Publication notice – Price Reduction

In the next few days, I plan to slash the price of First Contact Is Bad For You. It’ll be the same book, but you can get it at half the price! Isn’t that great?

This is not just a sale (like Barnes and Noble have occasionally done by putting the price down to $7.99), but a permanent reduction. Within a week or so, the price of the book should be only $4.99, making the purchase less of a gamble if you haven’t been convinced by this blog’s writing prowess.

Anyways, you may be interested to know of some related projects.

1. I am working on the sequel. It’s going fairly slowly, to be honest – I started work in earnest in November, and most of my time since then has been taking up with all sorts of college related tasks. Suffice it to say: “Drug diplomacy” – a good deal of the book takes place on Earth.

2. More immediately, I’m working on a video game that acts as a sidestory to the game. It’s going to be an old style point and click adventure game programmed in Stencyl, although the graphics are probably going to end up looking more like a JRPG on the SNES – Think Final Fantasy VI or such. It’s intended to have a more farcial tone than the rest of the series.

The latter I hope to get out before I return to college for my senior year.

Webcomic teaser – “The Saga of Otto”

Remember back at the end of December, 2011 when I said I was working on a webcomic? I still am. In the interrim, I’ve found an artist (whose name will be revealed once I upload everything), fleshed out a good deal of world-building information, plotted a few chapters, created a detailed script of one, began the script of another, etc. As usual, being a college student may slow down progress, but it’s still something you should look forward to.

Anyways, as part of the overall publicity machining, I’ve written a short story (although not ‘Ghetto Fantasy‘ short) that could give you some insight into the nature and tone of what I intend to do. Hope you enjoy it.

Tyrants were supposedly something you had to accept.

A man in a shack that he would describe as ‘rustic’, and that others would describe as ‘crappy’ was writing an essay on the virtues of primogeniture, and the failings of military dictatorships. It wasn’t going well, especially since he was a stickler for calligraphy; every letter had to be exactly formed, and the cold that seeped in was making it ever more difficult to get them right.

At this point, the man’s eyes shifted towards the paragraph that formed the cornerstone of his argument:

“While we know very little of the gods, we do in fact know that they were ordained by almighty Ancien, who knows all and is all, and that since his judgement is right, the gods’ positions are absolutely and utterly correct. We also know that they often ordain a king or queen to suit their interests. Since their positions are always correct, those who they ordain must also be entirely correct. However, a tyrant who takes control of a country by force, whether it be the duchy of Ostrolansk, or my own beloved Vaeringjar; may its glory last for all eternity, has the support of no gods, and therefore is simply a HERETIC.”

By my standards, this was a pretty crappy piece of political philosophy to come from anyone, anywhere. But I’ll admit the man was trying.

At this point, the man’s son came into the shack, allowing a burst of winter air to agonize his father further and slow the writing process.

“You’re working on that essay again?” asked the son.

“I always am, Otto,” the father responded. “I need the process of writing so that I can marshal my thoughts, and form something coherent with which I may form the seed of good will.”

“You do realize that if you publish that essay, you’ll be killed, right?”

“My life is nearly over as it is. If ideology necessitates sacrifice, then I shall certainly sacrifice my last few years so that others may live better.”

“… I see.” Otto looked vaguely uncomfortable at the thought of his father’s mortality. He had nothing to say, and he shuffled out of the cabin. Because it was winter, there was no real work that he could do, and so he headed to a friend’s home with intent to load up on cheap beer. In this, he succeeded. Now, it may have been due to the intoxication, or very possibly fungus growing on the grains used to brew the beer, but Otto soon had a vision of the entire Lower Pantheon standing in front of him. Most people were expected to see one or two in their lifetime, but when they all appeared, you had either done something horribly wrong, or you were about to be assigned an impossible task.

Bad Ideas #13: Literacy Related Edition

“omg bookz r dyin it took u 13 instalments to get to da bookz”

Doomsayers, silence yourselves, for 10 books that should not be written are upon thee.

121. Bromance of the Three Kingdoms
“That’s in the book already!” warned a friend of mine, claiming that it was between Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.

122. Great Expectations With A Vengeance
Enough is seldom adequate. Plenty never is.

123. Oliver Twist Gone Wild V
Thrilling depictions of Twist asking for more from everyone you wanted, from prostitutes to those fat cats in D.C!

124. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”: The Novel
… What? Sometimes I need to breathe.

125. And Then There Were ZUN
Originally called ‘Ten Little Lolicons” in the Japanese market.

126. Buy This Book
GenXers with bitter memories of OK Cola flock to this like… scene kiddies to Warped? Is there any music festival these days with the impact of Woodstock, or even Lollapalooza?

127. Henry Huggins in: “Subprime Mortgage Trouble”
Not for him, of course, but when your neighbors get kicked out of their homes, the property values do go down…

128. The Vegetables of Evil: The Baudelaire Cookbook
Now spleen and ideal don’t need to be just spleen and ideal! For instance, see page 38 for a delicious carrion offal recipe.

129. The Da Vinci Code II: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Jesus had pizza at the last supper, and Shredder is the heir to the Merovingian throne…

130. The Fellowship of the Discography of Ildjarn
Because apparently the ability to appreciate music with abrasive aesthetics leads to domination by Sauron.

10 installments ago, I said that these were going to keep coming. They do, but at a relatively restrained pace compared to what it used to be. Also, today is my 20th birthday. I’m slightly older now!

The Return of The Primary Writing Class – Final Paper

Several months ago, I showed you guys the short essay I wrote on blogging for my primary writing requirement class way back in my freshman year. Given some time, I’ve decided that my final paper, in which I discussed the value of video games in an educational context (mainly using the MMO Atlantica Online as a source of examples). It was written under time pressure, but it seems relatively coherent in retrospect, although the seams of heavy revision show (in the few days before I published it, I rewrote several pages of it). Anyways, you might find it interesting, so check it out (and the sources I cite, if you have access to them) if you’re into video games and justifying things.

 

“Why Video Games Have Use In A School Context”

 

As for Atlantica Online? It was fun in late 2009/early 2010, but I lost interest around level 95 (out of 130) or so, which incidentally is when the game starts getting much grindier than before. Nothing against the developers, although I’m not really seeing myself being able to get back into it.

5,000 Views – Is This Worth Mentioning?

Frankly, I don’t know, but it seems to be more than a lot of blogs get. On the other hand, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of websites that record 5,000 hits a day or more. But the point is that, according to WordPress’s stats, the blog hit 5,000 views today.

Speaking of stats, here are some more:

• The busiest day was March 10th, 2011, when WordPress recorded 80 views. This month, the most views I’ve received on any given day were 35 on January 7th.
• March 2011 was also the month with the most views – 478.
• 2011, although light on traffic so far, has still been more active than 2010. The highest view count in 2010? 209 for December 2010; only in one month of 2011 did I receive less traffic (June 2011).
• Out of all the articles, the one with the most comments is this one, where I claimed that the brief use of a King Crimson sample in the single track “Power” by Kanye West would not contribute to the awareness of the former. This was before I decided it was best to ignore mainstream pop. As of this writing, it only has 4 comments. It’s followed by a writeup on Morbid Angel’s 5th album, “Formulas Fatal to the Flesh”.
• Akismet (the blog’s spam protector) has detected a whopping 3,510 spam comments. They have been blocked, and for good reason. The greatest number of them came in August, 2011; in that month I received 626 spam comments.

If it seems like pointless masturbation over numbers, that’s because it probably is. At this point, I have a large amount of content, but it’s mostly aimed at niche audiences like League of Legends players and metalheads. What you guys can do for me is tell your friends and family about this blog, get them to read it. It probably won’t benefit you in any way, but did you think about that when you forwarded that video of the sneezing panda to your entire workforce?

I thought so.

My spring semester classes begin tomorrow. They ought to be fun, or at least useful.

P.S: I’m not blacking out the site for the SOPA/PIPA protests on 1/18. While I support the complete and utter destruction of everything these bills stand for (and the removal of its supporters from their positions of power), I just don’t have the site traffic for it to matter.

Halloween gibberish

Today is a day that has great significance in the Western world. It grew out of all sorts of mystical traditions, has a lot of folklore attached to it, and brings fleeting joy to people worldwide. I’m talking, of course, about Candy Cosplay Day. On October 31st, especially in the evenings, people worldwide use the day as an excuse to dress up as various fictional/nonfictional characters, and many of them also take the time to devour large quantities of candy. Some of them go to parties and inevitably try to get shitfaced. True story. I could go on for quite a while about the commercialization of traditional holidays, but you know that’s happening, and I probably wouldn’t add anything new to the subject.

