It’s my birthday. And I’m not really one of those people who are on the other side of 30 and have decided that they don’t like their birthdays.
We age one second at a time, not one year at a time, so I didn’t all of a sudden gain a year because today is my birthday. I think these days are good for self-reflection and deciding where to go next. You know, like what everybody says New Year’s Eve is for but no one ever does it.
That’s what I did today: thought about my past and future.
It’s April Fool’s day, which is my least favorite of holidays. Always has been. My birthday is the second, and while weather or not I’m funny is subjective, I do attempt a lot of jokes and try to make them actually land. These factors have always led to me having a giant target on my back durning April Fool’s.
Also, sites have calcified into making joke posts and announcements today. That’s the one that really grates. None of them are funny, and they all attempt to be “wacky” by just announcing something that’s simply more interesting than what the site or company normally does.
It’s like we create an alternative reality for one day, but one with more mirth and whimsy than our own. Then the calendar turns to the second and we are left back where we started but now with a contrast point of what could have been.
And the worst part of this is that the underlying joke of those posts is “this is so ridiculous! Who could ever believe it?!” Me, I’d like to believe it and I’m not stupid for doing so.
The now defunct ThinkGeek fell into this trap all the time. They’d announce “joke” products that were head and shoulders more interesting than what they were normally producing and get shammed by the community to actually start producing some of that stuff.
Today hundreds of tiny windows to gentler world are going to be opened by cynics, and then slammed shut with a practiced eye roll, and joyless, “but we’d never really do this. No one would really want it.”
So no, as someone who tries to make others laugh, I don’t fucking like April Fool’s Day. I’m going to stay off the net as much as I can, and I suggest you do the same. Don’t click on the “New Episodes” tag Netflix sometimes puts up on Firefly. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
Quickly walked outside today. I haven’t been out of the house in days and wanted to clear my head. Probably need to put that back on the daily to do list.
I’ve been thinking about Novels a lot lately. It’s a medium that I’ve always wanted to work in but I’ve struggled to wrap my head around. Most of what I’ve done has either been scripts or short stories.
Some of the things I like to think about are what a novel is and what are the benefits of working in it as a medium actually are. (Other than the audience for novels being much larger than the audience for short stories or story collections.)
One of the things everyone will tell you is what novels are not: they are not short stories that you’ve just made bigger.
I’ve read this a lot, but I’ve never seen any follow up on what it means. But I was thinking about the differences between a novel and a screen play and part of the answer dawned on me. In novels, you have every scene you need.
Screen plays are fixed objects because they have to grid to the run time of a movie or tv show. Basically this means that a screen play can never exceed 180 pages of screen play formatted text. (This assumes the standard one page per minute of film and a cap of three hours for the over all movie.) This constraint is one of the factors that causes things to feel rushed or lack emotional depth.
If you ever not bought a character turn or where confused by a character’s actions, you’ve experienced this. The cause is that there were missing scenes to give context or motivate character change. Usually these scenes are cut out or not written in order to maintain narrative flow or get to a section with more exciting visuals. Movies and tv shows can only be so long therefore not every scene can exist to get to a complete story. Not every character, detail, or subplot can be served due these constraints.
Novels don’t necessarily have this problem. Because they don’t have a fixed length and aren’t rigidly formatted in the ways scenes are constructed, novels have the room to build up every element and justify every turn their characters make. They can have a scene for everything.
Does this mean that all novels do this? NOPE!
But it’s something to think about if you’re ever writing a novel and definitely something you should expect if you’re ever reading a novel.
I’ve been making maps this entire day and lost track of time. Almost didn’t make a post today. It’s been raining here all day and it’s really only been good for thinking about some other world and making a map for it.
I’m not usually this kind of guy, but I’ve been enjoying the new Inkarnate interface and I can finally make it do what I want it to do.
So that’s good.
So I finished this on Thursday and have been sitting on my feelings about it for a few days. First there a few things that I want to get out of way: One, I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I am going to spoil some things that happen in the first two episodes. Two, here’s my background with Star Trek: I don’t have a lot of clear memories of when I wasn’t a fan. I can’t speak any Klingon, but I can explain in detail how a Warp Drive actually functions.
