Vampire Ham

A Story from the East

2011-09-01T07:14:00.003-05:00

I met an old woman from Tennessee this morning as I walked my dog. She was from the far side of the fall of the western world. Our town used to be like Leesburg, she said, before the homeless moved into the old train station. One-in-five affected by the storm, and we're sending food to Africa. I could only nod dumbly, but my heart said this.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Slog

2009-08-11T18:47:00.001-05:00

Today was the longest of all possible Tuesdays, for no reason at all.

Analogue Stockade

2009-07-20T08:23:00.003-05:00

I've spent most weekends of the last few months on the road, back and forth between home and Oklahoma, getting the last dregs of things owned by the missus, or in this case attending weddings. Everyone is getting married this summer, have you noticed? If you aren't: try harder.

To pass the time we've been listening to Dan Brown's Digital Fortress through the missus' GPS. I did a little reading into the book before I started writing this and found that one of my main quibbles, that the book's jargon seemed anachronistic from time to time, was because it was written eleven years ago. That's like dozens of lifetimes for tech. I have to give it a pass. I can barely remember what I was doing online 11 years ago, but I bet it was poorly formatted.

What really kills me is the climax. We've spent something like 10 hours getting to this point, following the twists and turns, only to have the book pull a complete 180 and dash all the playing pieces onto the floor. Dan decides that the finely tuned plots-within-plots he's been... plotting aren't good enough and discards them the last moment. The entire plot becomes a red herring, and the cryptographic geniuses we've been rooting for from the start become complete and total morons. The last few chapters to what had otherwise been a suspenseful and entertaining novel were cringe-inducing almost to the point of seizure.

And what's the deal with hating on Spain?

Sketchdump

2009-07-01T11:24:00.002-05:00

A sketch I did on my off time for the last couple of days, the silhouette for a spring-loaded sword design I'm working on and funky little water-seller type guy.

UP

2009-06-12T23:22:00.001-05:00

Here's your heart! It says. Do you feel it? Now watch.

Fracture Point

2009-02-09T12:10:00.003-06:00

A job approaches, perhaps. I've applied for a 3d modeling job working on flight sims for L-3 in Arlington. Not a game industry job, but using the same tools. If this works out I should be able to live comfortably until I can find a real industry job. The GDC in San Fran is coming at the end of March, and hopefully I'll be able to scare up some interviews there. Zenimax might also be hiring around then. We'll see!

The DH campaign last Saturday went well. 2/5s of the group had yet to create a character, so we got started a little later, but the rest weren't too bored by the time they were finished. The group got off track seconds into the game. I'd planned on winging most of the game anyway, just using my (far too detailed) notes as an outline, but they took it in an entirely different direction. Because of this I wound up throwing a lot of theme out the window. Guytoga is apparently the only planet in the 40k universe with Arbites officers bursting with local lore. A lot of the set pieces I'd hoped to bring into play were never visited, although hopefully the next session I'll be able to use them. Tony swears the 40k universe is apologetics for Nazi Germany, but that way lies madness.

Deadly Arctic Apocalypse 2009 - The Revenge

2009-01-28T12:38:00.002-06:00

Guess we dodged the bullet this time. One-third an inch of ice cannot douse the flames our our hearts.

Deadly Ice Apocalypse 2009

2009-01-27T15:52:00.003-06:00

SMU closed their campuses at 3:30 today, in hopes of sparing us the danger of being trapped by the deadly arctic maelstrom bearing down on our hapless town. As I write this the temperature sits at 31F, and there isn't anything falling from the sky. We'll see if the evening brings the "worst ice storm in over five years." Once the sun slips beyond our sight sets the night will bring malevolent storms with a deadly half-inch of soul-chilling precipitation. The lights of civilization will sputter and dim, giving way to fimbulwinter and the twilight of the gods.

Stepping in like Nothing Ever Happened

2009-01-26T13:45:00.004-06:00

I'm going to try to get back in the habit of writing here. I've got more spare time now, why not use it for something constructive?

So here I am, a month out from graduating, and looking for a job. There are prospects all over, but the industry seems averse to giving rejection letters, so I shamble on without feedback. I've been staying busy, the Guildhall has set up a post-graduate project with Gearbox making assets for an unannounced title, so I've been having fun with that. Whether or not the game ships it will make a nice line on my resume, and it's been great experience being able to take a model through the whole creative process in a week and a half, instead of a day like the last few terms of the GH. If nothing else this time allows me to retool my portfolio from animation-centric to environmental art. As much as I would love to be an animator that well has been consistently dry, so it's time I moved on to a more prevalent job option.

I've got a campaign in the works, for the first time in a long time. I've been planning a scenario for the Warhammer 40k rpg, Dark Heresy. Hopefully things will pan out there. Three of the possible five players have rolled up characters. I've got D&D 4e stuff to fall back on if the group doesn't like it. The rules aren't revolutionary, but they seem solid and the character creation makes for interesting, quirky, and half-fleshed out characters. It builds a strong foundation for a player to launch off of. Everyone rolled an incredibly young character, which seems a little unusual for classes like Tech-Priest, where some age and experience is expected. Would the Adeptus Mechanicus really borg out a 16 year old, as one of my players rolled? I assume they were trying to imply the age expectancy of a person from the given planet. Design-wise I would have based the age table on character career as opposed to homeworld. Or thrown in a modifier for the educated classes.

18 Months in the Pit

2008-12-09T10:43:00.000-06:00

I WIN

Gunslinger

2008-08-04T16:29:00.003-05:00

A little more of my work, a series of animations I did as part of a directed focus study. This was the start of the western theme.

Render Dump and the State of Things

2008-07-29T22:07:00.006-05:00

I apologize for the long lull. Part of my silence is the Guildhall's fault. Their curriculum is nothing if not rigorous. I haven't had much time to take stock of much of anything. Even now, sitting as I am in the middle of my summer break, I still have work I should be doing. But for a moment it can wait.

This last half of the year will be a hectic one, juggling a master's thesis, the final team game project, and finding a job all together like a trio of surly badgers. Minding the backspin will be the least of my worries. I'm looking forward to working on my thesis when the term picks up again. I'm doing an in-depth study of rigging for animation, specifically non-human creatures. I should have some pretty cool animations to show off at the end, along with the rigging chops to make me stand out to potential employers.

We had mock interviews for our last team project and I got the role of Lead Animator. I'm hardly a lead with only one other animator in the team, but it will let me delegate the workload. This project is a 3rd-person action adventure game starring kids in animal-themed footy pajamas and their totems fighting nightmares. We're using the Source engine, which is a little difficult to deal with from an art perspective, but it can also pull off some sweet effects. The concept art is looking really good, I think we'll have a very good looking product come December.

And now, some of my work from the last term or two!

First, a procedural material.One of my better speed models from two terms ago.

The next two pieces are some lighting work, meant to elicit a specific emotion. Guess which is which?

These are several of the models I've been working on for my Summer directed focus study. It's a Western-theme.And lastly a horrifically overmuscled speedpainting!

For the People

2008-02-26T21:17:00.005-06:00

The final project in this term's digital course was a subD model of a mechanical object. I wanted some nice and clunky and futuristic, a vehicle of some kind, and eventually settled on a model from Rackham's AT-43 line, the Red Blok Nakovalny recon strider. Beautiful model, and I think I've recreated it quite well. I feel much more comfortable with mechanical modeling at this point, and I'm kind of exciting about doing it again.Lovely, innit? It's only like 5 million tri's when I render it.

Co-opted, pt 6

2008-02-25T17:55:00.004-06:00

This past week we've been creating content for our Art Style Guide. I was able to take some of what we'd gone over in the last week to create some passable concept art. The first piece are imagings of modular cliffs and caves to fit in with our prehistoric setting. These assets were sprung on us very late in our prototype process, but we'll be better off once production starts.This final three pieces were quick 3d sketches of the caveman characters of our game. These were created more for silhouette value than anything else, and as such are lacking a lot of detail they'd require if they were ingame assets. These will probably be used as model sheets for the final models next term.
Still think they should have been done on paper.

Co-opted, pt 5

2008-02-18T18:11:00.003-06:00

This last week we spent our time studying concept art from Project Offset as a means to better understand and hone our own skills concepting. The lessons I was able to draw was primarily one of line quality. Ah line quality, my deadly foe! I found using the technique of transparent lines did me the most good, allowing me to quickly hash out both guide and bold lines.You can see from this first image that I hadn't quite grasped the concept yet. The basic structural shapes are present, but the lines are as a whole too thick.
This second piece is much better, the lines are finer and as a whole much cleaner.

Co-opted, pt 4

2008-02-07T12:00:00.000-06:00

My work for our team game production, animation cycles for our caveman. Computer animation is unusual in that it's both related and completely unrelated to the human body. It is composed of forward- and inverse-kinematics, that is, the motion is driven from both the root of the motion, ie the pelvis, shoulders, etc. Or the end of the chain, that is the hands, feet, head, whatever. This is unrelated to the human body. One does not move their hands to move their arms, it is the related linkages across the upper body that allows the hand to move. Animation falls somewhere between puppetry, traditional animation, and sculpture, and not muscle mechanics. The key to a good rig, and good animation, is in adding limitations to the rig to enforce more naturalistic motions.

Co-opted, pt 3

2008-01-29T14:09:00.000-06:00

Continuing with the face! While hunting for good examples of facial anatomy I found some incredible renders on a zBrush forum.
These are incredibly useful for my understanding of the musculature. They provide me with a sense of the actual depth and volumes of the shapes that I struggle with in my own notes.
I compared it to my notes and have indicated the sections that the model doesn't show. Most of the sections are areas covered with other muscles, but I thought it important to mark these areas. The side view in my notes matches up almost exactly with the zBrush version.

Co-opted, pt 2

2008-01-22T14:09:00.000-06:00

I am struggling at the moment with the amount of definition I put into my drawings. I've really started noticing this in the concept work for the team project I'm working on, tentatively called "Extinction: Cavemen vs. Dinosaurs." Really. With so much of the figures not obscured by clothes my weaknesses with muscle definition are thrown into stark relief.

I've fished the great gray sea for images to better assist me in driving the better points of human anatomy home.

These are only the beginning of what I hope to create. Until now my inspiration folder has contained interesting images, but not a lot that I could mine for anatomical reference.

Co-opted, pt 1

2008-01-14T11:48:00.000-06:00

One of the requirements for this term's anatomy course is to provide a art blog dealing with the subjects we cover in class. A public art journal, if you will. One a week till the end of the term, so about 8 weeks.

We went over the neck and skull this week. I'm going to focus on the skull, because of the coincedence that links it to one of my other classes. We're studying animation, revisiting the simplest of animations, the bouncing ball. Our task was to create an interesting 10-second animation, and me being the overscoping wonder that I am decided to make something more.
What I wound up with is something very Halloween, with an eyeball bouncing its way from the socket in a skull to a nice grave. What I want to show you is the skull I modeled for it, and then compare it to the anatomical skull which I took later in the week.

This is the skull, with a copy behind it so that you can get a good look at the side.

Compared with my notes you can see where my memory failed. The eye sockets are much too big for the skull, which leave almost no room at all for the brow. The nose is tiny and too low as well. I wasn't really happy with the cheek area even before we studied the anatomy, although I didn't really have time to go back and refine it.

What we have here is a skull that is really halfway between a normal face and actual bone. I've unconsciously added muscle shapes that give the skull shape and weight that it shouldn't really have. Part of it is stylization, but it's uninformed stylization that leaves the design as only mediocre.

Selling oneself for pageviews

2007-09-06T23:20:00.001-05:00

With love I hype the blog on which my C9 art compatriots at the Guildhall and I will be posting sketches. Until we forget or get lazy. Excelsior!

