Skyrim has come to occupy an interesting place in the reward centers of my brain. If you've read the contract I put in my last post, you'll see that I'm not playing video games until I get a certain amount of work done. I've been holding to that, so every time I actually get to fire up the Xbox 360 is a declaration of victory, of sorts: that I have imposed a certain amount of order and productivity on another day, in spite of being accountable to no one but myself for how I spend my time. It's hard to overstate the significance of that. When I was unemployed in 2006 and 2007, the task of managing my own time (and my depressing failure to do so) crushed me beyond any hope of productivity. That period has grown to monstrous proportions in my mind. (It's worth remembering that I had more than being unemployed to be upset about at that point of my life.) I need to remind myself occasionally that it was really only two periods adding up to less than five months.
I say this in part to explain that another element of my victory consists of how little Skyrim I've played since Christmas. I could very easily have completed the game by now and be feeling very bad about myself. But I have played enough that I feel like I can talk about it.
While researching for an article on Dwarf Fortress, actually, I stumbled on this neat blog post. It reminds me of some speculation I did back in college about story in video games but haven't done nearly enough of lately. The upshot of the post is this, and what I've played so far bears it out: Skyrim could do without a main plot, and overarching plots are becoming a vestigial feature--even a detriment--of open-world games. The future is one of player-defined objectives.
I am excited for the game that fulfills this prediction, though the cool future is always a few steps further away than it looks from here. The game worlds--at the very least the ones put together by Bethesda--are becoming rich enough for players to create their own goals. The system of receiving and completing quests feels imposed at this point. It constrains some goals by specifically defining them, and delegitimizes others by not mentioning them.
Take one quest early on. A village girl's two peevish boyfriends both ask me to deliver letters to her forged in their rival's name. This is a "quest," so it is in the official list of things I can do and remains there until I do it. I can help the first one by smearing the other, or I can help the second one by smearing the first, and those are my options. In my game, the quest remains uncompleted, and probably will remain so.
Now, if I had my own way perfectly, I would tell this girl that both of these guys are pricks. That's not an option, and I can even understand how you might not be able to walk up to a stranger and say that to them. But if that weren't an option, my next choice would be to destroy both letters and not get involved. To me, that would seem like a conclusive choice, but it wouldn't "complete" the "quest." Whatever narrative I construct for myself, there's a loss of satisfaction in seeing, in text, that the game doesn't acknowledge my decision.
So while I enjoy Skyrim, I'm constantly butting up against the boundaries of its narrative structure. I'm also finding myself comparing it--much to my surprise, unfavorably--to Fallout 3.
For many of these same reasons, I found Fallout 3 frustrating and never finished it. Comparing the two games, however, there are some places where Fallout 3 clearly wins out, and I hope maybe a lesson or two can be learned before we make the Truly Open-World Game of the Future.
First of all, there's the characters. Interesting characters are a pretty elementary thing in good storytelling. In the first three hours or so of Fallout 3 I remember meeting at least a half-dozen characters who I can still remember several years after playing. I liked Amata, I felt sorry for Butch, I worried about the Overseer, and I was sorry to leave all of them. I liked the hideous ghoul bartender Gob and the quixotic sheriff Lucas Simms. I felt bad about getting Lucas killed by Mr. Burke, who I found more than a little creepy. Conversely, in Skyrim, I'm sorry to say I don't really care about anyone I've met so far. I hope this changes.
The world of Skyrim is pretty and all, but I felt more comfortable in the depopulated Capitol Wasteland. It didn't seem so strange there that, given a little patience, I could meet every inhabitant of a large city. Skyrim has more people but it feels more like a world in miniature, with populations and distances more noticeably scaled-down. Similarly, I never thought twice about the ubiquity of bandits in what was essentially a Mad Max pastiche. In Skyrim, I have to wonder about how anyone can farm less than a five-minute walk from not one but two bandit fortresses.
All that said, I'm really looking forward to getting my allotted work done today so I can grab my ancient Nord war axe of frost and clear out another bandit stronghold. Maybe after that I'll even get back to the plot.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
New year, new rules
I mentioned, back in August (wow, that long), the idea of writing and following a sort of personal contract. Well, in the spirit of the new year, I have finally done so, and today is my second day of following its terms.
