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Sunday already

Work on Friday was a bit of a long day.  One of the people I worked with last time is thinking she might want my help for summer, so that could be useful.  The hour and a half commute each way is very annoying; John has suggested a few things.  Heading in early, hitting the gym or a coffee shop, and working out or getting writing done.

Both would be nice. Either would be nice, honestly, although I admit I am lacking faith in my carrying through with either.

Reading Sarah Monette makes me hopeful.  Sone of the things she writes are like the kind of things I would like to write.  It is just nice to see that it can be done, although its a leap from there to my being able to do it. The words I got out yesterday are annoying me; I’m trying to work myself up to finishing the damn thing. Maybe I will come across a tone or style that makes sense for it and then I will at least know how to pare down and shape up what I have.

I know what I want it to be about. It is just a near-impossible jump from there to plot, apparently.

Still. Better done than not done? And if I make progress I can celebrate by taking an hour to go find Harold or something. Fallout 3 is not as good as New Vegas, I am finding, but Harold and Dogmeat help a lot.

Notes from a dying laptop.

Huh.  822 words in just a bit under 57 minutes.  I think that’s actually pretty close to the “two hundred and fifty words every quarter hour.”  Mind, half of them need to be dragged out and shot, but there are words!

Had an interesting discussion about Dale (of Walking Dead), Glen Bateman (of The Stand), and Bobby (from Supernatural) with John, earlier today.  I was frustrated because I didn’t have quite the right words for them, and couldn’t pin down the common elements.  (Besides, you know, all three of them have made me cry once.  Damn characters.)

It’s hard to get into this without getting into spoilers, and my laptop is telling me “shut it down, dummy, you have 8 minutes left”, but the end result of the discussion was that we started with the idea of father figures and what they mean the hero has to do, and from there went through the concept of homemakers on to culture heros, tricksters, and civilizing influences.  TV Tropes has failed me, and that’s okay, because while it’s a nice thing to check in on occasionally I am actually perfectly fine with opinions that aren’t pre-listed on it.  (Still need a better breakdown of pet monster idea, too.)

4 minutes power left, warning light blinking, more later.

First, the hook…

A brief digression on story hooks.

There’s this thing Fallout does–all four RPGs, I mean.  I can’t speak to Tactics.  You start out with an important goal, and once you’ve done it, the elements of the world you were travelling through coalesce and you have the second bigger goal.  (You find the water chip, but the important thing is now to deal with the Master. You find get the GECK for your village, but the important thing is now to deal with the Enclave. You find out who shot you and why, but the important thing is now the second Battle of Hoover Dam and the ultimate fate of New Vegas.)

What’s important, I think, is that the first goal is not irrelevant; you do not fail at it, you never discover it didn’t matter.  But the process of achieving it results in you learning about the world, and gives you a chance to care about the second goal.  It’s interesting; and as far as I can tell, it’s fairly unique in video games.  I mean, I need to play more of them, but…

I’m not sure the technique would work as well in written stories or movies; the involvement is a bit more distant.  Still, possibly bits of it are adaptable.  Will keep an eye out for examples.

Lightning and lightning bugs.

Was thinking of movie commentary in the car this morning, and of Return of the Living Dead, and something that’s been in my head on and off came to mind:  Why isn’t there a word that defines what gender you’re attracted to, but doesn’t do so in relation to you?

I mean, the movie has a striptease scene in a graveyard, and part of the commentary (or possibly an interview I read once; regardless) is along the lines of “Yeah, we did this for the guys… If we’d known there would have been so many girls in the audience, we’d have put in eye candy for them too.”

Which is actually kind of nice to hear, but that’s a tangent–what I’m trying to address right now is that the group meeting the definition of “finds women attractive” is not the same as the group that meets the definition of “guys”.  (And yes, I get that the movie is nearly thirty years old, I am perfectly aware of colloquial assumptions, I know there is a long habit of going with the “everyone is straight until proven otherwise” assumption, and I think it’s at best a bit of a lazy and horribly erasing habit but that is neither here nor there.  So.)

So what is the word or term for people who are attracted to men or women?  As humans we tend to label and categorize and articulate; I can’t believe that there hasn’t been a term a little less unwieldy than “straight women and gay men and bisexuals of either any or all genders” created yet.  I doubt it’s a perfect term, because one of the other things we tend to do is simplify and generalize, but there has to be something.

And am I completely missing something?  Christ knows it’s possible–this knapsack is invisible, but it does one hell of a job as a pair of blinders.

Thoughts?

Edited to note:

The terms exist! They are androphile and gynophile.

Inertia

I’ve been thinking for most of the month that I should start posting again. I liked the regular writing, and beyond that, the (admittedly small) amount of structure it imposed.

I’ve been thinking I should start posting again, but as many wise people have said, thinking is not doing.

So here I am writing again. Not really high on content right now, but… Well, the words are all spelt right and assembled correctly, so that’s a start. Onwards.

