I can and have. Figure it out. I'm trying to.

[38] Do you act different around your crush?
Around someone I'm attracted to? Yes. I get stupid, tongue-tied, and shy/bouncy. I don't know if it shows.

[39] What is your natural hair color?
Dark brown, almost black.

[40] Who/What is your favorite pokemon?
Ok, Pikachu is pretty awesome. But I don't know much about Pokemon so I'm picking from a pretty limited pool (like one hand).

"Railroading" in gamer culture involves a gamemaster forcing their players along a pre-set plotline through or towards a specific situation. But I've seen its analogue in fiction, too.

But how can you "railroad" when writing fiction, since railroading involves causing another to believe their fictional construct has an effect on a situation and its outcome via choice, when it has no effect and choice is meaningless?

By forcing characters in your plot to adhere to the plot as you've imagined it, rather than the plot as it would unfold around the characters, their skills, abilities, and natures.

An example, from a gaming context: I played in a LARP one year at GenCon where the story revolved around a haunting in an abandoned theater and the emergence of a great evil. Some of the characters had powers of teleportation and flight.

Instead of incorporating such elements into the unfolding narrative, the gamemaster utilized a sad old chestnut of (bad) adventure gaming and declared that no such powers worked, providing a weak rationale for their failure of some sort of unknown barrier effect preventing their usage.

Some might be tempted to argue that such a rationale is perfectly, well, rational. That it may be, but good story it is not. Such excuses only create a situation where your characters serve your plot, rather than the plot serving the characters (who are the living heart of a story). In fiction, this weakens the characters by removing important, established, identifying pieces of that character: it is literally like removing or altering personality traits.

Don't hose your characters out of their powers/abilities/skills/knowledge, unless them being hosed out of such is the point of the story. And if your story doesn't work because your character can do or knows a specific thing, you need to rethink your story, not deus ex machina it out of the way just to tell the story your way. The same applies to all similar alterations one might make in order to serve the plot (such as with character motivations, personality, and so forth).

That's bad storytelling.
(It's also bad gaming, but that's a different post.)

So, examples, where have you seen railroading in fiction? What's the most blatant example you recall?

(...Read Here...)

Well, I'm earning myself geek cred by finally watching Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, of which I had never seen an episode (only the campy 90's flick it was based on). Since the kids were gone this weekend, we were able to stay up until ridiculous hours of the night watching and have now almost finished Season 3.

And I'm liking it. I wasn't sure I would. Though there are bits that annoy the piss out of me, Whedon is proving capable enough with storylines and character development that things that the annoying bits end up getting changed up soon enough.

---

I also have a new 3rd Edition PDF product ready to go from Wild Hunt Studio, in "The Way of the Magus" series, titled "On Lotus Magic". It deals with using specially prepared--addictive and poisonous--lotus flowers to enhance a spellcaster's power. A lot of Conan/S&S influence.

It was a pain-in-the-ass to lay out because Adobe was not cooperating at all. No matter how I exported to PDF, Adobe screwed SOMETHING up in the document: failing to display the title font, or turning the decorative font I used in the background into rectangles, and/or completely hosing the transparencies and borders. So I spent two days piecing it together with Acrobat and Photoshop instead. Guh.

However, I wouldn't mind a pair of eyes or two to go over it before I upload it for sale. If you're interested in being such a pair of eyes, let me know.

I thought I'd managed to finally kick the depression I'd been feeling since the start of the month, but it's starting to come back. I'm thinking possibly due to the weather: it's been raining for the last three days. Very little sunshine.

I think the other part is that the money just didn't stretch this month. Our utility bill was so much I couldn't afford the whole thing, and I'm hoping that isn't going to be the case over the rest of the summer. If it is, I'm going to have to think about canceling some amenities -- satellite, phone, cell phone, internet...er, ok, that's ALL the amenities -- just to keep up with it.

I've been taking time out to try and just sit and relax and be in the moment, just de-stress and put a crimp on the moods and anxiety. It's sort-of working. Mainly, I go sit on the front porch in the most comfortable chair in the house and just watch the trees and the wind:



The papasan! We've had the frame for around five years and not had a cushion for it. Finally picked one up a while back and, oh man, so comfy. I napped in it one afternoon when it was warm and the kids were quiet for once.

Also been trying to keep busy. Finished or put finishing touches on two more of the noir pieces, and started another that I'm pretty happy with. Took me forever to decide on the layout for the piece, though. Two left after this.

I've written more for Waking the Dead over at the Well, doubling the size of the story, though I haven't finished it yet. Comments are very welcome.

(Also, if you're new, these are the stories preceding it, in reverse order: Yellow Skulls and Dragonfly & Cricket. I'll eventually tag these so its apparent they're part of a pseudo-serial.)

I also discovered that the version of WordPress I upgraded to has a very annoying feature that can not be turned off via the control panel: revisions. Every time you make a change to an entry, it saves an additional copy of the entry in the database, wiki-style.

So if you go in and change two words, you end up with two copies in your database, the old one and the new one. If you go in and change another word and remove a sentence, you now have three copies in your database. Which is a ridiculous waste of space and completely USELESS for my needs or, far as I can tell, for those of most single-author bloggers.

And (again) IT CAN'T BE TURNED OFF via control panel (you have to hack code). Jesus. Yeah, I can hack the code, it's easy to do, but whose bright idea was that?

(It's a rant. I swear and talk about dookie. You've been warned.)

So, Electronic Gaming Monthly went tits-up right after I subscribed to it. What do they do instead of offering me my money back? They start sending me Maxim. FUCKING Maxim. Without even bothering to ask what I'd like done. (In fact, I get one issue yesterday and another immediately afterward today.)

What. The. Hell. ?

