Saturday, September 25, 2010

Moving On To Other things

So moving past my annoyance of the comic book industry I want to talk about something else. I am not sure what though. Something. After complaining at length about not having enough time for things I started playing an MMO again because this is CLEARLY the correct course of action. As a result I still haven't finnished a book I wanted to get done with already and I am still at a loss as to how to paint up my Viktorias. No matter though as I now have one charecter at lvl 35, another at 30, two more I got from level 1-20, and my Warshade is moving rapidly twords mother fucking warshade status. I'm also having a lot of fun. At the end of the day that is what matters most to me. I spend more quality time with city of heroes than any other mmo I've ever played and that actually includes Dungeon Fighters.

So I am okay with having a massive horrible time sink. Of course right now it is also in "NEW TOY" mode so there is that. I am thinking that I am going to stick with it this time. As a result I'll be buying the Going Rouge expansion either after I am done with NaNo in November or the middle of October. We will see how my writting schedual goes.

One of the things I also wanted to adress is that Andrew sent me a message in responce to the last time I bitched about time and friends and the time friends take. Let me be clear that I wasn't really capital c complaining about anything but rather just working out where my time was going, where I want it to be going, and how I am choosing to spend my time. I just wnated to make sure I am okay with everything that is happening to me, and for the most part I am.

The trick to being me is that I need to live a very deliberate life. When I go to hang out on Tuesday it is my choice, I stay at work late because it is my choice, I choose to drop what I am doing and flee to New Orleans, roleplay once a week, have less time than I want for reading specifically because of video games, et cetera. What I do want to do less of is watch less TV, or when I watch TV I want it to be something educational. Bablyon 5 is great and all but I have been watching way to much of it so right now I need to step back and give it and everything else related to it a rest.

Lunch as well as this blog is over.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

I hate the Comic Book Industry

I was reaing a thread on rpg.net on something or other, and someone was commented that you don't get more mainstream than Batman. It's true I mean think about it. Think back to the 90's tv show, you know the good one... actually don't think watch. No logos, no words, nothings to indicate what the hell is going on until the very end of the openining sequence and yet it is undeniably understood as Batman. Even before the movies the person who didn't know who batman is was pretty rare. The same goes for Spiderman, Wolverine, and Superman. People know who these charecters are even though they have never picked up a comic book, never been near a comic book store, and in some cases they have beaten up people who read comics.

So how the hell is it that the charecters themselves are mainsteam but not the medium? I think that the problem is three fold and I am not going to go into it in minute detail because it really isn't all that nessisary.

One- Lack of Availability. My first comic was the first book of the Infinity Gauntlet series. Man oh man I loved the Infinity Gauntlet story. Right now in Books a Million there is a beautiful hardback book collecting the whole thing. Want. After that it was the punisher. The point is that whole my mom wrapped up grocery shopping I would look at comic books and I would end up with some. As I was talking to the owner of my FLGS she was talking to be about how comics used to be everywhere. She talked about how she used to drive to different gas stations and grocery stores picking up issues for her customers if her order was short. She'd loose money sure but keeping her customers happy was a bit more important to her. Now that option no longer excists. This is starting to change somewhat, you can get some books in the larger chain bookstores but everone goes grocery shopping, books stores are a culture all their own. A culture who drinks to much coffee.

Still the point remains.

Two- Lack of Advirtising. No seriously, look at all the comic book movies. The movies have multi million dollar advertising budgets including increadbily successful viral advirsements. You would think that somewhere SOMEHOW this would translate into comic book sales. Yet the comic books weren't ever really mentioned. After the Watchmen movie came out DC made a half hearted attempt to boost sales of some its trades by reprinting a bunch of trades with an "After you read watchmen try this" banner on top but good heavens that just ended up confusing lots of people who were trying to figgure out how Preacher was the sequel to Watchmen. There is more to say here but it ties directly into my third point and that is

Three- Comic book companies are poorly run. Good god they just are. I go to the marvel site and the two things I should be able to easily find are a way to subscribe to their comics, and their releases for at least a month in advance. THe subscription is easy. Getting this weeks releases isn't so hard, but good god damn I am not sure that there is a way to get a release schedual for longer than a week in advance. This is just nit picking though. I am talking about both of the big two suffering from release scheduals problems that are so bad that their side books end up spoiling the main event (civil war). That they will release events that are impossible to read in any sort of chronological order. I'm not talking a couple of things either I am talking about how the event will literally make NO sense unless you read at least two other books (blackest night). Hell even collected in trades the Blackest Night event doesn't even make sense unless you just with the fact that you are going to find out what the hell is going on in the next book or two. And there is absolutly no advirtising anywhere about any of this. And that is retarded.

