| Story Fragment: You've got male |
[10 Oct 2008|02:48am] |
[A friend of mine once asked me if, when I write another story, I could provide some kind of commentary for it. He thought it would be interesting to see where my ideas came from and how I arrived at certain plot points. I've decided to take him up on that idea and have added this intro. bit as backstory to where I was coming from when I began to write.
A few hours ago I read this article and one single quote I pulled from it struck me as quite interesting. "A good-faith argument could be made -- and I predict it eventually will be made -- that being male would meet the broadest definition of disability" Jumping from that idea - of masculinity being a disability - I imagined a world where being male was illegal or, at the very least, regulated. This was not solely an original idea by any means. There have been many stories in a variety of mediums with this premise.]
Story Fragment:
Detective Rousseau and I both looked at the dead body in the corner. Hidden away in a back room of the apartment that was little more than a closet, it had been discarded like trash. The body was now all but a xylophone with skin. I bent down to get a closer look at the gender. It was a male child. It had taken two weeks to get to this point I thought to myself as I looked at the fresh corpse. For two weeks this one had huddled in the dark without food or water. I pitied him having been born into this time, this place. I would not wish that on anyone. Times were tough. Especially for males. The passing of Local Ordinance 457 had been a instant death sentence for all unregistered males. Having been deemed to aggressive to live outside of controlled centers, most had been killed outright within a week in the city. Now, three years later, we were still finding bodies. The mother should have taken her government sponsored medicine. It was as simple as that. A five year jail sentence for having given birth to an unregistered male child was not worth it. Not if the prevention was a single pill twice a week. As I straighted up I noticed my partner Janet watching me. She knew I hated these cases. Each time we had to investigate the mothers, not the murders. No, they were not important. Not even murders really. We were here to see if the mother had had an unregistered birth and failed to report it. Janet moved toward me. "You OK, Liz?" Taking my lacking of response as an answer she came right up to me. "Look, I know you lost your shot at being on the birth-mother list this year. If you want to excuse yourself from this case, I'd be fine with it. The department has enough paperwork to keep you busy for a couple of weeks. Take some desk time." How did she know? I had been requesting to have a child for three years now. There were a limited number of slots open to law enforcement. I had just heard back yesterday from the home office. I had been denied again. I shook my head and got my equipment out. I needed to scan the DNA of the body to confirm who the mother was. If it was the apartment's owner then we would arrest her. No one had been home when we arrived. Well, no one alive at least. Neighbors had called in reporting a smell and we had investigated. Normally we would have just left it at that but there were signs of a struggle. We found the door left open and the front room looked like someone had let loose a tornado. Papers were all over the floor along with a half dozen desk drawers. Not that any of that mattered once we found the boy's body.
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| A sonnet for Link |
[05 Oct 2008|12:52am] |
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[I got bored as I was moving files about today. The first result was this. The following is the second.]
Link walks upon the fields
Danger follows at his feet
Hunting animals for his meals
Death comes to those he meets
In the darkness lanterns show the way
Arrows vanquish those of one eye
Heed my warning Sahasrahla did say
That day Six Armos Knights did die
Sahasrahla gave the Pegasus Shoes next
Dashing in the Library gave a special book
The Desert Palace's Lanmolas vexed
Rest of the game I have not had a look
Constanting hunting for the mighty triforce
You'd think he could for once have a voice
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| It's news to me |
[18 Sep 2008|06:52pm] |
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I've been leaving tabs open in Firefox for over a week now. Each time I open Google Reader I open another tab, saving content for later. The problem is that the later is not coming. I've been adding to the number of open tabs for over a week now. Having over ten windows open with each having five or more open tabs within them has become the norm. I just don't have the time or drive to read all this. It used to be my singular source. Back when I used to be inseparable from my laptop I read RSS feeds and news sites all the time. Whenever I was free to use the laptop, I was reading feeds within minutes. Always. It became such a problem that I had to start unsubscribing from feeds five at a time because even being minutes away from it caused items to pile up. I had most of the major news sites as well as many technology sites all sending me things. It became too much to read in any one sitting. As soon as I