mewelke's Journal

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

with dreams like these...
Last night I had a dream that I was working on a racing game. Perspective in the dream changed from being in the vehicle to a third person view of me working at the computer. One of the weird effects of the game was that it took place on actual roads, so while we were testing the game we were doing significant collateral damage to poor unsuspecting commuters.

But this was not the weird part. The weird part was that one of the roads drove between the tables through a restaurant. Sidney Greenstreet owned the restaurant, and he had this waitress that was his pet. He played this game each day where he'd say "There's my Fareeshan." And she'd say in her tiny voice "But I'm not a Fareeshan." And then he'd feed her a piece of buttered bread. And he'd repeat the mantra, and she'd again decline. And he'd feed her some soup. And on it went until sufficiently fed she'd say "I am a Fareeshan."

There's my Fareeshan. Shudder.

Back from the peninsula
Amy and I went to Olympic Peninsula and also I guess Kitsap Peninsula this weekend.

Our first stop was Port Townsend which advertises its tourist side around its Victorian buildings. The first thing you see though when you come into town are the signs of the bad side of town: payday advance place, pawn shop, habitat for humanity, ok they didn't complete the set with the bail bondsmen, but still... The problem with the place living up to what is advertised I think, is while there are a lot of old Victorian places, they are spread out too much. The real problem with the city though is the birds. The streets are covered in crap, and after the morning rounds of the birds so were all the cars in the parking lot. We stayed in a hotel that had once been a brothel, which was neat, though this being Washington in the summer, the sun was up by five, and the bird cries sounded as though someone in the street was torturing entire schools of small children to death.

The best thing about Port Townsend was the food. We ate a really nice meal at the Fountain Cafe, where the food and service were both better than they had any right to be... both the cook and waiter looked like 20 year old waster boys, but the food was great and delivered quickly. I had a turkey reuben where the cheese was smoked and melted in with the chopped turkey... super tasty. Dinner was also good, if a fairly standard seafood dinner, it was good and fresh.

The next day we went to Hurricane Ridge, which we'd missed last year.

Amy took this photo of the wee mountain goat, personally I don't like to be this close to the nature even the nature that's pretty used to being around lots of people.

The next day we were off to Lake Crescent where we'd stayed last year, but first we wanted to give Port Angeles another chance, and stopped there for lunch. Port Angeles failed again. Hardly anything was open, part of that may have been due to the holiday, but in general the town seems to have more abandoned and empty businesses than Portland. Those that are open almost all have a "Twilight" display, and there's even an entire "Twilight" themed store... which once you see, it's hard to stop vomiting.

Lake Crescent on the other hand was fantastic again. Just beautiful views, great food at the lodge, purely wonderful.

On the way back we stopped at the Skagit River Brewing company in Mount Vernon for lunch. I had a couple glasses of their barley wine, and Amy ordered the Smores which is in a bowl, and is insipid.

someone has a case of the Mondays
Even with just a four day week ahead I'm finding it extremely challenging to get moving this morning. Partially due to a very fun but depleting night out on Friday, I only accomplished about a third of what I'd intended for the weekend, and am now feeling that Monday morning malaise come on strong. Really feeling that sort of depression where I just want to go back to sleep and sleep the day away. Ah well, the bus awaits. Finished reading the Conan Omnibus last week, which I thought was fantastic. Maybe once I get stuck into the next book on my Kindle lineup, I'll at least have something to look forward to on the bus ride.

I need a cartoon anvil
Back in a pattern of insomnia. The last really bad one (in excess of a week) was last summer, so I wonder if it has something to do with these ludicrously long days. So far this is day four. I got a combined three, maybe four hours sleep last night, and that was fantastically rough and frightening. The pattern is: I have a hard time getting to sleep in the first place maybe drift off around one, then I wake up steadily every half hour till three, from three I sleep till five, which is now dawn. I usually manage to force myself back to sleep at dawn till the alarm goes off at six thirty.

Certainly it has a bit to do with the writing. By the time I get home, eat, and clean up, there really isn't much time. I tend to sleep better, assuming no other influences of sleeplessness, if I just veg out and watch the telly. Indeed I think television might be the best way of knocking an overactive brain to sleep if I'm not drinking, and after this last overly social and also heinously expensive weekend I'll be more or less living like a monk for the remainder of the month.

Here it is eleven thirty. If I went to sleep right this second, and magically slept through the night, I could get seven hours of sleep. Knowing this, and just having finished the writing I was working on, I'm not going to open up another project tonight. The problem is, I'm pretty gung ho to do just that, so my mind is bloody racing about thinking of things I could be working on. Plus since much of what I write is horror or dark fantasy, well let's just say that once I did manage to fall asleep last night, waking up and finding my house being watched by shadow men wasn't the best thing to lull me back to sleep.

