Pretty Little things on their way to hell

    Yesterday I was watching a lecture on the eastern intelectual tradition and at lecture 16 it finally got around to Japanese.  This series has SO MUCH STUFF IN IT.  The lecture talked about three thinkers but the two that stuck with me was the woman who wrote the story of Genji and the woman who wrote The Pillow Book.  These books propose two opposing ideas of aethetics to each other.  Genji is more of a long term love of the world, it is taking it all in and understanding and accepting that all things must come to an end, so it definitely has some buddist influences.  The Pillow Book is more fascinated with minutiae it is full of lists, small thoughts, essentially the little things in life.  The idea behind the pillow book is that it is something you jot down thoughts in just before going to bed or just after waking up whereas the story of Genji is a grand swooping narrative that takes place over 70 years and has like over 50 major characters or something ridiculous like that. 

To make a contemporary comparison it is like comparing the world views of Cloud Atlas and Amilie…yeah okay so maybe a French film and a movie that isn’t even on dvd yet aren’t the best choices but hey if you’ve seen both of these movies then it works out for you.  Magnolia would be a good stand in for Cloud Atlas as for a stand in to Amilie… yeah I dunno American Beauty would work pretty well.  Actually American Beauty works in both ways but I can do this all day and get no where so lets move on. 

Aesthetics is one of my favorite things and it is something that I am deeply connected to in both how I live my life and my various outlooks on life and yet for some reason my appreciation of the tiny things in life seems to have taken not so much of a back seat but rather it is in my subconscious rather than conscious.  I still love tiny things in life like certain tactile sensations, food of all sorts, tiny conversations I have with people, and in general all sorts of little things.  I’ll make a list in a little bit.  I think the question I have is do I appreciate them less by not acknowledging them in any sort of formal way ie a blog post like this or my own pillow book?  Do I end up missing out on certain things?

Lets take for example one of my favorite things.  We have these shaffers that have curled metal feet on them.  Terrible idea really they slide all over the place, not the point though.  What I love to do is to run my index finger along the inside of the curled feet.  I love how cold the metal is, and it isn’t perfectly smooth like stainless steel but its treated so that it has this nice subtle texture to it.  I could run my finger along it for far longer than most people would consider normal but whatever it feels nice.  I like to stop and appreciate beautiful sunsets and I love the way a handful of d12’s feel. Yes d12’s to you they are the bastard dice to me they are amazing.  Oh I also love frosted dice those things are the best. 

However, I don’t usually run around extolling the virtues of all these little things because I am usually busy engaging in them.  I mean why write about how amazing that first taste of strawberry ice cream is when you can go do it.  I mean I can do this right now.  Appreciation is the question.

I think that is one of the biggest challenges to having an ascthetic that is rooted in minutae rather than the grand swooping narrative of life.  There is always something that can be marvelous.  I can always indulge myself and I do so frequently.  I eat my double stuffed oreo cookies because I love them, I eat inappropriate things like bananas where ever and whenever I want, I love my music.  However, I think when my love isn’t tempered by reflection I find that I end up not necessarily missing some things but, shit I don’t know.  Ultimatley I think the reflection ends up being one of the little things that I just enjoy doing.  I don’t enjoy them any more or less because I stop to think and reflect upon them.  The small things are after all ultimately fleeting.  You can’t keep a sunset forever no matter how hard you want to and every smile is unique because the context is just as important as the facial expression itself.  Little things are little, they get lost, shuffled around, and it takes a little bit of practice to find them.  They may not be always there in the same spot but I’ve found that once I start looking it is everywhere I go.
    So how does this translate into the grand swooping narrative of life?  Well it doesn’t.  They are at polar opposites of each other though that doesn’t mean they are necessarily at odds.  They are just different.  If there is any better example of “your kink is not my kink” it is right here.  When people ask me what Cloud Atlas is about I usually end up shouting is its about “Love and infinity” because yeah that’s a pretty damn good three word summary.  Life’s swooping narrative sounds exciting it is the realm of love after all.  Not the cute little crush love but the massive life long 40 year married and we still like each other love.  It is the place where the daily ebb and flow of everyday life intermingle into this one majestic tapestry that is our lives and it is up to us to make it as amazing as possible because the world is a shitty place and it won’t do fuck all to help us.  Okay so maybe that last part may seem like a bummer but it is true.  It is up to us to make things grand.  It is taking life and making the most of it as possible for as long as possible.  It is standing in proud defiance in full view of death, destruction, and petty human drama and remaining as resilient as possible.  It is love not necessarily between a group of people but for everything no matter how ridiculous it is.  It is acknowledging the near impossibility of this message and not giving a god damn because that is the only way to make headway. 