had cleared one source of its tens, hundreds more waited. I still look through some of my favorite feeds, but things have changed. I was asked by someone the other day where I got my news from and what I thought the future of news delivery was. At the time I gave my answers as I saw them. I currently get news from the newspaper and The Daily Show. Giving those answers, as the person noted correctly, is seemingly contradictory. A large number of people in the 18-25 demographic get their news from The Daily Show. This isn't that surprising given their subject matter. Their irreverent views on the world and the mocking of the sacred cows of politics promote them as leaders, or at least warriors, for those who would have the system changed. It is this post-Cold War demographic that is fed up with governments and corporations and are reaching out for ways to react. Mockery is just the quickest and easiest way. The fact that information rides alongside the jocularity is secondary in most cases. People come for the laughs and get news by accident. It's almost a quaint thing. A thing for long ago and far away. Reading the newspaper has become a fading fad. It's not that people no longer read it but the number of readers has declined, seemingly, in direct proportion to the rise of portability ubiquity. As more and more people carry digital devices that tap into cell phone networks or even more mundane WiFi they decrease their reliance on paper products. Why would you want such a static thing when the news changes not in hours but seconds? Next-day news is the niche of the newspaper while next-second is the place for the always-on, always-connected device. I'm not sure if we don't lose something along the way though. When I was constantly streaming the latest and greatest of the day into my eyes I missed the things around me. Technology tunnel vision may be blinding us. I'm no modern Luddite rambling in some fear of technology but am simply wondering. There is something to the tangible. Holding a newspaper, or even a book, is to hold a product and a process. People worked on this thing. It's hard to see that in digital media. Still, I believe it is the future. Information will be free, and most likely in your hands sooner than you might think.
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| The one where Insert and Title have a quiet drink after a long week. |
[11 Sep 2008|06:02pm] |
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It's HBO. So, I guess I should have known. True Blood is, like, full of sexual situations. Starting with the very first scene too. It's not that I don't mind sex in television shows. But, this? Eh. I kinda wish they'd stop with it. I wrote that above paragraph a couple of days ago. I've been thinking about what I said there and have come up with an interesting thought. It's a visual thing. I think. There is, to me, a difference between seeing sex and reading a sexual situation. It occurred to me that I've read many books that have had sex scenes in them. I often don't even think about as I am reading it. When I see a sex scene within a show however I tend to respond. Most of the time the response is laughter. The way, due to standards and practices, that sex is portrayed on television is often hilarious. The impossibilities of certain actions, and speed at which they, ah, finish is astonishing. There is also a... touch of reality. Separating the fictional world of a book from that of actual reality is easy, I just move my eyes away. You'd think it was the same with visual media but it isn't. With books it's always picturing scenes play out in the mind's eyes but seeing something has a tendency to stay with you longer. The more emotionally invested you are with what your seeing, the longer the memory lingers.
You ever get that frustration? That soul soaking feeling that the world is conspiring against you? I get that a lot. It isn't, of course, but it seems that way from my eyes. It has a lot to do with how much sleep I get. When I am under a deluge of deadlines I tend to get angry often. The wave after wave of assignments just wearies me down. While my job doesn't demand much from me, either mentality or physically, it still eats up my time. Trying to fit weekly readings of a textbook between when I get home from work and when I have to be in class that night is hard. I know I shouldn't do that. I ought to be doing the readings and the work days before, but I don't. I often wait to the last minute, the night before. It's wearing me out. I've had to stay up later to make sure I've done the reading and can answer some questions coherently. This cycle has got to stop. It just makes me angry. When I get angry, I tend to snap at people. I don't usually mean to be rude, some of the time, but the filter on what I think about something and what is polite to say weakens without sleep. Being tired most of the time isn't much help socially. Many people, I've noticed, tend to think that I am being rude or even like to be rude to others. That isn't true. Sometimes. Most of the time it's just me trying to respond through the coat of weariness that I wear. I've become comfortable with it. Sort of a layer of numbness to the world's wants. It's easier to give the excuse that you're tired if you look it. Just slip on the coat and mumble on through.
