Facades, Fragility and Fett

The word of the week is tangible.

Aug 11 - Losing Laughter

A bright light went out of the world today.

Robin Williams has died, some say by suicide, but the details don't matter: he's gone, at the young age of 65.

The news shocked me as little has for some time.

The effervescent and brilliant comedian seemed to be a mainstay of Hollywood, making movies that were not only entertaining but showcased his brilliant talent and love of making people laugh.

This isn't going to be a tribute post; there's plenty of those already on the Internet this week, showing just how much and how many lives Robin Williams touched with his talent and compassion. Many people are sharing their personal stories of how Williams touched their lives, for the better.

What I want to say is fairly simple, something that I feel is true of very few people who have come down through the ages and I know the sentiment is shared by millions the world around today. It is thus:

The world is truly a darker place without Robin Williams, by far.

We can all take some comfort in that he is left us a legacy of laughter in his massive body of work and that wherever he is now, he lives again every time that someone smiles at his antics. 


Aug 12 - Living

Reducing one's debts is always a good idea. I'm not alone if I say that mine could be much smaller, but actually getting the wherewithal to reduce them is quite challenging.

One guy who has a plan to go debt-free in a year is Geoffrey Westlock, a recent film school grad. He's taken paying off his debts to new extremes: he's taken up life as a nomad, living in a trailer in Calgary, with no fixed address( temporarily )and setting up in empty parking lots at night, rent-free. He's keeping a blog here of his experience as he's doing a bit of travelling around of late - and why not? He's got a mobile home, after all:

So far, it appears to be working and his expenses are almost nil. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that, however; I have too much invested in 'my stuff' to give it all up, much as it pains me to admit it. Sure, I could put a majority of it in storage, but then I'm just trading one kind of rent for another, really.

Interesting idea though; you never know what might work. 

Right now I'm getting by, picking at my debts steadily for the last few months now that my pay's back to a living wage. As I've said before, it's not a wage that will buy me a car, a house and a boat to sail on( not that I need any of those things anyway )but it's enough to start tipping the balance towards the black.

Seeing red for too many years isn't good for you.


Aug 13 - Website In A Night!

It's been a rough week for writing for me.

Not much has been coming through, at least in useful doses. Small glimpses, parts of scenes and other bits have shown up, but nothing that I can turn into another ten chapters, so it's been slow going.

So, tonight after work, I decided  to finish my website.

When I say finish, I mean "Take from a rough outline to a finished product" in a timeframe of six hours - and why not? My site isn't anything complicated and I wanted to see what I could accomplish by setting myself a solid, achievable goal for tonight. I sure as heck wasn't getting any good writing done.

Judge for yourself how it turned out, then go have a look:
 

K.I.S.S

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with how the site shaped up, especially given that it's just a 'placeholder' site until I can get something much fancier designed. It's there to be an information stop for people I give my 'Book Business Cards' to, to show them I'm serious and that I have a lot more completed than just some scraps of paper with scribbles on them. It's also a place for them to check in from time to time, to help build a following and get good word of mouth wherever possible.

Plus, it's another checkmark on my To Get Published list - yay!


Aug 14 - Fett

I'm on a Fett kick for some reason lately - Boba Fett, that is.

Whatever you want to call it, I'm moderately mad about Mandalorians this year and Boba Fett in particular. Perhaps it all started last year in Phoenix, when I had the chance to put on the iconic helmet while waiting in line for a latte:

( not officially endorsed by Starbucks USA )

There's just something about the badass bounty Hunter that appeals to me, but I can't quite put a finger on it. It's definitely not his cold-blooded attitude though, so while I'm a little confused where my Fett-fandom( Fett-ish? )has sprung from, I'm just going with it. Perhaps it will inform my writing work somehow, in some way I have yet to grasp; many my Muse is trying to tell me something?

All I know is that adding Fett to things instantly makes them cooler:
 

It turned out well, though I should have dusted before taking a pic...

