First, a note. With this post, boys and girls, I have done it. I have made at least one blog post every day in 2007. My most visible resolution from last year is now complete. I’m still amazed that I managed to get it all taken care of; that despite having 72 Bailout days, there was something new up every day. I guess this makes me an official blogger or something.
(Xbox Live Dead Update: It’s good and busted now. I’m not the only one having trouble with their gamercard, and thus I feel both that this is a problem that will get fixed, and schadenfreude. Mostly schadenfreude.)
Anyway, we’ll save the navel-gazing for later. Right now I want to detail the plan for 2008. I’m not going to be doing too much more coding on the site, really; I do enough of that at work. Now, that said, I’ll probably get struck with inspiration sometime this year and work on a programming project or something. But don’t expect the Dynamic Toys of years gone by; I’m not that kind of a nerd anymore. I’ll stick with tweaked Wordpress and SMF, thank you very much.
What is going to change is the content. I’m going to continue with daily updates (sort of), but they’re going to be staggered between blog.TFO and my LiveJournal. I went Permanent on the LJ back in the summer and promptly forgot about it; during the fall, however, I started doing weekly updates. So, I’m going to alternate days and weeks on a MWF/TuTh schedule. This week is special due to the holiday, so tomorrow we’ll see posts on both sites, but the remainder of the week sees TFO.net ascendant with the three-day schedule. The LJ will get the two-day setup this week. Next week, LJ gets three days while TFO.net gets two, and vice-versa. Weekends will be silent on both fronts from now on; I think I’ve earned that conceit. If you’re confused, don’t be; I’ll have reminder posts on TFO.net through January to point you in the right direction. I’m still working on a way to integrate both sides on the front page, but we’ll see how or if that works out.
Why would I divide my content? It’s mostly the same ol’ crap, right? Well, that’s the thing. I’m going to try to keep things from bleeding over as badly as they have before. What’s going to happen now is that TFO.net’s posts will be general life stuff as well as writing, while the LJ posts will be mostly gaming and anime related. This keeps everyone largely happy. I’m a little worried that this is going to change some of the dynamic around here, as comments will also be divided, but you win some and you lose some. Also, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. By defining days and locations specifically for certain topics, I should be able to cut down on the amount of Bailout used. (It failed with my “Link Wednesday” trial at the beginning of 2007 because Link Wednesdays are actually a lot more work than I initially thought them to be.) There might be some events which take up an entire week on one side or another– like Essay Week, or an upcoming game/anime project I’m mulling over– but those will be announced pretty far in advance.
Overall, I think this is a good way to improve the overall quality of the writing on the site. Bailout is a vice, and I hate writing short, curt excuse-posts. I really do enjoy just blasting out long entries (like this one, as a matter of fact) and I’m going to try to make sure that what you see on both sides is worth reading. That’s the big resolution– to improve as a writer by actually writing.
Let’s do that navel-gazing, hm? I tallied up all of the words written in the blog for 2007, counting this entry, and found the results to be quite fascinating. August was my most prolific month, with Essay Week pushing me into the range of 16,400 words; conversely, the runup to and exhaustion of Otakon in July produced only 6779 words. I only had five months where I came in under 10,000 words, and most of those were in the beginning. Overall, through the course of one year’s events, delights, and disasters, I wrote a grand total of 125,000 words on this site (counting this entry). That number, of course, completely disregards additional writing I did, including Netjak reviews, forum posts, and other miscellaney. It also puts into perspective the fiction writing I did– let’s say 30,000 words for Inconsequential, the 114,000 of Harvesting Blueberries (plus 20,000 more in character sketches prior to November), 10,000 for Metal Rogue (which I really must restart sometime), and maybe 5,000 in miscellaneous other fiction here and there. I wrote what basically amounts to two and a half books this year. Frightening that I can be so freaking wordy, isn’t it?
