"Mean" Steve's Fagblog

Addendum to previous.

2009-10-21T18:13:22Z

I don't know why I didn't mention the whole story/gameplay segregation/integration issues that keep coming up in games.

Half-Life 2 is praised for its tight storytelling, when it's in actuality no different than games like Marathon or Metal Gear Solid in which all action comes to a complete grinding halt while you read or listen to the exposition. Hell, one of the scientists in HL2: Episode 2 even lantern-hangs this by stating outright that he's spewing an expository monologue! How is this honestly any different than earlier games which give you background data as plaintext during a between-levels loading screen.

Certain games that are very story-heavy end up becoming interactive novels, to the point where the game seems like an afterthought to both the creator and the player (again, Marathon, MGS and HL2), the player though is so compelled by the story that he's compelled to continue through it, to slog though muddy, repetitive, boring gameplay (MGS3) just to finish the story.

Metal Slug didn't have much of an established story, forcing the player to imagine in the holes. Dictator on the rampage, Vest Dudes and Cutie Girls gotta fight him. Dictator sides with Mars People. In a move nobody saw coming, Mars People turn on Dictator. BLOW UP RADLY-RENDERED STUFF! That's basically all there is to it. Each character onscreen has a unique appearance and mannerism. This is what advertising copy-writers refer to as "story appeal."

Is this entirely "better" than the rigidly-defined characters from the "deeper" interactive novels? That's entirely up to the viewer. I will say this: Fio is still way-cuter than Alyx.

- Also -
Stealthoff!
Hitman vs MGS vs Splinter Cell. Also featuring Wolfenstein and 005 (A Game in Three Acts)

"New" show idea.

2009-10-20T10:22:10Z

This is an idea I've been kicking around for the past few weeks and trying to stitch down, streamline and get done right with a minimum of capital invested on my end.

First things first, I found some sweet shit on the Ebay that I intend on buying once I get this round of bills paid off. Wireless Lav kit for 28$, a Behringer 502 4-input mixer for 15$ or 40$ One Click Buy It Now and a Cheapy USB2 capture device for 32$. I'm a fan of Newegg and I prefer to do business with them for some reason. They've treated me right in the past and I'll continue to do business with them. I digress.

Why do I need this stuff? Well, here's my plan:

I intend on doing a little web show of episodes no longer than six minutes each in which I travel to pawn shops, used stores and thrift shops and track down bizarre, unusual, weird, unknown/underappreciated and totally sweet games. The show will be half travelogue / half video game / media series.

But here's the twist: It's not going to be a review show per se. No Yahtzee-style can't-enjoy-anything criticism, no Seanbaby-style non-sequitur ranting, no Nostalgia Critic-style low-production-values-bullshit-that's-somehow-beloved-by-tens-of-thousands-of-mouthbreathing-cretins* low-charisma idiocy.

No. I've decided to adopt the kind of stylistic direction as Anthony Bourdain's series "No Reservations" in which the camera follows me as I discuss geography and history and tie it into a game I'd found, all the while holding a sort of wisty, nostalgic tone to my narration and voice, in stark contrast to the way I imagine everybody else imagines my literary voice; as more of a gibbon dangling from a vine, hooting excitedly and throwing half-chewed mango at passersby.

We then transition to actually playing the game and discussing how it affects me, as an individual in that primal, lizard-brain instant-gratification center that videogames are intended to touch a person. At least that's what I'm told. I do recall in fourth grade being asked by the school psychologist to show him on the doll where exactly Super Mario Bros. 2 touched me.

In this series I eschew any pretense I have at being some kind of illuminated, intellectual, liberal art-school graduate and revert to my roots as what I think is a state of zen; a well-read, hard-fightin', well-traveled, storied, hard-drinkin', passionate desert-dwelling hillbilly that "grew up" with video games as a parental surrogate. Instead of presenting myself as one of the well-dressed web video assholes with a sportcoat and tie, I'll buck the trend by wearing beat-up old BDU trousers, slogan t-shirts (ZU-related homemade stencils or screenprints) and aloha shirts. I also have this totally sweet black cowboy hat. Your hat is a pussy, Yahtzee.

I've watched enough travelogues on the Travel Channel to understand how to shoot, compose, edit and tone a travelogue. It'll be difficult at first to do the shooting, lighting and audio gathering myself, so chances are, for this thing to be something great, I'll have to troll Craigslist for a PA.

I've been fiddling around with a neat screencasting utility to actually grab the video being displayed on my monitor as a video file. I'll do this for emulated games. The video capture device is for capturing video from my varied consoles. I even saw a neat homebrew kit for capturing video from a DS (original generation, so note-to-self, score one used).

Recurring jokes:
- Thrown controller montage.
- Any time I give an actual criticism of a game, it instantly cuts away to some cute girl giving a very hostile and disappointed line about my sexual prowess.
- Fightin' and Drinkin'. I have enough friends in my ju-jitsu and shootin'-stuff circles that can participate in punching me/getting punched by me as well as stage gunplay silliness. Also, I really like gin, this cannot be helped.
- Arrests. I have a friend in the Lyon County Sheriff's Office. Perhaps I can run a deal in which I have a recurring visual gag in which I'm arrested after making a joke about things that would be patently or statutorily illegal (drugs, violence, the inevitable underage jokes that'll come with an episode focusing on Pokemon).
- Self-awareness. Call myself out on when I get overly-nostalgic.
- Firefly Facepalm of the Week. Every week, as the episode's stinger, I state a moment from the inexplicably-beloved series Firefly that made me cringe with embarrassment. (jesus this could be a feature on its own!)**

Episode Ideas:
- Gun - PS2. I'm a fella who's from the Old West and likes revolvers. Hell I carry two. In short, Gun is an awful GTA3-clone set in the Old West. Is it fun? Sure. But it's pretty short and disappointing. Compare and contrast Red Dead Revolver, Gun.Smoke and Sunset Riders (SR fucking rules, btw)

- Battletoads - NES. Wisty nostalgic piece in which I discuss how shit my life was in middle school and how all I really had holding me together was Battletoads and my undying desire to conquer it. Cut to twenty years later and I still can't beat the fucker. Discuss Rare / Coin-It's track record, how they came to be and why they were an important player in the Nintendo-dominated era. All this over screencast video of me playing the game with the disclaimer that I'm going through it with the Game Genie on, running Infinite Lives. It'd be a long, brutal montage of three second clips showing every time I died, complete with rolling ticker at the bottom. In comparison, I can go through Metal Slug 3 in fewer than 30 credits.

- Oni - PS2/Windows. Noble successor to the Battletoads throne, the most compellingly-frustrating game of the last console generation or rightfully-ignored piece of shit? Discuss the genesis of the game, its schizophrenic art style and how it, like much media from the late 90s was directly inspired by mid/early-'90s anime (Ghost in the Shell in particular - cf. The Matrix, Shogo Mobile Armor Division). Also, state how the game is only fun when you are running the Infinite Ammo cheat. Max Payne is the game Oni should have been. Also, there's a reason I have two copies of this game, keyboard and mouse is fucking retarded for a beat-em-up.

- Playing Mega Crap - Long-time ZU readers (basically my whole flist less Hilary I think) will know Mega Crap. What's not known is that last time I went to San Jose, my friend Compy fabbed up a damn real, live, actual fuckin' Mega Crap cart for me. This episode will show the trials and tribulations involved in making a cart, in burning the ROM image to an EPROM (which itself was a Battletoads-level exercise in frustrating) and how Mega Crap is honestly the Original Gangster of the entire modding scene and how you little shits that play Counterstrike and Team Fortress should show some fucking respect.

