Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
At 9:33am, I cleared the final stage of Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis (Virtual Console). This is the second game cleared in 2007. Virtual Console titles do not count towards breaking the moratorium on new games (reinstated on February 8th). I have completed one out of four games needed to break the moratorium. The next game that is closest to completion is Final Fantasy XII, followed by Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Trauma Center: Second Opinion.
Yeah, while I was on such a great roll for Inconsequential last week, this week has just kind of stalled due to external factors. I’m otherwise engaged today, or I’d spend most of today writing. Tomorrow, well, maybe. I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s still sitting at 19 scenes remaining.
On the plus side, I did manage to knock off one project from my list. You’ll find out about that next week. I also feel much better– was fighting the beginnings of a sore throat for the latter half of the week– so I don’t have to worry about that. Well, not as much.
Also, in the John R Dum dept., last night I ran into my first real Wii problem. The controllers suddenly had ceased to function or even sync with the console. Apparently, the batteries had gone dead in the controller I was using, which confused the machine to such an extent that it took a hard reset of both the machines and the remotes to even restore order. Of course, I had had no idea that the batteries were dead. Ah well.
Over the past handful of days I’ve been learning how to do little bits here and there with the XNA Framework for C#. Basically, it’s my goal to have messed around in it enough to actually produce something presentable, in the hopes that maybe it would get me a job should I ever need one. Even if I never actually use it for serious work-related purposes, it’ll be good to mess around with. So far, I have a very brief and silly animation of an Azumanga character fading in and out while being scaled to 4.5 times the original size.
Yeah, this is going to take a while, folks.
So I did eventually discover a quick route to the closest Taco Bell to my workplace, which makes me a very happy fuzzy. However, there’s just one little problem. A couple weeks ago, the billboard announcing the specials read as follows:
GET STUFT
AT TACO BELL
And just yesterday afternoon, it read:
LIKE IT TIGHT?
TRY OUR TAQUITOS
I have since vowed never to order anything from that Taco Bell that includes the “Creamy Ranch” sauce.
Writer is a pretty nifty web-based word processor with no real frills. I actually like it because of that simplicity. No distractions, no other programs… just the proverbial blank page. Coupled with the Autohide extension, and I might have some kind of really high-productivity sessions… pffft, yeah, right. Still, it is a cool combination.
I got to thinking, though, that it might be cooler to do other stuff with the fullscreen mode, like using a Commodore 64. (I initially wanted to find a VIC-20 applet, but this is close enough for now.) I’m thinking my next project will be to track down my old set of OS/2 disks and seeing if it’ll install on my ‘reserve’ machine. Man, if I thought it would have done well with 8 MB of RAM, I can only imagine what’ll happen with the maximum it’ll support (because I know for a fact it’s less than the 256 that’s in the machine now).
Then again, maybe productivity isn’t your thing, and you’d much rather take this week’s title gag literally. Or, you could spend an interesting forty-two hours playing a different game.
There’s news about Apple and Apple, and a Norwegian Wood joke in there somewhere. Also, there’s a few cheap shots at Vista going around.
Little gaming done last night; I had other pressing engagements. I did, however, check out the Wii’s backwards-compatibility mode; I’ll cover that in the forums later today.
Some quick notes, as last night was… well, hectic. First, I managed to make a good chunk of progress in FF12, and leveling is going much faster. I imagine I’ll have that finished “soon”. I also found a cheap set of component cables for the Wii, so now both of my current-gen systems look as good as they’re going to.
Secondly, and probably a bit more interestingly, I was reminded that I haven’t watched the new Kanon series all the way through yet. Certainly I want to, and certainly I’ve been trying to keep up with the episodes released, but I’ve been WAY too busy to do so. Still, with any luck, once one or more projects wrap up, I’ll be able to sit back and have a look at it– probably I’ll get started Friday night and finish watching what’s out on Sunday.
I hope to do some writing on Incon over lunch but that may or may not happen. We shall see. Later, folks.
Yeah, I got nothin’ today, folks. I did, however, talk with my mom this morning, who wondered how she could see all the commercials she missed from last night’s football game. My sister told her of the site, that I’ve embedded videos from before (in fact, just yesterday), and my mother, bless her heart, said she was going to watch them on U2.
And with that, I can now no longer go to that site without “Zooropa” blasting in my headphones. Even better than the real thing, indeed.
Yeah, I’ve been saving this one.
Then there’s also part 2 and part 3. And for those of you who’d rather see the skit without the Azumanga, here.
There is apparently some big to-do tonight. I don’t know the details myself, something to do with football. Since the Steelers are not involved, the entire city of Pittsburgh cannot collectively give a %#$!. Which actually works out well for me, since that’s more or less my normal bearing on it anyway.
This whole post is going to be an update on Inconsequential, so those of you who aren’t following the novel’s progress, you’re excused. The rest of you, stick around, this one’s going to take a while to explain.
First, the hard numbers. I hit 77,000 words and have just 19 scenes left to write, with another two possibly up for rewriting/expanding. If I don’t count those two as being done, that puts me at 75,500 words. The page count is 138 (single-spaced), with five of those being front-matter and day separators. I figure that given a minimum of a page and a half for each scene I’ll hit 170 pages before it’s over. Each scene is about 800 to 1,200 words, so splitting the difference I’ll probably wind up with 95,000 to 97,000 words in the end. I’m still on track.
One of the things that has always been odd about my writing style is that I tend not to want to tell the story in a linear fashion. Of course, when it’s all said and done, the story is linear and does follow a certain progression. Event A in Storyline 1 has to happen before it can trigger Event B in Storyline 2, etc. The problem is that I oftentimes don’t like to write about Event A because I might think, “well, it’s not really all that funny, is it?”. Yeah, the book is a little uneven right now– at least, I think it is. However, that’s part of the challenge to it– I have to find the humor inherent in gathering information or in getting from a video room to a panel room. Sometimes I do it by incorporating a peculiarity of the anime subculture into the narrative, and other times I just have the characters have a conversation that is clearly absurd.
What always surprises me is when I manage to write a scene I didn’t even see coming. For example, one of the plot points involved getting one character to unexpectedly kiss another. I originally figured this would happen with a simple hug going too far, but then the idea of a pair of hand-sewn dolls in the likenesses of the characters involved in the kiss just sort of came to me. Before I realized it, the scene was written. I’m really getting back into actually enjoying writing it.
Or I would be, if today wasn’t the day I decided to do my taxes and found out that I may have made a horrible error. We shall see.
I had a wonderfully and suitably long post made up for today, where I would go ahead and list off a handful of the games I’d like to see on the Virtual Console. Yeah, and it would have been great if I hadn’t, y’know, LEFT IT ON THE USB STICK AT THE OFFICE. You’re all just going to have to wait for that– if not here, I might submit it to the ‘Jak. We shall see.