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| The one where Insert codes and TItle hides. |
[06 Sep 2008|07:04pm] |
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There is something I put into words the other day and, at the time, didn't think much about it. I don't like to code anymore. The crazy thing is that I don't think I ever really did. There is this weird reality that has been pushing on me as late. I need to get serious about what I want and what I need to let go of. When I started college, the first time, I thought I was on the right track. I was excited at what I could learn and what I could do. A vast horizon stretched before me. Learning to program the little bits of a computer was utterly fascinating. The actual work though was where I fell flat. I think I loved the illusion more that the substance. There was a dream made up of too many to count science fiction stories and reinforced with the belief that my pride would see me through the hard times. I've come to question that dream lately. It was never the actual experience of the work. It was the controlling of all the elements. It was, although I hate to use the word in this context, the narrative of the whole thing. There was a challenge. There were goals. It was all up to me to find the connections, the threads, to connect one point to another. This is how I view code. One section does something and then talks to another part that does something else - the basis of object-oriented code. There is a story there though. I think that was what drew me. It is the same premise of a story you might read in prose. There is the introduction - int main() - that starts the whole process. There are the main characters - the libraries included, basic archetypes of people - that drive the plot. Last is the glue of the story, the conflicts which the characters must pass through - the functions called. On some subconsciousness level, I suppose, I was writing out a tale each time an assignment was set before me.
At the same time I was questioning my reasoning for coding, I was looking at my pastimes. The most time consuming one, I thought, would be playing video games. After all, I was writing out reviews quite often for awhile there. I've even started playing World of Warcraft again. No, it turns out that I like books most of all. When I am frustrated at the world and want to just escape my problems I turn to books. It happened this past week. Trying to balance a, practically, full time job and being a student full-time is not fun. Every time I sit down it seems as if one or more things need to be done, as soon as possible. This is not to say that I haven't been able to make some downtime this past week. Thursday and Friday night, you may have noticed, I didn't post anything. I barely even checked my RSS feeds. Just wanting to step away from my worries, I started reading a series of novels. Reading fantasy books are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Not in the sense that I feel guilty about reading - if I did I wouldn't bother to tell you about it - but more in the fact that if I will rationalize all of my responsibilities away in order to read more of whatever story has hooked me. Lately it has been the The Hollows series of books by Kim Harrison. Chances are very good that if you are reading this, you won't like those books. I've mentioned before that I like strong female antagonists and so this series, with Rachel Morgan as a white witch who slowly has to do more and more "evil" things, is right up my alley. I'm not going to tell you I loved these books, I didn't. There are more that a few places, especially in the early books, where plot holes emerge. Still, I liked them enough to read all six of them over the last week or so.
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| The one where Insert and Title ruminate about old times. |
[01 Sep 2008|11:09pm] |
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The room rumbles. A large circle begins to turn. An occasional flash and dull tone rings out. Six more times this happens. Finally, a flash of light blinds you. A rushing wall of water jumps out at you and retreats before you can move. The stargate is ready. Will you go? The television show Stargate SG-1 is one of my favorites. Two thinkers and two warriors make up a team of travelers that seek out news of threats and allies against a common enemy. Beyond the science fiction basis of the show - the travel to other worlds via the Stargate - it holds other interesting ideas that over its ten year run have held me as a constant viewer. Not everyone speaks English. There are untold numbers of spoken languages throughout the world. Different culture speak and think uniquely. Extend that out to the galaxy and for as many stars there could be languages. This was the problem I saw with shows like Star Trek. Everyone seemed to speak English. The easiest way to show someone was foreign or alien was to have them speak broken English. It's frankly really annoying and a bit racist. In the movie Stargate though once they leave Earth, they are on an alien world. The people are different and the language, although deciphered rather quickly, is not English. This is what brought me to the television show - along with Richard Dean Anderson starring. I like that people groups are seen as unique, special. Of course, the stargate teams do play their own ethnocentric card pretty early. As soon as they learn that people worship different deities than they do, they seek to change the people's traditional ways. Still, I like that other ways of thought and culture exist in the show. There are other worlds. This is basic premise of numerous shows. Star Trek, and its later offspring, all had missions to other places, other worlds. Most space shows have this same trend. I won't argue that it is original to Stargate but it still stirs the imagination. The Unknown is a powerful archetype. In earlier written works it was death, later the New Lands. Now, for the modern man, it is science. What untold secrets lie in the search of these new places? The vast blackness of space becomes an easy canvas to paint adventures. Two suns, flying monkeys, intelligent fog - all Unknown. With television shows, and other media, we can explore the possibilities of these other worlds.
