Normal Force Kills

So, I was in the market for some used video games and I cruised over to Half.com to check out some prices. Ever since eBay bought Half.com whenever you search for an item, a list of similar items on eBay are listed at the bottom of the page as well. And wouldn’t you know that the first couple of eBay items were cheaper than Half.com.  Sweet!

When I followed the link to eBay, I was suddenly reminded why I’ve always preferred Half.com. Because on eBay people can just make up ridiculous shipping costs.

eBay: “Hey, we’re selling this thing for like $5.”
Me: “Holy crap, I’ll take it!”
eBay: “Done.  That’ll be $20.00.”
Me: “Wh… what the hell are you talking about? You said 5 dollars”
eBay: “Well, it is but the shipping cost are $15.”
Me: “It’s a damn CD!”
eBay: “Yeah, but it’s hand wrapped with packing paper by um… babies, and we… uh, deliver it to the post office on… unicorns. And you know how expensive they can be to upkeep.”

At least with Half.com they tell you how much you charge for shipping and that’s that. There are no little $9.99 shipping and handling surprises on that really cheap item you saw on eBay. Not that all items on eBay have exorbitant shipping costs but enough so it pays to be careful.

Stupid unicorns…

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For the most part, I haven’t the faintest idea when I learned the words that I know.  But there are a couple that stick out in my mind: epitome, anathema and tomfoolery.

Epitome I learned second-hand in 9th or 10th grade. One day at the lunch table, they were all laughing over an oral presentation someone gave during class. The person kept saying epee-tome (not e-pee but epee as in a type of fencing sword) this and epee-tome until the teacher finally stopped them and asked what word they were trying to say.

Well, phonetically that might be the way to approach the word. But English is a little screw at times and the word is pronounced e-pit-o-me. Ever since then, I’ll usually mispronounce epitome whenever I use it, all in good fun. Continue Reading »

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Somewhere between the age of 7 and um… now I adopted a couple of ideas that would bring my writing to a stand still, guaranteeing that I’d never get farther than a few pages and that I would spend an inordinate amount of time writing and re-writing everything to get it just right.

One idea was that the opening paragraph had to be perfect. Which meant lots and lots of re-writing; you’ve got to start off a story right. Right? The other idea was, now that the opening paragraph was perfect, everything else that followed needed to meet that high standard.

As a kid all that mattered was writing. Even if the story wasn’t any good, I knew what I meant and that’s all that mattered. But somewhere in the process of growing up, I became almost obsessed with doing everything right from the start. Knowingly writing something that was worded poorly but got the point across was an anathema to me. Breaking myself of the habit was painful, with the words were sitting there, just a sentence away, calling to me.

Sentence: “Come fix us.”
Me, looking away: “I… I can’t.”
Sentence: “Please, these words… they hurt us.”
Me: “No, I’ve got to keep going.”
Sentence: “I thought you loved us.”
Me, runs to a corner and cries.

Now I just write while listening to music, it… it helps.

Anyways, I thought it would be fun to look at opening paragraphs from a few of my favorite books. Continue Reading »

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I am going through my yearly motivation spurt. The list of things to accomplish seems to keep growing and I haven’t finished my little AJAX project. Now that I got most of the complicated bits done, the rest is basically a repeat of what I’ve already done. It’s like Tomas said, when you get past the point where you know you can do something, the motivation to finish it drops off. I think the key here is to glue myself to my chair and complete the project.

After that, the next project in queue is to play around with OCR. The idea came about because we have so many books in the house and Kat and I seem to have misplaced one of our favorite books, Howl’s Moving Castle. And I would love to get Castle in the Air in electronic form. My first thought would be to type out the pages of the book but at a 298 pages my fingers were looking rebellious. Plus, I have a thing against doing that much brute force work. A nice little script to take all the images and pull out the text seems so much cooler. My fingers agreed.

Continue Reading »

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‘Tis the season to get sick.  My voice is gone from either all this coughing or I’ve just entered second puberty and I don’t want to know what changes that will entail.

When I’m not hacking up a lung, I’ve been doing a little Javascript/PHP programming for a project of mine. I even picked up some jQuery to make things easier.  (My brain feels full from just learning about all the things that can be done in jQuery or is that my brain swelling from being sick…)  I’ve sitting on about 1000 lines of code stuffed in an HTML and a PHP file and growing.

Once I get better, I’ll look through what I wrote and try to figure out what to do with it. Right now the options on the table are: 1) print it out double-spaced and with a very large font, roll it up and beat someone with it or 2) pretend it’s a recipe for really yummy muffins that can never be mades.