Ah well, here goes nothing. Maybe some mind numbing television to the rescue.

Ab Tak Chhappan
Interesting movie. Imagine if Michael Mann had been born in India, then he would have directed this. I liked this a lot really. It overcame my preconception that Indians are incapable of making a movie without huge musical numbers (although I do tend to like those in movies that they're strangely appropriate for... even fast forward to them.) This was very serious and held the proper tone well. I will say that it was too long, but then that's also true of most of Mann's films as well.

Almost there... stay on target.
Morning pre-bus writing has me one section away from completing the roughest of rough drafts in the roughish history of roughery. Ah well, can't really start cleaning it up until it's finished, even if it's finished so roughly that once I print it out I'll be able to use it to take the paint off walls.

In other notes, thanks to Steve for the Justice League top ten list. I just got through season1 last night. Good stuff. Thus far my favorite character is Hawkgirl. There's no problem she won't try and solve by hitting it with her mace. I was convinced for a moment that she was going to try and hit the allergen with her mace. Every time I say something snarky it seems like the Flash says the exact same thing in dialogue. And I love how they use comic book history without making it overbearing. My only real dissapointment so far was that Etrigan didn't speak in couplets, though now I'm not sure if that was just an Ennis thing or not. Season 2 arrives via Netflix before the weekend begins.

Frozen Moles
I have today off to deal with many appointments (Doctor's, Vision, still have the Dentist to go). Anyway the Doctor froze this mole on the back of my leg beneath the knee. Supposedly it's going to fall off now, but of course I'm impatient, so I keep smacking the top of the leg like a Ketchup bottle in the hopes the impact will follow through to the other side.

I don't know what happens when a mole falls off, but I've put a bandaid over it at least till I'm the dentist. Don't want to leave biological material behind in the dentist's office, well apart from what's spat into the bowl.

High School Reunion
I just got the flier for my 20 year reunion. I have zero intention of spending actual money to go to such a thing. Now there maybe five or so people that I'd like to talk to, but the odds of any of them showing are pretty much null and even if they did, yeah I'm curious what they're doing, but I'm not $100 and an evening of intense discomfort curious, so I asked aloud "why would I go?"

And conveniently the flier has a "Why I should attend" section:

"Your regular friends are sick of hearing about your kids." I don't have kids, though I suppose it could be fun to invent some for the evening, but that implies my actually knowing who anyone there is, and also explicitly implies that I'm going to have to hear about other people's kids all evening. I think that's a miss.

"You'll reminisce with some of your oldest and best friends." I'm actually friends with my oldest and best friends.

"You don't have to lie about your age." I have never had to lie about my age, not since becoming 21 anyway, another reason I don't want to remember the hatred for high school.

"Rekindle or begin new relationships." Ah, a plea to stalkers. Wonderful. That may be the worst thing on here.

"If you don't go, others will talk behind your back." I can pretty much guarantee this won't happen. If it did then it would be like a Schrodingers Cat thing. I'd only want to be there to find out this was happening so I could pop in and say "haha you fucking losers you're talking about someone you knew in high school behind their back 20 years later" but then someone could point out I was at the reunion myself.

"Roll back the evening and be 18 years old for the night." No. This is the worst thing on here.

"It won't be repeated for at least ten years." What does that say about it? If it were actually fun someone would feel compelled to do it more often, right?

"It's a target rich environment for multi-level marketing." Ok this has got to be the actual worst thing on here, and I've just thrown up in my mouth.

The only actual reasons I can think for going are:

It's on the Queen Mary. Maybe the ghosts will rise and haunt the feckin' thing.

AND

It's got a bar, I could get quite drunk, but I could do that anyway and without the $100 cover charge.

Oh merciful goddess, I just read the front of it. There's a section on High School Reunion Anxiety which is full of blatant lies, probably beginning with there really being such a thing as High School Reunion Anxiety. "Yes, Everyone is going to be there." Umm... clearly not. Not me for starters. "Yes, they will talk about you, whether you go or not." I doubt it, but I guess that's not an actual lie. "When all is said and done, no one regrets going and everyone's experience usually far exceeds their expectations." No one regrets going? Really? The balls to print that... I have no desire to go, but I'd love to meet the person who wrote that and ask them about the difficulties they have in living with such enormous bloated testicles. Generally though when I see words like "no one" and "everyone" I tend to see it as a red flag that the statement is actually false, and I'm pretty sure I learned that in High School.

writing observation
More and more I think the most important aspect of a short story, is a clever well timed short cut.

Still fighting against word count on the one I've been working on the last couple weeks, but the short cut I just found should help a lot.

Torchwood Season 2
It feels like every single scene of this show is either my favorite moment of television, the worst thing I've ever seen, or both.

