All entries written in March, 2008
March 31, 2008 at 10:13 am · Filed under Personal, Thoughts
I have this habit, and I understand a lot of writers have this habit, where I write down ideas that come to me suddenly on little scraps of paper. This is a useful thing to do when something strikes you out of the blue, and you don’t have access to your computer or your main, normal-sized notebook. But having many scraps of paper to keep track of when you’re primarily a computer-based writer just compounds the notebook problem of having to type everything into your records later. Often, I can expand on my original ideas this way and create truly fantastic results (sometimes I can get several pages from a single scrap of paper), but it still more than doubles my work time.
I’ve tried to stop myself from keeping so many longhand records, but there’s really nothing I can do about it. I can’t just let a good idea slip by when it comes to me, and in the end, I’m always glad to do the work I do, but at this point I’ve got such a backlog of things to type in, I don’t see how I’ll ever catch up. Taking these notes is no good if they get lost forever. I keep them in a little Ziploc baggie by my computer to prevent them from getting mixed in with the trash by accident–this baggie taunts me with its morbid obesity. And I always have better things to do.
Still, I had to start a second baggie this weekend (a third, if you count the original big one). I need help.
March 30, 2008 at 7:34 pm · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
Welp, it finally happened. While I was away visiting my parents for Easter last weekend, I saw a commercial for one of those mail-order “greatest hits” compilation CDs that contains songs I recognize. Well, I mean, plenty of those kinds of CDs have songs that I know of on them, but this one actually plays songs I liked back in high school and junior high, when they were just getting popular. Like, getting radio play for the first time.
I’m not sure if this should make me feel old, or just indignant that my teenage years have been co-opted by MusicSpace. In any case, I’ve finally found a cheesy nostalgia mix in a genre I know well enough to catch all the mistakes–some of those songs really should not be on there.
March 29, 2008 at 9:28 am · Filed under Reviews, Thoughts
I guess this counts as a review. Anyway, I woke up this morning and turned on my TV, which I’d left on the WB last night after watching Family Guy. Immediately, I saw a commercial for an upcoming episode of Legion of Superheroes, a show I sampled at its premiere and found boring. But the promo got me interested enough to hang around for the episode, primarily because it dropped the name of Imperiex, who I guess has probably been in the show for a while. I wondered if Legion had been pulling a Teen Titans behind my back (i.e., getting better than it seemed at first).
Turns out no. I watched the show dying for it to live up to its potential, but not only was this version of Imperiex flat and uninteresting, even scenes like the death of Superman had kind of a laundry list quality to them. Nobody seems to have a real personality or an engagement in the events around them, and even Brainiac-5, the guy the camera is on most often, only seems to be able to express himself through cliched, boring dialogue. Maybe I would be more into it if I’d watched this long arc from the beginning, but I didn’t need any backstory to become involved in Teen Titans‘ Trigon arc, and that one actually made me want to go back and catch up!
Basically, watching Legion of Superheroes again reminded me of why I’d let it go in the first place–there are just too many characters. The writers don’t have enough space in a half-hour episode to invest any of them with personalities or give any of them due attention. Hell, I didn’t even come away sure of anybody’s name (beyond the obvious ones, I mean). Maybe in a lesser story arc, they boil it down to a core five or six and work with them more closely, I don’t know (the opening credits imply that this is possible), but if there was any history behind the main members of the team, it didn’t come off in their interplay, or even their dialogue. At least you could always get a sense of the sexual tension between Robin and Starfire in Teen Titans.
Bottom line–I wouldn’t recommend this show, and unless someone tells me something I don’t know, I don’t think I’ll be going back to examine any older episodes, either. It just bores me, but the worst part is that the potential was there. Legion of Superheroes could have used some of the more daring and precedent-breaking portions of the Superman comics timeline as its fuel, but if this Imperiex episode was any indication, it let the chance pass it by.
March 17, 2008 at 9:09 am · Filed under Announcements
Yup, it’s official! A River of Darkness will begin its run on the site this Friday, 3/21! There will be a new chapter every Friday from then on, until the story is over. I’ll try and keep you posted, and to continue leaving those “coming soon” comments I started with toward the end of Bad Company. No matter what, though, I hope you enjoy the story.
See you on Friday!
March 16, 2008 at 1:31 pm · Filed under Reviews, Thoughts
This is one of those games that you used to see all the time on the $9.99 rack at Best Buy, alongside its brother, Dark Fall: The Journal (which I have yet to find). Being the second and thus the more recent one in the series, Lights Out is the easier title to find now, but that’s not saying much. My copy came from a Best Buy in Long Island City, and there were at least two more there, if anyone’s interested.
And anyone should be! This game is fantastic. The only reason it’s sold in a jewel case for $9.99 is that adventure games are even less popular and common now than they were a few years ago–and this, once again, is not saying much. Except for Myst, adventure games have never really caught on with a large audience. I myself get the urge to play them about once a year, usually at the dawn of spring. I had been meaning to pick up the Dark Falls since forever ago, but somehow I never got around to it, and now they’re impossible to find without ordering online. But this game was worth the time I spent looking for it.