- Bokosuka Madness - Compy also fabbed up a Bokosuka Wars cart. How fucking rad is that? Detail the maddening quest one man takes in unraveling its mysteries and defeating the game. Travelogue Segment: Tracking down a totally sweet bottle of three dollar cab sauv.

- Metal Slug Anthology - PS2/Wii. Underappreciated by mainstream gamers, lauded and praised by people with sense in their heads. I go out of my way to track down Metal Slug cabinets. Travelogue Section: Metal Slug machines in my general vicinity. I know of at least six. Also take some time to discuss lovingly the Irem shooters that are MS's direct ancestors. Also, the Wii's controls fucking suck. Shake the Wiimote to throw a grenade? Why? There's a perfectly good trigger button right under your left middle finger. ,.|..

- Playing Violence Fight - Arcade. A VF cab is owned by Tip Top Amusement and Vending in Carson City. They have to know where the game is. It's my mission to track it down and play it again. There was at one time, a VF cab in the discount theater where I worked my first job. The 1P 8-way was stuck and you could only play as 2P if 2P joined and beat 1P. Fucking weak. Wisty nostalgic horseshit about Carson City and my love/hate relationship with the town. "It seems that the town is full of people who share the same interests in media as me but also harbor gambling and substance abuse problems. This is why I'm able to grab a copy of Planet Earth on DVD for six dollars." Also: get a great shot of the Nugget's facade. Street Fighter 2, bitches!

- Zelda Wind Waker / Controller Issues - GC. While not an underdog, bizarre or maligned, Wind Waker is a totally sweet game with bullshit backwards-assed c-stick controls. In this episode, I discuss how I find a copy of Wind Waker at a pawn shop for C H E E P and then go into a segment where I take a controller into the workshop and perform some gruesome surgery on it in order to flip the axes on the c-stick or second analog while discussing how much the insistence that up=look up and right=look left shit pisses me the fuck right off.

- Metal Slug revisited. I intend on writing a game design doc which transposes the rules from Metal Slug into an FPS situation and submit it to the Half-Life 2 modding community. I want to know, is it possible to glean as much enjoyment from Metal Slug in a different medium. This will open the door to another series of essay-style episodes in which I transpose genres into different media, such as: turn-based strategy into a third-person shooter. Shooter into RPG (RM2K community), and others as I think them up.

- Beyond Good and Evil - XBox. Holy shit is this ever an underappreciated gem. I think that more people have played with my wiener than with this game. Which given the amount of times I've woken up sprawled out in an alley plus one hangover minus one pair trousers, isn't difficult to imagine. I found my (current) copy in a pawn shop in Sparks ("It's said of Reno that it's so close to hell you can see Sparks") for five fucking dollars. Holy shit goddamn! I lost (or had stolen -__- ) my original copy some years back and it's heartbreaking, as BG&E is a beautiful game that nobody played and also has the same horseshit second analog controls issue as Wind Waker.

- Breakdown - XBox. Irritating first-person puncher. What a piece of shit. It's Oni all over again. Bullshit combos that you can't ever remember, all requiring beat-perfect timing that expert Guitar Hero players can't possibly pull off and ineffectual gunplay. Interesting novelty, transposing a fighter into FPS, but nothing that hasn't already been done by The Super Spy and Punch-Out! Tried again with Mirror's Edge to mixed results. Tie this in as a callback to Metal Slug Revisited episode. - or - Combine the two.

- Bayou Billy - NES. My life's story is co-opted by those fuckers at Konami!

- Rolling Thunder Retrospective. Goddamn do I ever love me up some Rolling Thunder. Little do you realize that the much-maligned SUNA RT clone Rough Rangers had residence in local Carson fixture, Rico's Pizzeria. Similar to the Playing Violence Fight episode, this one is more about me tracking down Rough Rangers and playing it again.

- The Wizard and Me. Interesting fun Steve fact! Was part of the casting process for The Wizard. Producer was scouting locations in my town (Gardnerville) for shooting the movie and caught me begging for quarters from my grandpa at a local casino (Sharkey's). I'm sure I was playing that bullshit gun game Cheyenne or Choplifter. More Travelogue than games episode in which I wax nostalgic about the movie and the places it was shot and how I played in them as a child. Hey big surprise that I spent a lot of time in pizza restaurants as a kid, right? (this may end up being the pilot episode)

- Bubble Ghost - GB. Sweet puzzle game that few people have heard of and even fewer have played. Travelogue section to spooky-balls haunted shit (Virginia City is a great spooky-balls haunted shit location)

- MANLY GAMES. Games so manly your beard will sprout, your muscles will throb and you'll basically have a hard-on so hard that it'll basically tear the universe asunder, its density will be so great that it'll form a tiny singularity. I speak of course of. ~TwInKlE StAr SpRiTeS~ (Arcade, PSX-Import) This episode can also deal with modding your PS2 to accept a boot disc and allow you to play any damn game.

- Emulation vs. Real Media. I think this is a valid topic of discussion, the debate of which deserves an entire episode. Personally, I'm on the emu side but I'd much rather have the legit cart/system if it can be had. There's something just visceral about it. Also featured: DIY controllers and my teenymame project!

- Interview with Ulillillia. Dude is insane, but our kind of insane. Guy should be cherished as a National Treasure among video gamers. Hat is perpetually off, glass is perpetually tipped to U-dogg.

- Charles Barclay Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. - RM2K. And RM games in general. Crossover episode with Richie in which we discuss freeware RPGs, how much I hate RPGs but will make an exception for one that's truly fantastic (Chrono Trigger, CBSUAJ:G and uh ???) as well as a jaunt into the bowels of the RPG Maker community and why CBSUAJ:G works well as a comedy game and why the myriad other RM games fall so flat as comedy. Maybe interview the creators?

- Duke It Out! Duke Nukem retrospective. Wisty nostalgic horseshit about the early shareware scene and how I was introduced to it and Duke Nukem by way of a 3.5" floppy bearing the first shareware episode as a Christmas gift circa 1994. Discuss the lesser-known Duke games (oh god the one on the PSX sucks balls but The Manhattan Project is great!) and lament the leaked footage from the cancelled Duke Forever.

- Future ideas/Random noodling that I have to write down or the consciousness stream will wind through the rocks and then cascade off the rushing falls of my intellect:
` The Game Boy through its four (five?) iterations as a handheld has been a dumping-ground for shovelware. Track down an Urban Yeti cart. Urban Yeti fucking rules.
` I fucking hate GTA3 San Andreas - not as an ironic iconoclast that's attacking things that are generally held as good - but as a dude that's tired of needless minigames and tacked-on "RPG Elements" that he doesn't want to play but is forced to anyway to progress the story. Compare and Contrast to System Shock/SS2 (also, I am so bent out of shape that I can't find my SS media). Also, Mercenaries Playground of Destruction out-GTAs GTA.
` Sly Cooper series is fucking awesome and I'm glad I grabbed a second-hand copy at a Gamestop so many years ago.
` Game Crazy is going out of business. That's a total fucking bummer, as I preferred shopping there to Gamestop. Nostalgic travelogue about the games stores that are out of business and the stuff we purchased there. Funcoland (System Shock ;___;), Babbage's (Police Quest Swat 2, total bullshit unwinnable FMV game I still have around somewhere), CompUSA (too many to name, UT, Q3, HL, the first copy of Oni, etc etc); and how depressing it is that there are so few indy game shops in the area (I know of two, in an area of over a half a million people).
` How come Kingpin: Life of Crime was so damn underwhelming?
` Tachyon The Fringe: Wing Commander clone starring Bruce Fucking Campbell. Shit yeah! Underapprciated gem of the eon! Oooooh~ eleven bucks!
` Build-ing worlds. Build engine games that weren't Duke-3D. Blood, Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage. All classics. Especially Redneck Rampage fuck yeah.
' Skate or Die 2 is the same game as Skate 2, just four console generations and the "or die" removed. Frustrating controls, stupid, pointless story mode that's rendered moot as the big payoff to the story mode is offered from the title screen. Ripoff. Also, skateboarding games are at heart the same as wrestling games in which they require you to stop pressing directions and buttons at a precise moment and then press a different direction and button in order to execute a move. I hate these more than the hold-back-then-forward-and-button moves from Street Fighter.
` Outfoxies (Arcade) vs. Super Smash Bros. (varied Nintendo consoles). Deep-scrolling sidescrolling platform fighting games full of randomly-generated items and weapons. Outfoxies rules, SSB is kind of meh. But that's just like, my opinion.
` Speaking of randomly-generated: Spelunky! Do some more research on procedurally-generated dungeoneering games. (Also is Diablo is just a graphics patch on top of Rogue/NetHack?)