Enough self-congratulations, I suppose. I wish you all a Happy New Year’s, and hope that you all party as much as I want to. Catch you all in Election Year.
At 7:10p, I completed the third and final episode of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox 360. This is the twentieth game cleared in 2007. The next game that is closest to completion is Touch Detective 2 1/2 (DS), followed by Brave Story (PSP) and (nothing else started). Final clear time was 7:30 over three days, with a completion rate of 43.7%.
(Xbox Live is still acting funny with regards to the gamercard up there. I’m still upset. Nothing new about either of these.)
I recently raised the point that I’m a huge game and anime/movie junkie to Rick, adding that I was about two steps from becoming a full-blown hikikomori. (This in and of itself was a nerd-joke; John McClane has something similar said about him in Die Hard With a Vengeance.) Rick responded that I do too much stuff to really be considered among the total shut-ins, but given my general social calendar, I’m damn close.
Not that I plan on changing this. Meh. Too much effort.
To turn this to the semi-serious side, though, I do have quite a bit of a gaming and anime backlog, as I’ve said many times before. Clearing out half of the Reclamation List did that nicely, so I’m likely to be in good shape for entertainment for quite some time. What this means in terms of a resolution is that I’m planning on twenty-five Game Clear notices in 2008, with five of those hopefully in the first quarter.
I’ve not prioritized my gaming very well. I have dozens of open games, the big one being Super Robot Taisen, but other notable ones being Brave Story, Twilight Princess, and Dead Rising. Still, I’ve found myself getting into a few other titles on the side which have engaged my attention at just the right time to derail an active run. So, I’m going to set out an order right now. By the time you read this, I’ll (probably) have started a run at Eternal Sonata, which is what I hope will be the first major Game Clear for 2008. (I might be wrapping up Lego Star Wars if I haven’t started ES yet; rest assured that if it’s not active when I post this, it will be started by the end of today.) I might get a minor Clear with Touch Detective or a Phoenix Wright game (I’m backed up by two on that series– please don’t hurt me, lawyer fans). After Eternal Sonata, I’m going to jump back into Valkyrie Profile with the intent of finishing it at long last.
Downtime is something I’ve also been exceptionally poor at managing. Some nights I just don’t feel like playing a game or writing, and I wind up wasting the majority of the night surfing or doing something inane when I could be watching an anime or TV series. There’s a bit to deal with there, but the point is that I’m going to make a better effort at having some ‘passive’ entertainment at the ready when I’m feeling blah. Given how I’m going to manage the ‘08 Reclamation List, I should be able to work through this at a faster pace than I have before– no more marathonning series unless I really can’t wait to see the next bits.
That does bring us to the Reclamation List. Last year I decided to hold off on buying titles at the beginning of the year based on Rick’s “moratorium” idea, and I definitely want to give it another stab. The trick of it is, though, that GameFly has been unusually good to me, and I’ve not rented a game ‘to death’ (as in to completion). After the Achievement Race ends on the 19th, though, the plan is to treat GameFly games as half-purchases: I can send it back if I think it sucks, but if I feel like playing it more than about five hours or so, it stays until completed.
Now, that does nothing for the actual purchases. Since I’ve been looking forward to Brawl since, well, the Wii was announced, that one is a guaranteed purchase. Professor Layton is also a series I want to show support for, so that’s also an allowed exception unless I have fewer than two Game Clears by February 10th (if I only have one, Layton waits). And, since I’ve proven myself completely incapable of preventing myself from purchasing games, for each Game Clear I rack up from January 1st to March 31st, I will pick up one GameCube game from the Reclamation List; if I reclaim all GameCube games, I can continue with some of the more common PS2 games. (The reason for this restriction is because the ‘Cube shelf is woefully underfilled.) After April 1st, the ban will be either relaxed or broken depending on how many Clears I’ve racked up.
