my mental sieve...
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| Evil Wayne my mental sieve... |
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Monday, October 31, 2005 To NaNoWriMo or Not to NaNoWriMo? I'm still on the fence about participating in NaNoWriMo this year and the damn thing starts tomorrow (I am such a procrastinator). Yesterday, I was quite sure I wouldn't be participating. But Steve just emailed me that he signed up and that reminds me of what a slacker I am about the whole thing. There has always been this strong attraction to writing for me. I jot down these little ideas all the time, but they really go nowhere. Or if I do start them, then end up as incomplete garbage (4S anyone?). I never finished the story from last year either. However, I've been thinking that maybe I could do a scaled back version. I do have unused time at lunch to write. That worked very well last year -- in fact, most of the writing I did was at work. If I cut the target number by a third, say 33K instead of 50K, that might be reachable. I still have no idea what to write. But if I do, it'll be 33K of total trash... 0 comments Sunday, October 30, 2005 Pumpking Carving 2005  It freaking snowed yesterday. This is some freaktastic weather lately. Three weeks ago it was in the 70's and we get big, fat snowflakes yesterday. Today it's in the 60s and tomorrow, Halloween is supposed to be in the mid-60s as well. Which is great for trick or treating, but freaky none-the-less. A trip up to Mom & Dad's to carve pumpkins with most of the family yesterday. It was a bit crazy with so many people there, and so little room to actually carve. I think they bought 18 pumpkins for each person.  But it was a pretty good time and we got our pumpkins carved out. At the end we ligth them up and, this year, the new camera has all those fancy settings real cameras have. I still don't know exactly what I'm doing, but here's some shots I took with only the pumpkins for illumination.   posted by Evil Wayne | 3:06 PM 0 comments Birthday  posted by Evil Wayne | 2:18 PM 0 comments Friday, October 28, 2005 Word Let's start by saying you should never, ever, set books in Word. You can, but under no circumstances should you think you're doing anything but a hack job. Word does all kinds of funky things because it assumes you're a moron. It's holding your hand and telling you what it thinks is the best for you. It wants to write you a term paper, and that's about all it's good for -- it's not supposed to publish you a book. For example, it's thinks it's a good idea to link references in text or turn URL into hotlinks. Who the fuck publishes a book with hotlinks?!? Yeah, that's elitist, but screw it. I've been trying to plow my way through a mess created by authors using Word and these people are dumb as f'ing posts. There's a tag-style; Body No Indent, right? It formats the text so the paragraph will have no indent at the top (and by the way, who, but grade school children think a half-inch is an acceptable indent?!?) And a different tag, Body Text, for regular indented text. That's the way it should be. Except in place where they've used Body No Indent for Body Text, they just add a tab at the beginning of the paragraph instead of selecting a different style. This is exactly why Word blows for setting text. In a real layout program you just CAN'T screw with a style like that. If you want to have an indent, it has to be part of the tag. You can't make it up as you go -- which is clearly what they're doing here. If you try to, you get zero results immediately. Which forces you to correct your half-baked mistakes. Word baby's you. It says, "Oh, it's okay, you screwed up, but here's a cookie. Let's make it better with a minimum amount of effort on your part." They don't want you to have to use your brain. It's just that down the line you've screwed yourself because you've introduced errors that are a nightmare to track down and you've learned nothing. Text design and layout can be a chore. It's a thankless job that never gets the props it deserves. Because a good layout is transparent. Nobody ever looks at a book and says, "Man, that's sweet the way the text flows so smoothly. And the bullets are just streamlined!" But bad design is a throbbing, puss-filled wart on the end of your nose. Everybody knows a shitty layout when they see it. Which is why it takes some actual skill to make it work. And why nobody gets it. Anyone who's played with Word or it's bastard cousins this way thinks they got mad skillz. They're ready to take on any job and why desktop publishing is both a boon and a bane at the same time. You don't know what you're doing. Sit down and shut up. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:33 PM 2 comments Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Serial Wednesday: 4S (Finally) Okay, we're back on the air! New and exciting; Episodes 45 thru 50 bring us to the halfway point of this terrible nightmare. It's all downhill from here, kids. And I mean that in every way possible. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:52 PM 2 comments No More Anonymous Comments Not that there was ever a deluge of comments on this blog, but I've changed the setting so you have to login in order to leave a comment. Most of the anonymous ones I can suss out on my own, but I've been meaning to change it for awhile. Personally don't like the way blogger does comments --and there's been a bit of spam going on with them lately-- but I dig just about everything else, so it's not like I'm going to switch. On another topic, this is normally Serial Wednesday, but I'm a bit behind where I thought I would be with work at this point. Hopefully, I can get to it today, but if not I will get it out this week. I still have to make up for last week too. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:33 AM 2 comments Tuesday, October 25, 2005 That's About Right  posted by Evil Wayne | 5:20 PM 0 comments Monday, October 24, 2005 Dream Sequence Tine and I were living in an old house on a prairie. It has a large, enclosed porch with big windows. It was early fall outside; we had big screens on the windows and it looked like we lived near a farm. Outside there was a tall windmill and fields of wheat blowing in the wind. It all had this 1930s feel to it. Nobody seemed to speak. I walked around the porch, which had creaky, brown, old, painted boards. There was a table and on it was a Jamie's Ferris wheel. It spun slowly around while I looked out the window. Tine seemed to be behind me, but I could never actually see her, I just knew she was there. The same thing with the kids, they seemed to be nearby, but I couldn't actually see them at any time. I saw a little girl, I knew to be Kelly, but I couldn't see her face. It was covered by her hat. Then, I either gave up or just started walking around the porch. I ended up looking out across the wheat to the dirt road, I watch an Abrams tank drive by, which I knew was drastically wrong. I ran through the door, it crashing back into the house, clapping hard. I ran up the hill towards the road. The earth took on this extreme curvature, sort of like a cartoon, where I was running up and the horizon was only a few feet away, bringing the road and the farms on the other side into view like we were all on a gigantic rolling ball. As I got the road, the dust from the tank had pretty much obscured things. I wandered across the road and realized my parents had a farm there too. I ran up to see if everything was okay and my father stood in front of his aging barn in overalls and flat cap, holding a pumpkin or a squash. Now that I think of it, everything had this tan-brown tone to it. Again, nobody spoke to me. They just seemed to acknowledge that I was there, but continue to work. I turned around in the front yard and my sister, Kate, was sitting on a wooden patio chair, sunning herself. There was a picnic table as well, both were the same, gray, aged wood of the barn. At the table sat a little girl, with blonde hair in braided pigtails. She was also my sister, Kaylee (I don't have a sister Kaylee). She was about 8 and she was reading some Dr Seuss books. I sat down and she started talking to me about the books and how she didn't want to sell them, but Dad was going to make her for the money. I turned around and there was now a sign on the barn advertising vegetables and Dr Seuss books. I looked back at her and she was crying, really upset. I tried to console her, but then she said something to the effect of, "But I'm not real anyway. You're just dreaming me." And I had this feeling like I had been hit in the face with a frying pan. I tried to say, "No, no. You're real!" But I could feel it creeping across me that none of this was real. That I was dreaming, and I kept thinking of the tank and how it didn't belong here in these dust-bowl days. Then I seemed to be inside, look out at the wheat again. It was swaying heavily as the gray sky turned darker and darker. I kept thinking how real everything seemed, but I knew I was dreaming and it made me sad in the dream to know she didn't really exist. As it started to rain, I woke up. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:19 AM 2 comments Friday, October 21, 2005 We Now Return You to Your Regular Programming Well, Project CashCow went to press yesterday. With that, I hope to return to some semblance of normalcy around here. I can't guarantee it, of course. I've spent a large part of today actually avoiding work. I'm flush with that feeling of righteousness having barely survived the firestorm of bullshit that embodies Project CashCow. Unfortunately, work doesn't want to reciprocate. I end up checking a project that one of the FH's does and of course I'm doing that person's job now. I don't exactly know how you can be on your cell all the time at work. And I don't know how you're supposed to be getting anything done -- at least in a competent manner, that is. Nope, I'm not going throw a rage. I'm all done. Tomorrow is the big Halloween BrikWar game, and I'm getting pretty psyched for it, even though I have a lot to still do (but that's my normal M.O., wait until the last minute, then panic). I've managed to produce an intro video for the game at the last minute. It's only about 68% done right now. A large chunk still needs to be finished, but I think I can before midnight tonight. At least I hope so, otherwise we'll be forced to act out a narration in front of everyone. Booo... I would have used a vacation day today, but I already burned one early this week with TheBoy. I actually managed to rope Tine into it this production, give her a small voice over part in the beginning. It's a lot shorter than Brikington Manor, but I