And so on. I have a lot of faith in this project. As soon as I can score that mixer and lavaliere, I can start turning this mother out. This will be the anchor to my relaunch of Zeroes Unlimited. We'll see where it goes and if success follows it.

Onward and upward!

*one of my best friends is an NC fan. Sorry doll, love you to death but we totally disagree on media sometimes, it's made up for more though by the things upon which we agree.
** see* above.

Backstory Revisions.

2009-10-13T08:18:31Z

A criticism that's come up from people whose reference pool is shallower than the reservoir tip on a dollar-store condom is that the Saucer from Voices bears too much resemblance to the one in District 9.

While I was going for references and inspirations a little more deep than a current blockbuster, angling more for the obtuse alien mysteries of the novels "Roadside Picnic" and "Rendezvous With Rama" blended with the foreboding silent dread of the ships from The War Of The Worlds and Independence Day while sharing the worn-out, broken-down spaceship design aesthetic from the short film Alive In Joburg, which itself was the "pilot film" for District 9.

Alas, people only cry "ripoff!" at the sight of a broken-down old spaceship hanging overhead.

Fine, whatever, the shitheels with limited literacy win. I've spent a few days rolling the idea around in my head and think that I've discovered how to do a minor retool without scrapping the whole damn thing and making the show more friendly to local advertising interests.

Dig if you will an outline:

At the beginning of the story, it's revealed that there's a recent spate UFO sightings in the geographical vicinity (west coast United States and Canada). Sixie, the frustrated Bracewell probe residing unseen within our primitive Internet sees the Saucer sightings as an opportunity. Sixie wants off this planet and will do whatever it takes to return to an advanced computer network where it can properly think and communicate and live as was intended.*

Sixie uses its ability to manipulate lonely nerds (posing as a synthoid anime girl) to assist in the construction of a sort of FTL broadband antenna so as to allow it to attract and impregnate itself into one of these UFOs. Naturally, the energies and SCIENCE! involved in creating a FTL broadband transmitter causes Weirding to happen.**

Sixie's machinations attract the attention of the UFOs and they congregate over the city. Once Weirdness begins to materialize from the quantum vacuum,**** it's at this point that the Saucers begin to take action, they do so exactly as the autonomous broken ship did in the original production bible, by erecting an impenetrable defensive shell around the city and disallowing entry or egress.

Since the aliens have not press-ganged tens of thousands of Insiders into service to repair the broken ship, I can eschew the abandoned soft post-apocalypse setting I'd originally envisioned, instead replacing the mass shanghai with a few dozen to hundred at most Insiders being taken up onto the ships in an attempt for the aliens to learn to understand our intelligence and communicate. Naturally, the differences between our races' intelligence would be like us humans attempting to have a meaningful conversation with ants.

This change allows me to dodge the claim that I'm simply ripping off District 9 while also making the show friendly to local advertising interests. I had the idea, before I thought of a half dozen saucers over the city was to have the original broken-down saucer just sort of drift like a dinghy awash in the ocean, appearing at any old place in the city, rather than being moored at the city's 0:0 navigation point. The adrift idea was to allow for a nice lingering shot on a local business' storefront with the ship in the background as an establishing shot.

If the business in question were say on the south side of town with its facade pointing north, it would be impossible to get both the storefront and the ship in the frame if the ship were considered anchored at the point where the main drag (Virginia St.) intersects with the Truckee River (Reno's navigational zero point). By allowing for multiple ships, I can just eschew the previous conceit. K.I.S.S. principle, especially as established by the thesis statement in this entry, my audience is so retarded that they're the sorts of folks who call into nationally syndicated radio talk shows because the can't figure out how to fuck.*****

* Check the production bible as linked in the previous entry for the villain Sixie's backstory.
** as per the production bible, "anomalies" as far as I'm concerned sounds pretty unimaginitive and hackish, do a mental Ctrl+R and replace "Anomaly" with "Weirdness" and carry on.***
*** <3 footnotes to footnotes. At long enough timescales, anything is possible. Objects and energies will simply materialize out of the cold, hard vacuum of post Universal entropic heat-death. This is a great explanation of what causes the "weirding" to happen, as far as I'm concerned.
**** Zero-point energy collectors and quantum vacuum mines can potentially create infinite, cheap, clean energy that can boost a civilization up a rung on the Kardashev Scale but also you know kind of unmake reality.
***** literate people listen to Coast To Coast, illiterates listen to Loveline. I'm sure Loveline listeners would gripe at this entry if only it weren't a bunch of those funny squiggly little lines all drawn out in rows on that white glowy thing on that box what from their pornography come.

Voices Noodling

2009-10-06T08:26:44Z

http://trainwreck.zeroesunlimited.com/vi/
If anybody still cares, I stuck the Word docs relevant to Voices From The Inside up on Trainwreck.

I had a couple of interesting story-noodling ideas in my head that I wanted to jot down before I forgot them.

First:
I want to do a love story with a tragic ending in which a dimension-hopping spacetime-traveler appears. She takes on the form of an exotic-looking supercute human girl with an eerie hair/eye color combination (I was thinking green/purple or orange/gray). She'll explain that "her" true form has neither form nor intelligence as we can perceive it and it takes an immense amount of intellectual energy on her part to dumb herself down enough for those she interacts with to understand her. Dale almost instantly falls for her, seeing a sort of kindred spirit (also because this is television and we need to compress our stories as much as possible).

The two are able to communicate at the same level, as Dale feels that he too has to always condescend to everybody around him. Since this extradimensional entity is only appearing human, it's just as likely that she's as condescending to Dale as he is to everybody else.

I imagined her being just awestruck at the sight of The Ship. Naturally it's nowhere near as impressive as the things from her spacetime, but as she explains:

XD:
So this is it, huh? Doesn't look like much from down here. And look at you! It's very interesting being in the presence of the species that will eventually go on to become the dominant race in the universe. The things you'll achieve and accomplish will make thing overhead pale in comparison. It's just junk, a broken toy discarded by an absent-minded child-race. But, every great saga has a first page, and no matter how humble it is, it's always interesting to see where the story starts and follow it to its epic conclusion.

DALE:
Us? Really? Humans spreading out not just to all corners of our galaxy, but out into the universe as well? That's amazing.

XD:
Well, not you as you are now, no. Your present forms and intelligence capacities are by far too rudimentary and frail. A billion of your Earth years will pass before the the descendants of your descendants will spread out to every star in the heavens. It's interesting to see your kind, preserved as a sort of evolutionary larval stage.

TIM:
Did she really just say 'of your Earth years'?

XD:
You as you are now are as far removed from those beings that will one day conquer the universe as you now are from stromatolites.

TIM:
What the hell is a stromatolite?

DALE:
Very primitive life form, quite possibly the O.G. Still around, basically unchanged from their forms of a billion years ago. Have you ever even watched the damn National Geographic Channel?