I think a lot of people have lost their sense of aethetics both on the micro and macro level.  I think it is what tends to make us small minded and mean.  That isn’t the only thing but it certainly helps.  I think the biggest, best trick is to maintain a balance between the two.  To both see the narrative and the small pretty things.  It is strange.  It is also something we don’t really talk about any more.  Not in any serious level.  It didn’t use to be this way discussions of the sublime and how to appeciate art used to be common place and held an honorary part in literarly theoretical discussion.  I think it is a fascinating topic though but I will admit that there is nothing more individual than the way a person processes what they like which is why most conversations on the topic fail to bear any fruit. 

Anyway my lunch is over and I’m pretty much done here so TA!

Random Chunk of Comics Blog

Hello there.  It has been a while since I’ve updated this here blog but I am hoping to change all that.  Every year after NaNoWriMo I pledge to write more and blah blah blah and I never seem to manage to do so.  All of that momentum gets converted into excuses and then I end up just not doing it.  Instead I get wrapped up in 20 billion different things I want to do and I end up dabbling in about a dozen different things but sticking to none of them.  For example currently:

I want to work on my game again I am coming back to it with freshness and vigor
I want to finish painting my tomorrow’s war stuff
Play more Mage Wars/Netrunner/Malifaux
Play/Beat a JRPG current I want to do FF4 again but there are other contenders, Chrono Trigger is looking awefully nice
I did want to finish The Honerable School Boy but I just did that previous to writing this.  Now I want to start a new book
Dr. Who.
Figure out how to work a Yoga routine into my schedual

…you know now that it is in a list like that it doesn’t seem so overwhelming does it?  I mean some of those things are pretty easy to accomplish others aren’t so bad.  Some of them definitely fall in on the leisure time side of things, and a few of them can be done on portable media.  So it looks like  I need to set up a war wall.  This is something I did for my first couple of NaNoWriMo books and it is something I very much needed to do for my last book to keep my on track…but I didn’t.  I will do that when I am done here.  The idea is to type at least 1500 words.  Right now I am going to let my mind wander and see what comes out of it.  I just started there and poof I came up with all sorts of solutions and I feel better about the stuff I both need to and want to do.  Break lists into sub lists and take things both on and down until I win great victory.  Life doesn’t have to be a mess.

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently.  I just reread all 9 volumes of Preacher finished the last 200 pages of Honorable Schoolboy, all the new 52 Green Lantern stuff, and the new 52 Superman trade.  I’ll admit I wasn’t taken by the Superman trade the first time I read it.  I wanted more All-Star ultra mythic superman and not Superman year one.  Upon rereading though I got over my case of the grumpies and I grew to love it dearly.  Holy crap that’s a good book.  I think the mythic stuff is coming.  It’s interesting, right now in both of the big two we are seeing a changing of the guard.  On the Marvel side Jason Aaron and Hickman are taking over.  On the Dc side it is Lemire and Synder.  All of them, cept for Hickman got their start with Vertigo.  Just sayin.  Anyway it is nice. 

