Now With More Buds

I haven't blogged in a week, almost exactly.  That's not conspicuous at all, is it?  Don't worry, I might start blogging more frequently again soon.  I start orientation next week.  The pressing concern for the moment is this:

I'm standing in a wedding on Sunday.  I'm excited, but it's in Ohio, and my wife has to work, so that means I'll be apart from my wife for the better part of three days, and as jazzed as I am I'm going to be exhausted, because I know like... three people who are gonna be in the wedding?  I don't know how many Houghtonites will be at the wedding, and that's really the only group of people I know of the bride's, and I know even fewer of the grooms.

Still I'm honored to stand and witness the marriage of two good friends whose distance from me is yet another prod making me yearn to invent teleporters.

Graduating from college seems to have been a subtle shift in anxieties.  Some would say the stakes are higher now than they were, though monetarily I would say no way in heck are they actually.  Except that the high stakes from college have rolled over in the form of student loans looming over my head, demanding to be paid.

But I feel less like there's a single pressing project I need to finish to determine the course of my future, and more like every choice I make throughout every day contributes to the life I'm leading.

It's terrifying, but in the same way as a dull ache is agonizing.

Subtle, and always there, applying pressure.

I'm slowly making my way through The Hunger Games, to the pleasure of my family members who think it is quite good.  I have personal taste qualms about the first person present storytelling, though I think Collins executes it fairly well.  I am most impressed by the wells that go unmentioned in the story, one of things so often overlooked in first person stories.  The narrator is not always a stand-in for the author, and his/her flaws are rarely explicit, since it's hard to be fully conscious of your own failings.  The first person narrator in an active story is never (if the story is well done and the character well-fleshed-out) the unequivocal voice of truth.

Honestly, my personal voice choices have edged towards the third person omniscient, with the narrator having verisimilitude with the author.  It's an old-fashioned preference, but there it is.

At the same time as I wade into the strange coincidental cousin of the film Battle Royale, my wife is finishing up with The Wise Man's Fear, which means I can nerd out with her over a lot of stuff and we equally anticipate the third installment of the Kingkiller Chronicle.  I had some small ambition to review The Name of the Wind myself after reading a particularly aggravating review written by a professional.  I have since procrastinated and haven't done much that could be considered creative in the last week or so.

But I have played Guild Wars 2 like its servers are shutting down.  That's what you do when an MMO releases, right?  Play it eight hours a day for the first week?  That's pretty much what I did.

Now I sit and scoff at my own buffoonery and resist the urge to play the game.  It's hard, okay?  I love that game.  It's a mild obsession, and I'm doing my best to be an adult about it.

It's not going anywhere.

Time marches forward and more cool stuff is on the horizon.  Homestuck continues to be fantastic, a new season of Doctor Who approacheth, The Hobbit comes out this winter, and people have finally stopped harping on the "end of the world" that's supposed to happen before the year's over.  I probably jinxed it by saying that out loud on a blog that gets broadcast to... ten people?  I don't even know who all reads this blog, though you're awesome if you do, whether you agree with most of it or not.

One thing I've noticed about my life now is I don't feel like I'm in an environment where I can say, "All right, now I have to work on this" and have that be accepted.  That's probably just my bogus feelings, but it's true.  I feel like, since I don't have a grade waiting for the work that I do where the value of that grade is a condition of my earning honors that can get me hired better, any work I do is just frivolous head-in-the-clouds creative stuff.  I'm not saying my family doesn't support my art, but...

I need an art space.  A place to sit down that is the place where the ideas and the words are blended in an alchemical concoction meant to be administered to as many individuals as possible.  Okay, that got away from me.

-shrugs-

That's it for now.  Bye guys.

Anachronized Holidays and The Need For Time Travel

I get busy some days.  Still deliberating about a certain "job opportunity" for my wife, and things, and making plans about tomorrow.  Also, catching up on internet things like webcomics and the like.  Ho boy.  Ho ho boy.

It's July.  You know what that means.

Christmas.

In that vein, the sylvari and asura races will be playable in the final beta weekend event this July 20-22, which is super awesome but I'm still fighting an internal battle between making a crapload of sylvari characters and saving the sylvari for release as a surprise/treat.  It's a hard choice to make, because I like both ideas on their own merits.  My wife thinks I should wait.