Finally, reclaiming anime and movies work on slightly different rules. I have four unwatched series right now (Ai Yori Aoshi, Air, Sailor Moon, and Strawberry Marshmallow), a live-action series untouched (Veronica Mars S2), and a handful of rewatches cued up (Ah! My Goddess TVS1, Love Hina, Firefly/Serenity, the Matrix films, and Lord of the Rings Extended Editions). I won’t reclaim any DVDs from the List until two of the five unwatched sets are complete. Once that’s done, I can reclaim one series, but after that I can’t reclaim anything until I’ve collected the remainder of School Rumble and finished two more of the five unwatched. At that point, I get another reclamation before I finish up the other two unwatched (School Rumble being added to the initial five).
Yeah. It’s complicated, but I think I can stick to it this year. All I have to do is get through to April and then I can revise as needed. Tomorrow– New Year’s Eve– I’ll talk a little bit about how TFO.net itself will be changing in 2008.
At 7:17p, I completed the final stage of The Simpsons Game on the Xbox 360. This is the nineteenth game cleared in 2007. The next game that is closest to completion is Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (360), followed by Touch Detective 2 1/2 (DS) and Brave Story (PSP). Final clear time was 7:03 over four days.
(Quick Gaming Note: I’m aware of some problems with Xbox Live right now that are preventing the gamercard above from functioning properly. This all stems from a glitch with Soltrio Solitaire not properly giving me credit for an achievement, and it threatens to put me out of the running in the Achievement Race. Gah. More news as it develops.)
So, I might not have mentioned this, but I wrote a novel this year. (You may commence with the throwing of heavy objects to get me to stop bragging… now.) It’s not the first one, really, and that’s what worries me. Harvesting Blueberries is my second novel, but it’s not like I can go around and say “Oh, yeah, I’ve done this before,” because they invariably ask me about the first novel, and my response is usually a mumbled “we don’t talk about the first novel anymore”. So my second big resolution is going to be a stronger commitment to editing and submitting Blueberries for publication.
(side note: I realize, actually, that if I wanted to, I could write an FF8 fan novella remarkably similar to Blueberries… and the title would have to be “Sowing the SeeDs”. Yeah, not gonna happen.)
I only sent about seven query letters for Inconsequential. I really did mean to send more. Honestly. The problem is that that book was just such a weird niche title as to be almost unsellable as a first novel. (Or I could be rationalizing my crappy-ass writing, but I doubt that just enough to keep me out of Aerobic Brooding territory.) I did get some positive feedback from a couple of the rejections, though– particularly from a source I definitely would not have expected (Launchbooks sent me a personalized letter; I did indeed emit the squee of joy). So I figure that I just didn’t get it to the right people.
It’s the damnedest thing, honestly. I wrote Incon because I specifically did not want to write a fantasy story. So what should I find when I started leafing heavily through the 2007 Writer’s Market? “We want fantasy!”. That’s the other thing, though. I gravitate towards fantasy naturally anyway. I suppose Blueberries could be called “magical realism”, except that I certainly don’t get into any huge philosophical debates as Gabriel Garcia Marquez does. It’s not exactly “modern fantasy”, either, as there’s only the lightest of fantasy touches added in (I took great pains to not let the characters rely far too much on their less mundane aspects). Still, the fact that Blueberries is so wide open actually works in its favor, as opposed to how narrowly Incon was defined (”modern literary satire” wasn’t in terribly many agent listings).
So, the goal right now is to get ten letters sent a month, regardless of response times or rejections. I’m going to send letters based on this draft, as well, for January; editing will continue on it as I send out, but this is the biggest stumbling block I’ve had to deal with. Like yesterday, it boils down to laziness, but laziness of a different sort– I, previously, didn’t see the value in the whole endeavor. It’s a matter of risk versus reward, and blowing a couple hundred dollars on paper, toner, stamps and envelopes is a small price to pay to get published. Plus, well, the next one will be easier, or so I hear. And the next one might just be Incon… maybe.
