Current Ramblings
Sunday, November 30, 2003
I would like some Energon now, prease.
Thanksgiving was fun enough. I watched football, which I almost never do, and the Detroit Lions won, which they almost never do. I like visiting Graham's family, though I always end up skulking around a bit because I can't keep everyone from the extended family straight and don't want to embarass myself. The cookies came out really well, nice and soft and chewy. Friday morning was a normal insane shopping day, what with having to be at Wal-Mart around 6-ish to pick up a Landfill set for Graham. It snowed heavily on the drive home, but we made it through okay. I got new glasses on Saturday morning just before heading with Graham and Steve to Mid-Ohio-Con. (Maybe if I get a chance I'll have Walky or Ron take a picture so everybody can see my new glasses.) There was some shopping, some poking around the exhibitor booth, and some giggling and whispering "Oh my god it's Walter Koenig!" I stood over his shoulder while Steve got Brian Michael Bendis to sign something and talked to him for a bit, and Bendis seems like a really cool guy. He seems to still be at this point where, no matter how much Wizard and the rest of the comic press might talk about how he's the best thing since sliced bread, he's still really happy that people are actually reading and liking his stuff. We went to a panel later where Bendis, Roger Stern, Mark Waid, and Paul Jenkins talked about the business and art of writing comics. I'm really glad I went to that panel. It reminded me that I don't need to have some amazingly fresh Vertigo-eqsue universe concocted if I want to get into comics. I would love to write comics. I've always been good with dialogue, maybe not Bendis-good, but it's always come very naturally. That and plotting I'm fine with, it's the prose in between that bogs me down. So it was pretty fun, though I kinda wish we had been able to go earlier. And that I had picked up that old Captain Britain from work with the story about how Psylocke was too lame to be Captain Britain for Alan Davis to sign.
This is the worst thing to ever exist. And don't click on it at the office.
posted@11:17 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends! And a happy Thursday to everyone else! :D
I'll be traveling to Detroit to visit Graham's family on Thanksgiving, then coming back to Columbus on Friday. I just finished baking some cookies, because I'm old enough that I feel like I should be contributing to the food. They seem to have come out pretty well. I'm hoping the sighting of Energon toys in the US will spread like wildfire by what my manager calls the Shopocalypse and we'll all have them Friday or soon after. Happy holidays, I'll be back soon!
posted@11:34 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, November 24, 2003
So the jury in the case has recommended the death penalty in the John Allen Mohammed trial. For those who haven't been keeping up, he's the older of the two responsible for and the now-conviced mastermind of the DC sniper attacks from just over a year ago. I'm personally glad to hear it. I'm not a big cheering fan of the death penalty by any means, but I think one of the truly, purely appropriate uses of it is for people like him who have decided that humanity is their prey. I'd lump any other serial killers in with that, too. I admit I'm probably a little biased in this specific case, since I had family and friends in DC when it was going on. Some of the places he struck were places they shopped or bought gas. He didn't disregard human life, he disregarded humanity as a whole. He would have taken me down, he would have taken you down, he just didn't care. So I say fuck 'im. Civilization can't function with people like him.
posted@1:22 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Last night I watched "Airport 1975" on AMC. I don't know why it was on AMC, except that they seem to have an extremely broad definition of "Classics". It was a silly, contrived, misogynist movie, and I only started watching it because it has a lot of shots of Dulles at the opening, and I really like Dulles. Sadly, only the first five minutes or so take place there, and the rest of the movie doesn't have that "Dude, they still HAVE those chairs!" charm. It does, however, have pilot/stewardess banter that would get people immediately fired today, the most pathetic heroine I've seen in my life (Wah, I don't WANNA fly the plane anymore, wah, it's too scary!), Charlton Heston playing Charlton Heston, and Eric Estrada playing Eric Estrada. Not to "spoil" the movie for anybody, but I was bummed they killed off Eric Estrada. "Airplane!" really did not have to work hard to spoof this shit. There was even a little kid who needed to get hooked back up to her dialysis machine. And some nuns. And one of the nuns sang.
posted@1:54 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
I'm don't know how many people out there outside of Columbus and Ann Arbor are watching the OSU/Michigan game, but OSU is doing so badly that I expect them to come back from halftime with super powers.
posted@1:23 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
This isn't going to make a lot of sense. Whether it makes more or less sense because I am also violently multitasking remains to be seen.