There may still be some days in the next few weeks that I don't blog at all for various reasons.  Some of those days may be followed by face punch videos.  Some may not.  Honestly, I kept my original self-made bargain of one month and I did it again, punishments and all, so at this point whether I keep blogging every single day is a moot point.  Stuff is getting crazy around here, with the vacations and the job searching and the crazy little beautiful monster children.  Life only gets more complicated after college, kids.

Get that now.  Understand it.  Grok it.  It is knowledge you will need ingrained in your mind, so that you don't find yourself completely boggled when "Well chips, all my irons just fell right out of that fire."

Don't mind my Homestuck references, I'm freaking out about potatoes right now.  That's really all there is to say on the matter.

-shrugs-

Fantasy and the Weird

You know, for a shy person who doesn't like to step on toes, it's really hard to just be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go disappear and do productive things for a while.  Don't bug me."  Especially in a house that doesn't really have a separate place for me to work.

I need to not complain.  Don't complain.  So I'm just observing.  And trying to think of a way to do what I need to do.

Homestuck continues to be a thing.  A crazy thing.  It and Adventure Time are my cartoony indulgences.  Legend of Korra is not an indulgence.  It is a necessity.

I think one of the coolest ideas for creating a world is to play with video game motifs.  It's something that Homestuck does, and most video games (obviously).  There are quite a few other stories that I can't think of at the moment, and plenty of webcomics that don't have an overarching  plot, all of which mess around with video game (and other pop culture) motifs in building the world of their story.  Scott Pilgrim is another good example of this.

Themed worlds are definitely easier to create than wholly new ones.  And "wholly new ones" are probably impossible.  But what I mean is it's easier to say, "This story is set in the Prohibition Era U.S." and present a world that a lot of people will recognize.  It's not as easy to develop the epic sweeps of the history of Arda.  Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the Inheritance Cycle was Paolini's experiment in world-building.  He used a lot of the trappings of stereotypical fantasy (men, elves, dwarves, and dragons) but he worked hard to make it his own.

Honestly, and it's taken me a while to realize this about myself, I prefer my worlds a little weirder.  Doctor Who's version of reality is very engaging partly because it doesn't take itself seriously.  Worlds you can laugh in make the moments of sorrow that much more poignant.  Which reminds me of Up.  Goodness, that movie is brilliant.  I won't even get started on that, though.  The Avatar world (again, the Asian-themed cartoon world and not the giant-blue-tentacle-people world) has hilarious things like platypus-bears and the recurring tragedy of a man and his cabbages, but their existence only heightens the feeling when we learn about an important piece of Iroh's past, or see a pair of brothers doomed by the upbringing their father gave them.

And Homestuck is definitely weird.  It's like Hussie dropped in the Weird-brew teabag and just left it there in the piping water until the ratio of Weird to water made the tea into a non-Newtonian fluid.  Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey Weird tea.  That's what Homestuck is.

And that's why I love it.

Now, some people can't take that seriously.  The irony of that statement is fully intentional, yes.  What I mean is that some people lose all their disbelief suspension and miss out on the ride because it's just too weird.  But I was never nearly normal enough to get along with people who like their world always straight vanilla.  Sometimes you just need to have some bacon ice-cream and get over it.

There's a smaller version of a dragonfly, and some wise guy/gal named it the damselfly.  That's an official thing.  That's the kind of world we live in.  We name bugs after medieval mythology.

There's a beetle out there somewhere that, as far as I know, can haul around a banana that's way bigger than it is.  Ants can lift things 100 times their weight.  If fleas were human-sized, they could jump football fields.  In the depths of our ocean, the wildlife glows, and the invertebrates down there are more mind-blowing to watch than a model of a four-dimensional object.

Our world flipped the lid off the can of weird before we came up with the semantic concept that weird corresponds too.  Also, we're capable of exploring semantic concepts that could never occur, and live in those mental spaces fairly comfortably without going entirely insane.  Most of the time.  There was never a Zeus, God of the Sky, man, but we sure as heck know about the stuff he did.