It gets points for as Steve pointed out, it has Spike. I'm sure there are plenty of works out there that wouldn't benefit from having Spike, but I'm pretty certain there are more that would benefit from it. Could you imagine the possibilities if more shows adopted the insert Spike into the plot? Even daily soaps could become pretty good.

Being a spinoff of Dr Who, it's not surprising that it has that Brit campy scifi vibe, that sometimes works well and sometimes fails horribly, and it's amazing how often it does so a the same time.

But the worst thing hands down, is that nearly every episode has a moment where the writers clearly haven't thought the premise through and someone in the writers room ought to whip out the red flag of that doesn't work, or at the very least they need a character like Hurley in Lost whose job it is to speak the audience's snark.

Star Trek
There may be spoilers below...

We went to see the movie yesterday as a company event. Overall I really liked it. In fact, I think it's a testament to how good the movie was that it was able to overcome the insane mood that the previews put me in. The preview for GI Joe might have been sanity sapping on its own, but the Transformers preview that really did it. It contained a line of dialogue so ludicrous that I just snapped and went completely hysterical nearly hyperventilating. "Oh no, Megatron needs what's in my brain." Those words would be challenging to make sound anything other than a warning label to stay well away from the movie, like the rattle on the end of a snake's tail, even if they were spoken by a good actor. But when shouted by a Shia Lebouf, it's a wonder theaters everywhere aren't currently filled with patients rocking back and forth cradling their knees.

The new Trek movie did not start particularly well. There were some moments right up front that stress tested the willing suspension of disbelief, even the very liberal "I've willingly gone to see a Star Trek movie" disbelief suspension. And some of these moments most likely carried throughout the film, but by later in the movie, I just didn't care. If at any moment something happened that some part of my brain would start to pick at for the lack of reality, the other 99% of the brain that was having the best time at the theater since... I don't know... certainly I've seen better movies recently, even Dark knight was probably a better film, but it wasn't anywhere near as much fun... So I'd tell that whingeing bit of nay saying cranial crap to sit down and enjoy itself.

A large part of the fun of the movie is watching the actors become the characters. Yes when I saw the first Star Wars prequel I thought it was ridiculous that they had to work so many of the characters from the original into the story, and it probably was ridiculous that every named character from original Trek was at the academy at the same time, but it didn't matter. They did too good a job with it, and really seemed like they were having as much fun themselves as I was having watching.

One interesting thing that I just thought of... Though JJ Abrams didn't actually write this, here's another story where the main character loses his father. And what's more that's all the result of someone trying to go back in time to change the past.

I really want to see it again. It's nowhere near as good a film as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it taps into that same sort of childlike enjoyment.

GI Joe Resolute
It's interesting when one of your favorite writers does something you find ... terrible is too severe a word, but it wasn't to the quality I'd expect from Warren Ellis.

There were some good bits to be sure. I really liked the fight between the two ninjas, the way it flipped between flashback and present was interesting. The use of hand grenades as traps was a good time. It was fun to see actual fatalities in the story, which I suppose was the point. I wonder if this is where it went wrong for me though, that in many ways the goal was to remake the old GI Joe cartoon but with people actually getting shot meant that some of the dialogue would have to sound like the old cartoon, plus with it occurring in initially in 5 minute segments so at times the words are ham-fisted efforts to move the plot along. This combined with poor voice acting "And there's something happening in New York..." Ugh.

The hilarious bad moment though came towards the beginning. Cobra has destroyed the motorpool, Moscow, and all sattelite communications. So Joe tells all the characters from the show "we're going to work directly with the support personnel." Could you imagine working in GI Joe support? Here you are you're technically able, but not some sort of crazed commando yourself. You want to do your job and get out of there. So all the sudden your jack ass boss's jack ass boss's decide they're going to come into your office for the first time ever and spend the day looking over your shoulder. And if that's not bad enough, these jack ass bosses come complete with costume and call signs. I think I'd actually be happier working for Cobra even with his stabby tendencies.

Homicide A Year on the Streets
Reading David Simon's "Homicide a year on the streets". This line had me laughing like a mad man on the bus this morning:

Detective: "So you shoot someone, sure. Then you shoot a second person. Well it is Baltimore. Then you shoot a third person? It's time to admit you have a problem."

You Made Me Realize
Just back from seeing My Bloody Valentine in Seattle.

It was a religious experience. I've never experienced such a mix of noise, beauty, and aggression out of an amp before.

They played every song I wanted to hear. "When You Sleep" was my favorite song off Loveless when I heard the recording. The live version though is so much more. As much as I respect Kevin Shields, Belinda, etc, it's that Animal Muppet drummer of theirs that really takes the cake on that. Holy crap.

I've seen other bands utilize video on a screen behind before, but never so effectively. On one song, and I don't remember which, this video played of a woman running to the music, and repeatedly no matter what she did, she fell into a pit. This was repeated over and over to incredible effect. In fact each song seemed increasingly... long is the wrong word... sustained to drive home some mad point.