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| The one where Insert gets all serious and Title waxes poetically. |
[31 Aug 2008|11:00pm] |
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I don't like deadlines. The note of finality strikes a cord of hatred in soul. Dead. Line. It's as if some magic is held in that single word. It wields power. Faced with a deadline the work gets done. The 11th hour is the busiest. Artificial deadlines are the worst. Not the solid, unwavering timetable of due dates but the slippery slope of personal goals. I like to think I can motivate myself to get things done. If I do this now, I can do that later. It almost never works. I hem and haw. I rationalize. Maybe if I...? Only after I'm midway into a distraction do the doubts come. Will I have time? Did I leave enough room? I slipped the surely bonds of a personal promise today. Again. I thought I would get this seeming short programming assignment out of the way, but I haven't. Yet. I found the distractions to daunting to miss. You'd think I'd be able to construct better traps for my mind. Alas, my will is weak. The programming can wait, I have a book to finish. I must know how this ends tonight! I've a deadline to meet.
The waves are ruthless. They pound. They break. They smash. Each attack washed away after. Silent assassins of the seas. You build your castle. Piece by piece you construct your fortress from the sand. A little pat there, a quick smooth-over here. Perfection looks back. Then the waves come. You watch. You can do nothing else. Time has shown you the harsh truth. You are no sand weaver. This was no masterpiece able to hold back the ocean's onslaught. This was hobby. This was fantasy. Holding the remnants of your work, you watch the sand fall away. Another chance blows on the wind. Hope floats by and you follow. There are other beaches, other projects.
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| The one where Insert looks at the edge and Title looks at the bottle. |
[30 Aug 2008|10:51pm] |
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I think I've figured it out. I don't like to code. I like the result. I like the sense of achievement but the process? Ugh. I could do without that. I'm currently taking a programming class that I don't strictly need. It is supposed to be a combination class for those on a fast track through their CS majors. Obviously, I don't fit that bill. Both classes that it is composed of I've already taken - with 'A's. I still enrolled for a couple of reasons, including needing a full-load for my insurance. I think I just figured out the real reason though. I think I wanted to prove to myself that coding isn't for me. For both programming and prose the process is the same. The difference lies in the grammar. Sublimation of creation forces, compiling versus content. I'm still going to finish. If anything, it should help my GPA. Which, honestly, could use the help anyway.
I had this cool thought while watching through the first two discs of Superman: The Animated Series. What if so many people like Superman not for the clearly-defined morality, but for his vast destruction? I had a philosophy professor who was convinced that many people loved to hear about criminals not for their capture but for their crimes. He suggested that on some level people had their inner-most desires linked to bad behavior. That people wanted to act out their impulses but society, and its rules, held them back. It was the criminals that realized these fantasies for the masses. It's an interesting idea to say the least. He destroyed the building. He wrecked the bus. He halted the train, smashing the rails. Surprisingly, I'm not talking about some super-villain but Superman. It's amazing when you consider that in most cases the hero can do as much if not more damage than the evil he's fighting. I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this but it's quite interesting. I've always wondered what being an insurance adjuster would be like in these fictional worlds. Would it be hard or easy? How about a builder? Construction work must see a boom when the fights are over. The populace, what do they think? Is it their desire for justice or just destruction that is painted across the sky during the aerial fight?
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| The one where Insert tries to write like David Sedaris and Title just shakes his head. |
[29 Aug 2008|05:49pm] |
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I want things just a certain way. Proper place, special time - exactly like that. When things happen to move the needle from Perfect to No-So, I tend to get annoyed. It's simple things that have the most impact too. That single loose thread on a shirt. Those mismatched socks on the person walking in front of you. All those little things that yell out, if only to you, fix me! You start something new. The new becomes routine and before you know it, a pattern of behavior emerges. You start to listen to a certain radio program while you do the dishes or watch a certain television show when it's time for dinner. Slowly, interesting idiosyncrasies become engraved actions. It's no wonder then that when that oh-so-common show isn't on or that radio program takes a break, you start to feel off. Those grooves you travel suddenly aren't so smooth anymore. It was running out of old podcasts that did it to me. I can hear you thinking: What does listening to podcasts have to do with anything? For you, probably nothing. For me though it is what keeps me sane, awake and entertained as I do my mundane work. Being janitor, or if you want to get fancy: custodian, isn't the best job. Most of the time you are cleaning up after an event or to get ready for upcoming one. Repetition is the name of the game. It is not uncommon to clean the same rooms two or three times a week. Over and over it goes. To combat that you need something entertaining. I turned to podcasts. Specifically 1UP Network's podcasts. At this point I've listened to practically every episode of EGM Live* (now 1UP FM), GFW Radio and 1UP Yours. When I started listening the large amount of backlog episodes interested me. Surely I would never have time to listen to all of them. Over time though that came to be false. I chipped away at them. At first it was only the new ones, then I started on slightly older ones. Before I knew it I was downloading large swathes of the backlog. It didn't help that I introduced a friend to them. Separately we'd listen to the old shows then get together and talk about how much things had changed. Over a few weeks a I was listening to more than a handful of episodes a day. As you can imagine, I eventually ran out. This happened last week. I've tried other shows. They help, but I miss the voices. Or was it the jokes. Maybe it was the arguments. Whatever it was that kept me listening, I now seem to want again. Even the older shows held a place in what I was doing. I'd be dust mopping and listening to Shane Bettenhausen rant about how he's always right or Shawn Elliott tell of some great past adventure in griefing. Once you build those connections, they stay. Place, action and sound, they link if your mind. Patterns of behavior hold you. Before you know it, you've become addicted. It's only when it stops that you learn to see those out-of-place things. Those mismatching buttons on a favorite shirt. Maybe that constant listening wasn't the best thing. That perfect image of an engraved action probably needs a rest, at least until you make another groove in the path of life with a new obsession.