I guess what this Weird tangent was about is that we all need to settle down and non sequitur all over everything once in a while.  It's more honest.

Also, people like me need to drag our heads down out of the clouds every so often and do some manual labor so we can know this world we're living in isn't just made out of semantic space just because that's how we can (kind of) comprehend it.  There's stuff to it.  And it happens.  It keeps hapening.  You gotta eat something that's alive (or once was) in order to live.  Dog my cats, but that kinda sucks, doesn't it?  All it takes is a gulp of something suitably not air to cut off our respiration, and we go out like a light.

 I'm gonna stop there before I get too morbid.  I guess that's the kind of stuff I think about, and I bring it all back to stories because I'm wired that way.  This was all another defense of fantasy as a storytelling medium, I guess.  Or something.  I don't even know.

I'm still thinking about that deep sea jellyfish.

It's a Ramble

Okay, forget what I said yesterday.  Problem Sleuth was awesome.  And comparatively short when sized up with Homestuck.  In some ways it seemed even more game-like than Homestuck, in that there are bosses with health meters and everything.  A lot.  To go along with that, I will say once more that I think I understand a lot more references (in-jokes) in Homestuck than I did before.

I find myself wanting to work in a world, which is a good thing.  It's only that I already spent a lot of time being anti-social today (see reading most of Problem Sleuth), so I don't think I should lock myself away and start writing.  So maybe I'll boot up my tablet and try to work on some comic-style Hearthstead stuff.  That'll be fun?

Is it a trapping of my generation to want to nerd/fanboy out frequently?  This question came out of nowhere (ish) just now, and is totally not premeditated.  But I'm in earnest.  I mean, people got obsessed before the 90's obviously, but was there ever so much story, and so much esteem for the "awesome," that one could make partaking of the storm of stories their lifelong occupation and only really tap the surface?  How does one judge the value of a story?  What does "unique" mean in light of it?

There is a certain kind of consumer whom I cannot understand.  It is the person who can only just stand fiction, so by extension finds any sort of story that stretches the fabric of reality, or of "society," or anything else short of strict realism to be childish and inane, and worth nothing but dismissal as so much dross.  This sort of person exists, and I do not know that—one such individual being revealed to me—we could ever have useful dialogue together.  The rigors of science, the cold brutal reality of reality, these bore me.  And honestly I have to check my apathy about the stories of the real world because actual life is more important than the stuff I make up to amuse myself.  But it's easier to generalize about life and the real world and retreat to somewhere else a little less painful.

That's the other thing.  When realistic fiction doesn't bore me and actually succeeds in impelling emotion, it's a rush of depressing truth.

For a Christian, I'm kind of a downer.  But yeah, I'm not exactly in a season where I particularly feel like anyone's listening to messages about the savior of this world we made terrible.  That bears thinking about, when I'm not busy thinking about my writing, or trying to figure out how to get a job, or what not.

Yeah, I need a paradigm shift.

Speaking of, what happened to that band from my high school?  Did they all break up and become atheists or something?  I mean, it was kind of a cool band.  There was a song about Gollum and wanting/needing the Precious.  Wow I'm apparently not in the best mood today.  Sorry about that, I guess.

Naps are good things.  There seem to be cycles.  You see, little kids take them until they're not little anymore, then they start doing them again when puberty hits, and then stop during the age when they never sleep (mid-adolescence), then once you're an adult you start loving to take them again.  Or at least that's my experience/observation.

I wish there were things like Kickstarters to have reading funds.  Because, you know, I don't really have a disposable income (let alone disposable time) to read all the things I want to read.

That disposable income thing means I need a job.

Job.  Job.  Job.

Job job.

Jobbery boj.

Okay, um...

Good night.

The Cultural Paradox of Old Books (Or Why is Everything So Complicated?)

I honestly don't know why John Carter didn't do well in theaters.  Was it not close enough to the books?  Because there were definitely parts with strong emotional resonance, and I thought for one thing, that the way they dealt with accents was better than normal for a movie of this kind.  It was entertaining.  I liked it.  There.

Also, it had the kid from Spy Kids in it as Edgar Rice Burroughs.  So that's... I dunno... weird?