    I kinda wish they still had Grant Morrison working on three or four books at the same time but right now it is just Superman and Batman Inc and that’s coming to an end.  Soon Morrion’s multi year Batman Arc will come to a close and what a massively amazing good time it was.  It is kinda astounding that they would let one writer have so much freedom with such an iconic character.  Over the course of Morrison’s Batman run we got, Batman’s son Damian, a reason behind the Joker’s madness, Batman being pushed past the boundaries of sanity, Batman being lost in time, Nightwing becoming Batman, and Bruce Wayne setting up a “bat franchise”.  The whole thing is massive, fun and you can see its reverberations in the other bat family books.  I think they will be around for years to come.  Just like his run on the X-men.  A lot of people criticise marvel because immediately after Morrison left the X-books they started undoring what he did, Magneto came back, the Stepford Cuckoos were given a stupid origin, and yet some of the stuff he did stuck.  Jene Grey is to the best of my knowledge still dead.  Cyclopse and the White Queen have stayed together forever, and the whole dynamic is just a little bit different.  I still don’t have the time, patients, or  desire to get into the x-books even if Jason Aaron and Bendis are writing them.  There is to much background mythology stuff that I just can’t bother with.  That being said I do mean to give the Avengers vs. X-men a read.

Speaking of which its funny.  Ten years later comic fans are still wringing their hands like children over the Marvel civil war.  I personally think it was a brilliant event.  It brought me back into reading Marvel comics and as soon as the Dark Reign was over with I lost interest.  For just a few minutes the Marvel universe had this fascinating, sweeping, narrative that has such an important and interesting message.  Of course no one could be bothered to see it for what it was.  They were to busy wanking their favorite character to see the bigger picture, bunch of crap.  Anyway the whole thing ended with Siege and once again the Marvel universe became books about people hitting each other and interpersonal drama. 

Now we have the Avengers vs. X-men arc and hey it seems like it is pretty much the civil war all over again doesn’t it?  But since it’s the dark phoenix returning and not super hero registration and the moral ambiguity surrounding that whole issue I guess it is easier for people to get their heads around or something.  I dunno it all seems like a bunch of crap to me.  I’ll give it a read sometime soon so then my moral judgement will have some weight behind it.

A lot of people seem to be shitting all over DC and it’s new 52 but I really bloody like it.  Instead of having one big fuck off universe they broke all the books up into little familys.  There is the bat family and all those books are interconnected.  There is the Aninmal Man/Swamp Thing books and they are basically, at this point, one book.  The superman family and the green lantern family both stand on their own and the green lantern books in particular are a hell of a lot of fun.  Before the new 52 they were getting to be a little bit to ridiculously grim.  At any rate I like this approach.  The writing across the line is pretty uneven but hey Marvel has its stinkers too and what I like of the new 52 I really REALLY like. 

So there’s that then.  There are so many comics I want to buy right now that its pretty mindboggling.  In particular I need the last two volumes of  Scalped, the last volume of Sweet Tooth and the next Delux hard back edition of 100 Bullets.  On the one hand I am furious that I have to replace 100 bullets.  On the other hand I am getting nice deluxe hard back copies which is nice.  Some of the bindings on my 100 bullets trades weren’t the best and it is one of those things I will never get tired of rereading.  In fact I haven’t even cracked open my first two volumes because I know once I start reading them I will go ape shit unless I can read the whole thing.  If they do the same thing for Preacher I might sell my old trades to finance the purchase of the deluxe books.  That would be snazzy.  Preacher is one of those things that deserves a deluxe treatment.

I still think Preacher is Ennis’s best work.  His run on the Punisher is great.  The stuff he’s written for Crossed is the best stuff written for Crossed by a mile and some of the best survival horror I’ve seen this side of Walking Dead.  But somewhere during The Boys he just kinda lost it.  Ennis loves to subvert tropes I get that.  He did it with glee in Preacher and he did it with grace in the Punisher but somewhere during The Boys he just got lost in what he was doing.  I own the first 4 volumes and I read the rest.  It is good.  It does that thing where he goes and explains everyone’s origin story.  I fucking love that it is one of my favorite things about Preacher and yet The Boys just doesn’t have the same heart and soul and without the heart and soul the over the top fuckedupery just doesn’t hold any salt with me.  Preacher?  That’s a different story.  Every time I reread Preacher I feel like I am a better person.  I don’t always agree with everything I read but I like it.  I like the idea of living with honor and conviction.  I like the idea of being good because there is just to much bad in the world.  I like the idea of owning up to your failures and learning.  We see Jesse Custer grow and change over the course of those books in such a way that we don’t usually get to see in fiction.  Preacher is long, and every issue is jam packed with text.  We see Jesse try, fail, try harder, get shafted, he literally goes and tries to figure things out for nearly half a year before getting back on course.  He feels like person.  Not just any person but a good one.  His flaws are not his limitations.  They are something for him to overcome so that he can be a better person.  It is just that simple.  I love those books and I can’t imagine reading them in any way other than a whole unit. 

