2015, An Annotated Year in Scott: February

Let's get to it, then.



A few friends and I spent a few hours a week watching Three Kingdoms, a 95-episode Chinese historical drama that seeks to tell as much as it can of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era in Chinese history (roughly 184-250 CE).  Hundreds of characters come together and struggle for preeminence, heroes rise and fall, and great nations tremble before the unrelenting force of history.  I've heard this story referenced so many times, I knew one day I'd have to experience it for myself, and now I have.  I know stuff about Cao Cao, my friends, and if you are dedicated to being the best person you can be, someday you may know stuff about Cao Cao as well.



SuperMutant Magic Academy is a hard-to-find but phenomenal webcomic that has since been collected into a much-easier-to-read anthology.  Its creator, Jillian Tamaki, has done storyboard work for Adventure Time, among many other things.  This comic primarily concerns itself with the inescapable anguish of being alive and teen romance drama, but it has its fair share of utterly surreal, brilliant moments, and it's always hilarious.  It makes me smile and feel warm, even while it makes me sad.  Truly a great human work.  Think of all the things you're missing.



Conscious of the ways these media were isolating me from the mainstream, and frustrated by my inability to share them with others effectively, I wrote this poem to express my dissatisfaction with all the beauty I'd found but was barred from leading people to see.  I feel like I'm always awake, and it's lonely.



Somebody at work had a lot of extra jerky, and gave me a huge bag of it.  I walked around the building handing it out to random passersby, brightening up their days with my unexpected gift of jerky.  I was no Jerky Santa; I did not discriminate between naughty and nice.  I simply shared the joy of jerky with one and all, and all was well.  Food is a beauty most easily shared, but most transitorily enjoyed.  You get hungry again.



I expected many guests in my office, so I baked many cookies for them (many more than shown here, in fact).  It was a pleasure, once again, to share the gift of food, and I received many compliments for it.  But they left after taking a cookie, and it was just me and the computers again.  I ate two cookies.



If you're reading my blog, and you aren't reading David Foster Wallace, your priorities are all wrong.



I did not eat those chips.  I did well.  Sometimes, the darkness is your ally.



The Grand Budapest Hotel was the most marvelous movie I saw this year, more perfect even than Mad Max or Star Wars.  I saw it three times, and I cried, and cried, and cried all the more.  The beginning to the end was a perfect, crystalline moment of clarity in a muddled world, and I smiled and laughed.  One friend told me it made her feel very strong emotions, but she couldn't pin down exactly why.  There was nothing to pin down, though.  The film is a warm hand in yours, a soft kiss, a force of love.



My wife sends me flowers on Valentine's Day, not the other way around.  If you think that's a problem, you ought to reconsider your preconceptions.  If not, do it anyway.



This was me toying with those vague, dissatisfied posts some people love to plaster all over their social media feeds.  Something is wrong today, but they are not interested in talking about it -- they just want you to know how grumpy they feel.  But I was not feeling grumpy.  I was feeling conflicted, and I went about it as a reasonable person would, but framed in a distinctly negative way.  It was an experiment, and I didn't like the result, and I didn't do it again.



This was another experiment.  I love Metal Gear Solid, as is evident above.  I've tried to learn everything I can about the story and what it all means, even though it's totally insane and difficult to take seriously at the best of times.  But it's no less meaningful to me, for all that.  Knowing these games' popularity, I was reasonably certain I'd get a good number of interesting responses.  I was wrong, and I only received one or two questions that I even considered to be in the spirit of my prompt.  I misjudged my audience badly.



But I also got this Metal Gear quote wrong, so what do I know.

various creative media; this would be so much easier if I had the powers of a deity

One day in and going strong!  Now that I've shared with you some of my poetry, I want to use today to talk about some of the other creative projects I've been working on.

First, you may have heard me mention elsewhere that I wrote a book in November.  This was part of the National Novel Writing Month competition; this was the first year I decided to participate, and I won!  (Before you get too excited, hundreds of thousands of people participate, and "winning" just means you managed to write at least 50,000 words [about 200 pages in paperback] of a novel within the month of November.  There are a lot of winners.)  My novel is the story of a WWII tank crewman who, through some bizarre twist of fate, magic, or science, somehow finds that his mind has been transplanted into the very tank he once crewed.  It's the tale of his journey through occupied France in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion in the company of a sassy French psychic as they try to stay ahead of the Nazis and discover what has brought about his bizarre condition!