Maybe in a few years I'll put together a costume and apply to join the Mandalorian Mercs, a highly-respected worldwide cosplay group. I met a few members while in AZ in 2013 and they seemed like a good bunch of folks, plus it would give me some people to hang out with at a con or two; not a bad thing at all.

Fett-ish, hmmm... not the best word for it. I'll work on that.


Aug 15 - Dropping Dropbox for Drive

I'm making a switch, though I don't really want to.

DropBox is being replaced by Google Drive for all my cloud files, because in three weeks my 2-year DropBox promo I received with my Samsung phone runs out. I'll go from over 50gb of storage to just 5gb, which is nowhere near enough space for my current needs.

Why the switch? Why not just pay DropBox to continue using their services?

For one simple reason: DropBox wants $110/year for 100gb of storage, while Google Drive is just $1.99 per month; you do the math. There's no real difference between the services in terms of speed or major features, so I can't stick with DropBox for any compelling reason; my wallet would catch fire, I suspect.

It's a shame, as I've enjoyed using DropBox, especially for its easy integration in my mobile data usage. Having access to ALL my documents, audio files and photos has been hugely freeing, but I'm not going to fork over a fair chunk of cash if I don't have to - that's that. 

Sorry DropBox: I've heard the siren song of Google and it sings sweetly to my bottom line... plus, DropBox's $109.99 is non-refundable - that's a no-brainer, duh! 

On a related note, my home PC is working perfectly again!

Some of you may recall that a few months ago I was having a terrible time: random crashes were causing me no end of headaches and I was worried that my main hard disk drive( SSD, actually )was failing. As it turns out, that wasn't the problem at all, as I discovered after patiently tracing the issues back to a simple source, with a simple fix. 

Can you guess what it was? Here's a hint:
 

Low cost, high frustration: bad cables, bad!

Would you believe a faulty drive cable( a $2.00 part )was causing the issues? Since I wasn't certain which one it was, I pulled all three and replaced them( lucky that I always keep spares! )with the result that my home PC's been running error-free for a week straight now. It's quite a relief, as I had visions of having to spend many hundreds of dollars replacing parts without any surety that the problems would go away.

It's a HUGE relief, that I know all my data is safe AND accessible again and that I can go away for the day to work without wondering if my home PC's going to reset itself in endless error-loops. I can run SETI@Home again, which is something I had to give up early in 2014 due to the constant crashes and errors; no good at all for submitting scientific data, you know.

Now maybe I can help find some alien signals; huzzah!


Aug 16 - On the Sixth Day, He Worked  

I had another shift at Staples today and it was... amusing.

Many of the people I used to work with have left; of those that remain, I've no illusions that most will be moving on soon as well. Leaving the same managers and a whole lot of new people to learn how to run things in the crazy morass of a retail outlet all over again.

It's funny to see how badly things are run, in a way, with my new 'outsider' perspective. A brief case in point: towards the end of my shift, the manager detailed me to help the resident tech with some computer work because he's way, way behind - simple enough. Then the same manager chastised me less than five minutes later for 'not being on the floor when it's obviously so busy!' - really?

Is that any way to run a business? Adding insult to injury, I was also told that I couldn't leave at my scheduled time 'because I was responsible for ensuring that all my co-workers had had their breaks' before I could go home.

Nope - that's the manager's responsibility, NOT mine. Just another sign of the cracks in the facade that I'm glad I'll be leaving behind at some point in the near future. Anyway. I found it funny for the most part and not stressful. 

That's good, because I saw the new Ninja Turtles film tonight and I needed my sense of humour to be fully available. 

An alternative TMNT vision - possibly better than the film?

While it wasn't bad, I don't think it's GOOD that I think the best thing about it was Megan Fox.

I mean, really - would you?

Now, I'm a fan from waaaaay back in the 1980's, with the silly cartoon TV series and all that. I've not read the original( or newer )comics in donkey's years, so I can't speak to them, but still: I'm a fan.