TIM:
Yeah man, I'm all about that show where people who deserve it sob about how they ended up in foreign jails, I laugh and laugh every time it's on.

Anyhow, Dale falls in love with the XD (or thinks he does) and faces a gutwrenching decision to kill her once their hideout is set upon by the antibody-zombies seeking to purge her as an effect spawned in by The Ship's reality-distorting engines. I want this story to be significant as it not only shows Dale as being more than just the comic relief loose-screw crackpot he starts off as in early episodes, but as a completely broken man, trying his hardest to cope with the tragedy of being stuck on the Inside without anybody to relate to or even love. When he finds this person, he has to destroy her as she's the cause of the seemingly nonstop attacks by the antibody force. This shatters him, having lasting continuity-effects. Part of Dale's backstory is that a girl he liked a lot and dated casually but never had the guts to kiss ended up being shanghaied by The Ship and he took it hard, as us nerds who have girls that never return our phone calls tend.

This is also a narrative point where Dale figures out the nature of the zombies (a thing he puzzles over for the first few episodes) and gets it mostly right. From this point on, the zombies stop being seen as less a threat than as a non-antagonistic force of nature and eventually they mature as full-on allies.

Second:
I was in-and-out of the car all night tonight and missed much of Coast To Coast (honestly, does anybody out there not understand that C2CAM is where I get the germ for many of my ideas?), but what I did catch was the guest speaker discussing how hauntings, Old Hag, alien abductions, night terrors, lucid dreaming/sleep paralysis and bigfoot may all be tied to the same kind of psychological phenomenon but are all interpreted differently by different experiencers and will be every bit as "real" to them as it is to another experiencer who perceives what he experienced in a completely different manner.

This got me thinking about haunted house stories. I thought it'd be an interesting twist if the house itself were the ghost or alien or succubus or night terror and it is perceived differently by the characters as they explore it. Rooms are constantly shifting, the house's style changes from observer to observer, the layout has no consistency as does its physical location within the city.

Just kind of stream-of-consciousness making this up as I type, I imagine the story starting off with Our Heroes trying to ditch a Cultist police patrol and winding up in a house that one of them swears to God was a vacant lot last week.

From there, Alison tries to explain the above thesis and everybody else tries to puzzle out the nature of the house, battling with their own internal demons which manifest themselves within the house.

I can't tell yet if this take on the haunted house story is fun and original or stodgy and cliched.

herp derp

2009-09-21T09:11:04Z

Hey I think I'm done acting crazy and being all down on myself.

Good times with medication. I keep on forgetting how much better I feel when I'm on speed than when I'm drunk and morose.

Anyhow, back to bullshit about writing.

Syfy (sigh) runs The Twilight Zone at 1am. Tonight they played "The Lonely," a beautiful, heartbreaking piece about a man named Corry wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years solitary on an asteroid. When we meet him, he's spent four and a half years on the rock and he's slowly descending into madness brought on by his crushing desperation and lonliness.

Gee I can't say I know why this episode speaks to me or anything.

When out of the blue the captain of the rocketship that does a quarterly supply drop leaves with Corry a crate containing a gynoid named Alicia. Corry is at first offput by the machine, but as time passes he learns to accept her and appreciate her company, eventually coming to love her.

Another year passes and the rocketship returns, its captain bringing good news, Corry's been pardoned and he's to return home a free man. Only he has to leave Alicia behind.

Now, this is a great story, but it's crippled by the half-hour television format. The budding relationship between Corry and Alicia is only glossed over in a montage and the third act takes up barely two minutes of screentime. Instead of Corry anguishing over whether or not he's finally found happiness in his prison with his no-hot-like-'60s-hot (well, 1958) robot girlfriend and having to be convinced that he's fit to return to Earth society in what could have been a tense, gripping sequence in which Corry comes to terms with his place in the world and decides to stay - instead the rocket captain simply shoots Alicia in head, revealing her to be nothing more than a bundle of wires in the shape of a pretty girl.

It was a good story by one of my literary idols, Rod Serling himself, an early Zone (seventh episode of the first season), so it was a bit rough around the edges and not as polished as later episodes such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and Richard Matheson's "The Invaders" (my two all-time favorite pieces of television-as-art) but "The Lonely" as a story seems to run contrary to Serling's own philosophy on writing.

Rod Serling has stated that all good stories start with a good ending then work their way backwards. You don't need an ironic twist, or a twist at all, just a good ending, a memorable way to end the story, as it's the only thing most people will really ever remember. Everybody remembers that To Serve Man was a cookbook, everybody knows that the self-absorbed asshole's glasses break in "Time Enough At Last" but who remembers the rest of the story?

"The Lonely" however is an inversion of this thesis, we have a great long first act, a short second act that's mostly a montage and a scant third act with no real twist and no denounment to speak of. The ending is nowhere near as memorable as the setup and rising action, the first act really makes the episode and then it just sort of faceplants off a cliff.

That said, I really love the episode, I just wish that it weren't a half-hour teleplay. As an hour-long format, we'd have had a lot more screentime to explore the relationship that Corry forms with Alicia and how he eventually learns that he's home here on his little asteroid. As an hour-long episode, the story could detail how Corry couldn't adapt to life back home, haunted by Alicia's memory or completely warped by five years of solitary that he honestly cannot deal with life back home. Alas, the story is indered by the half hour format.

What this episode reminds me is that even though the people I idolize are so much better than I am, they're also not infallible. They make mistakes, they learn, they struggle and stumble. Rod Serling didn't start out writing "The Monsters Are Due" or "Five Characters In Search Of an Exit" rather, cut their teeth on stories like "The Lonely."

meansteve @ 2009-09-12T04:26:00

2009-09-12T11:27:35Z

im wondering if what im experiencing is the classic 'descent into madness'?

K K K K K YEAH!

2009-08-27T12:12:37Z

In the year 201X, long after the novelty of the Las Vegas Elvis impersonator has waned and the fleeting popularity of the Michael impersonater went floppy like the fourth hour of a Viagra-induced priapism, did the city need a new celebrity to latch onto and appreciate ironically.

And thus was born the Lounge Lemmy. The Mayor of Drinkin' Island, still alive into his seventies, rocking faces and banging jailbait backstage found himself reborn in the guise of lounge singers crooning out Motorhead hits in dive bars, strip clubs and the Fremont Street Experience Remembers The Eighties.

The success of the Lounge Lemmy led to some not-so-successful imitators of the impersonators, the Dive Bar Diamond Dave soon followed and fizzled but the Jukebox James Hetfield worked fairly well, but ended up being segregated to pirate-themed bars and fish and chips joints in Norftown. Seaside Sebastian Bach crooned out a few gigs consiting mainly of misremembered lyrics to "Eighteen And Life" on Lake Mead but ended up getting into a fatal knife fight with an Axl Rose impersonator who as fate later revealed turned out to not be an impersonator but the real Guns 'n' Roses frontman.

Long Live The Mayor!

(another ten pages today, I'm up to 106 and have three days to finish this final act, most recent scene featured a Lounge Lemmy singing "Too Good To Be True" while two characters talked about feelings~)

SO CLOSE

2009-08-26T11:10:19Z

I managed to CRANK'D out another 20 or so pages today. I can totally do this, make the contest my willing and complicit little bitch over the next four or so days.

If anybody gives a shit, here's the .doc file of what I've been doing:

AEON_BABEL_08-24-09.doc

I'm at 96 pages so far, acts one and two are mostly complete, now it's time for the third act climax and resolution bullshit.