Jona/Tomberry

2007-06-14T23:04:00.000-05:00

Jona/Tomberry
Uploaded by anotheraccount

Another weird and cool film to share. What really struck me was using CG for the heads but actors for the bodies. It adds a depth to the motion and characterization that really gave me pause when I first saw it. I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Oregon Travelogue, part six

2007-06-11T22:09:00.002-05:00

Before the night ended we headed to Harris Beach to watch the sunset. The sun had turned the sky into an electric yellow by the time we got there, dyed the color by the spume blown out of the waves by the gale. It was fiercely windy, and the waves were crashing with more force than I'd seem them all week. Foam lay at the tide line like thick meringue the color of old wallpaper. You looked at the sunset through spires of rock that lay above the waves, but the ocean seemed to have its own ideas about that and great torrents of white spray crashed across the stone faces. It was like some great Classical painting of a maelstrom come to life, great jagged rocks and huge waves threatening a beaten sailor, while the sharks wait for him to fall.

Sadly, this morning the waves were too high for us to do any fishing. Zoli took us out for about a half hour but the sea never really called down, so we came back. His boat is part RV, part airplane on the inside. It's swank. It's got two bedrooms. The man himself is a roly-poly ruddy faced Hungarian, accent and all. Zoli tries, half-heartedly, to get my grandpa to drink a beer nearly every time they meet. He never succeeds, I think it's more for their amusement than anything.

I ran a lot of errands today. I replaced their old printer (refill cartridges bad) and picked up some things to take back with me. Some old guy two doors down gave me a cane so I suppose I've got, that if security will let me on a plane with it. I found a comic book store too, with a really nice guy at the helm. He runs it like a service, he's desperately in love with the idea of a comic book store in town, and he's willing to pay for it. It was small but clean and reasonably well-stocked.

That evening I got my last fish on the trip. "The Hungry Clam" down in the Brookings harbor fries up a mean cod. I really liked it. Then, one last walk on the beach. I always try to stick the beach in my mind the last time I go out on a vacation, but it never really seems to stay. It's too big. We met a nice Canadian couple and talked to them for a bit, about currency exchange and life and living and my future. They were on a vacation crossing the American West. Down from Edmonton through Washington into Oregon and soon through nearly the rest of the country west of the Rockies. I wish them well.

This is probably the last of my travelogue posts, as tomorrow I must flight back to the Great Middle of Everything. I can't say this has been my best writing, but it's been my week, more or less, and I wanted to share. Hope it wasn't too much of a bore.

Oregon Travelogue, part five

2007-06-10T19:40:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was awash. As in it rained, more or less without ceasing, until today. I spent the day inside relaxing, watching the humming birds flit outside in the grey deluge, getting myself in debt up to my ears to Tom Nook and reading a book with a space Catholic. Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, copyright 1989. Not a bad read, but not really an amazing piece of science fiction either. It reads like any other far-future tale, played straight and very dry. At least there are tricorne hats.

Macabre sidenote: They found a body on Lone Ranch the night after I was there. He'd been out running, or so the story goes right now, and was hit by a Camaro. My grandpa brought him in. He works, you see, for the mortician. Chiefly in the business of picking up and dropping off.

Lunch was Chinese (the Rice Bowl, good Chinese, run by Vietnamese) and after it I went out to Whaleshead. There are great huge cliffs out in the ocean there, some of them big enough to be islands. A lot of them are nesting grounds in the right months, but now must not be the time, because I didn't see a lot birds around them. If you look at one right it looks like the head of a huge leviathan, hence the name of the beach. Waves were up as I walked, throwing up great plumes of spray as they dashed against the dark rocks. It's sort of a lonely beach, long and sparkling with grey sand and nearly free of rocks. A few streams cut paths to the ocean. They dunes weren't tall like they were two years ago, so the streams were only a few inches below the rest of the beach. Back then it was more like four feet. Eventually the dog got thirsty and tired of walking so we headed back.

Zoli came back, and so we're going fishing off his yacht tomorrow. He gets two salmon, and the rest of us have to pretend not to be fishing when the Coast Guard is around. At six in the morning.

I'm not sure if I'm up for tactical espionage at six in the morning.

Oregon Travelogue, part four

2007-06-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

Another pleasant day, although a fog rolled in mid-morning and stuck around for a few hours. There were pancakes too, but they didn't stay around long either.

I finally got out to do some climbing today. I headed out for Lone Ranch after breakfast, as the fog was just starting to roll up the hills. By the time I got through town and to the beach it covered everything. The fog here is not like back home, it rolls like a living thing, stretching out long fingers of white mist that crawl across the grey sand. I couldn't see more than ten feet in front of me, and the great rocks that dotted the beach would appear out of nothing, looming up like monsters or old guilt. The fog thinned as I walked, though, and by the time I reached the great sea cliffs that hang out over the water it had cleared enough for me to climb.

The rock here was smooth, not jagged like some of the places yesterday, and there were plenty of handholds. Climbing these rock walls gives me peace. The weighing of this angle or that, where to put each foot, when to go upward and when to approach a problem laterally, each wall is a puzzle to be solved, then solved again on the descent. There were tide pools too, full of crab and starfish, between the great colossi. I tried to get to the top of a great high pile, what had once between a single great spire before it great planes had shorn off. I couldn't reach the pinnacle, I got to the top of a crevasse standing on a huge boulder between the two walls when it got to sheer and vertical for me to proceed. I spooked a flock of oyster pickers though, little black birds with red feet, and they began to call and circle. I must have been close to a nest. On the way back, creeping down another crevasse, I stepped down onto a small rock lodged between both sides. To my horror it settled a few inches and began to tilt. I waited a moment longer and it continued to sink, but I leapt free before it fell and dropped me. That was when I knew I'd had enough climbing for the day. Besides, I was hungry for lunch!

This evening was my grandparents' 55th anniversary. They picked the prime rib and I the prawn. I sort of wished I'd had a steak. The beer batter wasn't so much ale as it was canola.

Oregon Travelogue, part three

2007-06-07T23:55:00.000-05:00

It was warmer this morning, and it stayed that way all day.

I could have gone out to a beach this morning, as my grandparents were out on errands and they left me a car, but I decided to wait up for them so we could have lunch. Wild River pizza. Chicken pesto was my choice, and while I love pesto on an almost pathological level it wasn't really anything to write home about. Hah.

The initial plan was to go rock-hopping, to find some sea cliff and throw myself up it. I didn't really see that plan through, but the day was far from a waste. We went up north of Brookings, deeper into Oregon. There's dune country there, and llamas. We passed the Natural Bridge where, in years past my uncles and cousins crossed and nearly fell to their deaths and Whaleshead where in years past one of said uncles tried to vault a creek on the beach reliving his college track days and broke his arm, 'struth. We passed by all those places, and stopped at last at the beach by Pistol River. There were big dunes between the ocean and the road, and with the stiff wind that had picked up the sand was blowing up pretty fierce. There were a lot of wind surfers, by the road and in the water, and I imagine it must have been a pretty good day for it, if you could get your sail to the water without it knocking you down, bashing you over the head, and taking your wallet. There were great rock outcropping on the beach, looming up like rocks in a zen garden of vast and terrible proportions. I climbed one, small compared to the green-topped mountains that lay down the beach, to get the lay of the land. It was tough rock, jagged and rough and untouched by the sea below it. There wasn't much to see, a wide belt of grey sand extending as far as the eye could see, an endless blue sea topped frothed with white caps, the surfers, and the looming giants of stone. It was beautiful, but we didn't stay long, off to find another view.

Cape Sebastian lay just a few miles up the coast but high above Pistol River. It sits at the top of a ridge, hundreds of feet above the ocean. The wind was even stronger here than down on the beach. It blew cold, much colder than you'd expect. There was a trail leading into the brush, and I thought it would be a disappointment, a lot of the high trails start to blur together after you've been on them a lot, there are only so many cliffs and gorse bushes one can take. Soon enough, however, the trail turned into a forest, with a drop off on one side. There was no wind beneath it, and the moss grew thick on tree and stone. It was really quite beautiful. I might have waded through a lot of poison oak too but I haven't started itching yet, so I'm probably alright.

That about wraps things up, except that some young idiot in a pick-up crashed through the neighbor's garage tonight, doing some grievous damage to itself, the building, and the car within. The police, EMT, and fire department all showed up, although no one was hurt. Suspended license too, moron.

Oregon Travelogue, part two

2007-06-06T22:56:00.000-05:00

Blogger ate this once. Alack.

Fern Canyon indeed!

The morning was cold, waking up in the RV. I'd like to say I was camped out beneath a great trees, but I was really just in the driveway. We drove to Crescent City for lunch, for fish and chips (and darn good ones) at a place called the Chart Room. They served pies with meringue piled so high on the top they looked like great egg white mountains. Outside on the docks sea lions barked and sunned themselves, while cormorants dried their wings in preparation for another dive.

After that was the long drive through the red woods, hugging the ridges. There is something about the scale here that boggles me. The sky, the trees, everything is grand and vast. All the man made things seem bolted onto a landscape following a more ancient proportion. There be giants in the land.

At last we reached the last road, unpaved and narrow, that led to Fern Canyon. We forded three creeks where they cut the road in two like green glass, and at the end of the road we reached it. You walk into Fern Canyon with the ocean at your back, following the creek that created it. It is wide and deep, probably 50 feet in both directions. Not Grand perhaps, but impressive nonetheless. The walls are covered in a green carpet of moss and waving ferns. It's an incredible sight, a vertical wall covered in verdant life. That's where it got its name. There are logs, the remains of trees that have fallen in, some of which form a path over the creek. There were a lot more than last time I was there, a ranger said they'd had a hard winter and that a lot of trees had been blown into the canyon. It was still beautiful. If there is a place on this earth I could claim as my favorite this would be it. It is as pure and holy a place as I've ever been.

If you're ever ever ever in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park ask around for Fern Canyon. It's really an amazing place! There will be photos. Eventually.

Oregon Travelogue

2007-06-05T22:29:00.000-05:00

When I started this post light rain beat a rhythm on the tin roof above my ahead, soon lost under the analogue song of the modem of this computer.

Ah Oregon, how I love it!

I am here at the bottom of the state for the next week, and time and bandwidth permitting I'd like to share my thoughts while I'm here.

I flew United, and they managed to nearly hose my itinerary twice before I even got off the ground. First by changing my first hop from Denver to Chicago, then canceling it, getting me a ticket for another carrier but not actually getting me a seat, and then at long last placing me back on the original flight to Denver. Needless to say I was a little frazzled, but once I got past security and actually onto a plane I slipped back into my travel rhythm. There was sushi in San Francisco, and despite some more rational thoughts (such as, "This is an airport!") I got my fish, and liked it. Not exactly gourmet, but it beats a burger! A long lay-over later I arrived, the sun just beginning its decscent, at the tiny bus station of an airport that is Crecent City. At last I was in the land of the redwoods! The ocean was before me and the crows above! After catching my ride (and a burger!) we crossed the green hills and forests to Brookings. And we went to the beach! You have to go to the beach you know. Like first thing. It's still big and grey and blue and wonderful. I took a lot of photos, which I won't try to send through this. Expect them later. Sadly I discovered the battery in my camera seems to have a bad case of the dry-charge. I might have to fall back on coppertops to get through this week.

Also, Zoli the strange Hungarian who befriended my grandfather has decided to go back to Grant's Pass since the weather was looking pretty grey around here yesterday, so I don't think I'll get to go out on his yacht. It's a very pretty yacht though. I've never really been on one. Perhaps tomorrow we will go to Fern Canyon. If we do I'll try to explain it. I tried once before, maybe two years ago in July. I think I hid it in some prose. I know we're going sometime this week. We have to.

I think that's all. I wish you all well, and I miss you!

Strings

2007-05-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

Giovanni Sollima - Sogno ad Occhi Aperti (Daydream) PART 1

Giovanni Sollima - Sogno ad Occhi Aperti (Daydream) PART 2

Beautiful, strange, haunting. I've decided to share media on my blog! I'm always sending links to you guys, but this way at least they have something they can get back to that won't get lost under all the spam.