I think I may have gotten to the bottom of my creative problems. I hope I have, because I need to create. I've gotten too sidetracked and I've been ignoring my muse. I don't know how I reached this point. I could get all introspective and try to blame it on all kinds of things. Goodness knows I could come up with enough possibilities: I've grown complacent with my lot in life, I've been through too many upheavals (I've learned that major sudden life changes, like moving, can disjoint stuff like that, like when I fell out of TFs in the first place), or maybe it was simply the upheavals that I've had to consider in my own creative work while I set things on the backburner and hold my breath, or the feeling that I can't go forward until I know how things are going to happen when they could take years to resolve. I could even blame other distracting muses, to whatever extent you can blame things who are not real. Maybe I was "growing up." Maybe it was a lot of different things all chipping away it. I hope I can hold on to this for more than a day or two. I hope that voice that was always the clearest in my head (yes, yes, head voices, but I mean the kind that are self-initiated by imagination, not the ones that come out of nowhere because you're psycho) is back to stay, because I need it. I'm not saying, "Oooo, I'm gonna write a big long story tonight!" I think I need to go back and immerse myself a little bit in my old stuff so I can remember what I was doing, to pick up where I left off in a manner of speaking. I need to try to anchor this while I have it. Maybe I'll go try to glue that figurine back together...
posted@10:32 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, November 17, 2003
How did anybody ever know anything about themselves before the advent of the online quiz? :P
Nerdslut
What's your sexual appeal?
brought to you by Quizilla
posted@10:34 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Pine cat litter is the best stuff ever. I only bought it because PetSmart was out of the stuff I normally get, and I needed something cheap that could be washed out in the bathtub. But it's really good. It absorbs extremely well, and I like getting a clean pellet of it and letting it soak up a drop of water so I can watch it puff up. It absorbs so well I wasn't even overwhelmed by noxious fumes from the stuff that had drained to the bottom. There was no stuff that had drained to the bottom, it's that good. And the dry pellets are big enough that I can vacuum them up easily when she inevitably kicks half of them out of the box. I highly recommend this stuff to anybody who's got a cat. And that's my Random Product Endorsement of the Day.
posted@6:20 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Check out Jackpot's TF art site. He's got some unused Dreamwave "More Than Meets The Eye" art that makes you wonder what was wrong with them.
According to the "Gender Genie", I write like a man. So take that, Graham. I do not write like a girl. The opening scene to "The Last Mini-Con" got me:
Female Score: 346
Male Score: 615
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Okay, so it doesn't take into account whether you are, in fact, writing a story about giant warring robots that revolves around how they feel about things. And plugging old blog entries in it comes up with slightly-female results at Female Score: 2526/Male Score: 2080. But as far as fanfic goes, it's still proof.
I'm trying to stay up very late tonight because I'm on the "overnight shift" Sunday. We only do these 7PM-3AM shifts for special events, this time Christmas decorating. It seems to involve a free dinner at Steak-and-Shake, and I'm all for that.
Oh, that's right, I was gonna do a weekly feature, and I guess Saturday night/Sunday morning is as good a time for that as any. The inaugural Cool Used Book Shop Find of the Week: A set of the three Gundam novels from 1990. The Discworld PS1 game gave them a run for their money, but it's hard to beat Amuro having sex with Seyla for no apparent reason.
posted@3:26 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, November 13, 2003
If anybody has too much money to spend this Christmas and wants to get me a nice Christmas present, one of these Mulberry leather GBASP cases from Europe would do very nicely.
I do realize that my last post (that wasn't a web quiz) was highly ironic. But I have been trying to spend more time offline. I'm currently up to three books I'm in the middle of reading: A book about weblogs, the new Al Franken book, and a British cyberpunk novel. I don't usually read this much non-fiction, actually, but accumulating books is just what happens when you work at a bookstore - especially one where everything's dirt cheap. And I find myself facinated by the idea of books about internet culture. Maybe I'm just not accustomed to the existance of books about a culture I myself am so totally immersed in. I suppose that's just another part of that growing-up business, that people my own age and with my own interests and habits actually write books and get them published. And I couldn't pass up Franken's new one, since the conservative media it debates is part of my work life - that and, much like him, I wonder what is wrong with Ann Coulter. And it was $10. And I was needing some new sci-fi. I will finish one of these before next week, I swear it. And if I finish Franken's book fast enough, I can sell it back to my store for $5.
I think, at the end of the week, I will introduce a new feature to my blog: Used Book Shop Find of the Week. I already have some good candidates lined up.
posted@8:59 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Like, you're Shadowcat!