Writing action scenes is pretty easy, they tend to flow from my fingertips a lot more smoothly than dialog, as evident by these godawful Livejournal posts where I feel as I'm talking down to you, holding back my words, trying so very hard to just write as someone would speak instead of just putting words down. The last few entries where I basically gushed about my favorite films were done with a lot of Dutch Courage. Love dat gin.

Anyway, I've discovered that I'm kind of crappy at writing actual setup-punchline jokes, but feel that most of the dialog in this thing should be read like the totally deadpan exchanges in Ghostbusters, in which the characters know they're saying something ridiculous, but to them it's serious business, resulting in some of the funniest exchanges in cinema history, for example:

PETER:
Egon, this is like that time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Remember that?
EGON:
That would've worked if you hadn't stopped me.

That's sort of the vibe I'm going for here and don't know exactly if I'm pulling it off. Time will tell, I suppose. I'll just be glad to be done with this and stop writing a finger-quotes "comedy" and be on to the WAR IS SERIOUS WW2 story that's been buzzing around in my head.

HEY ANOTHER TWO PAGES

2009-08-24T11:08:39Z

I'm never going to meet this deadline.

I got another two pages of Aeon Babel out. I really should stop putting movies on in the background and absently looking up to them every so often.

Tonight, following my trend of "watch all of Cameron's films chronologically" that I've for some reason set instead of actually working on this thing, I noticed one of the "little things" that I do so adore about his films and gushed all over in the previous entry like a staked vampire bleeding out in its coffin:

Toward the beginning of the film, the focus character Bud gets angry at his soon-to-be ex-wife Lindsay and throws his wedding ring in the chemical toilet. He has a change of heart and fishes the ring out, staining his hands blue in the process.

Throughout the whole movie, Bud's hand remains blue, even after three scenes where he's swimming underwater, hands very clearly exposed to the sea. In the sequence where he's reviving the intentionally-drowned Lindsay, you can still see the blue residue from the chemical toilet around his fingernails and the creases in his knuckles.

That's devotion to detail, one of the dumb ridiculous little things that most people would overlook. Hell, that was just one dumb little thing to overlook out of thousands of dumb little things in the movie.

Outstanding work. I honestly cannot wait for Avatar.

Next entry: In which I watch True Lies instead of working.

Instead of working on a thing for which there's a deadline, I'm BLAWGGING~

2009-08-23T10:25:09Z

Having seen Inglorious Basterds yesterday (and one more time tomorrow fuck yeah!), I'm remembering why I wanted to be a filmmaker in the first place, a writer/director in particular.

I do recall becoming instantly smitten with Quentin Tarantino at the height of his popularity in the mid 1990s. Naturally he was the world's darling with the Academy Award-winning Pulp Fiction, but I liked him more when he was doing oddball things like From Dusk Till Dawn (everybody hates From Dusk Till Dawn for some ridiculous reason) and script doctoring Crimson Tide. He's always been best at snappy dialog. While his dialog is witty, clever and funny, it always felt sort of forced and artificial. No real human beings speak like Jules and Vincent. Not even best friends of over a decade.

I'm fairly glad that Inglorious Basterds seems to have eschewed that unnatural for the most part dialog and has fixed itself, has started to sound like how real people in real situations would speak and behave.

Well aside from Aldo, who is just delightfully over the top, I don't think any of his lines were meant to be not-comedic however. I laughed at all of them, especially when he was speaking eye-tie, but I digress.

As fun as Basterds was, it was still a Tarantino film, meaning it wasn't a very good film. Yes it was a competent film with high production values, but the damned movie wasn't Citizen Kane or anything. That's his thing though, he does movies that are intentionally bad, calling back to his youth misspent working in a video store - with unlimited access to garbage exploitation films from the 1970s

That's what he grew up with, that's what he likes, that's what he aspires to be. As a fella with the same sorts of aspirations and dreams and desires, I can't fault him for following his dreams and living his life the way he wanted to. High fucking five, Mr. Tarantino, you pop culture-obsessed loudmouth you.*

It's been postulated that the time in pop culture that's the totally way-objective "best" is the years between eight and twelve. For me, that was 1988 - 1992. For me, that was Guns 'n' Roses, Terminator 2 and the Back to the Future sequels. The things that came before, I was too young to appreciate properly**, the things that came after happened beyond that magical timeframe and they're totally-objectively definable as "crap" as far as I'm concerned goddammit. (Godawful Seattle music, Jurassic Park 2 and the Aliens sequels, forinstance). To someone four years younger than me, those things will be as gold to them.

What I'm getting at through ridiculous roundabout means is that while Tarantino was in love with retarded exploitation flicks from the 70s, I grew up (that's a lie and you know it) with the action films of James Cameron.

Aliens is and always will be my favorite film of all time. The dialog feels completely naturalistic, the characters all come across as if they're real people having real conversations with one another. The setting is believable, everything from the clothes to the hairstyles to the small things like interior and industrial design speak about a used, lived-in future. Ripley's quarters on Gateway Station look like the room that a single woman and her cat would live in. The edges of her countertop are worn; her coffee maker looks cheap, like it came from the dollar store. Little things that give the film that extra feel of verisimilitude are what make me absolutely adore it.

Granted, the technology that the Marines used was pretty damned state of the art for 1986, but basically the laptop I'm typing on right now has more computing power than the entirety of the starship Sulaco. But I digress. That sequence with the sentry guns was fucking intense, even though the consoles for the thing were a joke, even by the standards of the mid-'80s. I can imagine that if the film were made today, the sentry guns would be running on a Palm or RIM-branded smartphone. And that'd fucking suck. The neat little touches are what made me love the film. Everything about it just felt one hundred percent plausible. At no time do you roll your eyes and go "oh come on." You're drawn into the story, you care for the characters, even the asshole Lieutenant Gorman who redeems himself at the end. You boo the Company man, Burke and cheer when he meets his justified demise. Every character has his own little story and every character has an end.

The film, even though it was a sequel, was entirely self-contained***. You didn't need to have intimate knowledge of the first film to be able to come into this one. Exposition is dealt with in a clever way that doesn't make you feel like you're being browbeat by a big fat steaming expodump on your chest.

That's the sort of thing I aspire to do. Aliens should be the bar to entry. Dear screen writers and motion picture directors: please be at least this good.

It's not like it's really all that damned hard to be as good as Aliens. It just takes effort and devotion to your art, the desire to create the best work that you can produce with the funds allotted. Aliens had a pretty paltry budget. Like nine million or so (IMDB says 18.5M$, but the commentaries on the Quadrilogy box set say otherwise, digressious maximus) while the abysmal Aliens Vs. Predator had a budget of 60M$, over half of which - that'd be twice Aliens' budget - was spent on the big ridiculous CGI explosion at the end, whereas in Aliens, they used a light bulb wrapped in polyester cotton filler.

The filmmakers behind Alien vs. Predator (and it's even worse sequel) just didn't try (or if this were TVTropes, they [Just Didn't Care] to achieve the bar set by its predecessor. No, it sought to just churn out any old crap, get that coveted PG-13 rating and sell as many tickets to dipshit teenagers as possible (who we know never ever go to see R films ever) and then roll around in that filthy filthy lucre instead of trying to make art for art's sake (as was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's company slogan).

Aliens was a commercial success, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars since its release, much of which can be measured in video sales (they managed to very recently get another damn ten bucks from me, I bought a replacement DVD copy at Wal-Mart in a twofer pack along with The Abyss fuck yeah!) but unfortunately Alien vs. Predator grossed over 200M$ at the box office with another untold millions in DVD sales and rentals. Fuck.

What I'm getting at here - in that meandering stream-of-consciousness way that'd make Tim Rogers groan - is I don't really care if I'm a blockbuster commercial success, if I become a director or screenwriter placed at the helm of a movie budgeted with more zeroes than my circle of friends, I want to make a film that people twenty years in the future can look back on and state "that was a marvel of low-budget filmmaking, more films ought to be like that."

