The word of the week is gorram.
July 21 - Dang, Again?
Well, that didn't last long.
After exactly 2 weeks, my glasses failed again at exactly
the same spot, so I guess that temporary repair was far more temporary than I
had thought.
Fortunately, my computer glasses arrived from Hong Kong on
Friday and so I've been able to use them this week. They're all right, in that
they fit my head, have a lovely yellow tint and have the correct prescription -
almost. Due to my lack of glasses two weeks ago along with a rather bad headache and a rather nasty case of eyestrain, I transposed a single number
when I was ordering them and so they're not -quite- correct. Meaning that
I'll have to order some new glasses in the coming weeks: one pair for regular
use and one pair for computer use.
Fortunately I've located a place in the USA called Zenni Opitcal that can provide me with two pairs of glasses along with my custom
specs( pun intended )and a yellow tint - they will even toss click on
sunglasses into the bargain. All for less than $100 Canadian with shipping
included, quite the deal.
However, as fate would have it the exact frames I want are
out of stock, so I'll have to wait a bit. I'll just have to keep on viewing the
world slightly out of focus and doing my eye exercises more often until then.
A bit of related fun:
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| Do not adjust your monitor... |
If you Google the word 'Tilt' your search results will
appear… with a slight tilt. It's amusing and disconcerting at the same time - a
great example of how little things can shake up our long-held perceptions of
the world, of all the things we're used to being knocked ever-so-slightly
askew.
Kind of like when your glasses are out of whack.
July 22 - Me, a Captain?
I'm VERY excited to hear that Firefly Online is happening!
Not until 2015 though but that's still fantastic news for fans
of the show who have waited a decade now for any possibility of continuing the
stories told about the 'Verse. Being able to play your own Captain, hiring a crew
and romping about the 'Verse is really what it's all about, as the canny
trailer below tells us so succinctly:
I don't really have much worse than this, I can now hardly
wait until 2015. I guess I'll just have to find some time in between editing my
second novel, getting my first one out there and starting on my third.
It sounds like it'll be a really shiny year for me!
July 23 - Bike Angel?
In the last month, somebody's tampered with my bike - twice.
The first time, I found my bike seat had been removed and
put back again, but the quick release-clamp had been taken along with the mount
for my lock. Which was annoying but not nearly as big a problem as it would've
been if my seat had been taken too; I've no idea why they took the one and not
the other.
The second time that they filled with my bike, whoever
'they' are, they removed my rear wheel completely, so that I found my bike in
the morning looking like this:
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| Not how I want to find my bike in the morning... |
Very strangely, those same people who removed the wheel simply
placed it next to my bike, which I took as a good thing. From what I can figure
out, the first people who messed with my bike simply did so because they could
and wanted to be jerks. The second person(s?) to do so was either (a) interrupted
in the act and had to abandon I will before they could come back for it or (b) they
removed it using the quick release lever and left it there to show me that I
had been remiss in completely securing my bike.
I took the hint the second time and purchased a cable lock
to run through the rear tire as well as the bike rack to secure both. Definitely
a strange thing though, to find your bike wheels sitting next year bike and not
missing completely; maybe it's a new thing for thieves to be beneficent?
It's too bad I can't find a good Dragon to watch over my
bike!
Or to be my kite. I finally found a scaled( pun intended
)image of the dragon kite I'd like to buy one day - and it's HUGE! Have a
gander:
Apparently it requires a team of handlers AND a 'pilot' kite
flying above it to keep it steady, so there's NO way that it can be operated by
a single person - such as myself - solo on a nice sunny-windy day. There's also
the time commitment: if I'm flying a kite, I'm not writing or doing anything
else productive and well, right now my time's in rather short supply, so this
summer's again going to be kite-free for me.
Kinda sad, but hey, I'll just keep looking for a perfect
kite to take to next year's Kite Festival.
July 24 - Are You Crying?
The writing is going very well on my second novel.
Perhaps it's a little difficult to follow my progress
without resorting to spoilers, but I'm still making the effort. In some ways,
I'm documenting it for myself, as I did two years ago when writing my first
book's initial draft to be able to look back at my process and see how I did
it, as well as what's changed from then to now.
Tonight I had a difficult scene to write, one that was very
emotional.
Keeping it spoiler-free, I'll only say that I had to
encompass two characters who wanted to help each other but didn't know how. It
was very exhausting for me mentally to tell it from the one point of view while
occupying both in my head. While it's not quite the analogy I'd use, it was as
if I was an observer in a room with two people arguing about something that neither
could agree on but both understood - to the point where they were yelling at
each other in frustration.
I don't know about you, but that's uncomfortable for
me to fully visualize.
By no means does it compare to the agonies that many authors
put themselves through, writing about situations that they're extraordinarily
uncomfortable with such as murder, violence, racism or any of the other things
that writers write in order to tell a story and get a point across.
I'm very involved in my creative process, investing myself
deeply in my characters. When I'm envisioning scenes, putting them together in
my head or even seeing them unfold, I am usually seeing things for the first
time. Meaning that I'm feeling them for the first time as well. Pivotal scenes
with deep emotions and consequences for the characters and plot often affect me
emotionally whether I want them to or not and it's exactly that emotional
connection that I want to convey in my writing to my readers.
Judging by the way tonight scene went tonight, I'm very much
on the right path in that regard.
