Christmas has come and gone. Parents and friends visited, extended families seen. Tree acquired and decorated. I enjoyed both Christmas dinner with Girlfriend's family and post-Christmas brunch with my own. Christmas remains my favorite season. I know that doesn't make me particularly special, but I'll add my voice to the chorus.
I had the opportunity to observe some of the family's newer members, and I noticed more than I think I ever had before how simultaneously jading and heartwarming a child at Christmas can be. I witnessed true, unvarnished joy, elicited by the satisfaction of un-self-conscious greed. We grown ups know that there are right things and wrong things to be happy about, and that interpersonal duties require that we never become fully absorbed in our own pleasure. Contrast with a five-year-old, concerned with nothing beyond what else he gets, at the moment he gets it.
In terms of my own haul, this Christmas has given me cause to reconsider my original plan of getting a job. It looks like I'll actually be needing that time to give adequate attention to the things I got. The acquisitional highlights of the season include another year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Batman: Arkham City, and freaking Skyrim. Preliminary assessments estimate these items to comprise approximately two zillion hours of media. Also, my parents gave me a Kindle, which contains a theoretically infinite amount of text. I started down that road by acquiring Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey for free, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for 95 cents. That strange little device has revived my likelihood of reading books that I had previously written off as just too big--not in terms of length but in terms of weight. I certainly would have re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by now if my neck didn't cramp at the mere thought of carrying it to and from work every day.
But, since neither Skyrim nor indiscriminate reading comes with health insurance, I grudgingly retain employment as Plan A.
I spent some time this week watching the meteoric collapse of Ocean Marketing, but I think that affair actually merits a separate post, and it seemed appropriate to do the Christmas post first.
Two blog-related items of of minimal importance:
1) This blog is approaching its 1,000th page view, which is both neat and pathetic.
2) I've decided to experiment with labels. It sounds like fun, and what's the worst that can happen? It might even make the blog more organized to future readers.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
On the verge of attempting something cool
Curses! Late again! This time I'm afraid I just forgot.
This week has involved some "adventures" with health insurance. Washington's extensive laws on the matter had made me complacent, it seems. Getting insured when you're beset with as many abbreviations as I am is much harder in Maryland. Perhaps it would be less frustrating if I could be indignant about it, but it just sort of underscores how preposterous... ah, never mind. My politicometer is beeping at me, and I'd rather talk about something else anyway.
Last night and today I all but finished an adventure pitch to send to Paizo. Writing for the Pathfinder Society would be pretty cool. The tale I have in mind is one of intrigue and tense adventure, but could also just be about four to five armed psychopaths cutting and scorching a swath through a succession of deadly obstacles. It's important to account for different play styles, I think. I hope to send the pitch tomorrow, after having another human being or two look it over.
If they don't pick it up, I'm considering publishing on my own. Preliminary research suggests that that can be done without litigious depantsing.
This week has involved some "adventures" with health insurance. Washington's extensive laws on the matter had made me complacent, it seems. Getting insured when you're beset with as many abbreviations as I am is much harder in Maryland. Perhaps it would be less frustrating if I could be indignant about it, but it just sort of underscores how preposterous... ah, never mind. My politicometer is beeping at me, and I'd rather talk about something else anyway.
Last night and today I all but finished an adventure pitch to send to Paizo. Writing for the Pathfinder Society would be pretty cool. The tale I have in mind is one of intrigue and tense adventure, but could also just be about four to five armed psychopaths cutting and scorching a swath through a succession of deadly obstacles. It's important to account for different play styles, I think. I hope to send the pitch tomorrow, after having another human being or two look it over.
If they don't pick it up, I'm considering publishing on my own. Preliminary research suggests that that can be done without litigious depantsing.
Monday, December 12, 2011
NaNoWriMo done; what's next?
I forgot to post this when I wrote it last night. Here it is. The Christmas song rant at the end is new, though.
I still am here, finding my feet in the outskirts of Washington D.C. It's the middle of December and yesterday we couldn't seem to get the air conditioning to turn off. It turned out that was actually the furnace, doing everything it was supposed to do except create heat. This will be remedied forthwith, our exceedingly kind landlord, assures us, but that is the adventure of the day: space heaters and exploratory wall surgery.
Back in Seattle, après moi, le déluge. This week the last of us will be moving out of the old house. To my not insubstantial surprise, the weirdness of this was alleviated by a music video slideshow that Katie put together of the various housemates from the past 5 (!) years.
Oh, I completed NaNoWriMo! I won't claim that I won this year, because I passed 50,000 words on December 8, one day after my self-extended deadline. That will be the first year I've fallen short since I started taking it seriously, which is disappointing, I think I may have moved to another level along the way. When I first embarked on that journey, I figured that this was something I had to do to prove to myself that I could be a writer. This year, as I found myself becoming frustrated with my prolonged novelling sprint cutting into time I could be spending on Hengist, or Nenle and Death, or one of several unnamed short stories, it occurred to me that November was no longer the battleground of my self-actualization.