The songs also grew louder and louder. This is the first show I've ever used ear plugs at, and I'm quite glad as my head is still full of feedback. At one point I worried a bit, when I could feel the drums on my sternum, despite being at least a hundred meters back. Then they played my second favorite song, "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and that was louder and I worried truly as I had an idea as to what was next. They're infamous for ending with a version of their song "You Made Me Realize" and the noise blowing people out at the bridge. When they got to the bridge of that song I said, not that anyone could hear, "We're going to die." It was epic. I'd guess the bridge, which grew in noise, volume, and violence, must have lasted at least ten minutes of real time but seemed like more. I wondered for a moment if they would achieve "the Brown Note", and from the way Rich contorted in front of me I thought they had. Speaking of Rich, he emailed someone, during the bridge, "holy god they've weaponized My Bloody Valentine." The airflow from the shock of the amps was moving my clothes in gusts. I honestly thought we were traveling either in time or space or possibly both, that it didn't seem possible when the show ended that we'd be in Seattle in 2009... more like we were taking off and we'd land later on Mars or possibly on Earth but in the pre Cambrian era.

Now the question that plagues the show goer on a Monday night, how do I sleep after that?

things
Brain. No. Worky.

Anyway after months of power budgeting, I snapped a bit when I found out I was getting a tax refund and decided to blow it on some fun:

Top Gear on DVD! So far it's just season10, and I felt a bit weird getting something on DVD that's often repeated on television, but this was well worth it. The episodes they show on BBCA are often edited for time, especially the special episodes such as the brilliant Botswana special. Brilliant bits that had been cut out... partially because I suspect they also take care to edit out some of Clarkson's better lines. BBCA version: "This is proper off roading now." DVD Version: "This is proper off roading now. Even Welshmen, who where camoflauge, and kill people would say this is tough going."

Also picked up Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying, which I'm not if I bought out of missing roleplaying games, or just out of some masochistic desire to make all future moves more difficult. Holy fuck that book is heavy.

I bought Venture Bros Season 3, which is better on DVD partially because it's uncensored, but mostly I think it just works better watching a few episodes back to back, a similar effect as Arrested Developement I think.

The bulk of the refund though has gone into a Kindle2. At least thus far I'm loving the hell out of this. Normally I'm not a big gadget type, but there's something great about having this teeny book sized object that already contains more than a bookshelf worth of books. The display is nice because it's a slightly larger font than normal print, which I think is helping my eyes a lot. The two potential problems: I don't normally buy books on a whim, though I do buy a lot of books (the plus side of which is I believe the Kindle will eventually pay for itself with the difference in cost), but now I find myself wanting a book and ordering it at work for instance... instant gratification... that's what they call it... I think that was going to be the subject of this post before my brain broke. Also I don't know if there's a better way to navigate within a book than page by page, but it sure would be nice to mark a page and skip to the next chapter and back, if only to know where the chapter break is. Still it's got me reading on the bus again... lots and lots, though I did pick up one print version of a book recently which I liked a lot:

Really brilliant.

Progress
Strange progress, but it's a strange Friday night to a strange week. Tonight's real progress was culling a few items off my ideas list that I either realized I'm not going to do, or have found sufficient examples of something already pretty close to it out in the wild.

The week has been weird. I was drunk on Tuesday, which doesn't happen often to say the least. Then on Wednesday I had to put up with the misguided teabaggers... ugh... while I waited for the bus. Tonight I extricated myself from a party upstairs from me, in order to get a good start tomorrow on the writing. Of course with the party still in swing above, not sure when the good start will begin. There are three social engagements tomorrow evening I'd like to attend, though it may end up I crash out at the first one I step in the door at.

Have more drinking Sunday afternoon, and then it all begins again on Monday.

Madness. Madmess. Messy Madness.

signs and portents
It was reported this morning that only select post offices would be open till midnight for last minute tax filing, and that these would be denoted by a yellow sign. I can only assume:

Bob Seger's Greatest Hits
I was looking at boots on Amazon and in the "customers who bought these also purchased" saw "Bob Seger's Greatest Hits" and immediately decided I couldn't get those boots. The recommendations on Amazon are always a bit weird. For one thing, "customers who bought these" boots seem to have purchased many other boots, which strikes me as odd. How many hiking boots does one customer need? But regardless, I can't where boots that somehow identify me as a Bob Seger fan... not unless I'm going to hike the Himalayas, cause then Katmandu, would be where I was going to... Kill me.

"What he needs now is your understanding and a Confederate victory!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxk3Q05LPiE

I wish I was in the land of cotton, where good times are not forgotten!

I suspect it's a grim thing that I really needed this to cheer me up.

Black Books
If Black Books were a real store, I'd gladly accept minimum wage to work there.