In a nutshell, Star Trek Picard is like seeing your adult son after a long absence and now he has a face tattoo. You still love him, but boy that face tattoo sure is big!
Spoilers below here.
Face tattoos in this instance are the Federation of Planets being xenophobic, quick to anger, and willing to own slaves. These things can certainly be fodder for good story telling and conflict – I don’t think there were in this instance – but it mars the hopeful view of the future Star Trek was famous for.
That’s my biggest problem with this series. Now people might argue that getting rid of the hopefulness allows the show to be a better mirror of our “darker” times. Which it does and makes Star Trek a little more generic sci fi and hurting its ability to differentiate its self in a crowded market place. Also, while Star Trek has always commented on current or historical politics, it never did so directly in its series premises. Those were always in contrast to our current political leanings. Specifically, the 1960’s uncertainly with race relations and the cold war, and the 1980’s cynicism and callous money grabbing.
There also seems to be a lot of thought given to the fact that this move needed to be made because modern audiences don’t want to see that kind of hopefulness anymore. Seeing as this show was, on some level, cashing in on nostalgia, I’m going to call bullshit on that. Also, there’s an emerging genera called HopePunk, so there’s clearly a market for this kind of contrast.
Instead of leading that charge, it’s become a lot like every other sci fi property on the market, and I’m not sure who exactly this show is for, and I’m not sure what it does that everyone else isn’t doing better.
So it should come as no shock to anyone that I organize my life as a series of book cases, and sitting on top of this one was pile of cardboard pawns that I use for Dungeons and Dragons. Again, I had to wreck the room to get all of these either back in the boxes they go in or into a plastic bin that I used while I’m DM’ing for quick reveal.
This took longer than I hoped but not a long as I thought. And now we have this:
You’d think I’d be done, but this may never end.
I jumped into the SiteLeaf account to write about running this site for a month and posting every day. Turns out that was yesterday.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how things have been going, but it’s my blog damn it and I can be a long winded as I want.
Posting every day really hasn’t been that big of a deal and I’ve found that I’ve been able to fold it into my time fairly easily. When I go to write, I don’t dread it as I’ve done with other “blogging challenges.”
I put that in quotes because back in the day I used to give my self challenges to write every day for a month. I would make a big deal of it and I would write a review of each week during the challenge. And it was always a slog. In fact, I only finished one of those challenges once.
I thought the reason for this was that I was lazy. Turns out that was wrong. The fact that I wouldn’t write much on the blog was that I was building it up in my mind too much. It had to be too perfect. On my old blog, I was writing what I hoped were full articles and not simple posts. (These are very different in my mind. One is much more formal while the other is a simple update that you could see on any social media service.)
What I’m trying to do with this site is a simple sketch pad for me be play with ideas in a public space and to be a signaling system for what I’m working on each day. That every simple mission statement takes a lot of pressure off of me to be perfect and allows be the freedom to just get on with it.
I look forward to updating this site and have done some multiple times in a day, which was unthinkable on my last blog. This, to me, is the purest expression of what blogging is: personal updates about what’s happening in a persons life right now. Writing online should be about freedom and not a dreaded chore.
Because of that, I think I’ve actually written a few posts that are of some interest and would have had a place at my old blog, but I have been posting them at a higher frequency than I ever did on my other site.
This all said, I’ve written enough of these self-congratulatory posts to fear what comes next: the months long silence followed by the “it’s been a while” post. Somehow I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that this time, but we’ll see. All I can do is open this window again, sooner rather than later, and start typing. No pressure.
Operation: Oh-Shit-I-Need-To-Clean-The-Floor seems to have gone well. The comics are now in storage and I have a lot more space in the office closet. For what? Fuck knows, that’s not my job right now.
I’m just trying to clean up this space so it isn’t depressing to be in here and do some actual work. More on the actual work at a later date.
Have reached the point where I can no longer walk around freely. Floor is covered. Going to process single issue comics and put them in storage. At some point this will free up space. Or so I hope.