Mmmm… delicatable imaginary muffins.

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Did you know people’s thoughts taste like honey?

I thought thoughts tasted like pudding.  Hmmm…

What do they taste like for you?

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There’s something insane about the XBox 360’s marketplace.  For those of you unfamiliar with it, when you boot up the XBox, you get the option of playing your game or poking around XBox. The marketplace is one of the options you can select and it is the XBox 360’s version of iTunes, a digital store for downloading content.

Now since I don’t like wasting my money by buying things that are basically restricted to my XBox 360, most of the marketplace appeal is lost to me.  The only thing that I find remotely interesting is the music video downloads.

Even so, the selection is very limited when you consider they could be offering thousands of music videos.  But alas, the last I was on there were about 60 videos.  Some of which were the Making of the Video in addition to the actual video.

To watch the video you have to download it to the XBox.  No streaming here.  Ok, maybe I’ve been spoiled by YouTube but it is a nice feature. Regardless, with a fast connection the download doesn’t take that long, less than a minute.

The part that baffles my brain is some of the videos cost money to download. Ok, they cost Microsoft points but how to do you get Microsoft points?  Real money! It’s like playing those games that give out tickets which you turn in for prizes.  A rubber snake is 20 tickets.  The stereo is only 10,000 tickets.  o.O

Freak on a Leash by Korn cost 160 points. Or $2 US dollars.  And what do I get for my $2?  I’m not sure really as I’m not about to waste it on that.  The ability to watch the video on my XBox 360 whenever I want, I suppose.  Of course, I can go to YouTube and watch it for free:

[youtube width=”425″ height=”355″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU2zfDFjffo&fmt=18[/youtube]

Wow!  Look, I just saved 2 bucks.  But what if I did buy it on the XBox 360?

Me: “Yo dude, you’ve got to check out this video I just bought!  It’s tight!”
Friend: “Um… ok. Where is it?”
Me: “It’s totally on my XBox 360!”
Friend: “Where’s your XBox?”
Me: “It’s um… at home.”
Friend: “So how are we supposed to watch it?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
Friend: “Why are we friends again?”

Yea, I’m sorry.  I just don’t get it. Why am I supposed to buy videos when I can watch them for free? Not only watch them for free but watch them from nearly any internet enabled PC?  Hell, I can watch the video on my Wii for free.  The idea should be to promote the music not nickle and dime me so I can “own” the video on both my XBox 360 and iTunes!  At least iTunes charges real money, $1.99. for the video, even if I think the idea is rather silly.

Speaking of promoting, Kat watched a little TV the other night *shock* *gasp* and was telling me about this one continuous commercial that playing on MTV over the course of a few hours.

[youtube width=”425″ height=”355″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5holA_S-iIo[/youtube]

I don’t know who One Republic is but I love the concept. One long story split across a series of short, silly commercials.  I remember Bud Light did something like this with their frogs a while back and it was hilarious. And even though I missed the One Republic commercials when they aired, I’ve watched them on YouTube a couple of times already. (That’s why it has 650 views instead of 648. =P)

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The original plan was to write once a day. Length wasn’t as important as getting into the habit of writing daily. And on those days when nothing interesting came to mind — because who really wants to hear about how I washed the hell out of those dirty, dirty dishes — then I’d come up with something short and silly. Like the horoscopes that I used to write for the newspaper.

For example: Good fortune will come to you when you stumble upon a Genie. Unfortunately, in order to get your wishes, he’ll want you to rub something other than his lamp.

Sometimes I wish I had a copy of them. I wrote horoscopes for a year or two and every now and then it would be nice to go back and look through them. Which ones are still funny, which ones did I only think were funny?

When I started going to college, there was someone at school newspaper who wrote these crazy and zany horoscopes. It was the first thing I would read every Friday when the paper came out.

However, after my freshman year the horoscopes were no more, much to my disappointment. But life goes on and my sophomore year kept me very busy. Skip ahead a few years when I shyly went up to the newspaper because I was interested in writing a comic. A comic that I never go around to writing that in retrospect would not have been all that funny.

But the people at the newspaper were nice and who could resist free pizza? So I started to come around more and we all became friends. Then, out of the blue, someone came into the newspaper expressing an interest in writing horoscopes. To my dismay, these weren’t the horoscopes of old but “real” horoscopes. You know the ones, vague and general. The ones that are meant to be read seriously. What’s funny about that?!