Alright well I have a war wall to set up and on a whim I bought GTA 4 and I am really enjoying it so I might do that some more.  Bye kids! 

NANO is rumbling to a close

HEYO!  So here we are again!  Woo.  My National Novel Writing Month novel is rumbling to a close and I am more than a little bit relieved but also more than a little bit sad because I utterly screwed this novel up.  Poor little novel.  This is a squeal to the first novel I wrote which is essentially about choosing death and dispair.  It kind of put a close for me on a lot of the ways I felt and while it didn't come easily it did get written.  This novel I am writing now is about choosing life, but also tyranny of life.  The problem is that I didn't convey this very well.  There are a few reasons for this.  The cast is unusually large for me and disparate.  I have the ending pretty well planned but not the start or the middle which has caused some pretty signifigant problems.  Most importantly I didn't do a very good job developing my themes.  The biggest problem is that I just plain old don't write enough.  If I want to be better I need to practice more it is as simple as that.  Writing here doesn't count I mean honest to goodness fiction.  So I am not sure what I want to do with all this information.

I do want this book to work.  However, I am going to have to rip it all apart and rewrite most of it down to a fundamental level.  I'm okay with that.  I might end up doing it next year for nano or I might hunker down during the summer sometime and do it then.  That would be pretty cool.  Either way in the condition it is now the book needs some serious repair work and the first step to making any of that viable is by writing more fiction plain and simple.  So that will start happening.  Some nice light fiction chumklets here and there some longer stories stuff like that.  I also want to do some more rpg writing and other things.  Luckily I broke down the stigma of doing writing in my house so that's pretty good and I've hit a stride so that banging out 2500 words a night isn't so bad.  I take a break every 1000 words or so and it works out pretty nicely.  All in all this has been a good experience.  I've learned a lot about my writing process, the type and amount of prep work I need to do in order to be sucessful, I got better at dealing with distractions, and managing my time.  What I didn't do is produce a novel that I liked and I am pretty much okay with that.  NaNoWriMo is pretty much about everything else for me.  The novel itself is secondary.

So that's that.  In a couple of days I'll hit word count.  I can pretty much wrap up the plot at any time I want to but that's the thing.  There is still a lot to be done.  I definitely need to develop an ecconmy of space when it comes to my fiction writing but like I said more practice. 

Ultimately, I am not so sure why I stopped fiction writing.  I used to do it all the time.  I had those little note books I carried around with me and I filled three of them up.  Then somewhere along the line it all just stopped.  Being to busy in school at one point is very much a factor.  Then not being in school at all is another just as big factor.  The biggest thing though is that for the most part we do as we please.  The rest it just excuses.  Time to find out what I am using as an excuse to stop me from writing and fix it.  No biggie.

Getting READY for National Novel Writing Month

YAY!  National Novel Writing Month is one of those things I look forwards to with a mixture of dread and anticipation.  For the last 4 years it has been a part of my life one way or another and it has produced two 50,000 fiction chunks that are better known as novels out of me.  The first year I didn't find out about it until the 10th or so and I just couldn't catch up.  What can I say, I write slooooowly.  The other year I failed I lost everything in a power surge that took out my backup and the original copy.  Freak accident what can you do?  So this will be my 4th official year and hopefully I will produce a 3rd novel.  The current plan is to write a sequle/continuation of the first one.  The first one ends with the suicide of the main character.  So it goes.  However life goes on for everyone else so that's what the novel is about life going on.  Also one of my favorite plot points is having your past come up and haunt you.  I won't be doing that this time.  Instead it will be a whole host of new problems for the remaining characters to deal with.  I can't really decide how it will end but I know that I'll figure it out on the fly like I always do.  WOOP!

