3) New Zealand orcas attack great white sharks in the shallows, driving one onto the beach. Video.
4) Best of Literally Unbelievable for 2011. Part 1. Part 2.
6) Need a dedicated writing space? Live in Chicago. Check it out.
wasting time
Randomness for 12/5
Standard1) 5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think
3) Before and after Photoshop. (Hit the Toggle button)
4) Scholasticism of the Seventies.
5) Texts from Bennett. Hoh. Lee. Crap. via @laura_hudson
6) Skyrim reimagined as a Saturday morning cartoon in the 80’s. Video
7) Worst Nativity Sets. So many bad choices here, it’s tough to single out just one. Naked trolls? Bacon and sausage? Mexican mermaids? Damn, that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Five Things Make a Friday Post
Standard1) For folks who are still waiting for the Twenty Palace prequel, I have already self-published a number of short stories and novellas. None of them are in the 20P universe, but one is a historical fantasy set near Seattle in 1879, and the rest are second world fantasies. Some have never been published anywhere else: Kindle | Nook
2) Note for folks who visit that B&N page: I’m not the photographer, and I’ve never published scraped text through Hephaestus Books
3) Today is my tenth anniversary. The traditional gift is an ebook, right?
4) Last night we had our anniversary dinner. We ate steaks from Don and Joe’s, roast beets, green beans, and fingerling potatoes, a fancy cheese that I lost the label for and can’t ID right now, a delicious tiny lemon cheesecake from The Confectional, and a bottle of Beringer Cab from 1997 that we bought for our wedding. Thumbs up to all of it.
5) My son read a D&D comic and now wants to play the game. Do I have time to run a fantasy campaign? Shit to the no.
Quick note before I become productive:
StandardSkyrim releases today, of course, and I was really taken by this article about it: Things I Ate In Skyrim.
See, I buy games used and play them after they’ve been out a while. I never go online, preferring single-player exploration of the world. I always play on easy.
There have been times when I tried online games, usually through my buddy Jim’s account. He’s tried to get me hooked on Dark Age of Camelot (has it really been ten years?) and City of Heroes. The latter almost worked, but luckily my home life is antithetical to online gaming; if it wasn’t I’d never do anything else.
I’m not exactly Mr. Moderation here.
But I sometimes buy used games and put them in. Recently I played LEGENDARY, which was an amazingly stupid game. I bought because “Call of Duty with monsters instead of Nazis” but yikes.
Lately I’ve been playing FABLES: THE LOST CHAPTERS (I think that’s the title, anyway). It’s sort of interesting and sort of dull. When I’m not playing it, I want to be. When I am playing it, I keep thinking about how much time I’m wasting. And I’m annoyed at the traders who keep clustering around me while I fight bandits and hobbes, when they should be clearing the fuck out. I’m getting devil points with my area effect attacks, assholes! Back off!
Anyway, I’m mentally comparing the epic fantasy novels I’m reading with the “story” in the game, and trying to figure out what I can learn from it. Not much, apparently.
It’s after 4 am and my cough won’t let me sleep
StandardAttention Google users: There’s no medical advice in this post.
I’ve been sleeping on the couch for two nights because I don’t want to keep my wife awake, but tonight I can’t even fall asleep on my own.
What’s more, I find that the extended edition DVDs of Lord of the Rings don’t include the theatrical version. I have to pay extra for both? I’d have been happy to forgo a NZ travelogue and a docu on the movies’ sound design for the theatrical versions, you jerks.
Screw this. I’m just going to work on my new book and to hell with going to sleep. I can pull an all-nighter like I used to do in college, right? Right?
Here’s a sleep-deprived poll about the wip: Secret lake city of the unexpectedly intelligent alligator creatures, yes or no?
Randomness for 10/13
StandardApparently, I’m a “special snowflake”
StandardI just returned from NW Bookfest where, on a panel, author Mark Teppo referred to urban fantasy authors who make up their own monsters as “special snowflakes.”