I've been hanging around the writers' forum at Cracked.com for a while, biding my time. This is another thing that got put off for the duration of November. It's about time, for me to have some funny ideas now, and if any of them get picked up, you'll know. You'll so know.
Meanwhile, it's Christmas time. On Saturday Girlfriend and I rearranged furniture to make room for the tree that we will take in from the cold this month, in the spirit of holiday charity. (That, by the way, is a terrible image to follow to its logical conclusions. Don't.) There's a lot of enthusiastic decorating in this neighborhood, but so far I haven't seen any of those awful inflatables that started springing up like festive fungus back while I was in college. (Random scary note: I was going to write "a few years ago" but then I actually counted.)
Another way the times are a-changing, though not too fast: Christmas music. xkcd made an interesting point about our holiday radio play: our "classic" holiday songs (as opposed to our "traditional" ones, I might parse) overwhelmingly come out of the Baby Boom years. I'm tempted to speculate on how much of the cause and effect might be the opposite--did postwar prosperity spur interest in commercial Christmas and, consequently, Christmas songs, as much as Boomers' nostalgia for the songs of their childhood carried those songs forward? I guess the question is how many Christmas songs come out now, compared to then. Dare we speak of relative quality? I don't know where to begin to address this question rigorously, but a quick search and personal experience suggests that holiday songs written after 1970 are categorically insufferable. But then, I was thinking to myself on Saturday how tedious some of the upbeat Christmas novelty standards are, and we have the Boomers to blame for keeping them on the radio while the dross of my own childhood is allowed to mercifully vanish. Perhaps the most charitable thesis I can settle on is that I can hate almost anything.
These last two paragraphs were originally intended to be a brief segue into this question: When did "A Few of My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song? I heard at least two versions of it in the same mix over the course of dinner on Saturday. It kept bringing to mind images of Julie Andrews frolicking through verdant countryside. Has the song just been severed from its source at this point?
I still am here, finding my feet in the outskirts of Washington D.C. It's the middle of December and yesterday we couldn't seem to get the air conditioning to turn off. It turned out that was actually the furnace, doing everything it was supposed to do except create heat. This will be remedied forthwith, our exceedingly kind landlord, assures us, but that is the adventure of the day: space heaters and exploratory wall surgery.
Back in Seattle, après moi, le déluge. This week the last of us will be moving out of the old house. To my not insubstantial surprise, the weirdness of this was alleviated by a music video slideshow that Katie put together of the various housemates from the past 5 (!) years.
Oh, I completed NaNoWriMo! I won't claim that I won this year, because I passed 50,000 words on December 8, one day after my self-extended deadline. That will be the first year I've fallen short since I started taking it seriously, which is disappointing, I think I may have moved to another level along the way. When I first embarked on that journey, I figured that this was something I had to do to prove to myself that I could be a writer. This year, as I found myself becoming frustrated with my prolonged novelling sprint cutting into time I could be spending on Hengist, or Nenle and Death, or one of several unnamed short stories, it occurred to me that November was no longer the battleground of my self-actualization.
I've been hanging around the writers' forum at Cracked.com for a while, biding my time. This is another thing that got put off for the duration of November. It's about time, for me to have some funny ideas now, and if any of them get picked up, you'll know. You'll so know.
Meanwhile, it's Christmas time. On Saturday Girlfriend and I rearranged furniture to make room for the tree that we will take in from the cold this month, in the spirit of holiday charity. (That, by the way, is a terrible image to follow to its logical conclusions. Don't.) There's a lot of enthusiastic decorating in this neighborhood, but so far I haven't seen any of those awful inflatables that started springing up like festive fungus back while I was in college. (Random scary note: I was going to write "a few years ago" but then I actually counted.)
Another way the times are a-changing, though not too fast: Christmas music. xkcd made an interesting point about our holiday radio play: our "classic" holiday songs (as opposed to our "traditional" ones, I might parse) overwhelmingly come out of the Baby Boom years. I'm tempted to speculate on how much of the cause and effect might be the opposite--did postwar prosperity spur interest in commercial Christmas and, consequently, Christmas songs, as much as Boomers' nostalgia for the songs of their childhood carried those songs forward? I guess the question is how many Christmas songs come out now, compared to then. Dare we speak of relative quality? I don't know where to begin to address this question rigorously, but a quick search and personal experience suggests that holiday songs written after 1970 are categorically insufferable. But then, I was thinking to myself on Saturday how tedious some of the upbeat Christmas novelty standards are, and we have the Boomers to blame for keeping them on the radio while the dross of my own childhood is allowed to mercifully vanish. Perhaps the most charitable thesis I can settle on is that I can hate almost anything.
These last two paragraphs were originally intended to be a brief segue into this question: When did "A Few of My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song? I heard at least two versions of it in the same mix over the course of dinner on Saturday. It kept bringing to mind images of Julie Andrews frolicking through verdant countryside. Has the song just been severed from its source at this point?