Marvel comics should be advitised on the cartoon god damned network...or you know the Disney channel cause you know how they ended up owning Marvel. A halfway decent advitising campain combined with some events that provide good jumping on points for new readers, and make them more widely availble. Yet these are companies that STILL have scheduling and distribution problems.

I don't know the whole story. There could be all sorts of things I am missing. However, I am acutely aware of the power of advirtising. I am also acutely aware that some of these charecters are, at their core, mainstream. Now all that needs to happen is that all these things need to come together. I love comics and while I find most mainstream super hero comics to be boring as hell they do support the other comics that I want to read. I need one for the othe. I won't have either if both of the big two continue to fail at making their products superficially availble.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Okay Back at it

No seriously the last time I tried to write a blog post this girl and a guy took a seat near me. This girl had this voice, a voice that seriously felt like she put ear drums in my ass just so that she could fuck me with her voice. Oh man and her verbal cock was MASSIVE. I know people with smaller fists. Trish for example. Terrible times.

But for all intents and purposes the problems of the last post still stand. Really, though I think it is primarly an issue of organization and how I plan on spending my free time rather than a series of other things.

Andrew suggested making the game bi weekly. This would work if I didn't spontanously left town. When I say spontaneoulsy I really do mean that. There are times, like this week for example where I will be out getting ready to play Malifaux and then all the sudden I need to be home and packing, and closing up the house so I can take off to never never land once I get done with work. As a direct result of that making the game bi weekly would mean that we would just end up not playing for sometimes 2/3 weeks in a row. That's rough.

In general though I just need to better organize how I spend my time more. I also need to plot out what exactly needs to be done. While I was at werk with Sasha I planned out some stuff that needs to be done with the campain to get it back to directly where I want it to be. I also need to get everyone on the same page of what exactly their charecters can do because I am 90% positive that Jason's charecter doesn't work that way.

I was told I should grow my hair out. I am still going to cut it though. I think I like the way it looks super short much better.

You know girls put cucumbers in their vaginas. Not all of them but some of them do. Pickles are not for that. They are for eating. Though I suppose a post vagina cucumber is still edible but I mean...cumbers they have wax and pesticides on them. They are not for vaginas.

You know the proper puluralization for vaginas is vaginae? Well now you do. This is important for those threesome situations.

So I guess the two things I need to get done is that I need to finish painting the malifaux figgures we will be using in the demo at the con thing, and I need to patch up some holes in the campaign to make things a little bit more cohesive for me. The more cohesive things are for me, the more cohesive things are for everyone. Over and out.

Monday, September 13, 2010

5...4...3...

Numbers! So I have had a paticularly metatative day today at work. I went around thinking about Math as a language and what is at stake in the idea of the mathimatical language. It went alright, nothing ground breaking, nothing that hasn't been done before, but it was still nice. After awhile I began to respect how precise it is. While it certainly lacks in brevity it makes up in precision. Emotions though, that's where it gets tricky. I like emotions though. I also like the crystal wall. I love me some crystal. Woo meth. More to the point though I think math could come as close to our normal language when it comes to describing emotions, that is it wouldn't be able to do it very well. I imagine that the formula involved would use a series of personal memories as examples, or place holder values then one set of variables would be imputed by me and the other set of variables would be compleated by the person I would be trying to comunicate with. This would go back and forth until we reach some sort of agreement.

I think. I didn't think about this for very long.

I then thought about consent for a bit. Consent is a thing. You need it for sex and that is no joke. The thing about consent is that there is that niggling argument about the idea of coercion when it comes to obtaining consent. So like girl wants to have sex with me, and I wanna play video games, so she wines and wines until I consent to having sex with her. This is where things start to fall down. It is hard to argue against that. Because at its core the argument is absurd. However, everything that isn't the core of the argument isn't absurd. That is rough. Utilmatly though is that when people begin to theorize relationships people will meet with nothing but sadness, failure, OR you will think you are super smart and spurior to everyone else. The thing about relationships is that they are all unique despite christianity's, and popular media's best efforts.