think it coveys the plot. Or at least a starting point. Starting sometime next week, I'll see about getting some of it up online. There will be a webpage at some point, because this is part two of our horror trilogy (although I'm not sure Shaun knows it yet) and good documentation is key. Hopefully, it won't take me 14 months to catalog the whole thing. This year we'll have audio as well. I know I owe the PARV game, but we're recording this one too. So, at some point there will be two different games to listen too. The Pipton Farmstead Terror, tomorrow's game, is going to be another great excursion to Arkham and all things Lovecraftian. I'm pretty excited. It's like Christmas Eve; I'm feeling all jumpy and wound-up. Like I have to pee... Shaun and I have been batting plotlines, images, stats and ideas for months now. The last couple of days have been a total maelstrom of activity. Too bad nobody ever really gets to see it, because some of it is genius the way it fits together. And some of it is garbage too.. Mostly from me. 0 comments Wednesday, October 19, 2005 Out Of Order  No serial this week. Or at least not today. Sorry about the lack of updates at all over the last week. I'm all screwed up with work and home and, I guess, life. But that's nothing new now, is it? TheBoy has had a fever over the last couple of days. I caught the lull between editorial passes on Project CashCow and stayed home with him yesterday; Tine's got him today. A quick trip to the Dr office yesterday to make sure it wasn't anything particularly nasty. Oh, he loves the Dr's office. He tries to be brave and we have to reassure him no needles. But when the doctor comes in, he goes into freak-out mode. He's almost screaming when the doctor puts the stethoscope up to his chest. It's about 925% worse if a needle shows up. But TheBoy has some viral infection that just needs to run it's coarse. Which means it'll make the rounds in the house. I don't understand how doctors, especially pediatricians, aren't just constantly sick. That waiting room was full of sick kids. My luck I'll get sick just in time for the weekend. Project CashCow should be out of here tomorrow. I should start working on the final leg today into tomorrow. With a little luck it won't suck the remaining fragments of my soul into the abyss. I'm not counting on it, but I can hope. Plus, I'm trying like mad to come up with an opening video for this weekend's brikwar game. The Pipton Farmstead Terrors is finally shaping up into a good game. The video isn't exactly necessary, but it adds that extra glitz making it look like we know what we're doing. Once again, Sullivan has done the bulk of the work. Someday I might actually be able to lend a significant amount of help. I go home and I still can't sit down and do anything I want until everyone's in bed. Which is why I usually burn myself out until 1 AM on all kinds of stupid things. Oh, backing up, I got The Brikington Manor Horrors game mentioned on the All Games Considered podcast. I've pimped out the game to a couple of shows - mostly on the merits of it being a Halloween game. Have yet to hear about it on any other show. We did some decorating for the season as well over the weekend. Next year, I really should do it in September. Putting stuff up two weeks before a holiday seems like such a waste. Especially for Halloween, which is my favorite holiday. This year has been so sucky because of every thing else going on at the same time.  This past weekend was also the NELUG Distribution Event. Where a chunk of the club's property was lotted off to the paid members. I got my bags of swag, but I blew it when it came to the raffle left overs. I took the first thing my name came up for and it was an Extreme Creatures set. Lots of purple Technic. Where the hell am I going to use purple Technic? I don't even use that much Technic now... I proxied for Alfred and he wound up with an extra bag of swag. Damnit!  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Alfred will have some kind of "donation" for being his proxy and getting him that extra bag. [Subtle Hint]. Then I won't have to slash his tires. posted by Evil Wayne | 12:39 PM 4 comments Wednesday, October 12, 2005 Serial Wednesday: 4S This week, Episodes 41-45 are brought to you by the letter X. posted by Evil Wayne | 8:21 AM 2 comments Tuesday, October 11, 2005 Slag We got wood last weekend. I told you 5 years was wood and I wasn't kidding. Two cords are sitting dumped on my lawn in the rear of the house (so I've got wood in the rear -- you can make of that what you will). Unfortunately, we were away last weekend and it started raining this past Friday and it hasn't stopped. I managed to cover the wood with some of those cheap plastic tarp for painting, but by now they're not fairing too well. It's also supposed to keep raining at least until this weekend. One one hand, it's nice for the 80-degree weather to finally give way to more seasonable temperatures. But it's done nothing but rain since the change and that means the ground is mud. And that meant the weekend was a bust as well for stacking the wood. I hate stacking wood. Two cords is at least 4 hours of work and that's with help. I hate the job hanging over me like that. It's supposed to rain all week, so next weekend is out as well. I hope it isn't December before I get to it, because that could be