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| The one where Title greets Insert with a fist and a curse. Later they drink coffee together. |
[28 Aug 2008|05:59pm] |
I don't know. I feel like if I am going to switch majors to journalism, which I am still considering, I should write more. Both more often and with a higher volume. Only... I don't always want to. I have stories I'd like to tell, ideas I'd like to investigate and theories I'd like to explore. There is... something. Fear, maybe? There is a wall, a block, a barrier that stops me from posting. I've written out a couple hundred words worth of several stories but when it comes to posting, I stop. Looming over any post is the thought that people will read what I type and then try to pick it apart. A single loose thread could unravel a tapestry of words. It's this thought that gives me pause more often than not.
I've been thinking about writing about video games again. Which is to say, I haven't stopped thinking about writing reviews despite not posting anything. I've gotten to the point though that I just don't care about trying to come off as some expert. I ain't. I'll play a game despite mediocre controls just for an engaging story. I'll also spend time in a game with plot holes so big a car could drive through if it is fun. The point being that I don't think I will review anymore. I do however like to write about my gaming experiences. Those little moments when a game influences your life or when you just keep coming back to the same game. I like those.
I didn't mean for it to be a secret, didn't mean in the way that you hardly tell anyone about it. I like vampire stories. I kinda always have. I read fantasy stories about dark elves and underground kingdoms when I was younger and still dabble in that genre. I guess, due in part to me not telling people what books I read, that it never really came up till now.My friend and I were playing a video game over at his house when his brother came into the room. Seeing that we were quite involved with the game, he started asking questions. Can The Hulk have sex? Can vampires spread the HIV infection? It the later question that started the discussion. I mentioned that, having read many books about vampires, I didn't feel they could. Being all supernatural kinda stopped that. Having mentioned that I had read those books got me a Raised Eyebrow of Interest though. In all previous talks of various mythologies, I had failed to say that I had read some of Anne Rice's, Charlaine Harris's (looking forward to True Blood) and Octavia E. Butler's works. So, let it be known: I have read over a dozen books featuring or solely about vampires.
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| The one where Insert meets Title again on a street corner after a long seperation. |
[27 Aug 2008|07:11pm] |
I know I haven't posted in a long time. I can't point at any one reason why I haven't but suffice it to say that there are more than one and less than half a dozen. My main reason for even typing this however is that I want to brag talk about what I am up regarding books, movies and games. (I'm not sure if it is sad or normal to count the accomplishments of one's life in the amount of media consumed or not.)
I posted a list of stuff I wanted to get done back in May and, at almost the end of August, I haven't done as much as I wanted. I did finish reading Microserfs and Wintersmith but the others I have still yet to even start. On the video game front I finished three of the five games. I watched a handful of episodes combined of all of the shows on the list. Not much to talk about but I guess something is better than nothing.
I want to say something about finally seeing the whole first season of Pushing Daisies. I really love the surreal feel of the show. It reminds me heavily of the explosion of color that the movie The Wizard of Oz is famous for. The saturation of primary colors really makes the show stand out. Add to that the quick, musical-like dialogue and you have a hit. Did I mention it was nominated for twelve Emmy awards for only nine episodes?