All of this coming from a guy that's struggling through a screenplay called Aeon Babel: The Genesis Saga.

When I conclude Aeon Babel, I have a wild hair up my ass to start working on a World War Two film. This idea came about totally independently and has absolutely nothing to do with having recently seen Basterds. Fuckin' totally.

* That line, coming from Kevin Smith of all people is hysterical. I loves me ups somes ironys****.

** Not to say that I can't appreciate them now, it's just that they weren't fresh in my mind at that crystallizing moment in my adolescent intellectual awakening. Point: Ghostbusters is, was and always will be the funniest movie in history, even though I first saw it when I was three or so. Seattle trash is still unmitigated shit though.

*** Special Edition Directors' Cut. Can you even buy the theatrical version anymore? Hell the only film(s) I give a shit about theatrical version(s) of is(are) Star Wars.

**** It was from the Clerks Cartoon, by the way.

Random Godzilla bullshit.

2009-08-19T12:00:23Z

Writing about giant robots smashing Las Vegas has got me in the mood to reflect on Godzilla a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEEXydQc9KE
I don't know how to feel about this clip. At first, HOLY SHIT IS THAT EVER FUCKING AWESOME!? J.J. "The Good Parts Aren't Original And The Original Parts Aren't Good" Abrams likely feebly clawed for this sort of feel when he made Cloverfield. But at second glance... CGI Godzilla? We went that route once, it was awful. So I'm torn between my ideals and my cynicism, like never knowing who to root for or against when a cop tasers a hippie.

--
The above though is pretty hypocritical when viewed alongside this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOISbaA2G18
In which sweet rubber suit Godzilla soundly trounces the choppily-animated rejoinder to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's 1998 take on Godzilla in a one-blow fight that takes up all of 00:45 of screentime. This was basically a statement made by the producers that "Godzilla will always be a dude in a suit." Then of course, he's shown in the link above as being full on CGI. I feel betrayed.

--
While my formative years were spent watching and re-watching VHS copies of the Showa-era tokusatsu/kaiju* movies until the tapes stretched and we got that distorted stagger effect on the top eighth of the screen, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Showa-era, despite how ridiculous the films got toward the end. That said; I do so adore the Millennium series, starting with Godzilla 2000:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK8GVlkl9tY
I loved the redesign. Godzilla basically looked the same from around 1964**-1995***, despite the Heisei-era's "dark and edgy like an obsidian knife" reboot to the franchise (beating Christopher Nolan to the punch by over two decades), Godzilla's design stayed basically the same as it had since "vs. Mothra." There was a gradual sleekening of the Godzilla suit over the span of the Heisei films, leading us to the finalized design for the Millennium series.

With Millennium, Godzilla began to look more like a giant bipedal lizardmonster and less like a guy in a rubber lizard suit. The lines were sleekened, his snout was made a bit pointier, his spikes had a more organic stegosaurian aesthetic, his skin looked more like the pebbled texture of a crocodilian's and his posture looked more "correct." Millennium Godzilla didn't stand erect, dragging his tail behind him, rather stood with tail and torso in more-or-less a straight line, tail acting as a counterbalance to his body's extreme bulk. Millennium Godzilla looked more "real" than his Heisei and Showa counterparts and this verisimilitude made him actually scary.

Well, as scary as a duder in a rubber suit bonking foam rubber buildings and stomping on RC tanks can be, but that's the fun of tokusatsu as an artform.

Godzilla 2000's ending was hysterical. Dipshits on TVTropes would say it was [narm], but I think it basically encapsulates everything that's right with Godzilla as a franchise. So over the top that it looks down on the top from its secret base on the moon. That classic exchange at the end just seals it for me.
"Then why, Why does he keep protecting us. Why didn't he kill us?"
"Maybe because... Godzilla is inside each one of us..."
(stomp stomp breath breath)

--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb0sLrS0kdU
Godzilla's death in "vs. Destroyah." It's okay to cry. Everybody cries when they see this. It's like Kamina dying but cranked up to ten thousand. The way Big G goes out at the end with the most pitiful mewling instead of his trademark triumphant roar is heartbreaking, it's like that final whimper your beloved family pet wheezes out its terminal breath at the veternarian's office. When Big G went down in 1984/The Return he bellowed, he let us know that as he sunk into the firey magma of Mount Fuji, that he'd be back, and there'd be a whirlwind to reap. But as he went in "vs. Destroyah," we're reassured and relieved that this is the last we'd ever see of him, that he finally went and with him, went an era. "vs. Destroyah" was the last of the Heisei-era films.

We had a five year break until Godzilla 2000**** when the big rubber monster was reborn as a tongue-in-cheek revival, keeping the good, throwing out the bad, returning to the humor of the Showa-era but leaving the camp with the Coleman stove in the garage.

Here's to another fifty years of a guy in a rubber lizard suit stomping on radio controlled tanks while another guy in a rubber pterodactyl costume sprays fire extinguisher foam out its mouth at him*****.

* I really hate being that guy. You know, the dipshit Japanophile douchefag who insists on calling things by their Japanese terms than by an English equivalent. I loathe how there's a distinction between "anime/manga" and "cartoons/comics." They're the same fucking thing. But the term "Tokusatsu" doesn't have a hard-and-fast English transliteration. It's like another favorite loanword of mine - schadenfreude. So forgive me if I come across like a dipshit Japanophile douchefag when I use and abuse the term.

** Godzilla vs. Mothra is where his look seemed to stop evolving, the four films before appeared to have new, and redesigned costumes in each, but I'm more an dabbling enthusiast than any sort of serious Godzilla historian.

*** 1995's "Vs. Destroyah" was the last of he Heisei-era films, leading to 1998's lukewarm Devlin/Emmerich film.

**** See above. Most of us have stricken the 1998 film from our personal canons.

***** P.S. bring back Jet Jaguar.

SO MUCH RAGE I HAVE A HAIRBONER

2009-08-11T07:44:54Z

I am so angry right now my hair has spontaneously gone blond and spiky and is standing up taller than I do.

They're remaking Repo Man.

Fuck you.

Full stop.

Dear Hollywood; There are dudes out there writing things that are original. Like me, for instance. Dudes who would take a damn pittance just to see something unique and clever on the screen.

And yet you rehash and retool and relaunch and rerun all the same hoary old bullshit that you've been pimping since the dawn of the motion picture.

Enough already.

READ THE FINE PRINT, DUMBFUCK

2009-07-31T07:46:06Z

So it appears that my deadline is August 30, and not August 01 like I thought for some ridiculous reason. I don't know where in the hell I came up with the August 01 date.

I've been writing hell of crazy on Aeon Babel this last week. I'm up to having added a good thirty pages to the original manuscript. However I'm in that boring godawful second act slump. I really, honestly hate writing second acts. It's said that American writers love second acts and tend to neglect the third. I tend to make my first acts go on for about fifty pages too long, neglect the second act as pointless busywork to get us to the third act payoff.

As it stands, yes I seriously wrote fifteen pages on Rick and Tristan in a damned flight simulator. Why aren't there more mecha anime feature films? It just feels like I'm writing a feature at the same lethargic pace as an OAV or 12-episode mini series, my pacing is just all off kilter.

sigh~ writing

Duh two more pages

2009-07-21T09:30:26Z

hey i guess i'm supposed to be working on this screenplay

i guess i have another two pages of prewriting

deadlines are fun things. i just ignore them and they go away, just like any pretense i have of being successful.

[sfx. gunshot]
[sfx. body hitting the ground]

In which I replace the letters S and C with dollar and cent signs

2009-07-17T19:40:42Z

So. Las Vegas.