Drawing it up was a bit of fun. I got to use the part of my brain that likes to read and interpret RPG rules, and that kept me from being bored to death while I proofread municipal codes for a living. I tried to craft language that was airtight, only giving me wiggle room where I was confident it was necessary and wouldn't let me wriggle out of the commitment altogether.
If you're a certain kind of curious, you can see the text of what I signed
Now, I hope that I made that button right. It should show you the text of the contract and if it does then I get to pat myself on the back for finally figuring out a somewhat reasonable way to handle spoiler text on this blog. Which opens up so many doors.
Anyway, the upshot of the contract is that on weekdays while I'm unemployed, I have to spend at least two hours a day looking for a job (or publishing opportunity, although the latter is so much more fun that I may have to amend the section to keep myself on-task). I have to spend four hours writing. I have to spend an hour reading something that isn't a glowing screen. And, finally, no dicking around until I'm done.
That last part (Section I-A-3) is a hard one to adhere to, but I think it's important. Important enough, anyway, that I didn't amend it even if I wasn't able to follow it exactly to the letter yesterday. It kept me from getting irretrievably distracted, and everything got done. It looks like I'll be able to manage it today, too. I'm more productive lately than I have been in a long time (which was definitely not the case the last time I was unemployed).
You might notice that the contract doesn't cover any period when I'm fully or partially employed. I want to work out language to cover those possibilities, but I need to figure out something that will make sense in any situation. Trying to find the perfect language for that is part of what tripped me up back in August. Right now I decided it was more important to get something down that I would work right now.
It's exciting to have a large portion of the day structured and spoken for, even if it doesn't actually bring in any money. I hope I will be able to look back on this as a period of definite progress. I'll be sending out my first pitches to Paizo and Cracked this week, and I'm making actual progress on Nenle and Death.
It's a beautiful, freezing day in Hyattsville.
Drawing it up was a bit of fun. I got to use the part of my brain that likes to read and interpret RPG rules, and that kept me from being bored to death while I proofread municipal codes for a living. I tried to craft language that was airtight, only giving me wiggle room where I was confident it was necessary and wouldn't let me wriggle out of the commitment altogether.
If you're a certain kind of curious, you can see the text of what I signed
Now, I hope that I made that button right. It should show you the text of the contract and if it does then I get to pat myself on the back for finally figuring out a somewhat reasonable way to handle spoiler text on this blog. Which opens up so many doors.
Anyway, the upshot of the contract is that on weekdays while I'm unemployed, I have to spend at least two hours a day looking for a job (or publishing opportunity, although the latter is so much more fun that I may have to amend the section to keep myself on-task). I have to spend four hours writing. I have to spend an hour reading something that isn't a glowing screen. And, finally, no dicking around until I'm done.
That last part (Section I-A-3) is a hard one to adhere to, but I think it's important. Important enough, anyway, that I didn't amend it even if I wasn't able to follow it exactly to the letter yesterday. It kept me from getting irretrievably distracted, and everything got done. It looks like I'll be able to manage it today, too. I'm more productive lately than I have been in a long time (which was definitely not the case the last time I was unemployed).
You might notice that the contract doesn't cover any period when I'm fully or partially employed. I want to work out language to cover those possibilities, but I need to figure out something that will make sense in any situation. Trying to find the perfect language for that is part of what tripped me up back in August. Right now I decided it was more important to get something down that I would work right now.
It's exciting to have a large portion of the day structured and spoken for, even if it doesn't actually bring in any money. I hope I will be able to look back on this as a period of definite progress. I'll be sending out my first pitches to Paizo and Cracked this week, and I'm making actual progress on Nenle and Death.
It's a beautiful, freezing day in Hyattsville.
Monday, January 2, 2012
It's not who you don't know, it's what you don't know
In my last post I made some mention of the Ocean Marketing debacle that unfolded like live theater over the week after Christmas. If this is new to you, a quick search will set you straight. The Examiner had the most complete play-by-play I could find. (Scroll down 2/3 of the page to "Original Article" to start at the beginning.) You can also see how it all started on Penny Arcade.
The phrase "a tragedy without a hero" came to my mind in reference to the affair, so I Googled it to see where that phrase has come up before. Thanks to one Waldo F. McNeir, the first few hits are in reference to Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. A parallel or two come to mind. Entertaining as it was, the story of Ocean Marketing did have some resemblance to a group stabbing.