I got it last week and just finished it this morning. Like the reviewer at the wonderful Just Adventure site whose article first made me want to buy the game, I’m not going to give anything away–in fact, I recommend that you don’t even read the back of the case! Even in the first few minutes of play, you find out that the environment is so much more than it seems. The game is nonlinear, which means there are several orders in which you can uncover the details, and I’d venture to say that any of these possibilities will be satisfying to you.
Here’s the big thing I want to mention, though: I think my way of going through the game was arguably the most satisfying, but I shouldn’t even have been able to do it! Due to what appears to be a bug right near the very beginning, I was able to play the whole game out of order, and finish things up while still skipping two major puzzles! I got what I needed from them in other ways, and though I had the idea that I must be missing something, since I reached the endgame with open spots in my inventory and one item never used, I figured those sections must have been optional.
For anyone who’s played it, click the protected entry below to read a less vague description of what happened to me. For the rest of you–go buy this game, play it, and then click the protected entry for a less vague description. I’ve done it this way to give anyone who might want to play the game for themselves ample time to back out, and to minimize the possibility of reading the spoilers accidentally. Lights Out deserves to be bought, played, and enjoyed firsthand. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still think my story is cool enough to tell.
Anyway, here’s a proper ending to the pose for anyone who didn’t switch to the protected one–Lights Out is good. It’s like reading a book you can interact with. The story is well-told however you discover it, and the in-game text (of which there is a lot, so be prepared) is very well-written and imagined, though the proofreading could admittedly use some work. This is one of those games you can very easily get lost in. I know I did–where the hell did this weekend go?
March 16, 2008 at 1:26 pm · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
Enter your password to view comments
March 15, 2008 at 10:17 am · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been out of town, and then I was working on…well, perhaps a little bit of backstory is in order.
One of my non-School Kids SG projects lately has been organizing my music; it was an idea brought on when I bought my iPod. This might not sound like a creative project to you, but trust me–it is. In particular, I’ve been organizing, naming, and, occasionally, writing about the 5 years’ worth of mix CDs I made during the time I was at or orbiting Bard. My idea was to put together an aural history of my Bardian years.
Except that I found I was missing one crucial CD. And while I was out of town visiting my parents, I finally found it–it had been lost for several years.
Keep reading….
March 4, 2008 at 7:17 pm · Filed under Misc, Thoughts
Continuing a series of posts in which I make fun of minor TV news typos, please find this announcement about Obama and McCain being projected as the winners in Vermont, seen on my MSN homepage just now. But what’s really interesting is their apparent longevity! (And they said McCain might be too old to run for president now!) Prepare to be amazed as you bear witness to this report from the far-flung year of twenty-thousand and eight!
March 3, 2008 at 9:01 am · Filed under Announcements
So. Hi.
March 3rd was the day I said my vacation would be over, but I actually got the site code fixed last weekend. Basically, everything now always sits 47 pixels from the left in Firefox, and everything always sits all the way on the left in IE, but it’s consistent at all resolutions. I mean, don’t try to view the site in a teeny, tiny window in either browser, but no site can shrink proportionally beyond a certain point.
Beyond that, though, there are going to be some changes around here. I’ve known for some time that the current system wasn’t working, so I’m going to change it. The original reason I opened this site as a blog was so that I could use it as a blog in addition to posting and promoting my stories, but somehow I lost sight of that. But ever since I stopped putting pressure on myself to appear professional all the time and keep a rigid schedule no matter what, I’ve actually found myself writing more than before, and looking forward to posting some of it here for the first time in months. Some of these posts have even been the most honest, and thus, to me, the most interesting, posts I’ve ever written; these are the ones with passwords on them (join the SKSG Facebook page or email me for the passwords).
The point is this: forget about schedules, reportage-style reviews, and a constant, predictable flow of content. Even I don’t know what’s going to happen now, but so far, the site has been better for my letting it happen. It’s been a long winter, but now I can smell Spring again, and I think it’s time I started having fun with what I do here. It’s time I let whoever is reading this thing get to know me better, in all my craziness and randomness. That was the original purpose of the site, and I’m not sure how I got so caught up in removing myself and staying professional that I forgot about that, but it’s never too late to change.
So subscribe to that RSS feed! If past history is any indication, I’ll probably have both fast periods and slow periods, but I can’t pin them down to specific days anymore, which means live bookmarking is probably the way to go if you want to stay up-to-date with when I’m posting here. And I hope you do–blog pages get lonely when you have no one to share them with.
Oh, and A River of Darkness is coming very soon. That I’ll post Friday to Friday just like always–I have the luxury of doing that with stories that are already complete ahead of time. I’ll post an announcement when it’s about to start; I hope you enjoy it!
March 2, 2008 at 9:53 am · Filed under On SKSG, Thoughts
When my spell checker scanned across the word “Midlogue” in the base file of Blood and Brotherhood, I clicked “Add to Dictionary.” I did the same for some of the more bizarre character names. But yes–new language has been created!
What’s funniest about spell-checking any of my books is how the list of caught words turns into a long string of onomatopoeias toward the end, after I’ve already clicked “Ignore All” on most of the common unreal words, like “ain’t” or “lemme” (as in “lemme go!”). For A River of Darkness, it was almost literally “Waaaaugh! Aaah! Guh! Haaaaa!” for something like the last 50 pages. I laughed.
Older entries »