I started "reading" Problem Sleuth, a predecessor to Homestuck, but I don't like it as much as I like Homestuck.  The references though, I understand so many more of them already.

I'm still reading Self-raised, a book published in 1876.  It's still kind of like an American Dickens novel.  I just want to finish reading it.

Also, there is prudery.  So prude as to be an affront for folks of this day and age who can't stand wholesomeness.  Like, the people in that book are so proper, and so careful in evading impropriety, that I'm certain some people will find it offensive.

There's also stuff involving black servants that's unfortunately typical of the era.  They aren't slaves, but they are happy to subordinate themselves to the white protagonists of the book.  It's kind of a problematic thing, but it would also be hard to depict them as people in the same social and financial standing as the upper crust (the main characters include a member of the Supreme Court, British nobility, and a highly successful member of the Washington bar).  I am disappointed with the author for this depiction, but I'm not as disappointed as if this book was written later than a decade after the abolition of slavery in America.

It's such a strange mix, all that propriety and the treatment of people.  Nowadays we can say that people are people (with the exception of the unborn, apparently), and everyone pretty much agrees.  I should point out though that the villains of the story are punished because they treat the servants more like objects and less like human beings, and that the protagonists actually tend to treat them more like people than the servants themselves do.

In the previous book, there were poor white people with less social standing than black servants, which is an actual thing that happened in our history.  So is the question more one of class than race?

Ugh, cultural stuff hurts to think about.

Do it anyway.  I will too.

There.  There's like, social responsibility going on in this blog a little bit.  Or something.

-shrugs-

Dad Gum

Today's Father's Day.  I wrote my dad a letter.  I know that sounds kinda lame, but writing is sort of my thing.  So there's that.

There's nothing better for your life than a dad who does what a dad's supposed to be.  Like be there, and live a godly example for you to follow.  Not that I'm gonna be a doctor like him.  It's not as simple as that.  But yeah, my dad's pretty much my hero.

Unfortunately I spent a lot of my eloquence on the letter.  Unless I'm stealing the witching hours after midnight, I usually only have so much well-thought-out prose before it dilutes.  Okay, I'm pretty much just pulling that out of my ear, but I kinda feel like if I start waxing poetic about my dad and Father's Day here it cheapens it somehow.

If you have a dad who's treated you right, let him know.  I'm not a dad yet, but I can tell you it will mean the world to him.  And yeah, I know there's not a lot of time to do it officially for Father's Day.  Well, you don't have to contain it within a day.  I don't celebrate and thank God for saving me on Resurrection Sunday alone.

Homestuck is good.  I kinda wish there was a way to get around the more crass elements of it so that I could share it with some of my friends who (rightfully, in my opinion) don't have the patience for that sort of thing.  It's one of those dichotomies I think a lot about sometimes, the different spheres.  I have a whole group of friends and family who don't use "swear words" or other vulgar language, not because they're holding themselves back, but because their dialects don't include those words in such places.  And then there's a whole culture out there that has a very hard time imagining a day without dropping an f-bomb somewhere.

This goes into that whole "swearing" topic.  I use quotes around the word "swearing" because I don't feel like the culture's been using the right word.  Yeah, I know words like damn and hell are curses (or "cusses"), and there's the more disrespectful variants involving the various names by which people refer to our Creator which are like curses compounded with going against the direct instruction of the being who invented you (incidentally that's not a useful argument to use on an atheist because, you know, they don't care if they're offending a God they don't believe or care exists).  But that oh so colorful word that still has nominal ties to sexual activity, and its counterpart about feces with the hissing and the fun hard "t" at the end, those aren't curses.  They aren't exactly swearing either.  I don't have any interesting in swearing by human waste, or by the procreational act.  Incidentally, I ascribe to the not-swearing-at-all let-your-yes-be-yes-and-your-no-be-no philosophy, so you don't hear me promising things very often, let alone "cursing things out."  I do have a habit of using the word "freaking" in several variations, and sometimes I call things "crap."

