Theatre: So Help Me God! Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and Groovaloo Freestyle Off-Broadway at the Union Square Theatre

( +15 )

( Visions of sugarplums dance in her enormous head )

Someone asked, so I may as well go into detail.

It was the early 90s. My only game console was a Game Boy -- my parents had zero interest in me owning an NES. (Hence I missed out on a good portion of gamer culture, but hey, that's another rant.) I'd gotten the "Final Fantasy Adventure," an RPG port that had the FF name tacked on it, and was playing through it for hours and hours while visiting relatives up in Maine one cold winter.

Early on, I'd discovered something interesting. It didn't really matter what your class was, or anything like that, as long as you bought an item from stores which was essentially "lightning in a box". They were cheap, available everywhere, and could one or two shot everything in the game. Overjoyed, I made this the core of my tactics -- stock up on lightning boxes, obliterate everything, collect profit, move on. I got through the game quite rapidly and without any resistance from the enemies worth note.

About 20 hours into the game, and I get to the next to last boss.

Who is immune to the lightning boxes. And because I hadn't learned any tactics, hadn't done any build work, basically never learned how to "properly" play the game, I couldn't proceed and win the game. I tried fighting him again and again and every single time met crushing failure. I couldn't go back to an earlier save, because there was one save slot and it was right before the boss. I was dead ended, stuck, and had failed completely.

Given I was a kid, this was incredibly demoralizing. And ever since then, I've made it a point to research builds, learn what I need to know, and tread very carefully in games lest I make some irreversible mistake and end up needing to either start the whole game over or abandon it. This was a pretty common feature of 90s games, such as Sierra adventure games where just stepping on the wrong pixel can kill you, not have an item you overlooked five hours before that was now critical, or action games where you can hit a skill wall nice and hard or not have the right tools to get through.

So, needless to say -- I am a fan of light death penalties, freely available respecs, changeable difficulty settings, and quickie-shot games like fighters or shooters where mistakes just mean you start a new round. Games with good design that, unlike early games, don't completely screw you over arbitrarily. Games which promote fun first and challenge second. But even then, I tend to be very cautious... timid, even, until I feel comfortable with how the penalties for failure work.

It's a silly fixation, I know, but it's what I gots.

Lots goin' on around here lately, and if I get a free minute between now and New Year's, maybe I'll write about it! For the time being, though, enjoy part 1 of what's sure to become an ongoing series- DON'T MESS WITH POMPOUS

For oyceter. Angel/Vampire Diaries/Twilight crossover AU (Angel S5, unspecified for the others). Angel, Spike, Wesley, Fred, Gunn, Damon Salvatore, Stefan Salvatore, and Edward Cullen. ~700 words, PG-13, total crack silliness.

Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995): A man with poor political skills gets in over his head.

I was, as writers are wont to do, despairing about my career.

"The rejection slips are nicer than ever," I said to Gini. "But I'm not there. And I don't know how to get there. Clearly my prose is finally up to speed, I have a better knack of pacing - they just don't like them enough. Or I can't make them buy my central premise. And I just feel like I'm stuck."

"Remember what they told you," she said. "The guys who kept writing and writing and writing had their breakthroughs. It'll come."

"But what if I never have my breakthrough? I mean, I wrote for twenty years before Clarion, and I never would have doped out some of the flaws I have on my own. I've been writing for twenty years, and - "

"No." She put a finger over my lips. "You've been writing for a little over a year. You called a mulligan on all those other years, remember?"

I stood, stunned. For twenty years, I had zero career. Now, after a year and change, I had one pro sale and eight smaller sales. That's not where I want to be, but put in perspective, that's not bad.

"You're marvelous," I said.

She kissed me. "I know."

ha ha! I put a drawing there to get your attention! It's of the Food Emporium on Gottingen, so it is related geographically at least.

The details for the signing at Strange Adventures next Friday in Halifax are up! All the info is on this facebook event. See you there! (ps, dudes, don't add me on facebook, I don't add people I don't know and neither should you!)

This should be fun!

One of the things I love about life is how full of tiny details it is. So many things seemed simple, right up until I did 'em.

Take stand-up comedy, for example. I did it once. I bombed, of course. I thought I could spin a story and make people laugh, but once I actually got up there I realized how intense stand-up was. I didn't know how to stand on stage, the timing for an audience is entirely different than the timing for a single person, and the jokes that generally did well one-on-one just didn't cut it with a bunch of strangers. It was all small stuff, like the way you hold a microphone, that I'd never even considered until I got up there.

And then I saw Kat Williams' standup the other day, and in a between-schticks segment, he said something like, "It's a game. You only have five minutes, so you gotta see how many laughs you can stuff into that time frame. If you get 'em to laugh ten times in five minutes, your goal's to double that. You have to mine every laugh, so that when you leave they go, 'Hey, where'd that guy go? We want him back.'"

To do that, you have to be efficient. You have to know so many tiny details that I, as a non-stand-up comic, would never think about. But I'd love to know all of them. I love those fiddly bits.

One of the most marvelous things about the Clarion Writers' Workshop was how it stuffed me full of knowledge in such a brief period of time. I don't think I've ever learned so much in a six-week period of time, to the point where I look back at some of my pre-Clarion stuff and go, "Hey, I really didn't see that?" Now, when I read a story, I see hundreds of subtle techniques, some working, some not. Being hyperaccelerated like that really makes it starkly clear how much craft there is in writing.

There's a part of me that wants to access that alternate-self me where I'd said "fuck it" and gone balls-out to be a stand-up comic, to be an actor, to be an artist, just so I could punch through the space-time continuum and see their craft as they did.

I know it's complex. I know it's subtle. I just wish I had the eyes to view it.

surprise! today i looked at neopets and made everything i possibly could as pretty and easy on the eyes as possible!

SURPRISE EDIT I TINK IT LOOKS BEST WITH MY LIVEJOURANL COLORS IN THERE AS WELL



SURPRISE I CANT CLICK LINKS SO I HAD TO CHANGE MY AIM WINDOW TO SOMETHING ELSE

Knockin' down commissions one by one. This was for "Communist Prime" - who'd-a thought!?



If you're not nerdy enough to know, it's based on Optimus Prime and includes a mix of all sorts of communist imagery, from cars to uniforms.

Check out my portfolio here.

I do commissions! Clearly.

SINCE I CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO EMBED FRUIT MYSTERY DIRECTLY INTO MY LIVEJOURNAL I WILL INSTEAD FILL THE VOID IWTH MY NOW FAVORITE YOUTUBE POOP



tonight i went to eat BURGERS at a place that said yes we're open even though these very heavy closed curtains right behind the door that you have to walk all the way around the back of the building to get to say otherwise
and I WAS ENJOYING THE AMBIENCE
OF A SPORTS NEWS TELEVISION NEXT TO LOOPED VIDEOS OF DUDE SURFING
oh i get it a surf themed burger joint you dont see mayn SURF THEMED RESTURAUNTS HERE AT ALL
here
inc alifornia
no im not even sure what a fucking beach looks like i hear there are frisbees and volleyballs but i mean i can just go to my local elementary school for that right

AND WHILE ENJOYING the tiki atmosphere and listening to danielle tell stories about how she thought she was going down on a woman with a rusty cold vagina when she was infact licking a tailpipe BANJOS AND VIOLINS BANJOS AND VIOLINS I CANT HEAR DANIELLES STORY ABOUT HOW SHE MADE OUT WITH A CAT TONGUE WAS IT A CAT WAS IT A TAILPIPE ILL NEVER KNOW BECAUSE THERE WAS A HOEDOWN BEHIND US
so i ate my surf burger while chickendancing with squishtopher becuase thats the only country song i know and pretending to listen to danielles robot catgirl lesbian fantasies

TOMORROWS SURPRISE WILL MAKE YOUR STOMACH RUMBLE

this i sall filler because i CVOULDNT FUCKING POST FRUIT MYSTERY
http://home.wildit.net.au/hellohelloben/mystery.html
it is old but it is CLASSIC EDUTAINMENT

Two of them today! Readers ahead of the curve may by now have become suspicious that I am yoinking these from somewhere; and that is true: if you’re already a reader of drawn.ca you’ll have seen these before. Whoever thought it would be a fantastic idea to put Kool Keith and Tom Waits on a musical track together, at the same time? A gold star for that person.

I’d kind of like to make a regular thing of this and I’ll try to broaden my search pattern with respect to cartooning and animation blogs; but friends, by all means, if you’ve seen a neat cartoon, drop me a line so that we can share it with the whole class.

Trichrome Blue from Lois van Baarle on Vimeo.

Originally published at The Dawn Chapel. You can comment here or there.

I just made Joe shriek, "No! No! Stop! I can't hear you!" while hiding under a blanket by reading a page from the second book of L.J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries series to him.

*\o/*

Clearly, I must acquire books one, three, and four! This is very handy.

Also, I never read book three because I couldn't find it.

I had to do something I haven't done in a long time: Adjust the difficulty level to "punk" to beat the game. This is a thing I don't normally do, but a) the final battle takes about twenty minutes, and b) the AI was failing me so badly I figured I might as well counter-cheat. Because when you have two massive tanks who, despite many urgings, stand there like morons watching the battle when your healer keeps charing in to face off the Archdemon, you get tired of watching your healer get tail-thrashed into oblivion. And once the healer goes down, well, my party was pretty much dead. After ninety minutes of "get halfway, have Wynne die, watch everyone else burn potions," I decided the AI needed some rectification.

Still, the game is over, and I have seen that final cinematic (or at least one of them), and suffice it to say it's still worth your money. I do feel an urge to play through again, as an evil character - though not quite so quickly. This might be an "over the next couple of months" thing.

The ending? Qualified. It's obviously leaving room open for sequels, and all of your "good" decisions have ramifications that may not be obvious. I like that, even if some of them feel a little like a Joss Whedon/Serenity kick in the teeth just for ending's sake.

Now I die of bed. And tomorrow, I work a long day. Whee!

After my previous post about the mainstreaming of horror characters, where I mentioned that somehow Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula had been made into mascots for children's breakfast cereals, I remembered that the third of the monster-mascot bunch, Boo Berry, had been presented as a Peter Lorre soundalike. Karloff, Lugosi and Lorre, who came to prominence as a child murderer in M. A reanimated corpse, a vampire and a child murderer -- part of this complete breakfast!

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9011852

- All weapons can now be dual-wielded in the main campaign except for pistols, which are now triple-wielded.

- Assault rifles come equipped with reflex sights, heartbeat sensors, thermobaric grenade launchers, infrared scanners and aimbots by default.

- Combat knives in multiplayer have active camouflage systems.

- One of the introductory levels features you playing as a terrorist armed with a flamethrower and Browning M2 machine gun in a football stadium filed entirely with infants and kittens. This level has nothing to do with the rest of the game.

- All levels will feature, at some point, you getting knocked on your ass and your commanding officer picking you up and telling you to walk it off (in so many words). One particularly suspenseful level begin with you getting knocked on your ass, your CO getting knocked on his ass when he goes to rescue you and a third party dragging you both away.

- The total friendly body count at the end of the game comes to approximately 250,000 Marines killed or wounded and one SAS member who kind of sprained his ankle landing wrong after snowboarding down an exploding mountain on top of a series of terrorist corpses.

- Player health, recovery times and movement speeds are tripled for SAS missions as compared to Marine levels. In addition, SAS members can punch dudes so hard their heads explode it's totally sweet man you ever see like in Fallout 3 when you headshot someone it's like that only more.

- Neither of them can lean around corners, though.

- The Ultranationalist forces are now armed with every assault rifle and SMG made since World War II, as well as several prototypes that never reached production. The question of where, precisely, they obtained hundreds or thousands of OICWs and StG 44s is never addressed.

- The American Insurgent levels result in the game installing and launching IO Interactive's Freedom Fighters.

Yes, you lucky lucky humans, now is your chance to let someone who may or may not be Eartha Kitt, we're not quite sure, welcome you to the Land of Steely Dan in this 1978 commercial for Aja.

(Yes, kiddies, they really used to run television commercials for newly released record albums. Maybe someday we'll watch some more!)

There really isn't much to this, honestly, but ye gads I sure like saying "The Land of Steely Dan". Sounds like a fun place to visit, but you might want to stay away from that silver rocketship.

THE FIRST STAGE OF THE NEW EDGEWORTH PHOENIX WRIGHT GAME IS ON FACEBOOK






YOU SHOULD PLAY IT
http://apps.facebook.com/miles_edgeworth/index.php

Two slots for musical pieces at least 1 minute long (if it runs over, no extra charge--enjoy!), probably 1:30 or so. Give me a 1-2 word prompt. I will deliver the mp3 to you via yousendit, and you can do whatever you like with it so long as I am credited as the composer. Please let me know if you'd like me to post it to LJ for others to enjoy, or if you'd rather keep it for yourself.

Examples of previous work: "Unshadowed," "Ghostfall," "Once Upon a Bird" (all mp3's, right-click or ctrl-click to download).

IMPORTANT NOTE: Unless I can finagle something in my in-laws' basement over the Christmas holiday, I am unlikely to be able to record live instruments (although I'll pack my ocarina and soprano recorder anyway). So count on everything being digital.

First slot: will be done by Feb. 1, 2010. $30. EXCEPTION: if you want it by Christmas, you can ask for this slot but it will cost $50. (I can't take my keyboard to NY, so I will have to accelerate the timetable for all the keyboard input.)

Second slot: will be done by Mar. 1, 2010. $30.

Payment: PayPal to requiescat at cityofveils dot com.

(The achievable desire of my heart this time is an iPod Touch. If I start earning my way toward it now, I might get to own one before they are completely obsolete and have been replaced by HAL. *g*)

For armandae. Prompt: "palindromic palomino." Fantasy, PG-13 with implied f/f, ~900 words. (I was going to make it about palindromic primes, but couldn't fit the prime bit in. Sorry!)

The mathematician had had some peculiar guests in her time: astrologer-queens with comet-shaped birthmarks on their faces, sages who spoke a different language every day, blind generals who had never lost a battle. But she had not expected a visitor from the steppes, wearing undyed leather, a shortbow at her back. The visitor appeared to be an unremarkable woman of wiry build, with black hair braided tightly back and deeply tanned skin. ( Read more... )

I watched Quarantine last night (I know, I know, I should have watched [REC] instead, sue me). I have a soft spot in my heart for zombie movies, and I've been thinking about them a lot lately for some reason. New Moon is a smash hit, through the roof, with its vampires and werewolves. Is it possible, I wonder, that one day there will be a supernatural romance between a teenage girl and a zombie? It seems implausible, but then let's step back and think about this for a moment.

( Read more... )

By way of nestra. ( Read more... )

Feel free to link to your wishlist in comments--I can't do spendy stuff right now, but I can do other things like writing ficlets or making icons or whatnot.

SUPRISE WEEK DAY 1.5: LETS TALK ABOUT WORK BA-BY LETS TALK ABOUT POOP AND PEE LETS TALK ABOUT ALL THE GOOD DOGS AND THE BAD DOGS THAT PLAY WITH ME
LETS TALK ABOUT WORK
LETS TALK ABOUT WORK

so yesterday SASHA THE BURNESE mountain dog was so stressed during her am potty break and i said whats wrong sasha whats the matter and she hop ran away like she was afraid of her own tail
and she WAS
HER SECOND TAIL
A SECOND MYSTERY TAIL a poop covered rope hanging from her butt and GOD DAMNIT I AM SASHA WHY CANT I GET AWAY FROM THIS NUISANCE IM RUNNING FORWARD ITS BEHIND ME WHY CANT I GET AWAY
so daphny brain decided to help sasha brain and i was trying to scare her so she would clench her ass and be rid of the rope poop
it looked like a poop kabob but instead of a skewer it was on a rope hanging from a dogs ass
so im chasing her around SLAMMING THE POOPER SCOOPERS TOGETHER screaming SASHA SASHA SASHA IM SCARY LOOK AT ME but she was too preoccupied with her poop to even notice the clanging and slamming meanwhile all the other dogs in the room are cowering in corners BECASUE I AM A METAL BEAST WITH METAL ARM EXTENSIONS THAT SHINE AND MAKE NOISES NO DOG MOUTH CAN

!!!SURPRISE ACTIVITY TIME!!!!

GUESS THE DISEASE***

This week has been the worst. This whole semester has been a waste.
I'm not going to do well in any of my classes, and I'm going to have to take at least one of them over.
Oh well.

Today, I'm watching The Royal Tenenbaums and, for the seven millionth time, proclaiming it the perfect movie. There are many reasons for this, but for me right now, it's the scene where Royal catches his sort-of ex-wife Etheline on the street that he is dying of a terrible disease, and she breaks down crying hysterically, and then a minute later he apologizes and tells her that he didn't mean it, he just wanted to reconnect. And she whaps him with her purse, and he claims he's dying again, and she peers very closely at him and whispers, "Are you or aren't you?" And suddenly, I know everything I need to know about both people in this marriage.

What's your perfect movie, and why?

Brutal Legend! I haven't actually gotten to the RTS elements yet. I'm about to; that's the next mission. So far, it's been an enjoyable romp with AMAZING art direction and fun writing, but traditionally I suck badly at RTS games, so we'll see if the fun level slopes away sharply. I'll talk more about that next time.

I unfortunately accidentally got a major plot twist spoiled for me by watching some multiplayer videos, of the flavor of "Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal". Honestly, though, that's fine; I care more about WHY a twist happens than the twist itself; I'm still curious to see how Character A got to Point B. I'm also curious how the Drowning Doom, the 3rd faction, fits in... I like 3rds factions in stories because they provide an alternative to Pure Good and Pure Evil, some sort of sideline viewpoint that has legitimate reasons not to trust in either camp. Sadly, I don't think that's the case here, but we'll see.

As for the soundtrack... honestly, I'm not a metalhead. And yet, I'm enjoying this, particularly the classic / standard stuff from Sabbath, Maiden, Megadeth, etc. It was enough to make me wanna fire up iTunes and let the wacky Genius^tm thingy put together a nice metal playlist to enjoy last night while playing some TF2. I think the emphasis on the sheer awesomeness of rock rather than the GRR BURLY MAN MAN KILL EAT ENEMIES sort of aggression that metal typically carries these days helped a lot. Humor and metal go together well and help take the piss out of it all.

Mirror's Edge! For a game that's basically "Do it right or die horribly over and over and over" and focused completely on speed runs, I'm actually enjoying this. I think it's because of the very minor penalty for failure... if you do become street pizza, you immediately respawn not too far from where you died, to have another go at it. It's fast, it's forgiving, and it's less of a bitchslap than other games deliver to you when you screw up. Borderlands is the same; if you croak, you just zot over to town with slightly less money but no worse for wear. TF2? Respawn, move out. Booyah. (L4D2, well, MUCH stiffer penalty since you could have to restart the same campaign mission over and over. One reason why I prefer Versus/Scavenge.)

I'm all in favor of forgiving death penalties, ever since being traumatized by a JRPG which basically dunked me into an unwinnable, unfixable doom scenario after 20 hours of play because I made a build mistake two hours into play. Being able to roll back without a cascading series of crippling drawbacks makes it easier to experiment a bit and try alternate approaches without being punished for not memorizing an extensive FAQ or not having twitchy l33t sk1llz.

Finally, the move is on -- I pack up and move to my new house next Friday. Packing is pretty much done, although there's a LOT of stuff down here, and miscellaneous odds and ends are going to turn up constantly over the next week without a proper box to put them in. Plus there's the iffy relocations of sensitive/gigantic/weird things, like my MAME cab and my skeeball machine and the pile of game consoles around the TV... ugh. I just want this to go off smoothly and stress free. (Which is gonna be tricky considering the Child's Play charity event in Second Life is that very night. We have plans in place to handle it, thanks to my resourceful mom, but it's gonna be a tight squeeze.)

From andrewducker: Have Your Own Personal Jesus

Not surprising at all: God believes what you do.

"People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want," the team write. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."

In that, I try to be honest about my personal faith. I like to believe that God's for the causes that I am; I always keep it in mind, however, that I could be really pissing Him off.

Last night, I did something I never did before: I consulted my wife for advice on a moral quandary.

On something I was about to do in a videogame.

As such, I do have to say that though Dragon Age drags for a bit in the middle, it's a game that gives you a lot of subtle choices. Is this the right move? Who knows? Yes, as the "good" guy you just kept the noble, upstanding king on the throne... who perpetuates a caste system that stagnates his country. So was that the right move? I'm still not sure.

( Cut for spoilers and blathering RPG meandering )

So that is my final "plot" decision in the game before I go into the final battle... And because it's a moral blur, I'm honestly not sure if this is the decision I want to make. The ramifications on the game-world? I'm totally not sure whether this is correct. And it may be the mistake that sets up the plot for the inevitable Dragon Age II: Age Harder, because it seems like the kind of frail, very human idiocy that could cause generations of misery.

That's a good game. The kind I'll remember for a while.

Did you know pine nuts could cause taste distubances? Well, they can - and I am living proof. We had pine nuts in our dinner on Monday. Maybe two or three days ago, I developed a mysterious bitter taste in my mouth whenever I eat or drink. Based on my Googling, I am convinced this is my problem! I got the bad nut! Lucky me!

The moral of the story - kids, enjoy your pine nuts with caution. Keep 'em fresh, keep them Italian... keep it real. If you develop a phantom bitter taste a day or two after eating them, do not assume you have a brain tumor.

Duty calls!

For telophase. About 700 words. Rated G, fantasy. Prompt: "secret passages."

At the end of the world was a mountain, and in the hidden heart of the mountain was a maze. At the center of the maze, the stories said, there bloomed a flower. Storytellers from the riverlands said the flower was fair as morning, and shone with its own light. Storytellers from the drylands said the flower had petals dark as shadow, and perfumed the entire maze with the scents of extinct fruits. And storytellers from the mountain itself said the flower was no flower, but the chrysalis of a goddess. ( Read more... )

The protagonist of "The Revenge Society" is Phantom Limb, who has undergone a transformation since we last saw him. This is, of course, nothing unusual in the Venture-verse, "transformation" is one of the strongest themes of the show. Phantom Limb transforms in this episode, The Sovereign transforms several times, Red Mantle and Dragoon merge into one (with limited success). Sgt Hatred tries desperately to transform into a good father-figure for the benefit of Hank, and Rusty even continues his delicate transformation into a father-figure for Dean.

( Read more... )

On the subject of World of Warcraft's repeatable daily quests, which bored me enough to stop playing a few months back:

[Mr. Spatch]: ugh, icecrown dailies [began to] feel like a job
[Mr. Spatch]: once more unto the zombie viking village
[Mr. Pin0r]: dots to the left of him
[Mr. Pin0r]: aoes to the right of him
[Mr. Spatch]: we happy few, we band of tauren
[Mr. Spatch]: For he today that's pwned in pvp / Shall be my guildie, be he ne'er so pubby
[Mr. Pin0r]: Ours is not to reason why
[Mr. Pin0r]: Ours is but to pull -- and die
[Mr. Spatch]: You're a better orc than I am, Grom Hellscream!
[Mr. Spatch]: (you sorta hafta say it "grom'll scream")
[Mr. Pin0r]: auuuugh
[Mr. Pin0r]: you're a horror, Mr. Spatch
[Mr. Spatch]: Well, you know what the music means.