What I will say is that the film really nailed the personalities of the turtles, as one of the friends I went to see the movie with so aptly observed. No problems there. The Shredder, well... if 'overboard' had a posterboy, he'd be a contender; I thought he was plenty evil enough without what they did to him in the film. A positive note was Will Arnett playing Vern, April's co-worker / cameraman from Channel 6: a definite piece of inspired casting there and his understated acting was a very solid part of the movie.

Bringing us back to Megan Fox playing April O'Neil.

Don't get me wrong; I don't despise Ms. Fox for her acting abilities( unlike some )or her off-screen antics( as others do )and I'm not immune to the fact that she's good to look at.

That said, she didn't do a bad job, not at all. Her character wasn't one-dimensional or overdone, neither flaky nor hyper-feminine, not a fool nor a coward; really, she didn't do anything wrong. I liked her performance and thought she did well acting next to CGI creatures in an action-heavy flick, which is probably why Michael Bay picked her again after her work in Transformers.

I think the fact that I liked her in the part is what bothers me. I really wanted to see the original design of April O'Neil, yellow jumpsuit and all, come back to the films. Kind of like this:
 

Maybe April's Russian?

But that's nostalgia talking. We live in an age of reboots, with new films in a franchise coming at a steady pace every 4-7 years, depending on the studio and how badly they want to cash in - again.

How long do you think it'll be until they reboot the Ninja Turtles again?


Aug 17 - Bravo, Audio!
 
I picked up two freebies today: one TV show and a collection of audio books!

The television show is Johnny Bravo, which for some reason was running a 24-hour marathon today on one of my cable channels, oddly enough. For those of you who don't know, Johnny Bravo is animated cartoon series that debuted in 1997 and ran for seven years, being surprisingly good for most of its run. It follows the adventures of its namesake title character as he tries to navigate through a world far more complicated than he sees it and while he is lovable, he just can't quite get some things. Take a look:



The other freebie today is an audio book collection, which I really don't collect but I couldn't turn down as it was free - and still is for a week or two! It's 12 short stories written by RA Salvatore, set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and titled The Legend of Drizzt: The Collected Stories which follows the most famous Drow Elf with a good heart, Drizzt Do'urden:

Yes, you guessed it: Drizzt doesn't do smiles

What makes this particular audio collection special is that it is narrated by various g33ky celebrities, including Sean Astin, Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Weird Al Yankovic and eight more, all of whom I'm looking forward to hearing tell the tales of Drizzt in their own unique voices. You can download the entire collection to play using the Audible app or PC software program here, but hurry as it won't be free for too much longer once the promotion is over.

Apart from that, I had a very solid day of simply catching up on various things, including sending feedback on a friend's 40,000 word novel that he wanted my opinion on. The fellow writer had put me onto a book called The Key: How to Write a Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth which explores famous golden-age author Joseph Campbell's insights into universal structure maps and how that can be applied to create powerful mythic stories. I found the book very interesting, in that while writing my own work I hit a majority of the mythical points that are present in many of the most endearing tales that are still around today.

That really pleased me, to know that while writing my first novel I was already unconsciously channeling the core precepts of mythic storytelling to reinforce my work. Having read The Key, I'm may apply a few more points to my work but I'm going to take a hands-off approach, as I seem to be doing just fine writing the way I am right now and I don't want to trip myself up by trying to kick off a checklist of points throughout my second and third books.


This weekend disappeared all too quickly; it's Sunday night again and I'm just finishing up the blog, wondering where the time all went but I do feel a certain sense of accomplishment nonetheless when I think of how my week went. Although work was very tiring and quite stressful at times, again I have to be thankful that I don't bring any of it home with me anymore or have to answer a ringing cell phone does all the problem in the middle of dinner or other personal time. My day jobs are exactly that now: they take place during daytime hours and once I had home, my time is my own. That's a fantastic feeling, I have to tell you and quite a change from where I was only a few years ago!