So, in an attempt to do something loosely themed around the season, I watched a horror movie, specifically Hellraiser (1987). It didn’t really horrify me, since I’ve been desensitized to violence and gore by video games, but I did find the movie entertaining for all the imagery and ideas it pushed around. Those only familiar with Pinhead and the iconic Cenobites might find their relative lack of screen time disappointing, but apparently they weren’t emphasized until the later sequels. Probably worth noting is that the movie doesn’t really deal in suspense and the uncanny as much as your ‘traditional’ horror films (to the best of my knowledge), but it DOES have the heavily moralistic overtones you’d expect from a slasher, especially one with what are essentially BDSM freaks from another dimension. In overly simple terms, said moral is “Don’t be like Frank Cotton” – the mainest of the main characters, and one consumed by his obsession with earthly pleasures. The average reader is probably thinking “I’m not like Frank!”, and hopefully, that’s true. Still worth thinking about.

With all that moralizing out of the way, it’s probably worth noting how many sequels the film has, as well as their general disrepute with the public. Horror films always seem to get assloads of sequels for whatever reason, while your average franchise doesn’t last as long. In addition, many original horror scripts have famous brands attached to them, apparently to boost sales. I don’t understand it, but whtaever. Hellraiser’s sequels have taken it all over the place, but one idea that I find interesting (and unimplemented as of yet) is humanity becoming massively aware of the Cenobites and declaring war on them. Keep in mind I’ve only seen the first film, and that later entries in the series apparently make the Cenobites immune to most human weaponry, so either the humans would have to get very creative, or retcons would be in order. Anyways, I find the idea of humans attacking what is basically their id amusing, but then again, I’ve read The Salvation War, so I probably have a thing for people getting uppity and attacking supernatural beings.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy(ed) your Halloween. “Merchandise Driven” is also up on Fanfiction.net now, so there’s more food for thought (or at least a quick laugh).

Celebrity paradoxes in my fiction

For reference.

If you’ve been reading some of the stories I put up on here and Fanfiction.net, you might notice that I find this idea rather interesting. Obviously, the basic case (Series X the fiction does not exist within the universe of Series X) is rather simple and often not worthy of discussion. But what happens you subvert this? If you’re like me, all sorts of absurdity. So far, this has only manifest in my fanfictions, but who knows where they’ll pop up next?

Anyways, for reference:

• “Tweaking” is basically what happens when I try to play Oblivion with an integrated graphics card. In real life, it went surprisingly well after I ran a program called “PyFFI” to optimize the ‘meshes’ of the game’s geometry (removing the absurd amount of invisible polygons in the files) and downloaded some mods. On the other hand, if you woke up one day, perceiving the world at a low framerate, and found yourself unable to move quickly, with broken reflexes, would you do nearly as much as the main protagonist of the story would? In the end, the character’s ‘owner’ buys a new computer, and modifies the personality of the narrator for the worse. In the present, I worry that this story reeks of wish fulfillment, but otherwise. This is probably the most tenuous link, and it comes in near the end.
• “Flying Pillars Across the Universe” approaches the question in a simpler fashion. The existence of Akira Toriyama’s work within DBZ is a deus ex machina, but it sets things up fairly effectively, even if the main story has ended up focusing on several other ideas (and the gratuitous incorporation of characters from whatever media I’m consuming at the moment). Exactly what becomes of the book is unknown, but considering how quickly things diverge from canon (especially after the protagonists start hopping universes to solve their problems), it would rapidly become useless. Then, with the introduction of ‘Trucks’, the crazed GT fanboy, this gets taken up to 11.
• “Merchandise Driven“, which is the most recent of the relevant stories. In this case, Beast Wars characters land on Earth in the present, so instead of engaging in the aforementioned Beast Wars, they compete by selling Transformers toys in their likeness. Compared to the other two, this is probably the most in-depth discussion of the idea. If I’ve done a good job with it, several lines between Transformers canon and Transformers fandom will be smashed to little bits. For instance, one of the major events in the story so far involves Maximals raiding one of the Predacon manufacturing facilities to contaminate their supplies with an infamous gold plastic used in the mid 1990s prone to breaking terribly.