I love national novel writing month.  I think it is an amazing concept.  To write something for the sheer joy and exhileration of writing and no other reason.  To throw aside concerns of quality and just write something at all costs is amazing to me and so I participate with vigor.  The thing is that I am particularly bad at it.  As I said earlier I write slowly.  I also don't really have anywhere to write.  My house is not a good place for me to get things done.  I've longed to change this about my house but I am not sure how to make it happen.  I've tried a number of things but none of them seem to work the way I want them to and that doesn't upset me per say but it does.  The baby laptop was a lunge in the right direction but now I need to figure out a way to write at home.  As much as I hate to say it I think I need external motivation.  Like someone to say, "Knock off the stuff and do this other thing you need to".

I mean during NaNoWriMo it keeps me motivated and I dunno I am just able to do it.  Also I tend to make a really big deal about it here and on facebook because never underestimate the power of embarrassment.  I know I can do it.  I have done it and I'll continue to do so.  It is just that I can't seem to translate this accomplishment into other ones.  I'll get it though because I am not giving up either.  So there.

This year for reasons I am not sure of I am going to try to clean up and organize my house.  Last night I made some pretty epic strides in doing this and I think that will continue tonight.  Disorganization is the heart of relaxation.  Organization is the heart of productivity.  Somehow I need to find the balance between the two in my living space.  It should work...and if not well then at least it will be cleaner. 

Quarriors vs Puzzle Strike

YAY!  So everyone who knows me knows I love me some Dominion.  God I love Dominion that game is just so much fun.  Deck building games in general are just a good fun time and we have all sorts of pretenders to the throne.  That's fine.  Recently I've played both Quarriors and Puzzle Strike which are both games that have a lot in common with deck building but they aren't.  This mostly has to do with the fact that you are using things other than cards pogs in the case of puzzle strike and dice in the case of quarriors.  Also in both of these games you aren't building a buying engine to end the game.  Instead in PS you are trying to oust your other players and in Quarriors you are trying to make it so that you have enough monsters to survive till your turn which is the only way to generate points.  Both are very different games, however, both are lighter than Dominion and I like both of them.

The question is when compared to each other how do they stack up.

1) Teachability.  Quarriors is easier to teach and fairly easy to learn.  I've gotten multiple people up and running in about 5 minutes.  The game is easy as hell to pick up and there is a lot of public information for the new people to pour over and analyze.  All the cards I've encountered use very clear language that is easy to understand with only a basic understand of the game.  Like there was never a monster card where I just went "what the fuck does that mean".  Culling is the game's most complex mechaninc and once you see why it is important it is something that rarely gets forgotten. 

Puzzle Strike is more difficult to teach.  Crashing, counter crashing, and double crashing are all more than a little counterintuitive and tricky to explain.  The disks don't have a lot of room for explanation and so sometimes they can be slightly confusing.  Like using combo-master for someone's first game is a tool thing to do.  The game is also just plain old more complex.  You need to balance how many gems are in your gem pile, with how many gems are in other people's gem piles so that you don't accidently let someone else win the game when you deal the killing blow.  More complex isn't bad.  But it does make teaching the game a bit of a chore.

2) Components-  Pogs are fun but dice win.  Quarriors makes really good use of its dice.  Each dice has three corresponding monster cards which all do different things, sometimes radically different things.  As a result even if you are using the same dice it doens't nessiarily represent the same monster.  This gives you a huge variety in game play without having 80 billion components to deal with.

Puzzle Strike follows the more standard dominion alike model.

3) Breaking out and Game Length- Puzzle strike is a lot more difficult to break out and put up.  There are more base disks that need to be there in every game and just the way PS is stored in the box makes it more annoying to take out and put up.

Quarriors has three piles of dice that are present in every game, the cards are reasonably color coded to the dice and even though I had no idea what I was doing I had the game broken out and set up pretty effortlessly.  I could never remember what went in the starting bag but that's a me thing.