There's a reason "swearing" exists.  You want to verbally vent your frustration, or to punctuate the degree of awesome you just experienced, without the use of the word "very" taking over everything.  Or "quite."  Or, you know, any other word that means "to a high degree."  Because for some reason English speakers (or at least a lot of us) have reached a point where we feel like those words sound cheesy.  There's also reputation to uphold, and for many "cursing like a sailor" gets them a reputation for toughness, that you're someone you don't "f" around with or else.  Or something.  I think there's this idea like if you want to be taken seriously you should slip some of the commonly accepted vulgar parlance into your dialogue once in a while.

And then, those of us who don't use that sort of language, and don't have that idea about it, have a hard time taking you seriously.  But I think that's what some people want, too.  They talk that way because the people they want to be with talk that way.  It's the language of the culture, and in wanting to fit in, that's what they say.  Not that it's totally a conscious choice.  I read too much Homestuck at once and all the sudden I find myself censoring what I'm typing because there's stuff in it I don't want to be there.  It comes naturally.  It's part of, you know, the way our brains are wired.  It's why the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in life with people who speak it, not to sit alone in a room studying it.

There's a reason I only speak English.

I have kind of a roller-coaster model when it comes to this phenomenon.  Sometimes I don't bother with thinking deliberately about my idiolect at all, and sometimes it gets to be the most important thing in the world.  Those moments don't last too long, but it happens.  I'd like to make my language more of my language, my way of speaking, than just a product of who I spend time with.  It's a bit of a Sisyphan struggle.  But I try.  What can I say, I'm a stubborn kid.

-shrugs-

Character and World-building

I said yesterday that there's a beta event for Guild Wars 2 this weekend.  I am immensely excited for this, and hope to spend a large amount of time playing.  Maybe that old computer can even get set up for GW2 so I can play with my wife!

Running is my go-to idea for exercise, but I'm really bad about doing it.  I should probably do it soon, but the internet!  And the things!

And pizza!

Friday and Saturday I talked at length about diction and word choice and how they relate to writing (with a focus on Fantasy because, well, I'm me).  I wanted to talk today about characterization and its utmost importance.

As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to tell a compelling story it requires at least one person at the center of things, experiencing and interpreting the world, and influencing it with agency.  If there  isn't a person involved, it's not a story in my estimation.  That isn't to say it isn't art.  There's quite a few poems where there's hardly an author's voice, let alone a narrator (though this is most often a finely crafted illusion because, you know, there's an author or at least an editor where there's words involved), and that doesn't detract from the artistry of the poem.  Similarly, visual arts don't need human subjects to be artful or beautiful.  They just aren't stories in my eyes.

Now you might mention wilderness documentary stories, like that Chimpanzee movie.  But here's the thing:  in those works, the creatures depicted are anthropomorphized.  They're not people, and I believe they shouldn't be treated like people.  That's why movies like that bother me.  When things get more metaphorical it bothers me less, but animal movies annoy me because the stories pretend that these creatures are people.

I am making sure to use the word "person" because that is a more significant catch-all than human being.  In my worldview, the only "people" are human beings (aside from God and maybe angels).  However, there is a rich tradition of giving a non-human the aspects of personhood (self-cognizance and the like) throughout human history.  It's a good exercise for the imagination.  So I should clarify that the stories that bother me the most are the ones that are direct documentaries, especially of primates, that try to sell them as people when they're not.

So anyway, people are at the center of storytelling, because people are the origin of stories we tell.  I also believe that God is a storyteller, and that he has imparted stories to us, and that our penchant for storytelling is part of His image in us, but that does not detract from the centrality of people in our storytelling.

I've said all this to contextualize why doing your characters right is as important to the world you build with your story as diction and word choice.  It's also not one of the things you think about when you think "world-building."  That phrase conjures to mind the imagining of geography and infrastructure and special laws outside the ones that govern our universe.

But all that mind-blowing stuff has no meaning and no purpose when not considered through the lens of character.  It's hard for me to say this.  I love world-building for the sake of it.  Coming up with places and types of magic and different political systems is really fun.  But I realize that if you don't have a character who reacts to the circumstances you've invented for him (or her, or it) you don't have a story.  You just have a world.  And it's harder to sell or spread the word about a world you built aside from within a story.  You need a medium to convey the world you've carved in your mind.  That's where the art comes in, and fantasy writing relates to world-building as a medium for that creation you've done.

