Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Not much to report today, folks, except that I did indeed avoid the glut of people at the stores. This may be because there’s nothing worth inconveniencing myself over on special. Yeah, hooray for apathy.
Beyond that, folks, life is peachy. Catch you tomorrow, likely with more non-updates. I promise I’ll get around to posting actual Bailout video again sometime soon.
All hail the regenerative powers of the food coma.
…..yeah, nothing else. What did you really expect for Thanksgiving? I just explained why there’s no post today. Food coma. Deal with it.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Just some quick notes before I hit the road (in my killin’ machine, she’s got everything). First, I have hit the 70,000 word mark for Harvesting Blueberries and brought one of the main character’s subplots to a pretty good climax. In any event, there’s still a LOT of plot left to cover– things are picking up again as we reach towards the end of the second act. If I’m lucky/dedicated enough, I might hit 80K by the end of the month.
I did try my hand at the singing in Rock Band last night. In one of the stranger twists, I was no good at “Juke Box Hero” but positively rocked “Creep”. Maybe that’s not such a twist, after all.
And I’m seriously tempted to pick up FF12: Revenant Wings soon, but I want to know more about the game first. Oh, and clear away more of the now-insurmountable Backlog of Not-Quite-As-Much-Doom-Compared-To-Rick’s-But-Still-Pretty-Damn-Big-
Hell-Let’s-Just-Call-It-The-Backlog-Of-Mild-Unease.
Catch you cats tomorrow. Probably with an early bird-themed entry.
So, we’re heading into Thanksgiving weekend, here. This is going to be a rough couple of days for output, folks, so wish me a little bit of luck and timing. I’m trying to get some content together for the days ahead, but I thought I’d just take a look at what I’ve done so far.
I didn’t realize, actually, that in addition to being National Novel Writing Month, this was also National Blog Posting Month. I’m a little surprised to note this fact, because quite frankly, it’s not like I had to try very hard at all. As it stands, this is the 324th day in a row that I’ve had something up. I hate to post about it while I’m doing it, but I’ll be honest, I think it’s an accomplishment worth noting. Now, I don’t think it’s worthy of huge amounts of adulation, or even really that much recognition. But, for one guy with no readership to speak of to commit to a daily schedule is either a sign of dedication or insanity.
Add to that the fact that I finished a draft of a novel, started another, and all the other miscellaneous stuff that happened this year, and it edges ever so slightly into the “insanity” department.
Every year in December I make at least one post detailing just what this time of year means to me. I’m working on that one, actually; I tried to get it out of the way here, but I’m just coming from too dark of a place to really contemplate a concept like that properly. (It’s a long story, and one I’d like to keep private.) In any event, I’m hoping to have some more brightness to my mindset after this weekend.
As I mentioned on the forums this morning, I picked up Rock Band and Link’s Crossbow Training before work (and was damn lucky to get my hands on teh rawqk, let me tell you). Rock Band has some slight issues… but I’ve complained enough about those to other people and in other venues. Let’s just say that after Thanksgiving I’ll be able to put some time and thought into the game. And I certainly won’t be, y’know, singing. Because that would be cruel to the people in the rest of the building. …who the hell am I really kidding here? Oh, and LCT is awesome. I’m not sure how I feel about the Zapper, but for a $20 game, getting the closest thing to a Zelda FPS as we’re likely to is worth the slight discomfort and awkwardness. I can see how this will work pretty well with Ghost Squad, as it feels like an assault rifle, almost, but without the heft.
I’ve not really put too much time into gaming of late, as most of my attention has been devoted to Blueberries, but I’ve basically set myself to a challenge. If I can hit 72K words between tonight and tomorrow at lunch, I can slack off for a while and play through Touch Detective 2. I don’t really want to risk losing the momentum that I’ve had going, but for the time being, I’m starting to get a little burned out on it. Given that I’ve had a pretty good streak to this point (seriously, nearly 20,000 words in the 8 days since hitting 50K) I think I could afford a little break, so as to not completely destroy my enthusiasm. The story’s hitting a nebulous point, but I’m thinking it through and taking some of the elements into account.
In any event, I’m going to get back to doing whatever it was that I was doing that was so awesome. Because I am awesome like that. And you all wish you could be me. (Hey, I said it wasn’t worth adulation from you guys… I think I could be entitled to some tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandizement once in a while.) Catch you tomorrow.
As noted on the Twitter feed last night, I came up with a title for the current NaNo, here at about the halfway point through the plot. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the name of my next work (until I decide something else works better): Harvesting Blueberries.
The title came about due to blueberries coming up on two separate occasions in the course of conversation within the book, as well as having some relevance to a handful of plot elements (to give the most obvious one, troubled children = “blue berries”, but that’s a superficial connection– there are more, now that I think about it). Also, some interesting facts about true blueberries: they’re native to the northeast United States (the story’s set in Pittsburgh), they’re harvested throughout summer (the story takes place in late August), and the plants resist fire well, regenerating quickly after wild burns (the story centers on the recovery of a handful of abused gifted children in an experimental foster home). There are other species of berry that are indeed blue, which are native to Europe, but a genuine blueberry has white flesh with blue skin, while other species are blue throughout. It might seem a little pretentious to try to assign too much meaning to the title at this point, but it just fits, based on what I’ve written and what I have planned.
