The word of the week is tangent.
July 16 - My Birthday Watch
Quiet birthdays are the norm now; no more parties, long nights
staying out way too late swapping drinks with friends or howling at the moon. I
never did the last bit, but for all the rest I think the time has passed. I don’t
have a whole lot of people out here to go OUT with as it is, so maybe that’s
for the best. I did go out to The Masters Lounge here at the Westin Bear Mountain for a Guinness
and some nachos with my friend Kevin; the view was spectacular and the weather
was perfect. Fred the Mosquito even showed up, making his rounds as the Island’s
token Summer Mosquito; he didn’t stay long after I waved him away. All in all
it was a lazy, relaxing birthday that I admit I did spend a few hours of
writing a chapter( just this year, I swear! ).
Gifts are another birthday tradition that has also gone
sliding into disuse: what do you get for someone who is reducing what they have
every year because they don’t want to move it NEXT year? While I don’t have an
answer for that, apart from perhaps updating my shop-once-in-a-decade wardrobe,
I do like to pose a few ‘Neato!’ gift ideas to myself. Like the 7RON Watch. I
don’t wear watches, not since the advent of cell phones anyway, but I’d make an
exception in this case. Very. Very. Cool.
July 17 – Laptop vs. Tablet
For the last few weeks, I’ve been using both my ASUS TF101
tablet and a basic Win7 laptop to assist me in writing my novel. Displaying
chapter information and backstory that I’ve written is critical to forming
certain chapters cohesively and I’ve also wanted to see which of the two(
laptop or tablet )would be better at the job. After 2 weeks, the answer is:
neither.
The CQ62-ish laptop is crippled: it has only 2gigs ram, a single-core CPU and a pokey-slow hard
drive, so it chugs trying to multitask - which the tablet excels at. However,
the laptop DOES have a 15” screen compared to the tablet’s 10”, which makes
reading reams of text much easier on the eyes at arm’s length. Surfing the
internet is somewhat easier on the laptop, as I have access to all my bookmarks
and many, MANY tabs for reference in Firefox. Not so on the ASUS tablet, which tends
to see it’s browsers crash if I surf too quickly.
Which leads me to conclude that as with all tech, the inevitable
thing is to spend a LOT more money to get a faster machine( laptop or tablet
)that won’t have you gnashing your teeth waiting while you just try to get your
work done. Spend less than $700 and you’re compromising your ability to work
efficiently, where the laptop / tablet gets OUT of your way instead of blocking
your creative flow. Might be worth it… once I find another $700 laying about.
Christmas is coming, right?
July 18 - I may never fire a bow again?
While at my parent’s today, I realized I had overlooked two things on the wall when I moved a few months back: my sword and my bow. The
sword was a birthday gift some twenty years ago, a simple Spanish knockoff
meant only to look good on a wall – and it does. The bow however, is real: a
lovely wooden recurve made by Browning that draws about 40 pounds, meant for target
practice. I used to use it regularly for a few summers those same twenty years
ago, when I practiced with a local archery group of the SCA. I was decent and scored
well enough for my liking; I was a decent shot. And it was fun.
Looking at the bow today, I realized I hadn’t fired it in
over a decade. It’s been kept unstrung, as it should, on my wall all these
years, unused. The second thought that entered my head was that I may never
fire it again due to the unknown damage to my arms still lingering from earlier this year.
That was a very sad thought.
July 19 - Chris Foss
Growing up in the seventies, I saw a lot of sci-fi art and
none made a greater impression on me than the work of Chris Foss. His
spaceships weren’t the gleaming cylinder-rockets of the Golden Age of sci-fi,
nor were they the gritty-realistic grey boxes of Star Wars or Battlestar
Galactica. No, the ships of Foss’s art pieces are of unusual shapes, with oddly
defined details wherever you looked closely and coloured in the manner of
tribal warpaint. They grabbed my imagination and shook it mightily to make
stories and characters pop into my head with every picture: they were evocative
and provocative and many other words that called creativity into being. Back
then, it opened the doors in my mind to visualizing things as I wanted them to
be, free of the constraints of following other well-worn paths. Today, seeing
something so different tells me that there are LOTS of other ways of ‘defining’
sci-fi.
Thanks, Chis, for sharing your art with me. And the world.
July 20 - RUIN will become a movie!
Back in March of 2012, I wrote about a short CGI animated
film I’d discovered called RUIN. Mix up flying killer robots, a motorcycle and
nanotech in an apocalyptic world and you have a great 8-minute story. Good
enough for someone to want to make a longer film, apparently! McG has purchasedthe film rights to RUIN and will be working with Wes Ball of Oddball Animation
who created RUIN several years ago. If you haven’t seen it, have a look( and
listen, the music is great! )again below:
July 21 - Rango
It was a slow Saturday today. I went over to the Moss St.Paint-In, which saw tens of thousands of people come out on a gorgeous sunny
day to see hundreds of artists exhibiting their work all along the closed-off
street near to where I live (and used to live on). I’m not much of an art
expert, so I simply wandered and enjoyed the crowds enjoying the art, with the
occasional piece catching my eye. If I’d had thousands of dollars in my
pockets, I may have bought a piece or two for a few hundred… nothing really
jumped out and spoke to my inner muse, though I didn’t manage to browse the
whole 4km-long street.
After I managed to wrestle a migraine into submission, in
the evening my family and I watched Rango, starring Johnny Depp. I thought it
was a wonderful film that consistently( and intentionally )broke the Fourth Wall, which was awesome. The animation was breathtakingly detailed and there
was SO MUCH to take in that I’ll have to watch it a second time… or a third. We
rented the DVD( my first rental in a decade )from the local shop Pic-A-Flic, which
stunned me with it’s variety and volume of choices! Dense racks of television,
documentaries, movies and other media filled the place tight and the prices
were right: Rango cost me a Toonie for two nights. I’ll be back again!
July 22 –What the blah?
Woof! Today went sideways somehow. My mom didn’t have a good
night last night, so I stayed at my parent’s place all day today in case she
needed someone nearby or had to go to the hospital – something we’re quite used
to but I had hoped was going to happen less frequently in the future. As we
were both rather tired, I decided to forgo resuming writing today and instead
finished transferring my novel data so far into a program called Storybook. I
added in chapters, scenes, characters and plot threads, which will allow me to
visualize ALL aspects of the novel and see where I may be straying from a solid
storyline or neglecting to mention an important character more than once. Right
now the MOST important thing is to GET the chapters DONE though, so it’s going
to be a solid slog for the next few weeks to lay down another dozen chapters
for the next 1/3 of the book. Then I can spend a good few weeks wrapping up the
final half-dozen chapters in a nice tight unit to complete the first draft by
the end of August, I hope. The data entry and the blog took up the entirety of my day, along with periods of random unconsciousness. Blah.
It's been a three-day break from writing and I'm itching to get back to it this week, hopefully when my mom's feeling better. I'm also going to be putting some increased efforts into job-hunting, to try and find a better fir to my wants AND my needs. Knowing that I don't want to go backwards, I'll take going sideways for a bit job-wise if it means I can start to move forward by 2013. Yep!