In the series I worked on for most of my adolescence, called Talas Ke, there are two characters who come from (a slightly alternate version of) Earth, but spend the vast majority of the series on Talas Ke, the world I built.  They bring all their prejudices, experiences, memories, mannerisms, and so on from Earth with them, and view the differences of Talas Ke in light of that paradigm.  It's a fairly common formula, and because I started writing it when I was about twelve I wrote to discover, building the world as I went.  Looking back, I see the world-building and storytelling I did when I first wrote that story as sloppy and sometimes ill-conceived, but I've been told by many of those who've read it that it works.  Why?

Because they cared about the characters.  I plunged my characters into the world that I had made, as shoddily as I might have made it, and made them live it.  Because they lived it, and they reacted as fully as I could make them react, and as fleshed out as I could make them, I had invested readers.

Now, as I reflect to friends and family on my disappointments with that story, and express my need to revise it to a tremendous extent, I likely have some disappointed, invested readers.  It's because of them that I haven't given up on Talas Ke and intend to return to the world soon, to finish what I started almost ten years ago.  It's also because, in my slightly-insane writerly way, I owe it to those characters to finish their story.

Most of my short stories fail because I can't give the characters the roundness they need.  Epic, mainstream, AAA endeavors in writing or in film fall short because the characters aren't written true to themselves and to the world.  And do you know why the Avengers was such an awesome movie?  Why it's a record-breaker?  It's because Whedon wrote the characters well, and gave them their fullness to live in the world that was made.  If the characters weren't well written, they couldn't have been well-acted, and then no amount of fancy special effects shots could have saved the movie.

If you agonize over anything when you're writing, let it be the characters.  If you believe the characters, you'll believe the story, even if the world-building sucks or is just plain mind-raping.  Homestuck, as another example, has characters I am invested in for better or for worse, and it's that investment that has me reading through all the appearifying antics and yellow yards.  Characters are why I'm still reading the Wheel of Time series, and why after the first season of Game of Thrones I wiki-walked through what remains of the story, and might even read the remaining books as they are released.  They're also why A Song of Ice and Fire hurts me deeply to consume as a story, because it punishes you for caring about characters.

And if it sounds too painful to agonize over your characters, know that it gets better over time.  Maybe it's because you get more heartless, or maybe it's coming to terms, but unless you're a children's author you're very likely going to kill off a character you love at some point when you're writing.

I'd give some pithy saying, like "invest in your characters, and..." but I can't come up with the second half.  So just that.  If you're telling a story, invest in your characters, then build your world for them.

Plugs of a Shameless Nature

For starters, my Mac has been much less of a diva today.  That's really all there is to say on the matter.  Now go read/play/consume Homestuck.  Unless you're squeamish about certain content, in which case don't.  Play a tower defense game instead.

Speaking of that, I spent a while yesterday and today playing a game called Kingdom Rush.  It's a tower defense game, and the best animated and most entertaining one I've played (though I'm not exactly an expert in the field of tower defensology).  I used to play Bloons, and that was fun, but Kingdom Rush has a story mode, universal upgrades, challenge modes, and a fantasy motif.  You just....  You just can't beat that.

If you'll excuse me, my wife and I are going to eat chicken strips and fries while we watch an episode of Voyager.

I hope you are experiencing a similar sort of bliss.

shrug off

BIRTHDAY FEVER

So it's my birthday.  I was born twenty-two years ago today.  This is probably the first birthday I will spend not anticipating some sort of party, or some other shenanigans.  I feel like being a mature adult and just kind of going on with my life.

There's a sullen pit in there, somewhere, that wants nicely wrapped presents.  Maybe an iPhone or something stupid like that?  Video games.  The point being there's some part of me that wants stuff because that's what I got every birthday for a lotta years.

I don't particularly like that part of me, though I have come to terms with the fact that giving and receiving gifts is one of the languages that speak to me.  So I guess I'm actually spending quite a bit of this nonplussed at myself.

I'm also spending it reading Homestuck because HOLY CRAP HOW AM I NOT CAUGHT UP YET.

I am about to commence with feverish writing time for Workshop, then feverish bored/anxious time while I listen to speeches, and then feverish dishes-doing, and then feverish meatloaf eating, and then feverish I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO WHERE IS MY LIFE.  The latter will likely take place in my office, and I will probably be doing it late into the night.