Besides, I like blueberries. And the title doesn’t seem to have been used for a fiction book yet anyway. So, hopefully, this will work out.
I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t turn out to be too sappy or overly saccharine; it’s really, REALLY easy to throw easy pitches to the protagonists in a story that centers on child abuse. Someone I spoke to yesterday afternoon remarked that it was unusually dark subject matter for me, and to be completely honest, it really is. I’d just finished the description of the extent of the abuse on the primary victim, and it made me uncomfortable even writing about it. That’s a fascinating thing about being a writer; I can see such a horrifying thing in my mind, and I know that I have to work through my revulsion and document it as clinically as a coroner and as poetically as a reporter. Knowing that that’s what I have to do doesn’t make it any easier, mind you, but it does give me the resolve I need to actually do it.
And it also inspires me to beat the f#%$ out of anyone who would dare raise a hand in true anger against a child. Which can’t be a bad thing, really.
Aaaaaanyway. That’s that, really. Catch you gys tomorrow.
Link Wednesday? On a Sunday? It’s more likely than you think!
Let’s start with FATE/unlimited codes. I guess the SD tiger colosseum for PSP turned out to be pretty damn good, huh? Early rumors point to this one being a traditional 2D fighter along the lines of Street Fighter or (dare I say it) Guilty Gear, but no real information will be available until the 21st. That’s, like, Wednesday. We’ll all have something to be thankful for then.
On a break from the writing last night, I popped into my RSS feeds and found Chain Factor waiting for me. Ostensibly part of an alternate-reality game for Numb3rs (the TV show), it manages to stand out as an addicting little web game in and of itself. Well, enough of one to make me waste an entire hour’s worth of battery power sitting in Panera and playing the damn thing, anyway.
In the “low-hanging fruit” department, we also have troubling news that the 360 Avatar game’s Achievement points are ridiculously easy to get in full. Now, here’s the sitch– when you port a game to the 360, and you have to put Achievements in, you can basically do it one of two ways. You can do it the Final Fantasy XI way, which is to make them absolutely impossible to get (you get one for each job that you level to 75, which means that I have, oh, zero and no way to actually get them– and those are the only Achievements in the game); or, apparently, you can do it the Avatar way, which is to just make them throwaways and subvert the whole purpose of the Achievements. Now, I have my issues with the 360, but the Achievements are not one of them (by and large– it could, as always, be better). I dig the idea behind giving even an ephemeral extrinsic reward for accomplishing cool stuff in the games. But please, please. Make us earn them, and make sure they’re not all overtly ridiculous.
I’m in Panera Bread again today, but only for a little while. This was completely unexpected, mind, as I was positive my errands were going to take me longer than they did. Plus, I think I’m addicted to their “Muffies”… as overtly pornographic as those sound, they’re actually very innocent and tasty cookies made out of the tops of muffins. They’re soft, sweet, and delicious. …..right, digging myself deeper now. Back to writing for me.
Today, one of the most important people in my life adds another year to his “still alive” combo counter, which if this were a video game, he would be racking up the serious points by now. I kid, of course; the number’s not that high, but then again, he hasn’t missed any years yet, so it’s a perfect combo to this point. Right, I’m horribly off-topic now.
Often we say that there are people without whom “we wouldn’t be here”, but to be completely honest, there are really only two such people in the world for each of us. So, on this glorious day, I would like to wish my dad a happy birthday, and hope that he is having fun out with the rest of the family. I wish I could be there, but… well, soon. Soon.
Anyway, quiet day today, so I’m going to get back to writing. Ciao.
So, the TMBG concert… I loved it. I hadn’t realized that Mr. Smalls was an old church; it had perfect acoustics and was a generally nice place. The opening band, Oppenheimer, were OK but a little lackluster– they relied a bit too much on the vocoder. Of course, the Johns were awesome. I don’t have a setlist off the top of my head but the highlights were “The Cap’m”, “The Mesopotamians”, “Maybe I Know”, and “Doctor Worm”. (EDIT: I also really liked “With The Dark”.) I actually hadn’t heard any of The Else yet, so I picked that up (and a shirt) on the way out; iTunes has just finished ripping it and I’m exhausted. It’ll get a full listen tomorrow at work (today, actually– yeah, I’m copping out and calling this the entry for the 16th; technically, it’s 12:45 right now, so that counts). Catch you guys on Saturday, hopefully with that Bailout that I’ve been promising.
Let’s be honest here. Tonight’s the TMBG concert, so I had to dredge up some strange bit of Johns-related esoterica. I actually was going to do some original video as opposed to this, but, well, meh. Catch you guys tomorrow. (Actually, I found a different, better video shortly after writing this post, which means the title is still appropriate but is no longer a gag related to the video. What I’d found before was, in all honesty, pretty damn bad. Enjoy this, if you’ve not seen it yet.)
(EDIT: I came up with a way to solve a particularly annoying bug with the Twitter box up there. As you can see, I fixed it by making it more annoying, on purpose. I’m still working on finding a more permanent solution, likely by removing/reducing the XFire box. I don’t even USE XFire anymore.)
I had a neat rant written up, and was all satisfied with it, until I saw the gem below via Destructoid. So, I’m putting that rant behind a cut because now that I think about it, it’s not really all that clever, and showing you the video that really made me feel a LOT better about certain things last night. So, first, the cut…
( The Only Changes are Constants » )
And now…