It’d probably be a bad idea to focus on the idea too much, but for now, it makes the act of writing this stuff more fun.

Snappy answers to stupid WordPress prompts

The worst thing you can do to a blog is to make it about nothing. It means that you don’t have the inspiration to write about something that actually matters to you. You might guess from this that I disapprove of the “slice-of-life” type blogs of mothers raising children, corporate employees discussing their work, and so forth, but even those are acceptable when done right. Suffice it to say that you probably shouldn’t start a blog unless there’s an idea you want to express (this sentiment is sappy and obvious, but still worth remembering).

Some time ago, WordPress added a feature that gives you numerous small prompts any time you finish a post. Some of them could be interesting, but if you ask me, it promotes the ‘meaningless blog’ mindset. Needless to say, let’s treat them with the respect and tact that they truly deserve.

1. You just acquired a magic wand. What will you use it for?

I’d bludgeon people with it, just to see the looks on their faces.

2. If you could get away with committing one crime, what would you do?

Something that would horrify masses of people, but without having any real effect on them.

3. Can you get work done while music is playing?

Can you make music while working? Can you make music for a living?

4. Name something you’d like a lifetime supply of.

I prefer not to say anything that might damage my reputation.

Oh wait.
5. Remember that one time on the bus, when…? Share your mass transit stories.

Well one day, I was on this bus thingeroo. Suddenly, this person I’d never seen before got on. They were wearing this shirt with an interesting design on it, and they sat next to me. I said “Nice shirt,” and then we engaged in small talk. Then I arrived at my destination. I never saw the person again.

6. Is the book always better than the movie? Are there any exceptions?

Is adding extra nuance to your questions worth the extra complexity and difficulty of answering them?

7. List five things you love about your culture.

“True”

8. If you could go back in time and relive one day of your life, which would you choose?

If I believe time is a loop, can I relieve tomorrow today?

9. Of all celebrity voiceovers in animated movies, which one do you think was the best fit?

What would you say if I told you I’d never seen an animated movie?

10. Create a new law that will make the world a more fun place.

Anyone who is pied in the face must consume a portion of the remnants off of their body.
11. What’s your favorite month? Why?

Why don’t you take a guess? You have a 1 in 12 chance of being right, you know?
12. If you were given a chance to know what happens in your future, would you take it?

Hey! I’m the same guy who believes that time is a loop! I’d probably use it to see into the past, just to spite you.

 

Makes you wonder if making the questions deeper would be a good idea or not.

First Contact Is Bad For You

First Contact Is Bad For You is my debut full-length science fiction novel. It chronicles the adventures of Bob Sakamoto and Ted Decker on the planet Groenheid, where they initiate a ‘first contact’ scenario with a pre-modern industrial civilization. Needless to say, it all goes to hell pretty fast.

Also, Ted Decker is an cybernetic bear with a human brain. How many literary protagonists have that in their favor?

As of November 20th, 2011, the book is available through four retailers. I can’t link the iBookstore edition, but you should be able to find it through most Apple hardware/software.

• Amazon Kindle
• Apple iBookstore
• Barnes and Noble Nook 
• Sony eReader

Bookbaby now distributes to the Kobo and Copia eBook services! I’ll put up a link as soon as possible.

Currently, it’s only available as an ebook (DRM free) , but if sales are good, I might bring out an actual paper edition. It costs $9.95, but I may occasionally drop the price as part of a sales initiative. Thanks to Bookbaby, who provided the distribution, and the cover art. Definitely tell your friends.

Notes:

Here is a link to an early storyboard from May 2008. If you’re interested in seeing some early ideas I had, definitely check it out.

A sequel is in the works. I’ll post about it on this blog when it’s nearing completion.

Check out my other works by clicking the “Published Works” button at the top of the page.

Here follows a list of all the places in which I have allowed limited-scale free distribution:
The ZDoom forums – Where the souls aren’t actually lost!

Feel free to nab from them if they’re still up.

Blast from the past: The founding stimulus for this blog

I note, every now and then, that the course page for my spring semester 2010 writing class is still up, and occasionally I can’t help but be reminded of the little founding post that I “justified” this thing with. Of course, I archived it in case it was wiped, but still. Remember that this dates back to February 2010, and probably plays out a little different than my latest posts. As part of the assignment, my classmates commented to some degree on it, but for privacy reasons, you won’t see that unless they decide to repost their thoughts.