To recap: Paul Christoforo was in charge of distributing a product, and revealed himself over the course of an e-mail conversation with a customer to be a rude, petty, egomaniacal idiot. This was put out on the internet, at a moment when a large number of people had more free time than normal (and, I might hypothesize, some holiday frustrations to vent). The result was an information-age combination of the pillory and the Roman Colosseum. The internet ate Mr. Christoforo alive.
I come to bury Paul Christoforo, not to flame him. Did he deserve what happened? As it became clear that the man's name would be thoroughly demolished within a week, I found myself wondering that quite a lot. Clearly Mr. Christoforo has certain glaring personality flaws which make him unfit for any position which gives him even the illusion of power over other human beings. He had that position, though, and we can presume it was his livelihood. Is it possible to not deserve to lose something that you had no business having in the first place? What are the ethics of training the internet's Disproportionate Response Beam on someone? Is there a lesson to be learned here, and does anyone have the self-awareness to learn it?
What fascinated me about the story was the gradually developing portrait of Mr. Christoforo as a man with a seriously flawed worldview. He is apparently obsessed with contacts and status. When he wanted to make himself out to be a big man, he fabricated contacts for himself. When Mike Krahulik laid him low, he imagined that Krahulik had formidable contacts.
Christoforo's interview with MSNBC is particularly illuminating of this pathology. Here's what I consider the crown jewel of the interview: "Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened. I've dealt with thousands and thousands of customers with similar complaints, they were all asking the same question. When is it big enough that it hits the news? When it hits Penny Arcade, when it hits a guy who has the biggest affiliations in the industry." "You never know who knows who," he says later, "and lesson learned." See above re: self-awareness. Mike Krahulik's big affiliation is with the internet, not the Freemasons. "Customer Dave" didn't have any special strings to pull either. He just sent an email to somebody he had never met.
Personal contacts will always count for something, but easier, freer communication is eroding their power. The smoke-filled rooms where men of consequence used to chortle and plot look more and more like bunkers where they hide from the organic, chaotic powers at work in the larger world.
At least, I hope it's that way.
The phrase "a tragedy without a hero" came to my mind in reference to the affair, so I Googled it to see where that phrase has come up before. Thanks to one Waldo F. McNeir, the first few hits are in reference to Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. A parallel or two come to mind. Entertaining as it was, the story of Ocean Marketing did have some resemblance to a group stabbing.
To recap: Paul Christoforo was in charge of distributing a product, and revealed himself over the course of an e-mail conversation with a customer to be a rude, petty, egomaniacal idiot. This was put out on the internet, at a moment when a large number of people had more free time than normal (and, I might hypothesize, some holiday frustrations to vent). The result was an information-age combination of the pillory and the Roman Colosseum. The internet ate Mr. Christoforo alive.
I come to bury Paul Christoforo, not to flame him. Did he deserve what happened? As it became clear that the man's name would be thoroughly demolished within a week, I found myself wondering that quite a lot. Clearly Mr. Christoforo has certain glaring personality flaws which make him unfit for any position which gives him even the illusion of power over other human beings. He had that position, though, and we can presume it was his livelihood. Is it possible to not deserve to lose something that you had no business having in the first place? What are the ethics of training the internet's Disproportionate Response Beam on someone? Is there a lesson to be learned here, and does anyone have the self-awareness to learn it?
What fascinated me about the story was the gradually developing portrait of Mr. Christoforo as a man with a seriously flawed worldview. He is apparently obsessed with contacts and status. When he wanted to make himself out to be a big man, he fabricated contacts for himself. When Mike Krahulik laid him low, he imagined that Krahulik had formidable contacts.
Christoforo's interview with MSNBC is particularly illuminating of this pathology. Here's what I consider the crown jewel of the interview: "Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened. I've dealt with thousands and thousands of customers with similar complaints, they were all asking the same question. When is it big enough that it hits the news? When it hits Penny Arcade, when it hits a guy who has the biggest affiliations in the industry." "You never know who knows who," he says later, "and lesson learned." See above re: self-awareness. Mike Krahulik's big affiliation is with the internet, not the Freemasons. "Customer Dave" didn't have any special strings to pull either. He just sent an email to somebody he had never met.
Personal contacts will always count for something, but easier, freer communication is eroding their power. The smoke-filled rooms where men of consequence used to chortle and plot look more and more like bunkers where they hide from the organic, chaotic powers at work in the larger world.
At least, I hope it's that way.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Merry Belated Christmas
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.
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.
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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