January 2007

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2007.

Argh.

One of my traits as a writer is that I find it very hard to write in a non-linear fashion. I much prefer to start at the beginning of the story and write each chapter and scene in order. This is good on the scale of the whole story, since it means I can serially release chapters. On the level of chapters, though, it’s rather annoying, because it means that when a scene isn’t coming together, it can stall all progress for days, weeks, or even months.

The only thing that’ s worse than this is when I force my way through such a scene, come back to it the next night, and realize that what I wrote was such utter crud that it’s nearly unsalvageable.

Which is what just happened with the third scene of the final chapter of One Hundred Days. Bleh. The worst part is that it’s a simple scene – essentially the good guys launching an attack on the bad guys’ base and the guards at the entrance holding them off long enough for the rest of the bad guys to join the fight – but I just can’t get it to come together in any way that’s interesting to read and flows well.

So I figured I would whine about it here. Because that’s what blogs are for, right?

Okay, so I lied when I said posting was going to resume shortly. Oops.

Anyway, back over the holidays I was shopping at Best Buy and saw a box set of Stratos 4 going for a mere fifteen bucks. Since Steven Den Beste said nice things about it and the character designs were attractive, I figured it was worth that. So, a few weeks back I dug out the first volume and watched it with a friend.

Stratos 4 DVD 1 Cover.  Finding this image was harder than you'd think!

And now, much later, I’m going to post a collection of random thoughts, mainly for the purpose of having a recent post up here. Potential spoilers for the first DVD after the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

I Was Not Prepared…

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

…for how much of my free time the World of Warcraft expansion would take up. Posting to resume shortly.

Chapter 16 of One Hundred Days, imaginatively entitled “The Hundredth Day,” is now outlined and weighs in at 22 scenes.

Just in case someone cares.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.7; with any luck everything should be working fine. I also made a few small changes; there’s now an archives page and it’s now possible to browse back to posts that have “scrolled off” the front page. As always, let me know if you see anything weird.

One of the myriad reasons posting has been non-existent lately is, as my roommate could confirm, that I have been reading a very long Batman fanfiction, Cat-Tales by Chris Dee. Well, actually, the author calls it a Catwoman fanfiction, but it’s the same thing really.

A Girl's Gotta Protect Her Reputation

Having finally finished (or rather, caught up with, since it is still ongoing) the story, I figured I might as well offer some thoughts.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yet Another Apology Post

Once more, apologies for the lack of posting to anyone who cares. Any time my daily schedule changes it takes me a week or so to start making time to write again, and that’s about all the excuse I can give.

I do have a number of posts in various stages of production (where “production” is defined as “I’ve been thinking about it but haven’t actually written a word”) but it might be a few more days before any start showing up; most of my writing time will probably be going to finally finishing with the polish of One Hundred Days Chapter 15 and getting that out the door so I can get to work on the next (and final!) chapter.

In any case, neither I nor this blog is dead, and my thanks to everyone wasting their time reading my blather.

Speaking of Dattebayo

It seems it is crazy antics time again, as instead of a normal release of Bleach Episode 109 they’ve released “Bleach Episode 109 FINAL” as a “co-production” between themselves and YHBT (You Have Been Trolled), the name under which Dattebayo usually releases their trolls and fakesubs.

If you’re curious about just what the joke is this time, don’t bother downloading it. Despite being 170 MB, it’s roughly two minutes long, and pretty much just consists of screenshots of their feedback Inbox filled with whining about the release of episode 109 being late, followed by the announcement that because of this there will be no release of Bleach 109.

Past experience suggests that the episode nonetheless will be out before Bleach 110 airs, quite likely sometime tomorrow.

UPDATE: The more I think of it, the more likely it seems that the puzzling actual release of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Episode 1 was intended, in combination with a known-in-advance delay in getting out Bleach 109, precisely to prompt all the “why are you wasting time subbing Pokemon when BLEACH IS LATE?” whines so they could do this.

Of course, it’s always possible that they are for once serious and won’t release Bleach 109 and that they will continue to release episodes of Pokemon, making me look like an idiot, but I’m used to that.

UPDATE 2: That was faster than I expected. Only four hours after posting the troll, Bleach 109 has appeared on Dattebayo’s tracker. Of course, knowing Dattebayo it could be part of an even more elaborate troll, but I won’t know about that until tomorrow.

Upgrade Complete

I just finished upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.06. If you tried to read it in the past few minutes and it wasn’t there that’s why. A brief check by myself shows no problems; let me know if you see something weird.

Wow.

So, there’s going to be a 1 TB hard drive this year. For real. Not some RAID of smaller drives that pretends to be a 1 TB drive, but an honest 1 TB drive. Not only that, but it is launching at a mere $399, which is actually a price I could imagine spending.

Yeesh. I’m not even that old, and I can remember when 1 GB was a crazy-large hard drive that probably cost around that much.

« Older entries