When You Are Engulfed In Flames - heard of it? No? Ever hear of David Sedaris? It's his latest book. I just - as in an hour ago - started reading it. I'm 57 pages in and loving it.
If you have been reading my "tweets", and chances are pretty good you have been, you've noticed I've been playing older games. Starting with Super Metroid through Chrono Trigger, I'm now playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
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| The Yellow Wallpaper: It iz b3tt3r th4n u rem3mbr. R33d it @ga1n! |
[21 Jun 2008|02:07am] |
btw, teh s1ckne55 th4t sh3 cømpl4ins of m1ght b3 1n7erpreted az h3r d3zire 2 b fr33 øf teh 5ubørdin47ion th4t 5h3 3Xp3riencez und3r h3r huzband'z c0n7rol. teh w4llp4p3r: it iz @ ønc3 døm3stik n r3pul5ive, f@m1li@r n 0bj3ct1onable.
I didn't write this.
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| Stuff, you know, stuff and Life. Life and stuff. |
[19 Jun 2008|09:07pm] |
I was thinking about blogging about Computer Necessities on the way home from school tonight. I was trying to make out exactly what I Need on a system and what I Want on a system. E-mail is important, sure, but what about Music or Video? Storage is big too. I like having a large hard drive to fill with bits of life and bytes of content but is that Really Important? I'm thinking now, maybe not. Online storage can serve most needs. Pictures on Flickr, Documents on Google Docs and music from a streaming service. Those needs can be meet. Video games can be based in Flash content or even emulators of older games. This lead me to consider buying a cheaper end laptop.
I've been thinking about getting another laptop... again. Buying my own this time. I can't decide if this is something I should even consider. Sure, having a laptop would be helpful and I would not have to visit computer labs so often but I am Unsure. It would mean a couple of different things economically to me, and those who know me, but it's worth looking into, I think.
While considering that future purchase, and the upcoming tuition payoff, I was thinking about my future. I'm not where I want to be. Although, I don't really see what I could do about it right now. From where I am the road is long and, well, lonely. Within a year the last of high school acquaintances, those who I don't talk to regularly, will be graduated and gone. Sure some remain, but more and more I find that the older you get the harder it is to both make friends and keep them.
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| Woes and waits |
[18 Jun 2008|05:22pm] |
I'm not entirely sure why I do this. Every time I get fairly upset over something I tend to run to LiveJournal to bitch about it. So, in grand tradition, let me tell you why I am upset and who is to blame this time.
I've been enjoying playing Half-Life 2, and it's sequels, over the last few days. I say Enjoying but it is more like Enjoying, Most Of The Time. The copy of The Orange Box I am using to play the games is glitchy. Several times now, no matter the place, whichever game I am playing will crash on me and I will have to restart. While this is not too annoying at first, once it happens over and over during a battle it becomes amazing frustrating. This is the explanation, by the way, of why I have yet to finish Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Despite all the problems, and in full hope of fixing them, I was thinking of picking up my own copy in early July. I would still be on that path now if it weren't for my PSP screen being broken.
At some point today, I'm not sure exactly when, I managed to break the screen of my PSP. I, of course, didn't realize this till I was about to listen to some music and pulled it from my pocket. Basically, the screen is cracked and therefore ruined. Since I use the PSP primarily as a portable music player I am now out of luck there too. I would like to get a new one but, well, can't at the moment. I will need to wait till July to be able to purchase anything. Not Fun.
Also something that is, I guess, neither here nor there is the fact that I am on XFire now.
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| Story Fragment: Thinking of Famous Mice |
[06 Jun 2008|11:20pm] |
I was going along with this story just now and I suddenly got very tired. I'm not sure why Todd is looking at the scene at the beginning or how he exactly works for the Famous Mouse company. I do however like the ideas behind bits of this so I am posting what I have. Comments welcome.
There was a blue slide attached to a red swing set. Surrounding the swing set was a row of six foot tall lawn gnomes. Each gnome held a candle in one hand and a turnip in the other. While the swing set appeared to be older, the gnomes all looked fresh with not a single dent or scratch to be found. The screen flickered and the scene was refreshed for a fourth time.
Todd sighed. The problem was not that he did not like his job. He liked the pay and the double pay for overtime. No, the problem was at times like this when he had to spend hours and hours trying to figure out the "hidden meaning" behind what he was seeing. He had been through all the training classes and had kept up with all the current trends but sometimes he got handed a case when he just wanted to give up on humanity in general.