I guess I can completely see how my interest in video games means I would want to receive a softcore TnA men's magazine about chicks, cars, beer, and man-crap...OK, I'm lying. I can't. At all.

In a strange coincidence, this is like when I suddenly started receiving FHM, except there was no discernible reason for that happening. In this case, someone, somewhere actually made a decision to do this and thought it was a good idea.

I'm sure all the parents of underage kids who receive EGM are going to be wildly happy when Maxim shows up. So great plan, guys! (Though I figure if you're dumb enough to write and publish Maxim, you aren't exactly brain trusts to begin with.)

More amusing: last time, I joked about what a bitch it would be to suddenly start receiving Maxim. Is there a pattern here I wonder: will I receive a surprise subscription to GQ in June 2012? WE SHALL SEE!

(FUCKING Maxim!? SERIOUSLY?! WTF?!)

So I'm calling tomorrow. I'd better get all my damn subscription money back. Then I'll go outside and shit on this garbage and send a picture of it to the publishing offices as a review of their replacement policies and cultural and literary merit as a periodical.

OK, I won't.

Maybe.

...because I've got the cheese.

Tonematrix. This is additicingly fun.

I've updated The Adventurers image over on my dA gallery. I didn't like the way the legs and the shadows looked, so I fixed them, and added some thicker mist. An alternate mist-less version is also there, just to show off detail.

Two more pieces from the contract as well, and six more on the way as soon as I get them uploaded. And three pieces left to finish.

The Corporations

The Vigilantes

Clicky for bigger at dA.
Comments welcome.

I'm reading "Antarktos Rising" by Jeremy Robinson, part of a Lovecraft-homage-binge-order I placed on Amazon some months back. I'm a little past half-way through.

The writing is passable. A number of the characters are a bit shallow, but it's a decent read. There's some blatant nationalism, possibly racism, with what feels like a strong right-wing pro-America undercurrent (Arabs, Russians, and Chinese are all enemies and rather stereotyped, and there's a moment of French stereotyping and dismemberment, too, that I can't ignore). And then there's creationism.

I almost put the book down permanently when I hit this part...

( ...Creationism AHOY... )

For a lack of eight inches, I had to coil a twenty-five-foot extension cord in the corner in order to plug in the air conditioner. Reee-diculous.

I've been reading a number of things lately, and a recent post over on Judd's journal about China Mieville's literary philosophy caused quite a revelation for me after all those things stirred around in my brain some.

( ...revelations... )

Tore the 360 apart today because it has been overheating nonstop. Once I'd pulled the chassis off, I could see why: the heatsink was just clogged with dust. Cleaned it out, put it back together, and hooked it back up. I'll put it through its paces later--actually, I'll let the kids play Guitar Hero, since that has been red ringing it consistent and quick--but I suspect it will be fine.

Unfortunately, not so much luck with the computer.

It decided today was a good day to overheat. It's clean, the fans are running, etc. But it beeped its little head off in warning and then shut itself down. Thankfully, I don't think I lost anything, but it's damn aggravating. I pulled the case cover off for better airflow and so far it's working. Still hot though (running around 50C -- I've had this thing run at 32C steady and cooler before, even overclocked -- not sure where all the extra heat is coming from).

I just bleached and mopped out the sludge that collected underneath our basement stairs. The SE corner floods when it rains, and apparently when it does so, it leaves behind this sixteenth-of-an-inch brownish-yellowish stuff in which large white bubbles of mold form if you leave it sit.*

I used one side of the wash basin next to the washing machine as the mop bucket, with liberal amounts of bleach and hot water, and at the end realized I had to stick my hand in the soupy mess stew it had become to fish out the drain plug. Ewwwwwww!

I had no rubber gloves (and who wants to permanently ruin a pair of those on one lousy task?). So...plastic grocery bags. Double bagged. I did not have to put my naked arm or hand in the icky stuff! Yay!

* This was not intentional. We just don't USE the SE corner because it floods, and because it is a dark, cramped little area next to/under the stairs (where some spiders decided to nest in the fall). So I usually have no reason to wander back there and thus didn't notice the sludge/mold until Rainman's PCA moved the litterbox over there.

ORX bothers me.

It bothers me because I put SO MUCH work into it, and it has been utterly ignored.

Hel's skirt, I had to work just to get someone to publicly sneer at it.

I mean, NO ONE EVEN PIRATES IT!

What the fuck?

Intellectual and creative freedom are important things, which is why I'm writing this and why I want YOU to repeat wherever the hell you can: Rob Zombie is trying to claim he owns the rights to term "zombie" and is suing Eric Weiss, who created the multimedia project ZOMBIE!, to cease and desist any and all usage of the term.

More info here and here.

And this after RZ claims not to be a corporate sell-out?

OK, so why should you repeat this? RZ has lots of money, EW, not so much. Meaning that RZ can bury the guy in filings and court fees and demands for evidence and so forth, just running him out of money (the fairness of our legal system is a post for another time, but that's the way it is).

Widespread, bad publicity over ill-conceived lawsuits is the best way to fight back and force reconsideration of these sorts of frivolous, manipulative suits by assaulting the value of the public image and good-will of the brand bringing suit.

UPDATE: that was quick. RZ proves he's not a sell-out and calls off his overzealous lawyers. We can only hope he will also publicly flog them for being stupid.

I've been using GreatNews as my feedreader for a while now, but there's one problem: it crashes like a drunk in the Indy 500. SPECTACULARLY and ALL THE TIME. And leaves widespread damage behind. In terms of losing off-feed articles I clicked through to read or responses I was making.

I'm going to try FeedDemon now instead to see how it handles. (ADDENDUM: That's a bust: don't like the layout.) Anyone have any other suggestions?