Quarriors also plays faster.  Roll dice to get resources and summon monsters, monsters attack, buy, and done.  There aren't action chains or a lot of complex interactions in the tradtional deck building sense.  Everyone's turn more or less takes the same amount of time no matter what.  The biggest choice you make is what die to buy and occasionally what to summon.  In general though once things get rolling (HA!) the momentum keeps up.  There is also a lot of suspence, will they knock out the monsters I set up or will they not get the critical face they need.  Other people's turns are more than just times where you hibernate.

Puzzle Strike has things like action chains, chips with complicated effects, attack resolutions and all sorts of other things.  However, unless you are the one being attacked or unless you are in a potential possition to block the attack other people's turns are just things that happen while you are waiting to go again.  The game takes longer to play but it also more complex and in many ways it is more satisfying.

To end all of this because I am out of time, Puzzle Strike is a real game.  It has stradegy not just with what you buy but also in how you play.  In a lot of ways I would argue that it is more complex than Dominion.  Quarriors on the other hand is much more simple than Dominion.  Quarriors is, for all intents and purposes, a party game.  It is quick, simple, tactile, and lots of fun.  It isn't necessarily something that I'd play all night unlike Puzzle Strike or Dominion.  Still it is an absolute perfect lunchtime/filler/ I dunno what to do type game.

banana

banana

CSIence Fiction, Double Feature

CSIence Fiction, Double Feature


Okay so I don't watch CSI.  I don't watch a lot of tv.  I don't have cable and I destest comercials which means I need to download CSI to watch it.  I can think of literally dozens of better uses for my bandwidth.  So of my friends who are more plugged into the internet than I am brought to me the atension of the quote, "I'll write up a GUI in visual basic to tracka killers IP adress".  Yep that graphical user interface is gonna come in real handy.  Of course anyone who has worked in IT has learned that they can just say fancy shit to their non IT bosses and they will think you are a fucking genius.  Whatever.  I am done talking about CSI.

I am not done talking about Star Trek the Next Generation though.  See here is how sad things have gotten.  When most people talk about TNG they are talking about their distorted memories of the show rather than what the show is really about.  TNG is one of my favorite shows of all time because it is just so different, it is something that could only really work in the 90's, it is something special.  The show itself took 3.5 seasons to really get its swing down and by the 4th season it had a pretty established pattern of what would happen in the episodes but those first three seasons is where the magic is most powerful.  It is where that show is both at its best and worse.

At many times over the course of the show, when a problem develops, someone will confidently say I need to use X and Y to reconfigure Z.  Reconfigure is a word they use all the damn time.  Lets take this sci-fi device that does this one thing and we'll make it do this other thing with SCI-FI magic!  Though that is what litterally happened that isn't what we were supposed to believe.  Piccard relentlessly cross trained all of his personnel, every episode starts with some members of the crew engaged in some sort of intelectual hobby.  We are led to believe that these are smart capable people so when they spout off their sci-fi stuff they know what they are doing.

One of the criticisms that a lot of people levy at TNG is that every one seems to know exactly what they are doing and how everything works.  Yes they do.  It is called being a member of Star Fleet you don't just end up flying around the galaxy doing shit, especially on the enterprise which is the Federation's flag ship.  This show put forth a bold new vision of humanity that was no longer driven foward by greed but rather the pursuit of knowledge and interests, a dream that the writers of DS9 and Voyager were unable to carry out because they didn't believe in it.  Which is sad. You look at the hope in TNG then you look at what they turned Star Fleet into over the course of DS9 and it is almost unrecognizable and more than a little sad.

I say all of this because TNG had smart capable characters using sci-fi vocabulary to solve problems.  The CSI moment I started this post with used real world words in a nonsensical way to do the same thing.  Anyone with some basic computer knowlage would know what she said is utter bullshit.  It feels like we've taken a giant step backwards and we are now enthralled by what we use every day.  In a way it reminds me of the very end of 100 Year of Solidtude where the gypsies return to the town and they start showing off the same tricks with magnets and ice that they did at the start of the book.

By now everyone should know better than "I'll make a GUI in visual basic to track their IP" but instead it is all Star Trek...still.  I am upset by this.