Collapse

2007-05-08T20:50:00.000-05:00

There's a lake behind my home. We've had about six inches of rain in the past two days in an especially wet year. I'll add more commentary and photos probably tomorrow, when there's light.What you're seeing is a collapsed retaining wall, which until recently had scrub pine growing on the other side.

Same area, from the side. The pond is about 8 feet lower than it should be.

This is a shot from the other side of the pond. There's not a lot of water left. This all happened between about 7:15 and 8:00 this evening. Pretty astounding that the hundreds of gallons that filled this thing went rushing away so quickly. There are some very sad fish sitting in the mud now.

One Day Later

2007-05-06T20:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I graduated from college, the culmination of four years of hard work and slacking off and great times. I made friends and I lost friends. A good time. Was had. By all.

To Kyle,
Thank you for being my roommate and friend for so many years! You really are an incredibly deep and playful person, and it's a shame I won't be able to hang-out with you anymore. Become a famous writer. Tell the story of Costa Rica and Illinois and your life as only you can, because you have a voice, and that's something a lot of people never find. It's a shame we never got you to play more games with us, you're a hoot!

To Chris,
I came to know you late, and it's really a shame, because I learned a lot from talking to you. You were incredible to work with, and your diligence in making an RPG work really made gaming with you a lot of fun. Seeing you graduate made me realize that your attention to detail and wisdom carried over into your academic career too. You are talented and driven, how can you not succeed? May your dice always explode.

To Dan,
You were always edgy, and when I first met you I think I was a little intimidated by that. What I've found is that you are a kind and compassionate person whose loyalty to his friends is matched by your passion for justice and a life without bullshit. Thanks for the in at the duplexes, that was an amazing year with a bunch of amazing guys! Probably the most fun of any of my college years. Get the heck out of AR and go do something with yourself, you're too good for them!

To Ben,
You always kept us on our toes! In the games you always knew exactly what you were doing, and you stuck to it no matter what anyone said! Thanks for a fun, if short (everyones were!) campaign. It's a bummer that you didn't get to graduate with us, but this time next year I fully expect you to be famous! That goes for Lauren too. If I see her at the Guildhall I know you won't be far behind.

To Breanna,
Imagine, an underclassmen who managed to be cool! You were different, bringing in a deep appreciation for nature, a reading list of heaps of fantasy, and lots of horses. Seriously, they were everywhere. You have great artistic skill and a keen eye for anatomy. Better than I, daresay. You were a lot more outdoorsy than the rest of us, but managed to be neither a granola-eating hippie or a cowgirl. Way to be multi-faceted! Here's hoping you can get a game going next semester with some fresh blood!

To Jo,
We weren't sure about you, at first. In fact, my opinion of you was pretty negative, but I was wrong! You have more depth and wit than I initially gave you credit. You were willing to try our crazy indie games, and you liked them! I regret we didn't get to hang out much outside of the games, but what with me receding from anime night and never really putting forth the effort the blame rests upon me. Enjoy your semester off, or whatever it is you're doing, then go finish and be famous already.

To Mar,
You're really talented, you know that? Like a lot. You need to go be famous. Seriously. Is it because you're foreign? I wish I was foreign. You design skills squeeze a lot of emotional weight and meaning into the simplest of drawings. Your sarcasm was like a great spear aimed at the heart of bureaucracy and injustice, here's hoping it never goes dull. You're hilarious! Your blog will be watched like forever.

Thank you all, for the people from day one and the people I didn't meet till late. You are all incredible, I love you all and I wish you the best.

good night ladies
good night sweet ladies
good night, good night.

Keeping Score

2007-04-30T23:57:00.000-05:00

Taurus: 1
Possum: 0

In its defense, there aren't a lot of mammals that can walk away from a head-on collision with a hatchback going 80.

The Last Show Before the End

2007-04-26T23:58:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the Senior Showcase, wherein we showed off the senior project we'd spent the last semester creating. It was bittersweet for me. On one hand it was the culmination of my college education, but it was also the end. Everyone's project looked very well done, but I feel like my animation looked a little unpolished since the 3 months I had to make it, start to finish, were all kinds of hectic. That kind of time frame is not enough to polish computer graphics to a level I'm comfortable with, not without a lot of people working beside me.

There was a musical short film which I was certain was going to be atrocious, that the producer didn't have the skills to pull it off. I was wrong. There were flaws, some jarring, and the opening was too slow and too long, but once the story got started (a tale of love found and lost between a girl and a soldier in WWII) it managed to make me feel. I didn't cry at the end (hah. spoiler.) but I was pretty close. In my defense she had lifted the good song from Moulin Rouge.

This is it, then. This week will soon come to a close, and then finals begin. After finals in graduation. I'm feeling sad and wistful already. The group is breaking up, like a glacier calving great sheets into the blue. Everyone is going somewhere. I think I'm finally ready to deal with that.

With the rush over I need to get back in the habit of sketching. I need to get back in the habit of writing. I need to get back in the habit of creating. I need to stop procrastinating.

Morale Bonus (+2)

2007-03-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

Work continues on the senior project. Most of the animation is done, what's left is the tricky parts of the dance and a little lighting, then I'll be in full tweak mode for about a week before delving for the last time in cinematography. For this project. All this hand animation has got me thinking mo cap is probably the greatest thing ever. That or big clunky non-dancing robots. No screenshots. Don't feel like it.

I received some good news yesterday. I got accepted into the Guild Hall.

I discovered my acceptance e-mail in my spam folder late in the afternoon, where it had languished since that morning. I'm glad I didn't just wipe it out of hand. I did a little dance,
and a little shouting, and it was good. It takes some of the heat off of this semester to know I've got the next step lined up. I'm understating my response rather keenly.

I'm going to make video games! Yeah! Take that!

Hardly a post at all

2007-02-26T16:00:00.000-06:00

Very quite and truly busy, but excited, as things are coming together. The show (musical, "Lucky Stiff," come and see) begins this weekend, so all the work I've been doing for that will finally bear fruit. The animation is coming together nicely as well, and seeing as I've got decent lighting and textures now I'll give you a taste. Decent enough, but still a work in progress.

Split Polygon Tool

2007-01-26T15:18:00.000-06:00

Three (?) weeks into the semester, and the senior project is progressing. Oh right, I'm working on a senior project, so you know. It's going to rock. I hope. The downside to this whole business is that the class involved with completing it demands a lot of bureaucratic hoop-jumping. To give us a feel for the real world. The real world must die. I've been able to make a lot of progress! The proposal, due yesterday, was complete two weeks ago, the storyboard last week, and much of the difficult modeling is complete now. The head of the ballerina at least, which is the most difficult part of the modeling part of the project. Next up, texturing.

It's Fine as Long as I Don't have to Stop

2006-12-29T23:47:00.000-06:00

This is it. This is the spin up to the end of my pursuit of a BA. One more semester and I slip from the green hills of the NW of AR and make tracks to the warm bourgeoise embrace of Plano, if I get accepted. (panicpanicPANICpanicpanic)

I've spent a little time here and there pulling together a portfolio and making progress on the statement of purpose. What kind of an assignment is a stament of purpose? Holding to a direct definition, wouldn't the application itself be a statement of purpose, and wouldn't the fee be proving that even more so? I shouldn't be complaining, it's not a lot to ask. They could have asked for the heads of an even dozen of my fellow applicants. That would have been tricky but still well below my tolerance for hoop-leaping. At least for this. I'm going to break into the industry if I have to break someone to do it.

The paper doesn't worry me. The portfolio does. Despite scrawling on paper for most of my life I still have an incredibly tiny amount of confidence of my own artistic ability. Oh well. Nothing I can do at this point. (panicpanicPANICpanicpanic)

The holidays have been lovely, if harried. I worked quite a bit before the 25th, and have managed to be kept busy most of the time. Perfectly lovely Christmas with presents and family (and more work!) Now I sit packed and ready for the move tomorrow. I'm really hoping things will calm down soon and I can get a little work done on my project, but likely as not I'll be out of here before things actually get settled. That leaves me seething only some of the time.

It will be nice to be back on campus so I can finish all the things I need to get done in peace.

Scrap

2006-12-23T00:11:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Burgh was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. When he was fourteen he melted it down to cast three silver bullets. The curse would end with him.

Today

2006-12-18T16:52:00.000-06:00

I saw a hawk today
sitting on a powerline.

He shivered a bit
in the cold winter air.

I saw a flock of geese
strutting in a Marriot parking lot.

I saw a falcon
crossing a busy intersection.

I went to New World Comics & Games
they don't carry games anymore.

The grey sky sat low and brooding.
Winter storms do not threaten

they creep.

Decked.

2006-12-16T18:10:00.000-06:00

It seems I'm going to be spending the holiday enraged. First they cart away the foreigners, now they're killing the river dolphins. Functionally extinct. I supposed to go see the Nutcracker tonight, but I'm not sure I want to see ballet in a world where perfectly friendly cetaceans have to go extinct. Sure, we're supposed to be sending animals to extinction all the time, but they never put faces to names.

You had to build the dam didn't you? You had to keep leaping forward. Way to go.

Someone give me some good news and tell me they're just hiding. Please, pull a coelecanth or something.

Brotherhood of Humanity

2006-12-13T13:42:00.000-06:00

This is bullshit. This is Black Maria stuff.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4829962

THE WAR AGAINST DECADENCE

2006-12-12T19:19:00.000-06:00

Lasers and the love of a beautiful woman.

The semester is over, why am I so sad?

Honourable Dead

2006-11-13T10:11:00.000-06:00

A moment of silence for the passing of the Crane box. Originally a freebie for playing in a Legend of the Five Rings tournament years ago, it had held cards for both L5R and 7th Sea for quite some time. More importantly, it held the decks. It held my most-favorite Fox Clan/Yoritomo's Alliance not-really-very-good-but-I-loved-it-anyway deck, the post-Gold Lion decks I ran with for a while, my Explorer's Society atomic-cannon, and all the rest of my cards for 7th sea. Apparently something in the back of my station wagon leaked on the box a lot for a long time. Enough to destroy the box and everything in it. Even the cards in sleeves. The 7th Sea deck is mostly intact, but even those cards have warped a bit. Everything else is a wash. Arg.

I don't really even play those games anymore, but they held fond memories. Those were our games, back in high school. Sure none of us were any good, and Gimpy couldn't make a decent deck even with a card library double the rest of us, but we loved it. Its history was our history. Sure, I still have another box or two, but the cards, and the characters, I had the greatest connection to were in that box. Those were my guys.

Just words

2006-09-13T10:55:00.000-05:00

I'm not as busy as I think I am. I have been unable to compartmentalize the different aspects of my day into seperate bits. I run everything together, and it gets a little stressful. I'm working on it.

On a lighter note, I now have three games to juggle. Wait, four. Numbers, Mammon, and Baroque I've mentioned before. Baroque is on the backburner, as is Numbers until I can do more testing. Mammon I've kind of dropped, due to the local group. I think I have a lot of work to do before I make a tactical game again. I don't build enough strategy into them. I don't really want to play a game where the abuse of the system is in fact the point. I'm sorry. It worked better in my head. I've been working on The King in Silicon and just roughing in another game I call Children of the Sun. They're both going to be more gamey games than Numbers, with Children trying to be almost entirely card- and dice-based. In King you take the role of neurotic cybernetic aristocrats in the future. Very French. Lots of dice rolling, maybe a fun death spiral. We'll see.

Children is very abstract. I have trouble explaining it to anyone. It might be a game only I want to play. Everyone plays a planet, both the literally and as a sort of god-like avatar who can converse with his fellow planets and walk the surface of himself. Sort of Greek pantheon meets Carl Sagan. You start by accreting yourself from the primordial gas cloud around the sun, using a deck of cards and playing a game like Go Fish to form yourself. I haven't really gotten much beyond that. You want to create life, and you want to steal elements from the other planets, but I'm not quite sure how to deal with that as of now. Invaders from beyond your system will show up as well, rogue planets and asteroids, but I'm still unsure as to deal with that mechanically.