And holy shit this girl's voice is incredibly piercing. I wish she would smoke more.

Relationships are built. They aren't things that can be summed up and condensed down into a series of theroies which excist to make something nice and neat, whereas there is nothing, and I mean nothing nice and neat about relationships. It has gotten to the point where I am going to start killing my ex lovers as it just makes life easier if I don't have to deal with them ever again. Ah life. Going back to what I was talking about relationships are complex and at the end of the day I would be willing to acquiesce to the pressure argument, if people gave up on passive agressive silly little social games. There is NO way to get everything that a relationship is into a clump of theory. People will try though, and they will come so close but at the end it all falls apart.

A little bit like my concentration.

There are new things to talk about now. It is 10pm and I want to go home. I am not going to though because I need to get some writting done. I miss it. Today I realized that National Novel Writting Month is right around the corner. I also realized that at this time last year I had FAR more projects going on than I do now. Actually, let me clarifiy I had a 100% more projects going on at this time last year whereas now I don't really have any sort of long range writting projects, no real intense reading projects, no art projects, I'm not even playing any games with any real seriousness...other than Touhou but that doesn't really count. So I started to wonder why this is. I realize that I am dealing with more and more social obligations that are all time consuming. I roleplay on friday nights, thursday night anime club, tuesday malifaux, I need to spend one to two evenings planning for friday and thats... the week. I don't have a whole lot of time to just sort of hang out and write for me, hell I hardly have enough time for kingdom of loathing, or all sorts of other things. The other day I was hemming and hawing over starting a new book because I was afraid of not having enough time to read it. Of course this book doesn't use paragraph breaks or sentences so it isn't something I can just pick up and put down.

Sooo I am not sure what I want to do about that. I like roleplaying! I like City of Heroes. I like writing, reading, calligraphy, and all sorts of other things. Soooo I am not entierly certain as to what I am going to do about this little conudrum. Also, to be perfectly honest, I've been in a bit of a slump these past couple of...I guess for a month in a half now. How aweful. I'm out of it now I think. Like the whole slump thing it wasn't bad but it definitly felt like my brain just plain old shut off. I still maintained all sorts of stuff though, I don't think anyone noticed. Yay for me. So now then, there is a future before me and I am perfectly willing to see just what is out there. On that note I am going home and playing city of heros.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Spending Some Time

Quality time with the blog, or it might not be quality time, who knows. I sure as heck don't.

So I got roped back into playing city of heroes by AJ's sinister word trick. He walked up to me and said, "Hey Mike Andrew is thinking of going back to city of heroes". Yep that's all that took.

Last night as I played I realized that I never really wanted to be away from that game in the first place. I was forced out due to writting in my blog nearly every night (FUCK YOU BLOG) and getting home after ten. Now before you could usually find someone doing something. Sure I might miss out on Warzone raids or I would have a bitch of a time getting a task force going but you know I'd still be able to use my super powers to be a righteous force of good in a grey world. I was a tank, and in certain situations I am invulnerable .

As I stood in the middle of three mobs of enemies consiting entirely of bosses and luitenents I realized that the only reason why I left was because the late night community was dead.

I hope this still isn't the case because I really do love that game, plowing through enemies, the leaping travel power, mother ship raids, beating up giant monsters, messing around in croatoa, Roman Nazis, and playing dressup. It is one of the few MMOs where I can spend the entire day in front of the computer playing it and I still feel like I have accomplished something. There is so little wasted time (unlike wow) that I am always moving onto something new. The only thing I REALLY wish is that I could listen in on multiple broadcast channels at a time, so I can tell if a roman task force is gathering, or a costume contest, or anything else I want to do. Maybe there is, I think I'll go ask.

And now the waiting game!