Oh, I want to make 2008 a two-novel year, too. I’m thinking May or June as a writing month, depending on how the gaming goes. I’ve found that this dedication stuff works wonders for me, and putting enough pressure on myself to do it helps out quite a bit. So, I might take late spring or early summer to do up a novel, or more likely, write up some short stories. A 100K word novel is a rough job, but four or five 10K word short stories, with a handful of shorter ones, would probably be enough to spur me into remaining creative the whole year around. And I’ve got a ton of stuff on my scrap pile to look through; what I outlined as the ‘06 NaNo could probably be reworked into a longer-form tale.
Fair enough, I suppose; we’ll see how well this turns out. Tomorrow, let’s have a look at the gaming and anime plans for the new year.
I started off 2006 with a significant amount of excess weight. By April, the majority of what I wanted to lose was gone. And by January of 2007 a good chunk of that was back. So, 2008’s ‘big’ resolution is the removal of the remainder.
Now, let me be honest here. I’m not, by any estimation, what anyone would call ‘fat’. Right now I’m hovering around 187-195, which is considered average for an American male of my age, but still a little high given my height. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, my Body Mass Index is (at the time of this writing) 27.3, which falls a little way into the “overweight” category. To put me into the “normal” category, I have to drop down to about 174. Not coincidentally, the 2006 endeavor ended with me moving from 215 to 175.
The interesting thing is that, despite the fact that I’ve eaten more since I’ve gone on the non-meat thing, I’ve maintained pretty much where I was. So, it’s really just a matter of recovering the discipline I had in both eating less and exercising more. The eating less is going to be easy– I just have to carry the itty bitty calorie book again, and possibly resuming my use of a specific diet shake plan which I did not continue with since arriving here in Pittsburgh (even though I really meant to, honest). The exercise… might be tricky.
2006 saw me doing daily walks in the morning and a weekend journey to the arcade for an hour or so of DDR. I’ll likely be resuming the weekly pilgrimages– I have a couple of arcades I can choose from, including one very close by and one a little further away that’s more fun– but the walks will have to be in the evening or will be replaced by stretches of home DDR or some other DVD workout. Fortunately, I’m smart enough to load the workout videos into KOS-MOS, so there’s no fussing with missing or damaged discs early in the morning.
The food is actually not going to be that big of a problem. I know a few very good recipes, and I’m quite capable of cooking for myself if I need to– and the fact that I just picked up “15-Minute Vegetarian Meals” helps my repertoire to an infinite degree. What will be the biggest problem (besides clearing away the positively enormous amount of Christmas food I wound up with) will be in not being lazy, and preparing varied and properly-sized meals ahead of time. I’m returning to the so-called “150-point” plan, so I have to be extremely conscious of my portion sizes and my choices of extras. In the past I quickly found myself in a rut as I would eat the same things day in and day out because they were known values, and the temptation to stray was very present. If I set aside some time Sundays to cook lunches for the week ahead, I’ll be in better shape with regards to mixing things up– both literally and figuratively.
The big hangup with that last paragraph is “not being lazy”, which is (I hope) going to go hand-in-hand with the discipline. We’ll see.
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll take a look at the state of the stories, and go over the current plan for the revision and publication of Harvesting Blueberries.
So, we’re coming up on the end of 2007. It’s been a good year, to be honest; lots of little things went very right, which far more than made up for the things that went wrong. Rather than detail everything, I figure it’s best to just say “it was a good year” and move forward.
There’s some developments recently that are worth mentioning. I hit the used movie store with some of the Christmas money and managed to reach over 50% collected on the Reclamation List. Which was a pretty big goal for me, actually, especially given that I expected it to take a lot longer and a lot more money than it actually did. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 59 items reclaimed of 117, with another 24 items on top of that listed as ‘will not reclaim’. For an overall percentage, I’m just shy of 71% done.) Some were multiple items (I counted the Matrix Trilogy as one item, even though I bought the discs separately), and others are somewhat more difficult to find or afford (read: Lunar, several PS1 titles). As a result, over the coming weekend I’m going to redesign the Reclamation List, put a couple more items onto it, and have a fresh sheet ready for 2008.