I'm sure it will just take time.

Okay, breath

2006-08-19T23:30:00.000-05:00

I think I've arrived. I need bookshelves.

Let Slip the Enervating Marrow

2006-08-15T18:55:00.000-05:00

I went to Dallas today. To SMU. To the Guildhall. To scope it out and try to get a feeling for whether or not I need to polish my warehouse skills any more. I brought with me a notebook, useful taking notes, and a sketchbook, useful for wiling away the travel. At the time in the early hours it did not occur to me that bringing a sketchbook to a place of higher education upon whose entrance my artistic skills were tantamount would be a Good Idea. I am stupid at seven in the morning. I spent the ride in varying levels of consciousness (thanks dad), and on arrival we partook of very tasty Thai cuisine in the most amazing bourgeois shopping district I'd ever seen. It was like Disneyland without all the damn [sic] kids.

Then we toured the campus. It's not really a campus, the Guildhall proper, it's more like an office building. The interior is hip like a devastatingly trendy coffee shop, and festooned with cardboard stand-ups of games new and less-new. There was a tour, there were explanations of curriculum, I saw the mocap studio. I saw the art studio. It was full of Games-Workshop games. Genestealers were noted, as well as miniature old world architecture. Numbers were passed, but they will not be mentioned here again. The sketchbook was mentioned, fetched, and perused. Compliments were given, the DA account was brought up, and likewise perused. Confidence flooded my soul like a river of scintillating jewels. It is a good thing to be vindicated for something you've been doing for a long time. I think I can do this. I think there's a place for me out there in the lights.

Also my robot came in.

Random Drops

2006-08-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

Received these in the mail today. The rightmost was actually rpgshop's free swag thing, as Nobilis was just expensive enough to make it. Not sure how I feel about it as it's the dreaded d20. It's like Oriental Adventures, only actually in Japan. Refreshing.

Soon

2006-08-13T23:26:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to watching V for Vendetta. I think I understand why Alan Moore flies off the handle every time they make a movie from one of his graphic novels. Actually this is only in regards to V, as I never saw From Hell and the Legue of Extraordinary Gentleman was just incredibly bad on all levels. They make his art into movies, and that pains him.

Watching it tore open new neural pathways, sending shimmering arcs between itself and Numbers. It was Portman's transformation that did it. Sure I'd read the comic, but it was just so much more visceral on the screen. It made me look again at feedback I'd gained from the Forge as well. The infernal machine is rotating again. I think, I think Nonconformity will have stricter controls. Lower levels will be mundane, only slowing rising to Dark City, Matrix, surrealist levels. I might have to invent some designation between Numbers and Primes, or granulate Primes more, because I want Numbers to narrate the character's growth from banal rut, to self-realization, to self-expression, then finally final transformation to reality warping ubermensch.

Oh, also I've written a mecha combat game I'm calling Mammon, involved chiefly with the succession wars between the noble houses after the death of the heirless galactic emperor. It deals chiefly with robot duels, I would have said small-scale but that would be a misnomer considering the Mammon reach 10 meters and higher. It's actually almost complete. The trouble was writing the equipment list. I'll try to throw a link up once it's a little more presentable. It looks to be pretty simple, without most of the crunching happening during the creation of the robot, and not during the game itself. Think highly influenced by anime, especially Five Star Stories. It's not striving for hard sci-fi. It chiefly tries to be fun.

The Big Fun Thing it has is the idea of Power Dice and Overload. When building a Mammon the player can use an engine that provides more power than the onboard systems require. This extra power becomes Power Dice, which can be used to make certain systems work better, at the cost of Strain, which as it grows can make piloting nigh impossible. For example, you can overload your lasers to do more damage, or your defense screens to better defend against those powerful laser blasts. It bares a passing resemblance to Battletech's heat mechanics, except it doesn't ding you for breathing too hard.

Oh, and the record sheets have a big box for drawing your machine, because every sheet should.

Seasonal Disturbances

2006-08-04T13:07:00.000-05:00

I've decided to put Numbers in a holding pattern for a little while. It's mostly complete, just needs some prettifying and some editing. The bulk of it is already complete. As nearly as I can tell the rules will stand up under duress, but I need actual playtesting to make sure. Seeing as the group is a couple weeks away I'm relegating to the backburner. I know I'll work on it here and there, but there are other things coming down the pipe I want to pay attention to.

Which brings us to Seasons of the Samurai, another game that is growing in my skull. That's what I'm calling it now, at least. It's a little cliché. It's closer to a board game than a real role-playing game, pitting the players against one another and without a GM. The players take the role of samurai lords, running their fiefs, attending court, and warring with the other lords in the area. A turn is divided into four seasons, in spring the peasants work the fields and the lord builds up his army, in summer the lords war against one another for glory and riches, in fall the peasants harvest the crops and lords train their armies, in winter the lords gather at court to attract followers and duel.

I haven't made much progress in anything but the summer. Units, your general and infantry and peasants and archers and calvary and whatever, are written onto index cards with their stats and abilties. The cards are placed face-down on an 8x8 (tentative) grid facedown down, with the 3 rows closest to the player being his front line, rear guard, and reserve. The front line and rear guard units are flipped over at the beginning of the battle, while reserve units stay hidden until they are moved forward. From there it becomes a battle of maneuver. In combat both unit rolls a number of dice (in my head peasants roll d4's, stupid peasants), and determine hits. (Probably on a 4+) Armor reduce the number of dice an opposing unit can roll, while magic allows re-rolls, polearms strike first, and ranged attacks occur without reprisal. Once a unit takes too many hits it is destroyed. It works in my head rather nicely.

More coming.

Folk Science

2006-07-28T16:52:00.000-05:00

A fellow at work has a theory as to why animals' heartbeats are faster or slower than our own, as well as why they don't perceive color as we do. Time moves differently for the animals than ourselves. He's read Hawking, you see. This is why I support the sciences in our education system.

Elusivus:
In regards to introducing NPC's, much of that is in the hands of the players already. They can set one up through role-playing, then define the stakes of a Gambit as developing that NPC as a new Contact. The wager can then be the antagonism of the NPC.

Nonconformity. That bit with difficulty and gaining dice was a logic error on my part. The idea is not to break even. That's not fun! Henceforth Noncom is not added to the order of an area. I suppose this will work since players have to bid Ego for dice, which acts as a limit to how much they can actually roll. I will have to give a lot of thought to failing Noncom rolls resulting in the loss, as opposed to simply burning through it to get dice. It would make the gambling aspect a little stronger, but I'm not sure if I like that. We'll see.

One pip of Ego gained at the beginning of a scene, as well as for each successful Gambit. Should keep things moving. We'll have to playtest to find a level where people don't hoard Ego.

Examples coming. That's what I've been working on recently.

They Wait in the Alleys

2006-07-25T02:28:00.000-05:00

I've discovered the noir rule-set I've been developing isn't really cut out for noir at all. I suppose I should have seen it coming. There was always a disconnect between setting and mechanics in my head, like a gulf that couldn't be crossed. The system provides too much character growth and open space to move around in. Noir is cramped and archetyped and probably need a heavier GM hand than I'd really written in. The City had gone from art-deco background to the antagonist, which didn't fit the genre at all. I did a lot of mental hurdles trying to make things fit, but it never really worked. And then, out of the blue, it all clicked.

The noir went away.

The setting, in a nutshell, is thus. It takes place in the City. Not a city, the City. The City is made up of the collective unconscious of it's millions of citizens, and the steel and concrete hive that encapuslates them. The City has achieved a strange sort of unlife, and with it a paranoiac need to control the world within it. The City does not like individuals. Individuals cannot be controlled, so the City has quashed individual expression through its boroughs and levels of control, changing the populace into colorless Number who go about their daily lives never realizing how meaningless it all is. The players take the role of Primes, Numbers who have begun to see through the charade the City has undertaken, and try to regain their lost individuality. At the same time they must avoid the forces of the City, those who fight an endless war to maintain conformity. It tastes a little like the Matrix, and for that I apologize. It's really supposed to be more surreal.

Phillips, Standard, or the dreaded Metric?

2006-07-17T16:46:00.000-05:00

The Amazing Screw-On Head originally a one-shot by Mignola, now animated with a pilot on scifi. Thought you ought to know.

The Grey Eye at the End of the Horizon

2006-07-11T02:46:00.000-05:00

It rained early in the afternoon, the kind of heavily affectionate summer storm that so often float across the land of wind and Baptists. It had cleared over by the time I went to work, although there brooded on the horizon the barest hint of a coming deluge, by which I mean it rained while I was at work, indeed, it rains even as I write this entry. It was with some trepidation that I returned to the warehouse, on the off chance the fundamental laws of logic and the universe had shifted against me favor and would soon leave me without a job. I was relieved to find that Azathoth did not sit enthroned and mindless at the center of all things, pulsing hellishly to the piping of idiot musicians.

Then:

The terrible old man puttered up to me astride his eletric steed. He clutched in his meaty hand a slip of paper, and checking it he addressed me. The deal was thus, I was not to leave my assigned aisle, or the aisles on either side, unless told specifically by either old man. So they can know if someone messes up the set-up of an aisle they can track it back to the person. Which is exactly what I was doing before, except this new missive gives them (really him) the right to be dicks if I try to be productive on some other aisle. Apparently. This is what the Americans call bullshit. Nobody else on the floor has to deal with flack like this.

Power trips within power trips. I am now at the beck and call of those in charge, but wait, wasn't that how things were in the first place? I'm not sure what kind of mentality it takes to come to such a circular conclusion but it's definitely a step removed from orthodox reality. Perhaps even more disturbing, at least since this is a job, is that this makes me far less productive than I would be normally. They're costing the company money. Ah, ego.

I don't know if they're playing stupid. I can't really gauge how devious the terrible old men are. I could go full out and say they're intentionally trying to piss me off, to goad me into a reaction that would give them reason to fire me, but I'm not sure they deserve such credit. The terrible old man got very close when he called me on the new rule, I'd moved on to a new aisle farther than I was allowed, you know, trying to be helpful? He sent me back to my own (empty and complete) aisle, and the beast almost showed its fangs.

I'm pretty sure they aren't that clever. They have incredible luck with making things less than optimal one way or another.

I may walk the sword's path but the mountain does not move.

I've got my wolf ticket, mother, and it feels fine.

Alpha Reversal Shining Wonder Technique

2006-07-08T01:13:00.000-05:00

I am not a good stocker. I will never be a good stocker. This is the conclusion I have come to at my job. I find it amusing and enraging in turn. The work itself is never very difficult but full of the sort of niggling details one only picks up on when one has made a career of warehouse stocking. It keeps the hands busy for eight hours at least, and the pay is better than minimum.

Which brings us to the story for the day!

The work was light this evening, there were very few drops and most everyone on the warehouse floor had cleared their aisles pretty early in the night. I pretty quickly moved on to other aisles, then back to my own, then to others, as the workflow rose and fell. Around midnight the floor was essentially bare. Aisles were checked, double-checked, and triple-checked. I even swept before clean-up time was called. which, according to the terrible old man, is against "company policy." The only people working were the pallet drivers. The rest were "working." Around 12:45 or so on my way back from the compactor I stopped to talk to Chacko and the Peruvian-whose-name-I-never-remember. My boredom was palpable, and I voiced my curiosity as to the point of us remaining if no one was actually doing any work. Minutes pass. The terrible old man begins to drive up the aisle on his fork lift. Quizzical glances are exchanged between the three of us. The terrible old man putters up and tells the Peruvian and I to clock out and go.

Clock out and go.

And he said it like it was some sort of punishment. I assent heartily and make my way to the clock. As I clock out he mentions something about "not firing people, but that I would have to talk to the less terrible old man on Monday." That took me aback for a second. The terrible old man was going to have me fired because I wasn't pretending to work? Then I laughed it off.

If I can't talk my way out of this I lose my job. If I lose my job I get a new job. If I get a new job I'll work normal hours.

An Aside from a Minor Character

2006-06-28T03:21:00.000-05:00

For she's crying oily tears down below, down below.
Oh she's crying oily tears down below.

Guts Check

2006-06-25T00:45:00.000-05:00

In retrospect the previously mentioned super-tuna may have in fact been a species of snake-like whale, considered by mainstream science to be extinct, but held by some cryptozoologists to still swim the oceans of the north. Whatever. I like whales, you know that.

What follows is wholly unrelated.

With all this time my mind has had to kill recently I've been able to give a lot of thought to the Deadlands: Hell on Earth campaign I'll be running once university gets up and running again. Produced by Great White Games, previously Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Mostly out of print, but a most excellent PnP RPG if ever there was one. Elusivus set my mind thinking when he asked for a campaign embryo, something around which he could formulate a character idea. It was an honest question, but one that cannot be answered rightly. The setting is post-apocalyptic, taking place 13 years after a nuclear war devastated the planet, in the American West.

Post-apocalyptic is both a setting and a style of play. One can expect to have to scrounge for supplies and salvage in the burned out husks of society, there will be mutants and there will be leather-club-reject biker gangs. Food will be scarce. Ammo will be scarcer. There is an element of supernatural horror as well, which include mystical happenings, nameless horrors,R'lyeh, the walking dead, insanity, los chupacabras, levitation, astral projection, spirit photography, the theory of Atlantis, Leng, Lemuria, most of Idaho, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. That's the best I can do for you, man. There will be mysteries. There will be gunfights. There will be car chases. There will be strange events in the dark places between one stop and the next.

I've got the first arc mostly fleshed out, if the group takes the hook, otherwise they'll have to make their own trouble. I have no doubts they will excel at this.

It all starts in Western Kansas.

Things Change in the Night

2006-06-23T14:47:00.000-05:00

...I told her that if she wanted to be a writer she ought to write. ("It's like most jobs," I told. "It's amazing how much of it just consists of showing up.") --Neil Gaiman

I've had a sense of the surreal at waking these last few days. I think it's due to the unusual schedule I'm keeping, that I am sleeping later for my own good and well into the light of the day. My body, it seems, is waking up sooner than the rest of me. I've been dreaming with my eyes open. I suppose it's really different parts of my brain waking up before others, not really my body, but I digress.

In the slow process of regaining consciouness (returning from the astral, soul possession, motivating the meat, et al.) I find myself aware of the bedroom around me. It is, as is so often the case in dreams, more than just my bedroom. It is vibrant and pregnant with hidden meaning, painted in broad strokes of nuance and color. It has not been the same twice. Once the piles of kipple beside my bed were transformed in my eyes to lustrous woodgrain. Another time the room itself expanded to an incredible height, and its fixtures loomed over me in the half light. And another time, this is the last one on my list, the room was bisected with gaping and jagged cracks. These dreams don't last long, they are fragile. The simple act of trying to touch them leads to the destruction of the illusion.

It's all rather refreshing, I'd been having something of a dry period in regards to dreams, and now what with these waking things, last night's metropolitan romp with a moral (no seriously, right before my alarm hit someone distinctly mentioned something about "being yourself") and the giant super-tuna with tribal-tatoos that kept trying to eat people I've been well entertained when not awake. Good times!

Xylophonic Vertebral Columns

2006-06-22T14:45:00.000-05:00

I meant to write something here last night after work, but instead I decided to go to bed. It's another entry in a long list of things that I've sidelined due to the unusual hours of my employment. We'll get to that in due time. Exposition is in order. It is as much to crystallize things in my own head as to make sense of it for you as well.

I had a few prospects at the beginning of the summer, most of them mediocre. There was a compelling offering of graphic design assistant at a local vo-tech, something I could actually excel at, but they dragged their feet, and continue to drag their feet, a good 4 weeks into the process. The powers that be, in a surprisingly unilateral tyrannical motion demanded that I be employed not only right now, but three weeks ago you long-haired slacker. As one might expect morale was low.

--what occurs between the last paragraph and the next is a week spent on Grand Cayman, a thoroughly delightful island just a stone throw's south of Cuba, known for incredible dive spots and private banking that is almost, but not quite, the envy of Switzerland. It rained several feet while we were there, but it didn't really bother me.--

Hands now firmly tied I soldiered on in pursuit of another job. It became a simple act of deduction from there. What are my skills? Web design, database engineering, graphic design, film, traditional and digital art. What job would best suit a person of such qualifications? Oh, I know! Warehouse stocker. But wait, that's not all! The 8-to-5 shift is too weak sauce for me! No! I will work 6pm to 2am! I am become god, destroyer of worlds. The heavens tremble at my hubris.

And that, gentle reader, is how I spend my evenings. Not with my family, not with my friends, not with you, but in the company of cardboard and steel.

Yesterday I took too many water breaks. People might think I didn't want to be there.
Yesterday I was working too slow. Once the drops start I'll never be able to catch up.
Yesterday I finished my shift ahead of schedule and dehydrated.

As you might expect I'm a little frustrated with the management.

Damn the man.

True Sailing is Dead

2006-02-16T23:04:00.000-06:00

Today must be Musteline Encounter Day. Not only did I almost run over a weasel (summer coat) on the way back home in the dark, but when I got back, as I was carrying my stuff back into the house I spooked a skunk. I gave a shout you see, and he turned tail and fled. I'm rather oblidged to him for that. Maybe I was just out of range.

Fishers of Binary

2006-02-07T23:01:00.000-06:00

A friend said to me, "You are always finding strange things on the internet, and reading a new blog."

I turned to him and replied:

"Searching the internet is like casting out a great net into a foggy sea.

You pull, and pull, and pull, and at long last the net lies at the bottom of your boat.

Sometimes you net is full of fish fresh and wriggling.

Sometimes your net is full of porn smelling most foul.

The idea is to throw the porn back."

He laughed at this. So it goes.

Jarvus the Space Monkey

2006-02-07T00:10:00.000-06:00

Jarvus began life as a simple chimpanzee, raised well enough in a laboratory by generally kind scientists who didn’t prod him or stick him with things very often, all things considered. Instead there were many buttons to be pressed and many tasty fruits to eat peeled AND unpeeled. Life, when it was not prodding or sticking him, was generally good, and the laboratory was a pleasant place to grow up aside from the ammonia smell.

When he was old enough the scientists began to train him for his journey to the stars, for you see young Jarvus was destined to become a Space Monkey, one of the last of that mighty breed. This was not so nice as his younger years as it consisted mainly of having to wear a silly suit and then being tied into a tiny box and flung about at ludicrous speeds. Had Jarvus not been a chimpanzee of singular mettle he would likely have washed out like the countless monkeys before him, sidelined into a dead-end job in comedy, fish packing, or cosmetics.

Failure was not an option, so Jarvus simply pushed himself harder. After grueling months of preparation the scientists deemed him ready to embark on his flight to the great beyonds of outer space. The date was set, the silver vessel was checked, prepped, and rechecked. When at least the day arrived the brave chimpanzee found himself strapped into his tiny craft and, after a long and agonizing countdown he rocketed out of the atmosphere into the inky cold darkness of outer space.

The stars wheeled around Jarvus’ ship, more than he had ever seen before, and the blue green ball he’d called home for his whole life shrank away beneath him. Behind his head somewhere something whirred quietly to life, and he began to feel drowsy. Grey mist swam before his eyes, and in the back of his mind he heard voices. Then he fell asleep for a long time. What the scientists had never told him, what they could not tell him, was that Jarvus was the primary test subject for a new form of cryogenic suspension, the deep space cryosleep they hoped to use to spread their race across the galaxy. Perhaps they would have, but humanity is capricious and the scientists soon abandoned the project, or were killed, or perhaps just died of old age. No one really knows for sure.

Regardless Jarvus slept on, all but a tiny part of his brain frozen away, bathed in the warm glow of an endless stream of technical specifications beamed from a lonely satellite sitting dejectedly at a forgotten LaGrange point. It was all that kept the little monkey alive. As the decades passed his silver ship grew tarnished, its shine dulled by micrometeors and stellar dust and yellowed by cosmic radiation that hammered away at it from the distant yellow sun. Not only did it change the outside of the ship, but the few stray rays that managed to penetrate the shielding on the craft found their way to chimpanzee within. He was... changed.

His genetic was twisted, unlocked, and evolved. He grew in stature, his figure taking on that of a near-man, not the slumped shamble of the lower primates. His cranium expanded, and with it his capacity for understanding the world around him. For the first time he dreamt of what his life had meant, of who he was. The dreaming not-quite-chimpanzee had begun to think like a man. Cell by cell he changed while above him the plants spun and danced before an endless tapestry of stars.

Time passed, and one day Jarvus’ tiny craft was picked up by a salvage ship. They did no what strange vessel that had picked up, indeed, they simply left it in their cargo bay and set course for the nearest spacebar. The little ship, its computer roused from a centuries slumber by the light and atmosphere of the bay, began to wake its sleeping occupant. For the first time in a century Jarvus rolled over. He woke slowly from the cryosleep, and at the end of the cargo hauler’s three day journey he opened his eyes. Peering at him through the dusty port of his ship was an ugly fat man in a tool belt, and a greasy thin man with a welding helmet pushed back over his head.

“Watch ‘im, Squink,” said the fat man, “He’s gonna throw shit at yah.” The greasy man chuckled.

“No!” yelled Jarvus, mortified. A heavy moment passed as each of them realized a chimpanzee had just spoken.

“I must be dreamin’,” one of the men groaned.

“Shiiiiiiiiiiit,” said the other with a whistling hiss.

“Listen,” sighed Jarvus, “We started this all on the wrong foot. Can we just start with introductions?”

“The monkey wants to say hello!” the fat man exclaimed.

“Chimpanzee,” Jarvus corrected.

“Shiiiiiiiiiiit,” the other repeated. Suddenly the deck gave a lurch, tossing Jarvus out of his vessel on his hands and knees. Klaxons began to whoop and yellow warning lights began to spin.

“The engines!” the greasy man yelled, running in one direction.

“The controls!” the fat man yelled, running in the opposite direction.

“A little help?” said Jarvus. Then remembering his simian dexterity he quickly righted himself and peered down the corridors after the men who had gone. After a moment he knuckled after the thinner of the two. The dusty corridor led him deeper into the bowels of the ship. He could hear the dull humming whir of power in the walls like the breath of a living thing. Beyond a dark bulkhead door marked ENGINES he found the greasy man fiddling with a steaming pile of machinery that dominated the room.

“Did you need a little help?” Jarvus said, peeking his head inside.

“Don’t need help from a monkey!” the man grunted as he tightened down a coupling.

“Chimpanzee.”

The man grunted and continued working. As he continued to tighten the coupling a white fog began to pile up at his feet.

“See all that coolant? I’m not sure it’s the coupling that’s the trouble,” the chimp added helpfully.

“Shurrup,” grumbled the man as he snugged down another coupling.

“I’m just saying, it seems more like an issue with the converters.” A blast of coolant filled the room, billowing out of the bulkhead door, followed quickly by the greasy thin man.

“You think you do better? Do better. I’ma check on Yurg.” He dropped his tool belt at the monkey’s feet. Then he left. Jarvus took a long look at the pulsing white wall that had become the room, then hefted the belt and stepped inside.

In the control room on the other side of the ship Yurg was trying to get his vessel back on course. Things were not responding to his liking. There were altogether too many little red lights on his heads-up display. Squink slunk in behind him quietly.

“Ain’t you fixing the engines?” the fat man asked.

“Monkey said he’d do it.”

“Shiiiiiiiiiiit.” It was his favorite word. “Hope the monkey can handle this pile of scrap better than you can, otherwise we’re going to be sucking Jovian ass real soon.”

On the front screen Jupiter hung swirling and bloated, taking up most of the sky. There was a terrible list to the view, and minute by minute the gas giant seemed to expand. For a moment the power dimmed and the both of the men swore. Then with a hum the lights came back, and all the red lights on the control winked to green. Yurg jerked on the controls and with a dull roar the cargo ship pulled away from Jupiter.

“The monkey did it!” Squink yelled.

“Chimpanzee, actually,” Jarvus corrected as he entered.

“This chimp knows his shit!” Yurg yelled, jerking a thumb back at the primate. “You’re all right! How’s about we don’t pop you in an airlock and instead just keeps you on as engineer?”

“But Yurk, you said I was the engineer!” the greasy thin man complained.

“Shurrup, you. How about it, monkey-man?”

“I guess I could consider it,” Jarvus replied.

“That’s great to hear! Welcome aboard,” the fat man extended a stained, pudgy, and slightly hairy arm. The chimp reached out with his own much hairier arm, and they shook on it.

“You got any bananas?”

BFF

2006-01-23T17:49:00.000-06:00

Never, ever, ever teach a Philosophy class without a basic understanding of physics. Take the time to learn the laws of thermodynamics. Otherwise you will be fighting an uphill battle against the people who do. Like me. And the freaking Engineering Majors. How can you expect me to defend the existence of God from an ontological perspective without using the second law? I don't want to regurgitate your answer back to you, if it's all the same.

Seriously. They let anybody teach at a conservative institution these days.

--edit-- Sorry, not ontological, teleological. My bad, I was full of rage.

An Aside

2006-01-06T23:41:00.000-06:00

I don't usually take online tests. They rank somewhere around EQ on my list of timesinks. I did, this time. I'm sorry. Took this one and scored a whopping 42.60355% Which, if I remember right, scores me higher than everyone in my apartment. Including the CS major. I am doomed.

Tomorrow I return to university. I have mixed feelings. Wish me well. Send more ammo.

Green Eyes

2005-12-03T23:15:00.000-06:00

Our furnace really sucks. Getting up in the morning is like jumping out of my bunk into a balmy day in Siberia. How you doing Kyle?

I will share with you a dream, or a piece of a dream, that was important to me this week. If you frequent my devArt account you've seen what the dream spawned: the slimewhale, but I am getting ahead of myself.

It began slowly, as my dreams tend to, in an ocean. It wasn't so much an ocean of water as it was an ocean of static, of flickering half-images roiling beneath scintillating light like a dead station viewed through a municipal pool with a layer of oil and grime covering the surface. I am beneath, depth doesn't matter, in my dream I am at home here as anywhere else, and the dim light filtering through the dark water does little to illuminate what lays around me. It could be five feet or five hundred. Then the song beings. There were no words, although on some level I understand what it being said. I cannot remember it now. Through the dimness many pale lights, green and pale yellow like wichfire in a swamp, approach.

The song continues.

Sliding through the depths there appeared the sinous forms of great whales. The lights I had seen were their eyes, great luminous eyes not in pairs but spread across their great heads in sizes great and small. Then I began to draw away from them. It wasn't my idea, it was the dream pulling me away. After crossing a great distance, the song of the whales traveling with me, there resolved out of the gloom an old and barnacle-encrusted dock. It was ruined, the few spars still standing protruded from the silt like lonely ribs. The ground had crept up slowly beneath me, and I now found myself on the coast. The whales' music turned to a song of farewell. I replied as best I could. I am just a man.

Then I rose from the waves onto a battered and rocky coast. Abandoned buildings lay scattered among the rocks, and it was there I found my friends.

But not into the Boss's Room

2005-11-29T23:55:00.000-06:00

So. The Protomen.

I suppose they're making the rounds in the circles I tend to roll in. Mega Man rock-opera, only it's not sophmoric or poorly performed. It is taking the names and kicking the asses. Not everyone's cup of tea of course, but I can't imagine any of my folken not getting at least a grin out of it. Those who remember the old ways. Back when you only needed two buttons to get by. Four, strictly speaking, but when do I ever?

It's good stuff, very stirring. Someone somewhere called it 'Orwellian' but that's all too pretentious for my taste so I'm just going to describe it as up tempo Pink Floyd with robots. And less angst. It sort of speaks to me. I think Mega Man 3 was pretty much the first game I ever beat, or at least the only one that mattered enough for me to remember. Beating a game in those days was a feat. They were tricky things then. Vaguely evil. I'd always be flushed and sweating by the end. I was serious about my games.

I can still whistle you Protoman's song.

I May Have Been Mistaken

2005-11-19T00:18:00.000-06:00

The cold of winter had broken during the night, and though the sun shown down bright that morning I was still dressed for a deeper chill. As I walked back to the apartment in the half heat of the fall afternoon I left my jacket open and my scarf loose about my neck. It flapped, a little, in the cool breeze. Crunching through the leaves I spied an orchid nestled amongst the orange carpet.

I walked on.

For a moment I considered turning around and picking it up. Surely it was fake, I thought, mulling over what I had seen. That was not dew I saw shining on the petals, it was plastic, not petals at all really, but cleverly printed fabric. But it was an orchid, not something one usually comes across walking across campus in what was becoming an increasingly schizophrenic fall season. Perhaps I had made a mistake. In my rush from here to there, the film finally complete, a rehearsal to get to, the off chance that she would still be online, I passed it by. I can't say whether it was good or bad. It might still be there, in the dark, in the not-quite chill November air. Nestled on an orange carpet.

She Says She Reciprocates

2005-11-10T22:12:00.000-06:00

I have given my philosophy some thought, pondering this and that and real life, and have come to a better (oh boy, value-free, how about more complete?) understanding of it. Pain does not simply pass through the willing, or if it does it does not go whole it leaves something behind. I believe this to be wisdom. Those who do not give their pain to another gain wisdom in its place. Not always in equal measure, but still receiving it.

Delusions

2005-11-06T23:29:00.000-06:00

Gas in Oklahoma as low as $1.91, I don't know how or why. Weren't we having an energy crisis last week? Did someone get bored and decide to correct the market by hand, or is the Midwest having one last petrol dance before the Dark Times come?

Driving back home from after completing a project I spied two cats crossing the road, headed toward the cemetary. Their eyes gleamed in the headlights like twin pairs of witchfire. As I approached I noticed they were beagles.

Syncretism

2005-11-03T13:46:00.000-06:00

I believe as a race humanity can respond to his fellow man in only two ways: he can cause pain or he can not. The problem is that once we have pain, and we all have it, we can likewise only respond in two ways: we can either embrace the pain and let it pass through us or we can hold it at arms length and keep it distant until we can give it to another. It's a cycle, A circle of pain.

Found a new comic, new for me at least. I really like it. Makes me think. Why don't you head on over and check it out?

I did the make-up, mom. I am talented.

Scratch Theory

2005-10-31T22:50:00.000-06:00

HALLOWEEN. I have done nothing. All my spooky cheer was spent this weekend. I did, however dress up in not only one but two costumes. Which makes me 2x better than those trick-or-treating scrubs, at least. Also taller. Emo kid and Half-assed Dracula. They were sweet to the point of imminent oral combustion.

I've led an increasingly nomadic existence of late, passing mile markers like it's going out of style. It's my fault really, and considering my reasons I have no complaints. All in all crossing the endless highways of the Midwest lends a sort of skewed perspective on what goes on within. Why is it that real business seems to dissappear within a mile of any major turnpike? I don't mean like office buildings, turnpikes are turnpikes because they're cross the hoary boondocks. I mean like agriculture, you never see honest to goodness farmers in those empty fields. It's kind of eerie. I've always heard it said that all farming really is is a week or so of back-breaking labor then a lot of sitting around. But then farmers are always complaining about crop prices dropping, couldn't they be using that downtime to do something else? I can't really say what, being a died-in-the-wool suburban drone, I'm probably just being really inconsiderate. It's probably all a conspiracy anyway. It always is.

It.

2005-10-26T23:14:00.000-05:00

What have I created? A few misshapen towers, stairs that rise up and up and up to nowhere, and barrows of secret things better left untouched. Who will remember when I am gone? Who will sing the old songs? I am conflicted in all I do. Ideas squirm and gibber and pull me in a million directions. This is good. This is bad. This post is crap. I have lost the habit of posting, obviously, and lost it long ago.

Two eons to the gates of my beloved.

That was angst, pure and simple. And so I have blown it all out the back of my head like a master trepanner. How is it I never talk about what I am interested in and only wax pretentious? I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus and I must say it's one of the most beautiful games I've ever played. It's the kind of game I only dream of making, if all those dreams turn solid and I make it into the industry. It's quirky and bold and minimalist and ethereal. These are the things every review says about it. I can't really do it justice in words. It's a ghost of a game that died in a golden age. Which isn't to say that there ever really was a gaming golden age, no matter what the nostalgiacs say. It just seems ancient and unfettered, like an old pagan god let out for a stroll on a Sunday.

I have the sneaking suspicion that my college courses are hindering my preparations for entering the Scary World of the Adults, although I suppose that's just everyday paranoia.

I guess that's about

Yee-hah

2005-08-02T13:02:00.000-05:00

"I'm so hungry I could eat the horse off a saddle." My uncle seriosuly said that. Isn't it amazing?

University starts up again soon. I'm am totally stoked.

Bivouacing Suburbia

2005-07-11T12:36:00.000-05:00

Lunch at Jason's Deli. I spied a colony of children not far from the door, awaiting their macaroni and spaghetti. The line moved. I moved. In the dark forgotten places thing scuttled. I ordered a rueben wondering, as I always do, if it will be kosher. The answers never come, like the ipod you won by shooting all those terrorists (or monkies, or bugs, etc.) on top of your ex-girlfreind's Xanga that you still read like an itenerant buzzard. I ate the rueben. It was mediocre. Through the noon roar I began to detect new sounds, like the distant song of the jungle. It was an atonal piping or squawking. It faded in and out, it had been going on a long-time before my dull ears picked up on the rhythm. I looked up from my meal, eyes straining to pick out source of the noise among the cavorting chaotic shapes of the diners around me. It was the children. Their food put aside the kids had transformed themselves into a colony of crazed howler monkey children. They sat or stood in a rough semi-circle around a table, each making a high-pitched hoot that the others would mimic. This went on for some time, till they had grown tired of their piercing aural games and turned to something sweeter. Which would of course be the complimentary soft serve ice cream the Jason's provides. The big alpha led two of the smaller males, the smallest still hooting quietly to itself, up to the big machine. No, no, Also Sprach Zarathustra didn't play, there were no bones brandished in the pale dawn of man. They just got ice cream.

The Tyranny of Small Pieces of Paper

2005-07-11T08:55:00.000-05:00

I think I know why people hate banks. The root of the problem isn't the inherent nastiness of putting your hardearned money somewhere other than your pocket. It's not bankers' long history of corruption and graft. It's not the nasty habit of slapping you with a fee when you even gesture vaguely in the direction of the wrong ATM. It's the bureaucracy. Any sufficiently intelligent and free-thinking member of western society should, if he is wise, know to avoid bureaucracy with all the zeal he uses to avoid really dreadful things like those fancy virues you catch from monkies. (such as ebola, or bonoboism) It's the sea of forms one must swim through to get ones paltry pittance in with the rest. Getting an account is in itself a hurdle, but it doesn't get much easier once one is counted among the Chosen. A fistful of forms accompanies each and every transaction on both sides of the little glass booth. ID must be checked and re-checked, DNA backed-up and cross-referenced, retinas scanned, organs removed and weighed and lastly placed in canopic jars and buried with the body. It's all rather exasperating. This all hinges on the bank being open for banks, in the interest of snubbing the general public, keeping truly apalling hours. Unless you keep really peculiar hours yourself (which means you probably work in a bank, you ratfink you) you will likely never see the inside of a bank. Unless one has the resolve to brave the drive-through lines, which keep hours slightly more in line with the rest of humanity at the expense of clarity, you can't really do anything with your money at all. The vacuum tubes are pretty sweet though.

On an unrelated note, have you ever been somewhere so mind-bogglingly beautiful it approaches cryogenic ecstasy? The blood freezes and the heart stops for a long moment from the sheer ethereal wonderment of it all. Then it thaws and warmth goes rushing through the body like a hot river of delight. When it fades it leaves behind a fuzzy feeling of cheer.

I've this great idea for a pizza franchise. Pizzeria Del Fuego, specializing in South American style Italian. Despite being neither South American nor Italian I expect great success. Investors please leave contact info below.

Faster than a Cropduster on a Sunday

2005-06-30T13:28:00.000-05:00

I have an uncle with a singular ability. He speaks almost exclusively in colloquialism coached in a vague and rathe generic Texas-bordering-on-somewhere-West accent. No one in the family really knows where he got this accent. While he has lived in Texas many years he was raised in Oklahoma which, contrary to popular belief, doesn't really have a specific accent. It spawned me, after all, and I've been mistaken for something northern and an Irishman (in Ireland, which is crazy, and an entirely different story.) But I digress. So my uncle speaks in colloquialisms. He has all the old staples you've heard a thousand times on any number of television shows and movies, most of them bad, and he has a whole new slew that, when used, throw my thoughts into a complete halt with their mind-boggling backwoods-americana charm. Or something

"Where do you get all these sayings?" I ask as he opens up with another fulisade of poetic country wordsmithing. "Do you have a book of these things somewhere?"

He just looked at me inscrutably through his thick lenses, bristly mustache cocked rogishly to one side. It occurs to me now that he bears a striking resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt. He doesn't really respond, and the conversation moves on. That seems to be the norm. I think somewherre along the line I have become a conversation-leper in his eyes. Things get a little stilted when I open my mouth around him. It's hilarious. It's like watching a bear and a mongoose on stilts trying to dance. Together. To progressive rock.

Name that Symbolism

2005-06-24T14:40:00.000-05:00

Another piece of fiction. Hope you enjoy.

The Nightbus

It was a slow night for Norman Gast, night busman. Usually around this time he’d have a load of folks headed this way or that. His old grey bus would be full of chatter. Tonight his bus was nearly empty, only a few bums sat snoring in the back. The heat of the day had stuck around and humidity fogged most of the windows. Norm hated it when the weather got like this. Opening the doors was like sticking your face in an oven, the heat rolled in and the sweat rolled out and the windshield fogged up.

It wasn’t much better across the river. Usually the breeze off the dark waters cooled that side of town but tonight the heat just made it all the more humid. Low fog covered the streets like cotton. He never picked up more than two people at any stop, and most didn’t ride for long. Everyone was staying inside away from the oppressive heat.

As the night wore on Norm soon found himself alone on the bus. The bums in the back had tottered off to cooler pastures and he hadn’t seen a living soul on the streets for hours. He began to nod off, only his steely resolve as an official PT Bus Line Transportation Facilitator, 2^nd Class kept him from pulling off on some lonely street and catching some shut-eye.

He was sitting at a bus stop waiting for riders who weren’t coming when a strange thing happened. As he reached over to close the doors and rumble off into the night he noticed someone was there. Standing with her feet planted in the thick fog was a little girl. He could have sworn she hadn’t been there a second ago. The girl looked up at him with deep brown eyes that went right through him. She wore a yellow summer frock that still managed to look cheery in the hot night. She couldn’t have been more than five or six. Norm was more than surprised to see her. What was a little girl doing out this late at night?

“Can I ride the bus mister?” she asked.

“Why sure,” the busman replied, tipping his hat. “Climb aboard.”

She climbed in and opened her hand, offering him something. Nestled on her palm were two shiny pennies.

“Is this enough to ride?” she asked.

“It’ll do,” he replied gravely. They made a sound like a tiny bell when she dropped them in the till.

“I’m supposed to go across the river,” the little girl confided.

“Any place in particular?”

“I don’t know, but I know I’ll know it when I see it,” she stumbled over the words as if surprised to discover them in her mouth.

“Take a seat then,”

The little girl sat just a few seats from the front and Norm couldn’t help but glance back from time to time. She spent most of her time looking out the window, but sometimes when he caught her eye she’d give him a little smile and a wave.

“What’s your name?” she asked as he took a turn on 38^th.

“Norman,” he answered, “but my friends call me Norm.”

“My name’s Sally Agnes Monteclaire. Agnes was my grandmother’s name and I hate it.”

“I see,” he said.

“I’m supposed to meet my new family across the river,” she continued. “I don’t get to see my old one anymore.”

“I see,” he repeated.

“I don’t mind much,” she finished.

Sally was quiet for a long time after that. She spent most of the time staring out the foggy window, wiping it from time to time with a hanky she’d fished from somewhere. Before long Norm turned onto Lancaster Parkway which ran parallel to the river. When Sally caught sight of the water she let out a squeal.

“There’s the river!” she cried, but she sounded more nervous than excited. “I’m not sure I want to go over it,” she added worriedly.

“Why’s that?” Norm asked.

“I’ve never been across the river before. What if my new family doesn’t like me? What if all the kids hate me?”

Flipping on his indicators Norm pulled the bus to the side of the road. When he had the big vehicle stopped he put it in park then went and sat down beside Sally.

“Listen kid,” he began, “You don’t have to go there if you don’t want to. I can turn this bus around and drop you off right where you got on, but you gotta make that decision by yourself. So where do you want to go?”

“I think I want to go across,” she finally whispered, looking up at him with solemn brown eyes.

“Okay then,” he said, then stood and walked back to the driver’s seat. Checking his mirrors he put his old bus in drive and manhandled it back onto the road. Two blocks down the bridge squatted under the orange glare of the streetlights. Looking back in his mirrors Norm could see the girl’s eyes get bigger the closer they got.

Taking a left onto the bridge Norman looked out of the dark city that sprawled ahead of him. This side of town didn’t have streetlights like the other did. The people on this side of the river had made do by stringing Christmas lights between buildings in the darker streets and bringing their own light everywhere else. It looked homely and more than a little disheveled.

“Turn right here,” the girl said, her face plastered to the window. He was happy to oblige. At the next corner she said left, then halfway down that street she told him to turn down an alley. It was a tight squeeze getting his hulking bus between the two buildings that loomed in on either side. Norm had no idea how they’d get through if this alley contained anything in it bigger than a newspaper. Moments later they came out the other side into the gamboled and misty suburbs. Strange-shaped houses loomed out of the fog like forests of Victorian architecture. Many of the houses were dark, but in a few lights still glowed in living rooms and kitchens.

“I think you can let me off here,” Sally said, unsticking her face from the window. Norm brought his bus to a shuddering stop against the sidewalk and cracked open the front doors. The hot breath of the night invited itself in. Walking to the front of the bus she stopped at the door and peeked out into the muggy darkness.

“Thanks a lot mister,” Sally said, stepping down onto the pavement. She waved at him for a moment, then turned and walked toward the misty homes that lay ahead. “Goodbye!”

Norm waved back as the little figure faded into the darkness. She disappeared in bits and pieces as the fog rolled over her till all he could see was the bright yellow of her dress. Soon even that faded into the night and Norman Gast was left sitting in his bus on an empty street.

He sat for a long time watching the fog roll in the headlights till he noticed the cold line of sweat tracing its way down his back. He closed the doors. After a while the air-conditioning brought a semblance of cool back into the bus. He drove the long way back. By the time he reached the depot on the other side of the river the night had given way to pale dawn. The supervisor met him as he stepped off his bus. He was a small man with a clipboard and had a harried look that never quite reached his voice.

“Slow night?” he asked.

“Not bad,” Norm replied.

“Got pretty rough on this side of the river, couple of nasty accidents.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Nope. Had the four-way on Central pretty buggered for a while, lot of buses got behind schedule.”

“That’s a shame,” Norman didn’t sound so sure. “Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s today, Gast. You got another straight-shift coming up at five.”

“Tonight then,” he said turning toward the street. Then he was gone. Norman Gast, night busman, had gone in search of breakfast.

Signs of the Times

2005-06-08T08:26:00.000-05:00

It was a late night in O'Martin's. I had things I should have been doing, I always have things I should be doing, but as usual I was killing time in as self-destructive a way as I could come up with legally and on short notice. O'Martin's has the sort of dank, unsettlingly luminousity you never see outside of silent films anymore. The bar squatted like a poorly trained dachshund sitting among the remains of a blown-out television. Sputtering blue-white neon lit up the array of poisons like Christmas morining with a Baptist. The rest of the place was dark, lit only by cigarettes that glowed like a hundred lonely campfires that glitter quiet and impotent in the night. There was also a stage. It was a tiny stage, barely wide enough for one man, much less a band. It was scratched and pitted with years of invisible dead-end musicians ending their lives onstage. Upon that stage was a man or the shape of a man, sitting on a barstool with one short leg. He clutched an old acoutsic guitar and sat slumped over it like a man bereft, his dark lank hair hiding his face. There was something terrible about this slumped figure of a man, his hands hooked like spiders over the glossy body of his instrument but never, never brushing the strings. I watched him for a while, and as I looked time slowed to a crawl. His head rose slowly, lifted up like a great statue, and while his eyes were covered by his stringy hair I could see the glint of his teeth in the darkness.

Then he straightened his shoulders and took up his guitar with a practiced hand. His fingers moved toward the strings like ballistic missles, steady and unstoppable. Then I noticed the strings, they were black. They had no reflection to them, like whatever light that struck the guitar was swallowed up by the strings. It was like looking at six threads of midnight, like long cracks in reality into the darkness beyond. The music he played was silent, in frequencies beyond human hearing. It beat upon the ears and gibbered mutely beyond perception. It sank into the soul and said things. A family man across the bar bought himself another stiff one. Four guys sitting at a darkned booth began entertaining thoughts of murder. It was like being drowned in a sea of bad karma. The musician's grin widened. I dragged myself from the bar, buffeted by whatever ill winds blew from that baleful guitarist and his hellish instrument. It was a melody played by a madman on strings fashioned from raw nightmare. The man grinned even more, his face taking a more maniacal cast as his fingers moved in a blur. My steps slowed as if repulsed by the rhythms assailing me. With agonizing slowness I approached the stage. I raised my arm, fish clenched, knuckles white from the strain of wading through the maddening silence. My fist opened with a snap, dropping a scrap of paper that fluttered gayly down into a pitcher that sat at the musician's feet. It was a five-dollar bill.

"Can you play," I gasped, breath rasping. "Stairway to Heaven?"

Chernabog

2005-04-28T14:56:00.000-05:00

Late last night a conversation unfolded in the hall outside my room. It was mostly tongue in cheek, my roommate and a freshman commiserating the shapeless horror he must live with. The rhetoric took a dark turn and I knew I had to act. With a few keystrokes Mussorogsky's Night on Bald Mountain began to fill the air with its fearsome strains. I waited a few seconds for the music to sink in then stood, slowly, majestically, and gave the freshman a look. It was a look of such madness and horrific majesty that he took a step back, struck dumb in terror and awe. Then he beat a hasty retreat. It was amusing. My roommate and I laughed. Hope everyone is having a lovely week.

Crossing

2005-04-28T00:39:00.000-05:00

We spend our lives rowing across a great dim sea between the sunny port of our birth and the distant grey unfathomable city just over the horizon. Something is always following us across the great water. It is not death or devil. It is the unmaking. The undoing. The unknowing. Nameless and faceless it swims behind us. It is never close enough to touch but always close enough to murmur empty words. In the darkest times it slips behind us into the boat and whispers, unformed words buzzing against a benumbed ear.

Why finish?

Why cross?

Why care?

God help the one who listens.

Ko

2005-04-17T01:25:00.000-05:00

I have taken to playing go. You don't know what go is? Go is an old asian board game similiar (in premise at least) to Chess. For more information I point you here They seem to know what they are talking about, and they're top of the list in Google. But back to what I was saying!

Go is deceptively simple. Seductively simple. It reaches out with a pale hand with crimson nails that flash in the moonlight and whispers secrets. It is cruel. To the foolish and the unwary it crashes headlong, trampling underfoot ego and pretense. When playing go, especially as I am now, an unstudied neophyte, I find myself to be as much a hinderance as my opponent. I am too zealous, I think, in attempting to capture my opponent's pieces. I neglect my own territory and that by the end of the game my holdings are meager. That is, afterall, how you win. It is all about territory. I am too aggressive. I am the paper tiger, fierce and fragile. I must learn to defend. To consolidate. The tiger must wear the turtle's shell.

What do you get when you cross a turtle and a tiger? A title? A turger?

Ah. I know. A terrible literary invention.

A Week Late

2005-04-14T02:57:00.000-05:00

Pictures from Mini Con IV. Never have I been so filled with feelings of giddy joy and crushing horror!

This is my posse. You'll have to guess which one I am. Yes, that means I hang out with Domo-kun. I'm better than you, deal with it.

Right after taking this picture I lost consciousness. All I remember is eyes and teeth.

A whole slew of Final Fantasy cosplayers. Black Cloud Strife > You

I was able to snap this picture right before the ninja flipped out and tried to kill me. I was lucky the flash blinded him so I could escape.

Domo-kun again. He is the awesome.

More ninja goodness. Gaara from Naruto.

Wouldn't be a con without a catgirl. Here we go in super FFXI White Mage style.

It takes guts to not dress up like a whore at cons. These girls got it in spades.

The ubiqitous Sailor Moon groupshot. Note the hulking figure of the Androgynous Hairy Sailor Moon(trademark pending) on the far left.

On Feminism

2005-04-07T15:43:00.000-05:00

Anyone who thinks high heels are the shackles of a chauvinistic male-dominated society has never had to tie a necktie.

A Sense of Impending Mortality

2005-04-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

It is quite posible that the first 30 minutes right after I wake up are the most difficult. There's a certain nihilism that creeps into my soul as I peel back the blinds on my window and stare into the waking world. It's more than the sluggish muzz, the dull mental slog of pulling oneself up from unconsciousness. The less rational parts of me are literally fighting to keep me in bed. Excuses must be made daily to get the beast moving, even if that excuse is as weak as 'life looks better after 10am.'

On a lighter note, I have created a work of art, rendered painstakingyly in pastel, which I have entitled Orgrimmar at Evening. It shows the great captial of the Horde as seen from the gates of the Hall of Honour, looking through the hazy distance toward the Drag. It is far better than my previous attempt at pastel art in which I tried to render an entire forest of ferns. The more I work in traditional media the more I love photoshop.

For Sale

2005-04-01T21:41:00.000-06:00

I spent the evening with a girl who lives in a white house. It is one of those rambling colonial-styles places like in all the magazines. The grounds are well-groomed at this white house, the old gardener comes by twice a week to keep everything trimmed and beautiful. The picket fence around the white house draws a boundary in a spotless white line. The furniture is simple but servicable. It does what it needs to and has the rugged simple charm many find appealing. Anything nasty in the white house is locked up in the attic or the basement, out of sight of a guest. I could be content in a white house, but I'm not sure I could be happy.

I want to live in a rundown house. I want to live in a house with chipped paint. I want to live in a house with walls that smell of nicotine, of a thousand parties and the white hot morning after. I want to live in a house with mysteries, with cracks between the floorboards where old secrets rise like dustmotes in the summer heat. I want to live in a house where the attic is full of dead men's things and the basement is full of monsters. I want to live in a house that has seen time, looked in the red-rimmed eye of a summer's glare and the unfeeling fusillade of winter. I want to live in a house with a back door to the ocean and a front door to the woods. I want a house with ghosts. I want a house with painters.

Communism in America

2005-03-30T00:14:00.000-06:00

So I'm sitting in a German restaurant (Schilo's) with a couple of friends last Saturday when a parade comes by. I'm in favor of parades of principle. They're pretty and mostly harmless. Sort of like the cute younger sister of the angry mob. It was a Cesar Chavez parade, a guy I can honestly say I didn't know about till after this thing happened. He apparently did good things for Mexico and was a Socialist, but I digress. It was a good parade, with flag wavers, a couple of floats, bag pipe players, and masked punk rockers.

So after the parade I'm walking down the street when I pass this guy. I don't make eye-contact or anything, but he starts talking. To me I guess, no one else was around.
"I was going to work," he mumbled. "But now I'm too pissed off. Did you see that communist parade? Communism in America!"

Holy crap. There are communists in America. Someone call the vengeful shade of Macarthy, we've got a live one here. Somehow I managed to run into the one guy left in San Antonio still living in the Cold War. I wanted to turn around and tell the guy that we've got new enemies now, but I didn't. We have foes far wilier than communism could ever be.

Liberals.
Liberals and terrorists.
Liberals and terrorists and children's book authors.

A Single Violin

2005-03-25T10:19:00.000-06:00

There aren't many places with real magic anymore. All this wonderful progress has stitched us up in our skins. We are blinded by the inside of our eyelids, gummed shut by self-interest and pettiness and the weight of logic. Cirque du Soleil was in Austin last night and it was amazing. Watching a Cirque show was equal parts acid trip and religious experience. The colors, the movements, the music, all penetrate whatever shell a person has and stoke a sense of wonder in his soul. The acrobat's (actors? what do you call circus folk as a whole? Not circus folk, that sounds stupid) become part of of living tapestry. They aren't human, they have become something more. In the end when it's all over and the masks come off I feel both relief and great sadness. They are people, and that's a relief. They are people and that's a huge letdown.

Also while walking back to the car I almost got run over by one of those Honda SUV things. It was all like: I am not giving you the right of way, for, lo, I am a small foreign SUV and will not besmirch my honor.
And then I was all like walk walk walk. And then it didn't hit me.

Quarter turn to the left

2005-03-22T23:13:00.000-06:00

So I saw Robots this evening and I confess my opinions are mixed. Technically it was beautiful, the characters movements were lifelike (at least as lifelike as a slew of robots can be) and every surface screamed with all the life the animators could breathe into it. I did enjoy it for the most part, the cringing was kept to a minimum. The plot, however, left something to be desired. I don't think Hollywood will ever understand what an all ages movie should have. Cliches, big name actors, and fart jokes do not a story make. I got the feeling that the plot was rushed, or that maybe it was written just to show off the slick tricks the animators could pull. It wasn't quite a tech demo all the time, but sometimes it came close. (the ball ride?)

I don't want to be some snobby critic, you get no stars or anything, so in the end I guess I liked Robots. I just wish there had been more. Go see it if you like CG. That's why I did.

Afterwards that family of mine and I went to a trendy pan-asian restaurant. You know the kind. The ones run by gaijin roundeyes? I am of the opinion that an asian retuarant a) must be run by a non-english speaking person of asian descent, b) be in some grimey alley halfway across town , or c) all of the above. As such The Pei Wei Asian Diner does not pass muster.

Earthbound Status: Level 80, returning to Onett to fetch meteorite piece
Listening: Skindread--Babylon (because one genre is never enough!)
Playing: WoW (level 44 Hunter)
Debating: Matrix Online (because hunters suck now)

Interlude

2005-03-21T15:21:00.000-06:00

Less than half an hour ago I was driving home from lunch. As I sat stopped at an intersection I spied a banana lying in the gravel on the side of the road. It stood out as a bright spot of color in the dun roadside flotsam. It was marbled with brown and yellow like two armies warring over the same small battlefield. made me wonder. Where had this banana come from? What stories could it tell me? Had it been tossed from someone's lunch? Had it fallen from some laden banana truck headed for market? It would have to be quite a courageous fruit to seek its fortune under the hot southern sun. It was too proud to ask for help so I drove on. Bananas are notorious for never asking for help. I wished it luck then turned right, headed for my home.

The War against Giygas!

2005-03-21T12:23:00.000-06:00

This post is made up entirely of silly gamer talk. You've been warned.

I've been playing through Earthbound again. In case you don't know Earthbound is, in my humble opinion, the greatest rpg ever made. It came out on the SNES before the big two, Final Fantasy VI(III) and Chrono Trigger. Not that release dates really matter. It pretty much flew under the radar, even with Nintendo hyping it as much as they did. These were the dark days before rpg's went mainstream. It broke the genre in a way that's never really been done again.

It was a farce.

Your party is just a gang of psychic kids, traveling through a skewed modern world fighting stray pets, UFO's, and cultistst to save the world from cosmic evil. (it wouldn't be an rpg if you didn't save the world, would it?) You can't really condense how zanie the game really is in a short little blog. Suffice to say its freaking sweet. I need to go kill the 1,000 Year Sprout now, so I think I'll quit.

You Can't Just Walk into Mordor

2005-03-19T15:54:00.000-06:00

Here I am, back at home for springbreak. Whoo. That means nothing much is really happening. That can mean but one thing. Amusing trip anecdotes. I really have only one. I apologize. Shall I commit seppuku?

So I get to the airport no problem. Drop off my car and walk in. There's no line at the AA desk. I wonder for a moment why that is. It's spring break for a large chunk of the state, why aren't all the other silly college students flying home? Then I remember that I'm in Arkansas. Check-in goes off withouta hitch. Then security. Ah, security. Everyone's favorite part of any trip. Stand in line, hand the old lady (like shuffleboard old, should we blame the Reblubicans?) my ticket and DL. I now present to you in Dolby 18.1 As-I-remeber-it audio.

Security Lady(Henceforth know as Ethel, she looked like one, or maybe Bev): This is expired.
Me: What?
Ethel: Says it expired on the 7th. Have you got any other ID?
Me (panic mode activating): I've got a student ID...
Ethel: Let me see. (Proceeds to study my student ID like an art critic studying a Renoir) How old are you?
Me: (WHAT!?) 21?
Ethel: You don't look a day over 17.
Me(turing up the mystified innocent charm): Uh, I'm flattered?
Ethel: All right then, here's your ID and ticket, move along.

I skipped the part where I kowtowed three times and solemnly promised to get a new DL when I got home. And the part where they asked if my box of art supplies was a toolbox (yes, and I intend to dismantle the plane while it's in the air.) It wasn't really as funny. So I'm sitting at my gate looking at my DL, wondering how on earth I could have forgotten to get it renewed. There, under the EXPIRES sections was 3-2006. Poor Ethel had been reading the section that listed when I was over 21. At this point I really felt like a drink. Stupid conscience.

The pilots on my two connections sounded like a Russian spy and JFK, respectively. I thought that was a nice dichotomy.

Recycling Old Content

2005-03-18T01:47:00.000-06:00

I have just finished writing a paper. With it's completion my sping break will have officially begun.

My roommate and I have just realized that fruitbats, the really big ones from South America, look a lot like flying dachshunds. Except with shorter ears. Holy crap.

Isn't This Where We Came In?

2005-03-17T14:34:00.000-06:00

Why is this here? Why bother? I heard employers are starting to take an interest in what prospetives have to say in their blogs. That's my excuse, the truth is I've been wanting to make a blog for a while. I just never got around to it. Now I have.

The heavens will tremble at the force of my rhetoric.

So why 'Vampire Ham?' It grabs the mind, doesn't it? Makes you wonder? That's the idea. It's the sort of screwball absurd humor that defines me. If that's not your thing I suggest you run. Run far away and make yourself a sandwhich. Then make another and ship it to me. I'm trying to work on a decent template, but this is the first time I've worked with blogger so it might take longer than I want. We'll see.