Well guess what? I am special, because I think UF has to open itself beyond the same stock supernatural characters if it’s going to survive long term.
I’m also a snowflake, in that I melt when you touch me with your tongue.
I hope that’s clear.
Some stuff about today
StandardWent to the U-District early this morning (as my son reckons things, at least) to attend the live broadcast of local NPR-affiliate show “Weekday.” The first hour was an interview with actor and storyteller Stephen Tobolowski, of The Tobolowski Files. He talked a little about playing a pedophile principal on GLEE, being naked on CALIFORNICATION, and about his play “Two Idiots in Hollywood.” Great show.
The music was provided by “Awesome”. I suspect we’ll have one of their CDs on order by the time I return home, although their music wasn’t really to my tastes. Fun, but not for me.
After the show, my wife and son went home and I visited pals at their theater. They run Wing-It Productions, and if you’re in the Seattle area, you should go to one or two of their shows. They’re great.
Neither of my buddies could duck out for impromptu lunch, so I swung by Half-Price Books and picked up a bunch of old computer games I shouldn’t have bought, then ate lunch, then… Jesus, is it really so late?
I pretty much blew off the whole day, and I have NW Bookfest to attend tomorrow.
Crap. I’m supposed to be a writer, aren’t I? Writing things? Double crap.
Well, maybe I can accomplish something right now…
Randomness for 8/20
Standard1) Interview of a One-Year-Old Child. Video. Way funnier than it sounds.
2) Moebius did concept art for the movie WILLOW. Check out the art design that could have been.
3) Astonishing bike stunts in abandoned industrial facility. Video. Music’s nice, too.
5) Everything you need to know about the video game industry in one graphic.
6) The 10 Most Brutal Moments in ‘The Savage Sword of Conan’!
Story doesn’t matter.
StandardSome filmmaker friends are tearing into the quotes from a Disney exec in this article. Essentially, he’s saying that Disney is going to pull back and focus on big, expensive tent-pole movies. It’s the only kind of film that makes sense with the marketing budget they need to bring in really huge numbers of people. (Added later: this particular exec doesn’t actually greenlight films, so here’s a grain of salt.)
He’s also saying that, for this kind of movie, audiences don’t care that much about the story. They like the big budget spectacle, and if the story doesn’t hold together, well, that’s a secondary consideration.
Frankly, I find it hard to refute him. He points to ALICE IN WONDERLAND (which made a billion dollars?? Really?) and I point to TRANSFORMERS. The writer of the article brings up TRON: LEGACY, which had lots of spectacle, a crappy story, and which failed at the box office, but honestly, we can all point to the reasons any individual movies drew (or failed to draw) a big audience after the fact. Everyone thinks they can Monday morning quarterback surprise hits and flops, but no one can predict it reliably.
Personally, I’d love to know what’s driving the success of those movies, but I haven’t seen them. I watch some of them on DVD when they hit the library, but in the theater? Not so much.
However! There is an ongoing TV series that a lot of people really enjoy with plenty of spectacle (on a TV budget), a large and enthusiastic fanbase, and really awful stories. I mean, dumb stories that don’t make any sense at all, or that seem spackled together with bullshit and “Hurry past, don’t pay attention here”. And that’s DOCTOR WHO.
I quit the show when I realized that too often the “stories” were an arrangement of emotion-tugging moments with only the most spurious connection to each other. A really good story will evoke powerful emotions, but if that can’t be managed, the moments themselves can be strung together (“My friend is in danger!” “This is worse that I thought!” “You don’t scare me, Villain Of This Episode!” “Thank goodness you have been safely rescued, Friend!” “Oh, I stare stonily at the terrible cost of battling evil!”). Even without the context of a sensible, well-crafted story, those moments can force emotional responses from our well-trained brains.
Isn’t that what these big “tentpole” movies are doing? They mix spectacle with specific emotion-tugging moments (cue long-withheld hug from father), and if the story makes sense, well, that’s just a little extra gravy.
That’s how it seems to me, and as a person who creates (and tries to sell) stories, this is something I need to figure out.