In other news Kingdom of Loathing has just compleatly killed my hardcore run thanks to the stupid biggs dig event. Between gathering Lucra and digging I am having just about no time for my actual run. Ordinarily I tend to take an easy come easy go to this sort of thing. But I wasn't going to ascend until I saw that I could make it so that Feast of Boris would be right in the middle of my run, AWESOME. The day after I ascended the fucking dig site opens and I miss it because I was all day oneing and I just didn't have the adventures...whereas if I had just waited a day I would of had well over 200 adventures and I would of been able to gain access to all the content easily. Oh well. Now it has been changed so that you can only spend 30 adventures there every other day which is cool, hopefully it will still be going on after I get out of hardcore though.

Moving on, there is a con that is going to be happening at UWF. Our bratty little sister club is going to be putting it on and hopefully it is going to decent. I don't like the people running it but we have Malifaux now so running some demo games and such could actually be a lot of fun. The trick is how do we introduce a game that is very complicated to a new inexperienced audience? I did it through voilence. That won't work with everyone though.

The best way I think to go about it would be to have 25 point games with some of the eaiser to use masters ie, Lady Justice, Viktorias, Seamus, and one more. I am thinking Sonnia Crid, because we already have a crew for her, but definitly not Kirai, Leviticus, or Collette. Maaaaybe McMouring :). The way I plan to do it is to have one maybe two tables, we pick out the encounters and schemes ahead of time so as to not bewilder the new people, we explain the rules briefly and then we have a person who hangs out over the new guy's shoulder explaining to him what the different units do, all the special abilities, stuff they need to look out for, things like that. I think it could be fun.

TTFN

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Gagetry!

I should be working on Mutants and Masterminds but I don't want to. I instead want to write about middle class problems, even though I am not middle class I still have so of their problems isn't that fun? No. No it isn't.

Essentially, I want an e-book reader. I am in no way a gadget obsessed person. I say this as I type on my cute lil net book which is sitting next to my metallic pink ds. But it is true I do not have to have anything. I do want an ebook reader more and more. The reason being is that I want to start reading more. However, books are expensive, my local library is SORELY lacking, so that leaves me with an ebook reader. My biggest problem with ebook readers is that getting the stuff I want to read is still a hassle. Last night I spent some time on the Kindle store and I discovered some curious gaps. For example I couldn't fine Catch-22 but they had Catch as Catch Can. They didn't have Nightwook (dealbreaker) but theyh had a book about Nightwood called Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism: Tracing Nightwood. Of course that book is 84 fucking dollars. Now if I am going to spend 84 dollars on a fucking book I am going to be able to hold the damn thing, and optimally it will be encased in panda hide. I don't see panda's as endangered they are just a rare spawn. The Kindly Ones is up which is nice because I already read it but you should too. Some of the newer Necroscope books are available on the Kindle but not the classic ones which I really care about.

Worst of all the stuff from the gonzo fiction movement isn't on Kindle and I've been dying to read more of it.

So I am stuck. Even the superficial fun things I want to read, not on the kindle leagally or illeagally and so I am back to books.

When you combine this with the fact that there is no not taking, passage highlighting, nor am I certain that they will handle footnoting very well. One of my major complaints about my copy of Maldoror is the amount of flipping around the book I gotta do in order to know what the notes all mean. An ebook reader might aliviate that, and it problably won't. Of course Maldoror isn't even in the Kindle store so why should I care.

I keep mentioning the Kindle store because it is just easy to browse. I would like to point out that the Barns and Noble store isn't much better in terms of selection and strange gaps. Ultimatly, while I would love to get in on the whole ebook thing I think my taste in books just isn't going to allow it. Sure sure I can find pleanty of stuff to read, and I can go back to reading Stephen King books which is something I've been wanting to do forever. Actually I bet Under the Dome is at the library...not the point though. Also I think I'd need quite awhile to finish it.

I was going to write up some pros to the whole ebook thing but ultimatly my heart isn't in it. There are many many many books that I want. But they don't last, and I can't just reread them like I do my comic books. It just doesn't work as well. I dunno.

So that's that then. I suppose I could take the 200 bucks I would of spent on an ebook reader and turn it into real books but I am not so sure. I actually noticed some sweet deals while putting this post together so I might do that. For now though I have other things to do.

Well shit this wasn't very exciting. Umm hrm. Oh well. I am really tired for some reason so I guess I am going to fuck off, eat some cookies, and watch babylon 5.