And I will ignore that list due to trying to work through the Backlog of Moderate Annoyance. I’m taking a page from Rick’s moratorium on purchases, and re-establishing it on my own end for the first few months. The only planned purchases right now are Smash Brawl and Professor Layton, both in February– and Prof. Layton might be dropped off if I don’t have at least two Game Clears before the 10th. The earliest I’d be looking to work on Reclamation List ‘08 would probably be the end of March or the middle of April, when Tekkoshocon happens.
Speaking of Tekkoshocon. I decided to double-check the date for the coming year and found that the venerable convention– which has been at the Monroeville ExpoMart for the two years that I was in attendance– is actually changing venues, jumping across town to a different convention center. This is because the ExpoMart is being demolished. I guess the pungent aroma of Otaku Funk was just too much for the hall to bear… or, more likely, it was just damn old. Which it is. But I like my explanation better, because it makes my chosen subculture feel more important and mainstream than we really are. *ahem* Anyway, I’m hoping that Mad Gear shows up in the Dealer’s Room this year; yeah, yeah, commercialism is bad, but I like them, and their staff is very friendly.
Hey, that takes us nicely to game news. It’s amazing how smoothly I link these things, huh? Anyway, a couple of things worth mentioning here; I found this morning that Marvelous Interactive, who publish the Harvest Moon and Luminous Arc series in Japan, are opening a US division within the year. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that another niche publisher is taking the plunge on a US distribution arm, but on the other hand, it means that we’re likely going to be getting an unproven translation team for Luminous Arc 2. Which worries me greatly.
Oooh, SimCity DS 2 looks to be using the MySims art style! I like that. It’ll probably never leave Japan, but I like it.
There’s also some other things coming up, but I’ll go ahead and use those for the next couple of days’ entries. Stay tuned, folks: we’re going to become staunchly resolute before the year is out.
So I’m heading back to Pittsburgh today– taking off relatively early from the parents’ house so as to either avoid or land in the center of traffic. The journey one way is about five hours, but the XM helps the time pass, especially over the hellish stretch that is Route 86. Seriously, it’s the most boring hundred miles of road I have ever dealt with. I’ll even take harrowing death-dancing on the Pennsylvania Turnpike before having to drive any more than maybe ten miles of 86 daily.
Let’s talk gaming. I’m regretting leaving my parents the copy of Wii Play, because I’ve found that the billiards on that disc is actually fairly well done. However, these past few days have been the most use the disc has seen since its purchase in February, so there’s that. I’m sure the folks will enjoy it as much as I have– and that’s not even getting into the fact that I can send them Blue Glow and VC games if something comes up. So, yeah. As for the plan for two more Game Clears, that might not be done this year. Eighteen clears has got to be a record for me, especially considering three of those were forty-hour knock-down drag-out Pokemon brawls. I treated myself to buying Eternal Sonata from GameFly, which is something I wanted to do eventually anyway, so that’s likely to be one of the first Clears of 2008. We’re shooting for a cool twenty in ‘08, and to be completely honest, if I don’t get into another slump over the summer, I can do it.
There’s more to talk about– there’s the ever-promised sappy bleating, and the wonderful reminiscence of Christmases past, present, and future– but most of that will have to wait. I’ll give a little note tomorrow before work (maybe), and we’ll see what’s left to talk about over the weekend.
I hope everyone’s had a good holiday, and I hope that the fun is just beginning.
So, today is the day before Christmas. We’re looking at Bailout borrowed from Eric today, but I promise, tomorrow I’ll have brand new Bailout brought by the jolly man himself. John Hodgman. Wait, no, I mean Santa Claus. (In my defense, they are similar-looking.) Have a good day and sleep well tonight, if at all.