Which X-Men: Evolution character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
posted@12:02 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, November 09, 2003
We had to figure out how to relight the pilot light on our heater tonight. Fall's definitely here.
I finally found Nemesis Prime tonight. AT KROGER. I know it's pretty much standard issue to gripe about how your area's distribution is worse than everybody else's, but holy fuck, the GROCERY STORE got him in before any real stores!? What's up with that? I want Energon to just come out already.
I think I should try to spend less time on the computer. Not that you, my dear (I initially typed "dead" for some reason) internet buddies, are not worth my time. I just find myself putting things off, ignoring things that need to be done, and just generally behaving as a person with that thing they like to call "internet addiction". I sorta wonder about this "internet addiction" idea applied to myself. I inititally want to see it as a symptom of cyberpunk-inclination, the sort of thing you do because they won't yet let you put actual plugs and wires in your brain. I think it was for much the same reason that I got a cell phone: not because I expected people to call me all the time, but simply so I could be connected. If something happened, I would know. (Note: If any of you are on Virgin Mobile or just have text messaging, you let me know.) But I'm sure there are many, many people out there with the same problem who have never read a William Gibson novel, and possibly have not even heard of him. I wonder if there are different kinds of internet addiction, or if they're all just different shades of an information addiction. But I think this might hold the key to my writer's block and general feelings of boredom lately. I need to get off the internet and do other things. I need to spend time reading books and playing video games. I walk almost daily to keep my body from getting fat because I spend so much of the rest of my day sitting around, but maybe sitting in front of the computer doing the same things all the time is making my brain "fat". I need to get offline more often. But not tonight. Tonight's LONAC night.
posted@12:42 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Boy, Columbus' mayoral election today sure was exciting. I still went and voted, though. I love Columbus, so I did some research on the little local races and went and did me some voting. I also voted for Mike Coleman, though. He's unopposed 'cause he rocks.
In other news, Transformers.com has actually managed to beat the info-leakers with a couple of previously-unseen Energon Wave 2 toys. I'm really looking forward to this line. Something about the colors in general really, really appeals to me. Maybe it's all the blues and whites. I'm dying to see Arcee, though.
posted@11:53 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, November 03, 2003
Is anybody familiar with a techno song from the early 90s that incorporated sound bites from "The Running Man"? WHFS back in DC used to play it all the time in their late-night techno show, and I'd love to find it, but I don't even know what it's called.
My angst at not being able to afford much in the way of new GBA games right now has compelled me to dig out the oldskool Final Fantasy Tactics. I actually only bought a PS1 last fall, once they were marked down to $50, and I only have a handful of games for it. I originally gave up FFT because I got stuck on the Dorter Trade City battle real early in the game, and I'm awful about forgetting a game as soon as I'm stuck. But I started over and levelled up well before it this time. So if I'm not around much and not updating a lot, well, that's why. It's addictive, and unlike my GBA games, I can't get my day's fix on my lunch break. Not that that stopped me from playing Pokemon Sapphire for hours at home. I neeeeeed FFT Advance. And Pokemon Pinball. And Megaman Battle Network Blue. And...
Okay, that could go on for days. I really need to get inspired to write again. I don't know what's wrong with me. Sometimes I think I'm just getting old, which is sad. I'd like to do something for the fan club mag, but I can't get my head together enough to come up with a solid story idea. I blame Armada. It's got so many interesting concepts that I want to use, but it's not cohesive enough in and of itself to give me inspiration for actual stories - except for just writing my own take on the whole series. But all those concepts have pushed a lot of other stuff out of my head. I could do a G1 story, but what? I was feeling kind of inspired to go back to Firestormers and do some prequel stories with Trixter and Upstart right around the time the Earth Autobots get back in contact with the Cybertron-based ones, something in the background of the comic and maybe even a Matrix Quest story, but I don't want something about fanchars for the club mag. I haven't even been able to do much on Armada Legend for Sipher because I've had too much else distracting me. I get brief flashes where I feel really creative and inspired, but nothing comes of it anymore. Maybe it's my living situation; I simply cannot write with someone else in the room. Maybe I am getting old. Maybe I'm simply far too happy with my lot in life these days and I don't need the escapism that fed the fantasies that led to my fanfics. But I really need to write something other than this blog. Especially because I'd really like to do something for the fan mag.
I guess I'll go play Final Fantasy Tactics some more...
posted@9:51 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments