I have a funny pair of videos for you, to tide you over while I finish my school project. The first video is an excellent example of why I find Rimworld fascinating (you can read my posts about it if you like). The second one is what happens when the people making Sesame Street love Game of Thrones.
First, bad things happening to desperate space-wreck survivors (hint, it goes poorly):
Second, yes, they really did this:
I’ve been doing research for my History of Children’s Book Publishing class instead of writing an article today, and tomorrow I’ll spend as much of the day as I can cooped up in the Houghton Library at Harvard doing more research. I should have gone there earlier, but for the past week and a half every single day that I planned to go (and haven’t been busy with other things) the library has closed because of snow. Fimbulvetr has struck Boston, such is life.
In addition to that, I’ve been trying to figure out which story I want to continue for Chuck Wendig’s current flash fiction challenge. I haven’t yet decided, as I’m still reading through some of the initial submissions.
But that doesn’t mean I have nothing interesting to share! Two things have caught my attention today: one is an article about the ideological and theological underpinnings of ISIS / ISIL / Daesh, and the other is some super cool news about nanotech being used to fight cancer. The cancer one is a super fast read and is worth checking out, and the other one is just straight up fascinating as an examination of the self-proclaimed caliphate as a fundamentally apocalyptic millenarian organization.
You know that scheduling shift I mentioned on Monday? Looks like it’ll happen sooner than I’d realized. I’m afraid my second “real post” of the week will come on Thursday from now on, or at least until that’s inconvenient and has to change too. But there’s an excellent reason for this, and that reason is my class on Children’s Book Publishing, taught by Anita Silvey. I’m very excited about it.
Once again Chuck Wendig has provided me with a prompt to play with, and I intend to share the results here. I won’t be sharing them with you today though, because I spent most of today in a car. This time around, the prompt is “X meets Y,” a theme in keeping with nonsensical high-speed elevator pitches. I ended up rolling a few times on the table Wendig provided because my first result seemed too surreal, but my natural stubbornness inclines me towards using the first result anyway. I’ll tell you what that was later, and share the ones that I’m not writing instead: Fast and the Furious meets The Godfather, and The Matrix meets True Grit. Maybe I’ll get around to writing those some other time.
I should also note that I’m now going to be in classes on Wednesdays. My posting schedule may change some time in the near future, to avoid timing conflicts. I’ll be sure to let you know if/when it does.
I don’t have much else to tell you today: I expect to be busy, and I expect you’re the same.
That said, I do have some juicy tidbits about my planned Wayfinder game to share with you, and I’ve been playing (and loving) the new Tomb Raider. I’m not a fan of the quicktime events, but the writing is *excellent* and the game feels like a perfect adventure story. It makes me very happy. I can tell you more about both of those things next week (though I may be distracted and tell you about something else if another cool thing crops up).
So, uh, I forgot to post today. I’ve been sick, and was distracted by friends being free for the holidays, and then by helping my landlady and her family prep their Christmas tree. I hope that you’re all doing well, and I’ll be back next week. Hopefully with less diseased fatigue. ‘Til next time.
Hello everyone. I’ve been visiting family and recovering from travel for the past two weeks, but I’m ready to resume my regular schedule. I have a few thoughts to share with you today (disparate rather than cohesive), but first I have some exciting news: I have been accepted into Simmons’ MFA in Writing for Children (and Young Adults, but that’s not mentioned in the title). I think I mentioned this before, since I used the elements of Last Days of Loneliness that I shared here as part of my writing sample for the application. If you haven’t read those, have a gander at parts 1, 2, and 3. I’m not sure what this will mean for my posts in the future (I’ll start classes in January), and it may result in a slight change in content or length. On the other hand, I might just start posting things that I write for my classes, so that you can read them too. No worries, I’m sure I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, thus perpetuating my deliberate misuse of common phrases.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with cool science news, reality has continued to establish the premises of the setting I created for Alison McKenzie‘s flash fiction contest (my entry is here, and some additional tooling around with the setting can be found here). Specifically, we now have drugs (for rats) that allow for nerves to reestablish themselves (or communicate?) through intervening scar tissue. It looks like an acceptable approximation to human nerve regeneration is en route. This comes on top of the already existing heart-in-a-box organ preservation technology, so, you know, we’re really not that far from having chop-shops after all. Goodness, I hope that’s false, chop-shops are scary.
As is often the way of long trips, I consumed a good deal of media while I was gone. I finally saw Edge of Tomorrow and In Bruges, I showed Pacific Rim to someone who’d never seen it before, and I watched too many movies on planes (including A Fault in Our Stars, which I think merits some attention here, and Epic, which didn’t particularly impress me). I read some books too, though mostly I spent time with my lovely family, enjoyed playing with my nephews, and played lots of games.
At some point I’ll have to tell you all about the card games Hanabi and Pairs, but first I should mention that I ran the opening to my new campaign for my brothers; it went over excellently, despite me leaving all my campaign notes at home, and the game ended with one of my brothers in tears after a particularly emotional scene. His character, a paladin on the edge of death, had a moment with his god that deeply effected my brother. I was very happy with the final result, though I was a little anxious beforehand because we all thought his character had died for at least a few minutes (and my brother wasn’t especially happy about that). Before you ask, no, I didn’t handwave him back to life: he finally remembered he had “inspiration” (a D&D 5th ed. mechanic that allows you to roll twice and take the better of the two rolls), and used it to evade his otherwise-final death.
Ok, now that I’ve set myself a large number of reviews to share with you, I’m going to leave it here for today. Next Monday I’ll be back to the regular schedule, and I’ll probably start by talking about one of the things I’ve mentioned here today. Until then, I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying your early December!
Sorry friends, I’ll have a post for you some time tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. I’m visiting with my mother and step-father, and my time has been pretty well filled. When I do return, it will be with a review of Fury. Have fun in the meantime.
Not today, but tomorrow with a little bit of luck. I’ve got a lot more for you, mostly dealing with elves despite the fact that they’re quite rare in my stories of the setting thus far. It turns out that the setting is called Elven Progenitors for a good reason, and nearly all of the background politics has its basis in the conflicts of the elves.
So, look here tomorrow for more information on the setting background, and if you haven’t read my short stories you should go do that while you wait. Here’s a link to the first background post, and here are links to Paying the Tab, Jerome Goes North, Jerome’s Tropical Vacation, A Simple Misunderstanding, and Rum Luck. My apologies for prolonging the wait, I’ll have more for you soon.
I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take me to post a piece of world background for some of my stories. It’s not like I don’t already know it, I just didn’t realize how much of it I actually wanted to share in one post, or how long it would take to write it. I plan to have that out for you tomorrow, but for now please accept my apologies for the delay.
Fistful of Wits 