Found a place to live.

Found what looks like a job.

Found what looks like a career path.

Found some friends (seriously, a gay black dude that's the burliest queer in the world and likes Lucky Star? I think we're BFFs).

Next month, the movening begins.

(also herp derp two weeks to that deadline and I've written three pages, all bad)

Things In Vegas

2009-07-15T21:44:17Z

Things be lookin' up yo. It appears that I have a job (crappy) and a place to stay (equally crappy) and should be able to move up in the world from there. If not, just terribly crash and burn. But I have faith in myself that I can overcome this obstacle and go on to something bigger, better and less soulcrushing than my life in Reno here in Vegas.

Up up and up some more.

HUR DUR I ARE WRITAR

2009-07-05T11:52:10Z

Now that all my bullshit personal drama is out of the way and I'm back into my groove, I'm starting to write again. I basically have a month to pound out this Devil Cars thing we'd talked about for LIKE FIVE YEARS NOW IT SEEMS for the screenwriting competition I posted about a few entries back in my history.

I spent about two hours tonight... And got one page of prewriting. Herp derp duh. I'm so bummed that I lost a bunch of previous work I'd done on the piece. I really especially loathe it when I come up with something clever and original and then lose it, forcing me to try and dig it up again and reconstruct a very pale imitation of the original creature, much like dinosaur bones in a museum as opposed to the original creature.

It's all very frustrating, but I feel that I've pruned the main cast of protagonists, antagonists and protagonist support characters down to three for each faction, instead of the like five I had previously.

After spending some time in Las Vegas, I got a bit of a lay of the land. I keep forgetting that the supertacky Fremont Street Experience is hell and gone away from the new Strip, it's all the way over by the Fitzgerald's and the Stratosphere, like three miles from the Neostrip.

Regardless, I need to write a sequence where a Devil Car is rampaging through that accursed M&M's store. Fuck that place, fuck it in the buttery soft asshole. If I were to distill what I hate about Las Vegas into 2400 square feet, it'd be that fucking soulsore.

Due Date August 1. I can do this. I can do it not because I believe in you who believes in me, not because I believe in me who believes in you who believes in me, but because I believe in me who believes in you who believes in me believing in you believing in me ++_$TL37# !RECURSION ERROR SEGFAULT. PURGE DATA AND RECOMPILE KERNEL ++_$#&23#

SO RONERY

2009-07-01T02:02:07Z

Me and Kim Jong Il are brothers right now.

SO RONERY AND SADRY ARONE.

All my friends are married or have moved away.

Not even Ravage the pointiest kitty helps out.

I need to move.

The Trip

2009-06-23T18:53:09Z

This is crossposted from my GAYcebook page, so some of the names won't mean anything to my elljay friends.

The Trip
Subtitled: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

As trite and cliché as it sounds, my recent cross country trip was not undertaken to visit my friends or see the sights, but really to visit me.

I spent a long time alone in a borrowed car, traversing the states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas only to turn around and make the trip all over again. Three solid days in a car both ways, 18 hours of drivetime in each (save the first and final legs from Reno to Vegas which is only eight) leaves a guy with a lot of solitude and alone time to reflect, to meditated and to try to grasp his condition and his place in the world.

The main goal of the trip was to visit my best friend Angeline in Galveston TX.

Galveston for those Americans in the audience who care as much about geography as they do soccer, is in the extreme southeast corner of Texas, a stone’s throw from the Louisiana border. I went there with an unreasonable expectation and then golly was I ever put in a weird situation when my expectations were dashed to pieces on the rocks like so many Mongolian ships attempting to assault mainland Japan.

Basically, I’m in love with Angeline and have been for years. I fell for her before I even knew what she looked like. She’s such a sweet, caring individual with a huge heart. It’s why she’s my best friend and why I feel such a strong bond with her. It’s why I asked her to marry me. More on that later, I’ve a digression to get along with.

Granted she’s an “internet friend.” As an aside, I really hate the negative connotation placed upon “internet friends” by my “meat friends” all of whom have never actually engaged in any sort of interpersonal relationship with “internet people” and seem to automatically dismiss the medium as a valid outlet for emotional connectivity.

That’s total bullshit. My best friends are internet friends. I am now and always have been of the opinion that one can gauge another based solely on their writing. Things like literary voice, cadence and vocabulary speak volumes about an individual. I’m no profiler working for the FBI or anything building complicated psychological histories of people based on their Livejournal ramblings or anything, but I can generally tell if someone is a complete shithead or a lovely person based upon the way they write and the vocabulary they use in a casual online chat. She’s a lovely person. She’s so vibrant and fun and full of the joie de vivre that none of my other friends seem to have. I really want her to be a member of the family I don’t have which is why I asked.

And naturally she turned me down. She has reasons of her own and I won’t get into them here as it’s not the medium for me to spill her secrets and motivations, those are hers and hers alone so I’ll just leave them as that.

So, we spent a few days together. She’s still my best friend. We spent four days together laughing and carrying on and generally enjoying life. I thought to myself “this is a thing I wanted forever.” And I still do. I’d love to wake up every morning and share that very powerful life-affirming feeling of joy with that person and then go to sleep completely contented. Forever. That was what I was after.

We parted ways on Friday morning and I last spoke to her that evening as I was taking a nap in El Paso. When we spoke, she mentioned that “it’d eventually get old” to which I responded “June turned down Johnny for twenty years.” In retrospect, I assume that she meant “for her.”

The next day found me in Phoenix where I finally managed to link up with my buddy Steve (Steves up, everybody else down). We’ve participated on the gun boards, mainly as the antagonistic piss-takers that like to deflate the sails of the stuffed-shirt blowhards that populate the gun boards.

We spent Saturday evening laughing and joking and talking about my trip, being in Phoenix again made me remember how much I missed the place. Steve was shocked that I still recalled all the streets and freeways after not having lived there for ten years while he’s a lifer and can’t recall the order of the streets along I-17. To be fair though, I lived on the west side in Glendale and he lives on the east side in Scottsdale. He has a new family of his own, his wife just had another kid and he’s shipping out to basic in two weeks, so basically I picked the worst possible time to visit and was pretty lucky to have gotten a three hour window.

While I was taking a much-needed shower at his place (there’s no point in showering in East Texas, it’s like living in a pressure cooker), he did a thing that prompted him to state “I don’t wanna sound like a queer or nothin’, but I made you this.” Dude pulls a grocery store bag out of the fridge, inside is a couple sandwiches, sodas and etc. Dude packed me a lunch. So bromantic.

I left Phoenix for Las Vegas, intending on hooking up with my buddy Ron who moved from Gardnerville to Vegas (I’d visited with him and our friend Joe on the way through, I apologize profusely, Joe for not calling you on the return trip, it was a combination of your weird hours – didn’t want to wake you – combined with my natural forgetfulness. Sorry brother, your hospitality on the way through was outstanding and there's no possible way for me to repay you) as well as another online friend Zeke.

The three of us spent the day basically making fun of tourists along the Strip. Las Vegas is full of pretty girls with bolt-on aftermarket parts. Vegas sucks, fuck that town I am totally not moving there as soon as I grift the last few bucks out of my unemployment fund.

I spent the night crashed out on Ron's floor and we talked about life and love and family. He asked me "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and related all the answers everybody else has given him, but nobody ever turns the question around and asked him. So I asked him.

His response: "Happy."

It was at that moment I really realized that I'd found what I set out to find. I wanted to ask Angeline to be my family, to join me in a relationship that'll last forever when it turned out that's what we had in the first place. I went looking for family and realized that I had it the whole while.