It's called Losing Track, and it's just the first part of a multi-book series.  I'm working on editing it right now; I think it's going to need a couple more drafts before it's anywhere near ready to be published.  Once we reach that point, I expect I'll self-publish using a site like CreateSpace.  Naturally, I'll post a link to where you'll be able to order it here!

NaNoWriMo, as it's called, is pretty grueling; I found myself with little time to do anything but write in that month.  When I started out, I assumed I would need to write through my lunches at work in order to have a chance at making the deadline.  I was very lucky that a few of my nearby friends were participating as well, so we had a few super-productive writing parties.  In the end, my lunches were unharmed.  The great news is that I loved it -- right after finishing I was feeling pretty burned out, and promised myself I wouldn't do it next year, but looking ahead I can't see how I could deny myself that pleasure.

You see, I decided that for my first NaNoWriMo, I wanted to go in whole hog -- an ENTIRE NOVEL in one month -- and didn't let myself do any outlining or other preparation in advance (which is pretty common for participants to do).  The most I would let myself do before it started was think about what premise I'd like to write about.  And while it turned out pretty well (I think), I know that I can write much more efficiently, and write a much better story, if I give myself the chance to think about what's going to happen next before I actually sit down to write it.

In fact, I had a book all outlined and ready to work on when November arrived, but my decision forced me to set that aside.  That book was titled Gravity Hack (if you google that name, you will find a youtube video of a dubstep song sharing its title that was uploaded in October, but I promise I thought of the name years before [also, I do not listen to dubstep]).  GH would have been an epic sci-fi story about humans exiled from earth, mind-machine interfaces, two kinds of psychic powers, an alien invasion, a superintelligent nanovirus that passes itself off as God, and love.  Which isn't to say that I'm not still going to write it; I'm just no longer sure that a book is the proper way to do it.

When I first conceived of GH, I realized that a lot of the scenes would be very, well, cinematic, but I don't have the budget to make it into a movie in a way that would suit my vision (I could write a movie script and try to sell it to Hollywood, but then I'd lose creative control over it.  I could also try to crowd-fund it, but that'd be an uphill battle given my complete lack of movie-making experience; plus, on the off chance it were successful, it'd mean I'd have to work on it full-time, and I don't want to quit my job.

There is a computer program, one I've toyed around with in the past, called RPG Maker; it's designed to let you quickly and easily put together a computer game in the style of games like Final Fantasy in the old days.  Here's a screenshot of one of the early scenes:

It's a pretty spiffy little program; all of the characters on the screen above were created using a character generator.  I was just gluing pieces together, but technically they're original creations.  And while this program is designed for making games, it's versatile enough that you can use it for whatever you want.  I don't think I really want to put a strong game element into this, as I feel like it would get in the way of the narrative and, more significantly, it might present a strong obstacle to people who don't play games from experiencing my work.  To that end, I might create two versions; one for gamers, and one for people who just want to experience the story at their own pace.  The great thing is that this tool is cheap and extremely easy to learn and use; within the first hour of using it, I was able to create a pretty atmospheric area with a lot of funny things to see and do.

The only problem I have is that, while the built-in graphics look really good, and you're entirely permitted to use them in commercial products you want to sell (although the graphics in the shot above are mainly from a futuristic graphics pack that costs a little extra), it seems a little tacky to make a commercial product using prepackaged graphics.  Therefore, my plan is that when I finish the main plot of the game/interactive movie and I feel it's close enough to production quality, I'll hire an artist to draw custom graphics through the entire game, giving it is own unique art style and hopefully setting me apart from the rabble.

The best part about all of this is that some of the same friends who were by my side through NaNoWriMo have been drawn into this little idea too, so we're competing against each other to see what kind of cool things we can create.  That kind of friendly rivalry, I think, is going to bring out the best in me, so I'm really excited to see where this is going to go!  I just found out about this:  World Game Development Month!  Who's in?!

Hmm, I just realized I'll probably have to hire somebody to make music for the game, too.  It's crazy that sometimes I find myself wishing I didn't have such a good job; it would make it a lot easier to pursue my dreams!  Well, maybe when I finish paying off $150,000 in student loans, it'll be time to focus on passions.  For now, I'm lucky to work at a job that I like, with people I like, and still have time to follow those dreams on the side.  Thanks for following along!