For some people it was all money and sex. Or sex and violence. Or even work worries and sex. The most common thing on the minds of the residents of Joy, Texas, Todd had come to learn over his six months of work, was sex. Sure, things like paying bills or nagging wives crossed the minds of older married men and fantasies of candy castles found hold in the minds of young children, but sex was the main thing. Over the age of thirteen, the folks of Joy thought about sex more times per day than any other town or even city in the country. No one could figure out why. That was why the Famous Mouse people called in Todd.
He had been working with ThoughtGuard, the makers of the implants most businesses used now. The implants detected unhappiness in the brain and transmitted to a central location. Businesses were deploring this tool and most had seen huge rises in productivity after those who were found to be too unhappy about working were fired. Todd had been working on the implants emotional detection ranges and thought processing. He had heard a rumor that some company had found a way to process thoughts directly. That was when the Famous Mouse people came to see him about an offer to work on a problem within one of their corporate townships.
Starting with cartoons and then branching out to movies, the Famous Mouse people began to acquire great wealth. After influencing national politics, they made it a copyright offense if their name was ever mentioned out loud. That was when the name Famous Mouse began to spring up. Once they had secured large amounts of money, through the legal system, from anyone and everyone talking about them, they began to research ways to tap into the one place no one had ever thought to put copyright restrictions on before, the human mind.
They built several towns and populated them with loyal workers and implanted every one of them with ThoughtGuard's product, with one little thing changed. Instead of reporting just unhappiness they had their engineers change it so every emotion and thought was processed by a set of computers and analyzed. All of the towns reported the correct amount of happiness and the thoughts of the people were bland, for the most part. Anyone with reoccurring radical thoughts was asked to sign a legal form that forbade them from talking about their experiences and was asked to leave. Over time, a strange trend began to develop in one singular town that stood out among all the rest. The town of Joy, Texas thought about sex way too much.
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| What is my time worth? (DVDs) |
[05 Jun 2008|07:57pm] |
After reading this post I started to think about the range in which something "pays for itself".
After some quick research I came up with some data on prices of seasons of TV shows that, on average, reflect the market. Highly popular shows start, on their release dates, with the price of $59.99. Slightly less popular shows start at $49.99. The prices drops by about $10 each peg with the bottom level being $19.99.
*If you pay $59.99 then you are appreciating each episode at $2.72. The lower peg of $49.99 is $2.27 per episode. The most interesting range is $39.99 and lower. $39.99 gets you $1.82 per episode. That is less than both iTunes and Amazon's $1.99 per episode cost. ($43.78 for 22 episodes at $1.99 each)
Where does the subscription method fall within this data? Let me say that, on average, the cost of renting a single disc, from a brick and mortar store, is $4.50. In order for costs to "balance" then the total number of discs rented per month has to exceed the multiplied cost of the average price of the same number of that same item. In other words, if someone is paying $14.99 a month for a subscription service then renting 4 movies each month is less expensive, by $3, than renting that same number of discs from a brick and mortar store.
On many TV show DVDs there are 4 episodes per disc. Watching a whole season, 6 discs, would cost $27 renting the discs one at a time from a brick and mortar store. The cost for a subscription service would only be a product of the time it took to mail off and then receive the next disc within a month.
The problem still remains between seeing content and owning a copy of that content. That is something I don't plan to cover at this time.
*I am assuming that TV shows have a 22 episode season with 43 minutes of content per episode. I am also assuming that there is no additional content on the DVDs except the TV shows. That works out to 15.76 hours of programming per DVD set.
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| Considering the problem |
[01 Jun 2008|01:12pm] |
I think I may have painted the picture of my problems with a biased brush. I was angry, still am a bit, and wrote out of that anger. I'm not going to give up the ground that I think I'm right and he is wrong, but I have been thinking about it.
From his point of view I am being lazy and, I guess, my attending college is some sort of luxury. He just about said that if I wasn't attending college he would have probably fired me already.
Still, I guess... I will just have to do better.
I've been thinking about slowing down my game reviews cycle. I had said that two a week would be a steady pace but now I'm thinking even that is going to be hard. I need my job. If I have to cut out other things I like to do to keep it, well, I am just going to have to do that. After I review the games I current have from Gamefly I am going to cancel or, more hopefully, just freeze it. If I am having trouble with finding time to play games with just one class now, come July I will have zero time with two classes, one class a day, to manage. I still have notes for many games to type up. There will still be reviews, just at a slower pace.
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| Dan in Real Life |
[30 May 2008|07:32pm] |
My boss yelled at me today. Not a particularity new thing but something I think worth of noting anyway.
I got to work over a hour late, not for the first time, and he felt that he needed to Talk To Me About It. Thing is, while I don't really mind that so much, he decided to do it in front of a bunch of people. The action of an Ass, if you ask me.
To me (i.e. the person living my life) I see the fact that I am occasionally late for work not that great of a item to worry about. The fact that I show up for work on time, or even early, most days is the more incredible thing. What with work and school back to back several times a week, I get worn out pretty quickly. Added to that the fact that I've been outside, getting sunburned, this week and I'm glad I was even on time for the other days of the week.
I'm not sure my boss even understands what I use my money for. While he was giving me a Talking To he seemed to say, indirectly, that I was somehow greedy. He mentioned that I should be working more hours, as if I could fit them in, and that he thought I needed money for college. Which is to say, I think, that he is under the impression I need money for things for college and not that, as is the true reason, I need money for college. I am paying for my tuition, textbooks and other items.
I'm not saying I don't spend money on myself from time to time. I do. I've bought and seen movies as well as started to purchase graphic novels again. Still, I do get saddened at times when I think over the fact that I have to work and work only to pay for classes I really don't like which then, well, make me work. It's hard for me to get upset over the fact that I purchase a book now and then when I'm working more hours than almost anyone else I know my age who is also in college.
I get the feeling sometimes that I'm not living up to people's expectations. Every group I am a part of expects certain actions from me and when I have to back out of activities because of some other aspect of my life they don't seem to understand. When I work with kids, but can't dedicate all of my Saturdays for several months to training kids for an event, they seem disappointed that I am not completely committed to only them. When I can't take part in things at school because I am working with kids at the same time, the fellow students seem to think I am not faithful to my school. When I only get a 'B' in a class, after many long nights over many months of work, my teacher can't seem to understand why I didn't do better. When I am late for work on occasion my boss gets angry. Doing the amount of work I'm doing should not make me exhausted he says, ignorant of everything else that I do.
I think, assuming it would ever happen, that if all of those people who are disappointed at my actions were to get together they would realize something. I think, I hope, that they would begin to comprehend that I am just doing my best, most of the time, and if they don't like it, well, then they can just Shut The Hell Up about it.
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| Bland update |
[28 May 2008|08:13pm] |
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Movies I ended up really liking Memento. Unreliable narrators are always interesting in stories and in the case of Memento, an unreliable narrator who doesn't know he is unreliable, it is even better.
As for Dead or Alive, well, I think I agree with a friend of mine. It is so bad that it is good.
I also just pre-ordered Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs and Stargate - Continuum. GamesI am several hours closer to the end of Breath of Fire 3. I basically have the final area, re-fighting many of the boss battles from earlier in the game, and the final battle to go.
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| Title. Insert Title. |
[26 May 2008|09:35pm] |
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Oh, Blogger Hello blog. Long time no see. How are you doing? Yeah? I know... I've been away. Busy. Sure, I could have taken time out to say something. Look, I'm sorry. Just put that down. I'm here now. I'm talking to you. Put that down. Would it help if I said I'll be back real soon? Yeah? Okay. I'll be back when I can. It'll be alright. MoviesI've been making Netflix earn their money of late. I've managed to see For Your Consideration, Transformers, Pulp Fiction, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Producers, The Darjeeling Limited and Lost in Translation. I also went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) munntendo. Still in the queue to watch (that I currently have) are Dead or Alive, Appleseed, and Memento. BooksI've mentioned it on Twitter but I've started reading Watchmen. I've quite liked what I've read so far but that has only been about 30 pages. As for that list of books I said I'd like to read over the summer, I've yet to completely read any of them. I've been meaning to start Microserfs again but keep forgetting. I did read a large chunk of The Difference Engine the other day though. Oh and I finished volume one of Persepolis. GamesDespite the fact that I haven't posted any reviews, I've been playing games. I am almost done with Breath of Fire 3 (about 6 - 10 hours to go). I've been playing Shining Force EXA too and have managed to racked up over 10 hours (plus the reviewed 2 hours). I've also put over 2 hours into Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for the PSP. From Gamefly I still have Contra: Shattered Soldier and Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus.
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