trouble. ---- Toy R Us had a Buy-1-Get-1-Free on board games by certain companies starting on Saturday. I bought TheBoy Hungry, Hungry Hippos and got Risk: GodStorm for myself (okay, so the higher price prevails). TheBoy wanted Axis and Allies, I kid you not. He spotted it and demanded I give it to him and he wouldn't put it back. He kept looking at the back and telling me how he would be the plane and I would be the guy. It brought a tear to my eye. But I put it back, because, some where in the barn is my original copy of A&A and I really should try playing that first before investing in any of the other titles. The kids and Tine actually were a bit wowed by GodStorm. So I totally lucked out. Well, Kelly bailed halfway thru the game, but I spent a lot of time with the rules. I still don't understand the whole Underworld combat. Nice ancient-world board, sturdy pieces; either a single Romanesque soldier or a war elephant. With the right amount of faith tokens, you could put forth your gods and help you win combat or keep enemy units from the Underworld. The game has a restricted 5-turn limit, which was excellent (no more endless games) and you could bit for turn order at the top of each round. Which was really swanky, because it was how Mike won. He saved all his faith tokens and bought the last turn of the final round and laid waste to everyone (mostly me) to seize victory. I wish I had taken pictures, but I didn't. ---- We signed up for Netflix last week after dumping HBO. The pay channel was rapidly loosing favor with me since the demise of Carnivale. Frankly, I never go out of my way to see anything that's on and Tine keep renting movies she wants anyway. So Netflix can have my money instead. The first set of movies we got were SuperSize Me and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was sort of disappointed in Hitchhiker's. It seemed a bit rushed. It would have worked so much better as a mini-series - they could have explored all the little side-trips the book makes. I think I'll rent the original British mini-series, I remember it much more fondly. Although, Zooey Deschanel looks absolutely amazing in this movie (and I hate to admit it, but the opening song, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, really got stuck in my head). SuperSize Me, was pretty eye-opening. Beyond the gimmik of eating 5000 calories that would make anyone sick, he had a lot of side-facts about what's going on and how marketing really starts young. The amount of sugar was surprising. If you rent the DVD, check out the extras - specifically the deleted scene: The Smoking Fry. It's freaktastic. ---- Work is most likely going to be another bitch-goddess of pain this week. At least the later part of the week, anyway. With the Monday holiday, we lose another day in the ever tightening, noose-like schedule for Project CashCow. It's 800 pages of type, math and soul-searing pain has me turning a mech pass around in 1 fucking day. Jesus-fucking-Christ, I'm sweating just thinking about it right now. This hasn't been my month and I'm pretty sure I'm developing an anxiety disorder. I think they're crazy to think this is doable. I'm trying to block it out - you know, let it blindside me so the rage jumps from zero to heart-attack in 60 seconds... mutherfucker. --- Got everyone to play another game tonight, just to take the edge off everything that's coming at me. This time the Vampire Hunter game we've had for at least a year or two without cracking the box. It's was a neat little game with a goofy gimmik. The tower has a light in it that's either red or blue to simulate day or night. This makes parts on the board show one thing or another - good or bad - depending on if it's day or night. So a villager during the day is a werewolf at night. Took about 30 minutes to play and in the end, Tine killed the vampire. Nice and short, but fun. I'm already crusing through BoardGameGeek for more horror gaming. ---- NPR reviewed a CD on the way home. Laura Veirs' Year of Meteors. Folksy, slow, mellow. I bought it from iTunes and I've been listening to it over and over again. I love finding new music. ---- I've noticed that I've been without a mood indicator for sometime now. The site, Unkymoods, appears to be down for the count, so I've gone and removed it from the sidebar. Sigh. I really was digging having moods show up. Of course, I don't think that had one for Insanely Fuckin' Angry. At least not yet. Maybe I should draw my own. I can still do a mean stick figure. And by that I mean, angry. 2 comments Friday, October 07, 2005 I Am An Idiot, Again I signed up for NaNoWriMo again for next month. Well, not so much sign-up as reactivate. Last year I was pretty gung-ho about it (even though I never actually finished the story I was writing) and thought for sure this time I would be as well. At this moment, I'm not. I'm stressed to the point of failure. It feels like I can't breathe sometimes and the walls are closing in. It's probably some kind of anxiety disorder setting in, but work and home feel pretty claustrophobic lately. I'm not ready to start spending my lunch hours sitting in Jenn's office all next month again. But a lot could change in the next month, so I shouldn't start out fretting over it I guess. I signed up; I figure I can always just stop or not even start if things don't clear up by November 1st, right?