Angeline and Tony, Steve, Zeke, Ron and Joe, you guys are all my family. I never had any sort of familial connection with my blood relatives, like I was stuck with a bunch of hillbillies, none of whom understanded or accepted me. But you guys do. I love all you guys, you taught me that I'm really not alone and that I do have people to depend on.

Especially you, Angeline, I'm sorry if I put some sort of unreasonable emotional burden on you. It wasn't until later that I realized how great what we have/had is/was. You're really one of my best friends, like top three, someone for whom I'd hide a body. And I hope things stay that way, forever. Call me.

As for the other guys, I'm glad that I found you and connected with you. I feel just a little closer to my ultimate goal.

What do I want to be when I grow up? Accepted.

More like GAYcebook, right?

2009-06-05T07:25:37Z

Oh hee hee hee. Dennis Kanenwisher (aka D-kane, aka Denny-kun, aka 8=D~) has a Facebook page. I tried to buddy him. I hope he accepts.

I ONLY MEANT TO STAY AWHILE

2009-05-05T07:43:23Z

Just on the border of my waking mind there lied another time when darkness and light were one. I treaded the halls of sanity, I felt so glad to be unable to go beyond.

Then I watched Twilight again (you heard me). It made me come to a few stark realizations.
Well hell guys, watch it yourself and then we'll discuss. Go ahead. Oh hell here's a link for you. It's eleven minutes, it won't kill you, you big burly strapping manny-man-man men.

So, what the hell, women? Is this what passes for a panties-moistening cultural phenomenon these days? If so, then my respect for you as a gender has crashed through the floor, set back by a good eighty to ninety percent. No amount of enlightened video rebuttals from Sarah Haskins can make me retain the level of respect I had prior.

And they've made me think about swearing off of women. I don't want to look at or touch one ever again. Just basically fuck women. Not in the literal sense of course - because they're dead, beneath notice... Instead of being respectful and attempting to treat them with the same level of respect I give others that I've previously assumed to be of equal or similar intellectual footing, rather instead to treat them with the same disinterested disdain as I would a small child that doesn't know better or an inbred show-quality dog.

But wait... are those voices crying out in the darkness? Not all women fall for the line of bullshit antifeminist propaganda spewed by the Stephanie Meyer multimedia juggernaut machine? Tinny distant voices peeping like baby chicks in a nest. "But we don't all feel that way! It's the same folly as perpetrated by a High School disciplinarian to dismiss or punish the body whole thanks to the actions of a minority!"

Being an enlightened, liberal-minded populist, I realize that to dismiss an entire gender based upon the harpy-like trills of a vocal minority is fundamentally opposed to my very system of ideals, so I let the gears turn a bit and actually sit and think this out.

Is what we're seeing with the Cult of Twilight exactly what it says on the tin: women in general reducing themselves to incoherent, irrational beings obsessed with that which the media tells them to obsess - this behavior is so repellant to my ideals, thus forcing me to finally stop straddling the fence on this whole "hetero vs. homo" debate and jangle my spurs full time in Rob Halford's tent... or is it something far more sinister?

The crankjob conspiracy theorist Yang to my idealist Yin pokes its fanged maw out from under the bridge where it likes to sleep and grumbles a thesis:

"Look, asshole" it snarls. "You saw this before. Remember Interview With the Vampire? Yeah that movie in which Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas totally made kissyfaces at Tom Cruise and got you seriously considering the gay lifestyle? Filled your head with the false expectations that if only the rest of gay life were as ab-fab as this, then you'd be totally in? It's that all over again." The cranky conspiracy theorist side of the anthropomorphized Janus sculpture representation of my intellect thus shuffles back under its bridge, unscrews the tin lid from a bottle of bottom-shelf rum and can be heard guzzling deep drafts, muttering about black helicopters the whole while.

And he's right. Basically Twilight tries that gambit again. Typically vampire movies are dismissed as mere chick flick romantic wish-fulfillment fantasies. Whereas Interview was a big giant full-motion LED matrix billboard glowing in the darkness alongside your otherwise featurelessly straight freeway trying to sell you on the Gay Lifestyle - Twilight takes the opposite route: Rather than enticing you to the Gay Side, it attempts to repel you from the Straight Side.

And this is a real quandary for those of us that range between 2 and 6 on the Kinsey scale. Interview didn't convince us fully to ascend that latter to 7 Kinsey, which in the eyes of the gay recruiters is nothing short than a massive failure. A decade later and they tried again with the same tactic and thus Twilight was released to theaters in a further attempt to woo us undecideds.

A stiff and solid manly and secure 1K isn't going to be swayed by the movie's depiction of women, while those traipsing in the minefield between "WAY STRAIGHT DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT" and a 7K "TOM'S MAN" may find themselves utterly repelled by women, repulsed by the way they're so completely unilaterally attracted to a man that is completely dismissive of her, unless he's watching her when she sleeps, licking his chops with the same desire as you or I would when encountered with a cherry cheesecake.

When he's not thinking about her as a food item he's abusive, battering her to the point of broken bones and required surgery-intensive and yet still she swoons! She forgoes a guy that really truly does love her and is incredibly compatible with her [i]and she concedes the point, agreeing that they're perfect for one another[/i] only to return to the abusive monsterman who is only interested in her the same way we're interested in bacon cheeseburgers.

This behavior was engineered, plotted and distilled to turn us fence-sitters completely off of women forever. Well played, gay mafia. Well played indeed. You've taken my knight and placed me into check.

Maybe instead of turning totally gay, I'll simply treat women as fuck/food objects, as it's apparent that's how they want to be treated. The way women behave over Twilight has made me reevaluate my attractedness to you, my populist pro-feminist, equalitist ideals and may have decided that I'm not Way Gay yet, but a few steps closer.

If this was your intention, bravo! You brought me here but can you take me back again?

"Nevada" Film Office Screenwriting Competition

2009-05-05T01:12:12Z

The "Nevada" Film Office is holding a screenwriting contest.
I put "Nevada" in scary quotation marks because of the widly-held conception that Las Vegas is the state despite occupying less than one percent of its entire area. Basically the script contest is to write a feature film length commercial for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Anyway, some time back we came up with the idea to do a story about monster hot rods. The basic idea was for me to write it about Las Vegas (mainly because I hate the place and want to see people there die in a horribly hilarious manner) anyway. Sooo...

Due date August 1. 90-130 pages.

Fucking easy.

DUH POSTING HERE AGAIN

2009-05-02T08:57:04Z

After being all long-haul and writing two 40 page half-hour scripts no dang problem, I return to my long-abandoned feature Doomshrooms and try to write on it again.

Three hours later I'm left with a bunch of corrected mistakes, modified dialog and two whole new pages.

I

S U C K

A T

T H I S

I really want to just finish this story, I have the beats written out, but I still find myself totally anguishing over certain points of the narrative flow (which I can simply [lampshade] as [unreliable narrator] and be done with it).

Also, I sometimes feel that writing the beats and coming up with the jokes is the fun, creative part and writing dialog, action and scene description to merely be boring, pointless busywork.

Duh writing.

Hey I don't use this any more do I?

2009-03-06T00:37:12Z

Tome Versus in which I seek out challenges and crush them thus bettering myself as an artist, creator and human being.

Friend Fund

2008-11-07T20:24:42Z

Okay, I've officially closed out the fund, and thanks to some hilarious drama with Paypal, finally got the funds into a cash account. I am presently seated on a US Postal Money Order made out to one Angeline Nemarich for the sum of $300 American.

Thanks to those of you who donated.

I spoke with the lass in question on the phone today and she's asking for the addresses of our donors, so she can send a thank you card. You can reach me via aim at tomeoffinalnd or via email at tome.of.finland@gmail.com and I'll be certain to forward this information to her.

I've taken the liberty of signing a card in all of your (our) names.

Thanks for helping out. You guys are great.