It was blasphemy to my memory of what horoscopes should be. Thus I started to write my own. I carried around a notebook, long since retired, for random thoughts. I took it everywhere and whenever something funny popped into my head, into the notebook it went.

And that’s how the horoscopes were born. Once a week, I would flip through the book for inspiration and write them out. Leo and Cancer were constantly feuding, nut throwing squirrels were the big evil and Capricorns were always in trouble. ^_^ It should be no other way.

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Last week I began reminiscing about Choose Your Own Adventure stories. It started with a random thought, a throw-away line in my first new post in basically 61 weeks. I even dug out the two CYOAs that were collecting dust on the bookshelf to flip through and get inspired for writing a short silly one of my own. But something wasn’t right, these books were so very thin. Not anything like what I remembered.

There was a particular style of CYOA that I recall getting at the library: a white cover with some ominous looking baddie on the front. And they were thick. Not this 30, 40 page ones that I have. Enough space to contain quite a few different stories. But what were they called? For the life of me, I just couldn’t remember.

Then, to my surprise, a few days ago on Boing Boing I saw this:

Someone not only mapped all the paths in a CYOA but they did it on the exact style of books I used to get from the library when I was younger. Thank you, Sean Michael Ragan. ^_^

What I like about this is it helps me to visualize the paths for my CYOA. Not only that, these last few days I was working out the HTML structure for the story. (Ok, I worked on it Saturday, thought about it once today but my parents came to visit so I didn’t have much time for anything.) Kat made a few suggestions that make good sense but complicate matters a bit. All the more reason to plan things out from the get-go.

Anyway, blah blah blah. I like the graph, it makes me happy. I’m going to print it out, life-size, and sleep with it every night. Kat won’t be happy but she isn’t a wonderful life-size graph, now is she? It’s true, I checked. I couldn’t find a graph anywhere on her. How boring.

But I did find this, it’s a cover from one of those white bordered books that I remember reading.

I can’t recall if I ever read this particular mystery. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of these types of books. This publishing company was pumping out these books like some companies do for Harlequin novels. Girls read romance, boys read CYOAs. Or this boy did.

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What an odd couple of days it has been for vibrant dreams. If I could shut out the light and sleep in, I wonder how long I would dream. Would I be able to finish an adventure? Maybe if I finish one, I’d remember it better.

Last night I was a time traveler, running through various time lines for some reason I can’t understand. Searching for something. I remember walking with someone, reminiscing over old apartments. Mind you, I’ve never lived in any of these apartments, they were solely created for the dream. But they had a history. I had lived here. My dream self was sure of it.

One apartment was a small little place, tiny yet cozy. It’s a place I would have rented during college. It was a sunken first floor apartment, meaning it wasn’t quite a basement being completely below the ground level, but it wasn’t at ground level either. It was stuck in some weird state between the two.

I entered the apartment with my friend, despite not having a key, apparently things like locks aren’t a concern for a time traveler. We felt a little weird about just barging into without the occupant being there so lingered only briefly before leaving. But I remember parts of the apartment. The bathroom had a big frosted window so no one could see in. The kitchen was small and functional, and that’s all I can remember about it. I think the walls were yellow.

There was another apartment, but I don’t remember that very much. It was bigger, much bigger. And there was something important about it…

But it was getting late and I had to leave this timeline. I needed to be at a certain place at a certain time to jump to the next place. I woke up before I got there. I wish I knew where I was going and the reason for traveling.

Dreams are such frustrating things. They are detailed enough to make the whole thing seem real enough, but they don’t last nearly long enough. Then once you wake, the adventure fades away. And it’s almost always an adventure for me.

This is why I am late for work some days. I awake to a half finished dream, throw the covers over my head and drift back to sleep to pick up where I left off. Nothing else matters at the time. As long as I don’t open my eyes and just focus on the dream and the last images I can remember, I can get back into the story. Things change sometimes, and they go in a different direction bu who am I to complain.
Yesterday’s dream has mostly faded, but I remember one thing for sure. People traveling on giant parasols. I didn’t see a foot rest on them, somehow they supported all their weight with one arm. They just held onto the parsol and sailed through the sky. Hundreds of them floating idly by. Leaning one way or another would change the direction easily enough.

Some guy in a crazy yellow full body swimsuit with a single black stripe running down the middle had built a wind surfer and he took me on that, riding the wind like a surfer would ride a wave. It was exhilarating. But my dream wasn’t about these sky people, but something darker going on deep under the ground. Another crazy adventure.

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