posted by Evil Wayne |
2:07 PM
0 comments Thursday, October 06, 2005 Dream Sequence There was some kind of accident in the ocean and the sea was bubbling up faster than people could escape it. The whole world was flooding. We were at home and I refused to drive to Maine again (HA!). The house we were in was different; it was bigger had 3 floors and was on a river bank. As I looked out the window the water surged up over the embankment and just started rising. It washed out the streets, cars; people ran for cover and started swimming. We got to the third floor and Tine was yelling at me for not leaving. Then, we were in a truck of some kind. It was big and roomy - maybe it was a Hummer - and we were driving down a highway ahead of the rising water. We got to this small township that was on a large hillside. There, I found myself in a small cluster of old, red-brick buildings. In fact, I'm positive one of them was the Avon school in Lynn. But it was surrounded by other similar buildings, one of which was a hospital. There were lots of people around, waiting in lines at the door to the hospital. Nurses, dressed in a 40's style were wheeling people around in ancient wheelchairs. As I stood on the road, I could read the town sign and it was something funky like MQQAL - I remember the double Q's. And the style was typical of Massachusetts. Everyone was talking about the flooding and how it was still coming and there was no way out. Finally, I asked a nurse what everyone was waiting for. She told me if was for pills to overdoes on, because the water was coming and there was no hope. I was rather upset, but as I tried to think of some way to escape, I was suddenly standing in a pool of water. I looked down and it was coming up fast. Soon it was up to my chest and I started to swim for one of the buildings. As I got to it, I was able to crawl through a window, the water pushing me in. And that's about where I woke up. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:51 AM 2 comments Wednesday, October 05, 2005 5 Years Today is Tine and my anniversary (which is wood). It's been five years of wedded bliss, punctuated with a few thrown small appliances and at least one blow out, flaming car wreck. No, not really. I'm not really sure what to say, other than I was the one who remembered this morning, and she was the one who forgot. I want that on the record. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:59 PM 2 comments Serial Wednesday: 4S Continuing our trip into the absurd: Episodes 36-40 are now up for your viewing pleasure. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:24 AM 1 comments Monday, October 03, 2005 Don't Read This Despite having a good time Apple Pickin' this weekend, I've been on fucking edge for days. It's finally coming to a goddamn head as I can't seem to stop the voices from spouting off long strings of obscenities in my head. Let me start by saying that the drive to and from Maine just sucks donkey balls now. Do not read that I hate going to Maine. If you read that, you read it wrong. I hate the fucking ride. It's not a simple add-an-hour, it's adding 2 or more sometimes and it's the biggest reason I'm so hesitant when it comes to going up again. I also can't stand the sudden influence on one of my kids by his new idol. I'm not able to say all the shit I really fucking want to say, because I don't want it to come back and bite me in the ass (which it'll fucking do anyway, I'm sure). But it's all the wrong things he's coming away with and I'm the fucking asshole because I want him to grown and be something with the rest of his life. To top it all, I've spend all day bent over my computer racing to keep my current project on course because they can't fucking hire someone to replace the other guy that's left (and we're stuck with The FuckHeads). I've spent the last three workdays like this; overtime, working thru my lunch and I'm still catching flack because my other projects are just crashing into each other. So, I come home and the moment my voice has any kind of irritation in it, ti's met with brute-force hostility - and kids who get all fucking pissy because you can't have a scoop of fucking ice cream on your apple pie or some such shit. Everybody's taking a tantrum so why not me too. So Fuck It. The whole fucking world can go rot in hell - I give the fuck up, DO YOU HEAR ME?!? I warned you not to read this. I am fucking done. Fuck You. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:14 PM 3 comments |
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