So I guess, maybe, I have birthday fever?

I miss home.  I miss my college friends already.  Life is a weird thing.  I'm not even very unhappy.  Just a jumble of annoyance and excitement and contentment and discontentment all rolled into the semblance of a guy who needs to shave.

I'm gonna go write now.

-shrug-

I WROTE THIS IN PAGES BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS DUMB

I’m writing this blog on my word processor because the internet is being SO MANY BUTTS RIGHT NOW.  I mentioned a while back that I’m a bit, well, stuck on Homestuck.  This thing has only been going for—what—three years?  It’s huge.  A huge, labyrinthine timey wimey mindsplosion of amazing things.  Did I mention convoluted?  Because it is that.  To the point of hella.  Which is not an adjective a writer should use when speaking in his own voice.

Don’t judge me.  I have a degree.

Or I will in, like, two weeks.  I wrote eeks at first.  Did you know all you really need for a bachelor’s degree in writing is to frighten a couple mice?

On more serious topics, I punched myself in the face again today.  The unpleasantry was my own fault, and I hope it gave you a great deal of happiness.  Or, once again, whatever perverse name you have for what you feel when you watch a guy hit himself.

-shrug-

No wait!  I’m not done with the blog yet!  I did more than Homestuck and face punching today!  I also worked on those things I need to get done to accomplish that elusive goal I have set, without which my life is pretty much over.  There will be worse things to see than face-punching if I’m not BA by the end of May.

The Shallows is an interesting book, and I’m glad I was forced to read it for a class—for what that’s worth.  As a result of a speech I’m writing for my other class, incidentally, I fully intend to drastically increase my deep reading (or reading of physical books, or whatever you want to call the old way of doing things) so as to balance that part of my brain with the internet part that’s been getting stuffed full for the last four years.

Also, this week I should be downloading the client for Guild Wars 2, which has a Beta Weekend Event this weekend.  Wow that was redundant.  At any rate, I hereby bind myself by bloggery forespeech that I will not play the game until I’ve got my reading, a good amount of research, and one of those pesky papers out of the way.  It’s an undertaking, but with a juicy, delicious prize like GW2 waiting for me, I shall not want for motivation.  

It doesn’t hurt that if I don’t play the game, my wonderful wife certainly will, and enjoy it immensely.  I can enjoy it vicariously through her if necessary.

I think my rambling is finished for the day.  

-shrugs off-

Don't Hurt Me

I realize that yesterday's utilitarian blog ended up being the blog for the day. Maybe later I'll make a face-punch video to make up for that. Tonight, I'm just gonna blog about how I need to write a speech and memorize it for a week from now, and I still have no idea what I'm going to talk about.

I'm thinking maybe music copyright or something. I really don't know.

Meanwhile, I have a growing addiction to that one horrendously complex "webcomic" I mentioned a couple days ago. So complicated. So weird. So addicting.

And once again, all I really wanna do is drop everything and write. Gee golly goodness, maybe I'll just pull some all-nighters or something.

That's all I have to say. Seriously, I've got work to do. Sorry.

-shrug-

Is This Even Really a Webcomic?

Can't talk. Too busy reading(?) Homestuck. It's fantastic. Only downsides are the occasional vulgarity and foul language. Short of that, it's just sheer excellence. I've been quietly nerding out over it all day.

It's both the way the world builds slowly in intensity and the way the author plays around with the narrative that hook me. I can't really explain it now that I'm smack dab in the middle. Well actually, I think I can explain it in two words:

Liminal fantasy. You see, liminal fantasy is when there is the realm of the fantastic and the realm of the mundane, and these two realms bleed into each other throughout the story. Like all good fantasies, Homestuck isn't really hard and fast on the liminal line. There's the fact that it's cartoony to begin with, then there's the whole super complex thing with captchaloguing (I don't think I spelled that right) that's there from before things start getting intrusion-of-the-fantastic all up in there. But I think it's really well done for a comic(?) hosted on a site called MSpaintadventures.

So yeah, that's enough talking about it, now it's time to get back to reading.