The Curse of the Forgotten Fedora

http://orringrey.com/2012/01/10/the-curse-of-the-forgotten-fedora/

I an pleased to see that the use of sartorial cues with regards to life events has not completely fallen by the wayside since its use in “It Happened Tomorrow” (which is surely not the last use of it, but one I remember most clearly).

(Working on coming back. Horrible holiday season.)

American Horror Story, the embarrassment

Sitting down to watch episode eleven of AHS, and the psychic has just explained about the draw of the house.  The words “paramagnetic force” and “physics” were involved.  And…

I don’t think I have ever heard a more mood-breaking description of the dry-cell battery of evil.  And I have heard some really bad ones.  (And read them, but for the sake of the discussion, those are also covered in this complaint.)  It was …embarrassing.  And the description of the Roanoke colony, and the banishment curse, and… gah. Continue reading “American Horror Story, the embarrassment”

Slinking back in.

It’s not much god to say it now, but I’ve been busy. Obviously.

Light of my life got me the new Fright Night on DVD on Saturday. Very pleased.

Way way behind on my TV, partly due to lack of Walking Dead and partly due to Steam and partly due to the holiday crunch. I thought is escaped it, and then wham! But I’m making it through.

Best to any and all of you, and see you, at the latest, on the other side

Goddamn. O.o

Think I can safely say that’s the longest stretch of quiet since I started this thing, and am really glad that it was still only a three-day silence.

Not getting enough sleep.  Work’s coming on, carrying on, I’m getting to start to work on the second stage of the process as  well as the first… or the second-and-fourth as well as the first-and-third.  Got a bunch of holiday cards written and addressed.  Completely failed to get to bed early any of the nights I said I was going to, and did I mention not getting enough sleep?  Sleep debt, FTR, is distinctly unfun.  I’m running on about 5.5 hours last night, right now, and that’s not the first short night this week.

Lord I’m tired.  >.<

Managed to finish a couple of books this weekend; still not at the 83 I wanted to read this year, but getting way closer.

Need to head out soon.  Will try and find time to sketch up a couple of posts at work today, sit down and actually type something once I get home.  The gap in content… I know this isn’t exactly a daily stop for anyone, but it’s still an embarrassing thing to not get it done, especially when I think I could have had the time if I’d planned better.

It’s much blacker than they smear it… (My name!)

Got to see Oliver today at the NAC. 🙂 It’s a preview show, which means they let the audience in, but the director and people are sitting in front taking notes on what needs changing, and the real real show isn’t on until Friday. Dress rehearsal writ large.

Pros: Nancy. Also Fagin and Charley, but Nancy was amazing. She was less starry-eyed than I’ve seen her played before[1], and it made “As Long As He Needs Me” a lot more touching; I hadn’t noticed the line When someone needs you,/You love them so quite so clearly before, or started to unpack it. It was much more a portrayal of a codependant adult than an ingenue.

Also, they had a magician consultant listed in the program (I will check the exact title shortly); I had no idea why, until “You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket or Two”, when there were silk scarves appearing and disappearing all over the stage, plus Dodger flicking a silk scarf up and suddenly holding a cane in “I’d Do Anything”, as if the fabric had unfolded into one. Seriously impressive, especially sitting in the fourth row from the stage. (Charley was doing most of it, I think; I actually went looking at the program expecting to find that he`d been the magician consultant.)

Cons: Casting an adult as Oliver made it a bit harder to swallow some of the lines, particularly the ones that refer to how small he is, and it was weird to see Dodger as smaller and slighter than Oliver, although the actress handled it really well. And I found that the mob scene and Bill’s death were rather quick and flat.

(A note: the last performance of Oliver that I saw involved Bill Sykes running from the maddened mob, a light-and-shadow show, and him eventually falling from a rookery, getting tangled in some lines hanging therefrom, and strangling. Yes, onstage. It’s hard to top that.)

Flipside, the lingering on Charley and Bet picking up Nancy’s body to take it away was well-done. The program included a rather grim photo of group of children (identified only as “from the period”), and the tone of the picture–which I can, at the moment, only describe as being worn and possibly foredoomed–was notably not absent from the play. I mean, it didn’t overwhelm it–I can’t actually imagine a grim and foredoomed rendition of “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two”[2]–but it was there. Clearly not a setting where the greatest complaint children have is that the gruel is bland and a bit sparse, you know?

I was also rather surprised the Bill Sykes didn’t show up until the second act. Apparently that’s not unusual, so I suppose that’s more a reflection of how much the relationship between Bill and Nancy impressed me–has always impressed me about the story–than anything unusual about the staging.

—
[1] …and it’s beginning to occur to me that I’ve seen two performances of Oliver, but never the movie. May look into that, since the person I was with was observing that he thought the choreography was very like the movie.
[2] Okay, now I can. But I couldn’t before, and it’s still jarring.