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Now I'm here
So, here I am, on the outskirts of Washington D.C., in the house in which I live. I don't know how long it will take for this to stop feeling like a vacation, but I suppose Girlfriend going to work tomorrow morning will accelerate the process. I'm not really sure if I feel weird about moving anymore; I'm going with things for now, because they're actually going all right.
This past week has been a week of lasts: last visit to Pagliacci's, Toshi's, Oasis (for bubble tea loaded with an absurd amount of positive associations), Seattle Jujutsu and Sambo club, last day of work, last time in the Hedgehog House. It wasn't until I started counting those that it registered for me that I was moving, not just going somewhere.
I started packing on Thursday, and I really only started. I filled perhaps one or two boxes out of what would ultimately be about twenty (a rough estimate). On Friday I got up relatively early (or, if you consider that I had had a job as of Wednesday, relatively late) and started packing in earnest. Is it a universal experience that packing all one's belongings into boxes taxes an order of magnitude more time than you imagine it will? Looking over my relatively meager possessions (understanding that those of my possessions which would not be described as "meager" are few and at least box-shaped) I imagined it would take perhaps two hours to get it all packed up.
In the end, I was able to sleep on Friday night, and pack up my clothes last of all on Saturday, but I really considered pulling a packing all-nighter. It got done in the end.
My house filled up with friends in the afternoon who made surprisingly quick work of moving all of my things into my shipping pod. Many thanks to Abby, Alex, Anna, Bryan, Clayton, David, Jenn, and Katie for doing what I didn't realize until I saw them doing it would have been impossible to do on my own. We filled the rest of the evening divvying up unclaimed things and ultimately going to The Ram (another last until, as with most of the others, I visit), a decadent excursion paid for almost entirely with money found in the house. So that was cool.
So, as I said, here I am. I flew overnight without incident. I'm still a bit tired, so I'm blogging instead of NaNoing. The extension I allowed myself in my last post allows me three days after tonight to write 11,296 words. That's an ambitious number of words per day, but not undoable.
On a completely unrelated subject, JourneyQuest raised the $100k it needed to make a feature length second season, which redeems my faith the species homo sapiens internet. It also struck me as worth noting that they had just over 1,000 contributors, dovetailing nicely (if superficially) with the 1,000 true fans theory that my friend Clayton mentioned in a comment that I really should have responded to at the time. Anyway, it's nice to see a sufficient number of internet people come together and support something they want, not to mention that this particular project it meritorious in its own right.
I want to see that in a promotional blurb, front and center a the top of a film poster: "Meritorious!"
This past week has been a week of lasts: last visit to Pagliacci's, Toshi's, Oasis (for bubble tea loaded with an absurd amount of positive associations), Seattle Jujutsu and Sambo club, last day of work, last time in the Hedgehog House. It wasn't until I started counting those that it registered for me that I was moving, not just going somewhere.
I started packing on Thursday, and I really only started. I filled perhaps one or two boxes out of what would ultimately be about twenty (a rough estimate). On Friday I got up relatively early (or, if you consider that I had had a job as of Wednesday, relatively late) and started packing in earnest. Is it a universal experience that packing all one's belongings into boxes taxes an order of magnitude more time than you imagine it will? Looking over my relatively meager possessions (understanding that those of my possessions which would not be described as "meager" are few and at least box-shaped) I imagined it would take perhaps two hours to get it all packed up.
In the end, I was able to sleep on Friday night, and pack up my clothes last of all on Saturday, but I really considered pulling a packing all-nighter. It got done in the end.
My house filled up with friends in the afternoon who made surprisingly quick work of moving all of my things into my shipping pod. Many thanks to Abby, Alex, Anna, Bryan, Clayton, David, Jenn, and Katie for doing what I didn't realize until I saw them doing it would have been impossible to do on my own. We filled the rest of the evening divvying up unclaimed things and ultimately going to The Ram (another last until, as with most of the others, I visit), a decadent excursion paid for almost entirely with money found in the house. So that was cool.
So, as I said, here I am. I flew overnight without incident. I'm still a bit tired, so I'm blogging instead of NaNoing. The extension I allowed myself in my last post allows me three days after tonight to write 11,296 words. That's an ambitious number of words per day, but not undoable.
On a completely unrelated subject, JourneyQuest raised the $100k it needed to make a feature length second season, which redeems my faith the species homo sapiens internet. It also struck me as worth noting that they had just over 1,000 contributors, dovetailing nicely (if superficially) with the 1,000 true fans theory that my friend Clayton mentioned in a comment that I really should have responded to at the time. Anyway, it's nice to see a sufficient number of internet people come together and support something they want, not to mention that this particular project it meritorious in its own right.
I want to see that in a promotional blurb, front and center a the top of a film poster: "Meritorious!"
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