July 25 - But Is It Art?
Box art in videogames certainly has come a long way.
30 years ago, box art for the Atari 2600 was pretty basic
but there were quite a few gems all the same. None of the box art look like
what the games actually did, of course, but it was still cool.
As videogames evolved, so did the box art, though again what
was on the front of the box usually wasn't what was experienced in game. That
didn't come until well after the year 2000, when videogame graphics finally
started to get detailed enough that photorealism was on occasion possible.
Nowadays, it's not uncommon for high-end console or PC games to be so realistic
that one often forgets one is playing using an image generated pixel by pixel
and not by video footage taken of reality.
The art of the videogame cover is thus becoming lost, which
is why I was glad to run across the website of Mike Winterbauer, which will
resonate for fans of the old PC Might and Magic series, especially:
To be honest, what really caught my eye was the Wing
Commander box art, which I still recall on seeing for the first time, thinking
"Wow, I hope the game looks like that inside!" Which of course it
didn't, even though I had at the time in the late 1990s a fairly high-end PC with
all the specs needed for good graphics.
While you can still find examples of unique videogame art
here and there in the stores today, for the most part box art like was seen in
the 1980s and 1990s has vanished from shelves. Which is a pity, as I feel that
many of the images evoked a sense of innocent play in silicon worlds that has
been lost in the high-value big-budget box art covers you see now.
July 26 - That's Chris Foss?
Less than a week until Guardians of the Galaxy opens!
I'm quite excited about this movie, more so than any in
recent memory. That said, I'm a little leery of going to go see it on opening
night, though a fair number of people I know are going to do exactly that. Given
that opening night is a weeknight and it will be the late show, I may not
really want to subject myself to that, especially if I am watching the movie
with glasses intended for viewing things within 10 feet - definitely not
optimized for IMAX.
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| The Philippines get it a day early... lucky! |
About the movie itself: today I just discovered something
fascinating about GOTG!
As it turns out, one of my favorite sci-fi artists, Chris Foss, was tapped to do spaceship designs for the movie! I've mentioned Chris in
this blog several times before and for good reason: his work is seminal,
timeless and simply the best fusion of technical design and visual uniqueness
I've ever seen when it comes to spaceships. Here's just one example:
Needless to say, I'm even more excited to let my eyeballs
feast on the visuals in Guardians, now that I know that Foss is involved!
Speaking of space: how about that 2012 flare?
When I mentioned this particular bit of news a month or two
ago in the blog, I didn't have any visuals to go along with it. Since then, the
story has spread( two years after the fact! )and more information has been
released by NASA. Including a visual that gives you an animated frame of
reference to see just how big that burp of plasma was that missed the Earth by
what on a cosmic scale is a tiny margin:
Think about that next time you go outside to enjoy the sun: that
sunburn you might end up with could've been a lot worse. Well, not really, but
you would have been able to see it only by candlelight after the sun set
because every electrical system on the planet would have been malfunctioning.
July 27 - That's on the book list? Really?
When it comes to lists, I'm a sucker for ones that include
books.
Especially science fiction and fantasy books.
Bouncing around the Internet today, looking for shiny
objects as well as my usual topics of interest, I didn't find much. Which is
why I was grateful when a friend tossed this link my way:
In total, I have read 15 of the books on the list, though to
be fair some of the listings are actually for series like Asimov's Foundation series which is several books, not one. So by my count, I have a little
catching up to do but I'm pleased that I've read the majority of the books.
Save one: the Hunger Games and its sequels.
When all the hoopla started, I decided to put off both
reading the book and seeing the film for quite some time, in the main because I
was busy writing a novel of my own. Because of that, I got to read some reviews
of both the book and film and to be quite honest, they weren't all that great.
Since my reading list is already massive along with my backlog of films, I
ended up catching The Hunger Games on Netflix earlier this year. I wasn't very
impressed with the story, which seemed thin on many points as did the plot of
what was essentially totalitarian regime encouraging children to kill each
other for sport.
Not really my kind of story, apart from being somewhat weak.
Which is why I was very surprised to find it on the list
mentioned above. I can think of several dozen other books that I've read, many
of which I still have in my collection, that could quite deservedly take the
place of the hunger games. Reading the comments on the article, it seems that
the authors may have skewed the included books along the lines of overall
sales, which to my mind does not speak as much to the quality of the work as
the quantity in terms of how many people have read the books.
Just because a story is widely-read does not make it a good
one.
My evening was spent over at Moxie's restaurant, just a
short walk away from my apartment. I was there to celebrate the departure(
planned and pleasant )of two of my Staples coworkers who are leaving for
new life out on the East Coast for a few years. It was a lovely gathering, with
many shared stories and much laughter. I even received a compliment from one
person, who said( and I quote! ): "I want to write a book about you,
because you say so many interesting and intelligent things." WOW!
How rare are compliments like those, I ask you?
It was just a great evening and like all such, they are both
too rare and end too soon. That said, it was a big( yet so worthwhile! )chunk out of my usual
blog-time and I raced home to get to work to have this done in time for
just a little past midnight. Which I succeeded in, but only by the barest of margins.
So, you're welcome, and good night!
See above - I've had a FULL weekend( I worked Saturday unexpectedly at the old job )and along with my other projects / tasks, I'm beat but pleasantly so. Have a great week!