So I ended up creating a blog. How meta.

(Link to this very blog removed for obvious reasons)

I’ll be honest – this is one of the more spontaneous things I’ve done. Generally, I take a relatively long time to think these things out, but there really wasn’t anything to prevent me from doing it, except a lack of interest. But the idea of a blog is relatively basic, to the point that major social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook incorporate basic forms of it into their software (although, most likely, with less functionality than a dedicated blogging service), and that so many people decide to write about whatever interests them. Suffice it to say society is long past the point where it’s merely “cool” or “trendy” to be on the internet in such a form – it’s just the norm for an ever increasing section of the population. There are blogs on EVERYTHING – cooking, computing, cartoons, coprophilia – something for every interest, I’m sure. And if you can’t find your interests in a blog, you can make your own.

So as you can see from my URL, I ended up using WordPress as my blogging service. Prior to creating the blog I did some research on the services – WordPress is supposed to be one of the best overall – in addition to providing a lot of features, most of them are available for free. Besides the basic text-editing functions and such, there are many administrative options available through the “Dashboard” – One can view any post, tag, comment, image on the blog from a tab through it, and perform various actions on them (like deleting several images from your own posts, moderating comments, etc). You can drastically change the appearance of the blog, including preset themes, “Widgets” to add functionality to the page (such as the ability to search within the blog), , and for the professional, the ability to edit the underlying HTML and CSS (internet programming languages) of the blog.

Of course, all this power and functionality would be useless without content. In my case, I created the blog so I could share my opinions on entertainment – essentially the music I listen to, the games I play, the books I read. In addition, I can use the blog to promote my own interests, projects, and so forth, which is a fairly typical use of a blog, is it not? All this really adds up to a form of personal expression aided by internet technology. While it IS possible for author-viewer collaboration to go on through the comment feature, a blog is essentially a tool for one person to express themselves. Collaborative blogs do exist (obviously, because this is being posted on one), but they’re harder to set up, rarer, and there’s a limit to how many people can work on one blog at the same time before it all devolves into chaos.

As it is, if I want to keep a blog, it will require a good deal of effort on my part. I’d have to write content fairly often, make sure that spam doesn’t overwhelm it (Akismet has done an excellent job of preventing spam. In recent days, surprising amounts of bots have made rather pathetic attempts to add their own links, and it’s saddening. It’s also stupid.), and so forth – and there’s no guarantee that I will benefit in any way from it. Every blogger has to ask themselves why they’re blogging in the first place. Sometimes, they don’t know, and then, suddenly, your favorite webcomic operated through a blog stops updating…

Has anyone here ever mantained a blog, or considered doing so? What became of it? Did it change your perspective on the activity?

Incidentally, the idea of a wikiblog sounds quite interesting to me, although there’s not really any reason I can think of for one to exist…

Hope you derived something interesting from this. 

Publication notice

Fans of this blog (Shouldn’t it be “The fan”?) might be interested to know that I wrote something for Dead Homer Society, a blog that advocates the ending of the Simpsons on grounds that the newest episodes are a travesty to the brand. You guys should read it; more importantly you should read what the main writers have to offer, on grounds that they know what they’re talking about and come up with a great deal of humorous/informational things.

Not much else to say. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. If you have, do it again.

Note: A better link is in order now that it’s been off the front page for some time.

More novel buildup: An early storyboard

This comes all the way from late May, 2008 – the novel has changed hugely in the intervening times. However shrewd (insane?) readers may be able to guess at what’s coming, and once the book comes out, see where certain ideas may have come into play. The actual draftwriting was a very slow process (I was lazy), so the book had ample opportunity to morph into something far different. To prevent inconsistencies, improve the writing, set up the formatting for eBook forms, I’m doing substantial revisions, but the plot at this point has basically frozen into its final form.

Anyways, take a look; you might find some interest.

The document itself.

A few things I find interesting:

1. The mentioned locales had wildly different names (foreign sounding ones) – more importantly, I hadn’t decided to put the distaste of extraterrestrial languages in the Earthers.

2. There’s a few tinges of wacky magic  (or at least, technobabble supported science) in there – one of the ideas I was bouncing around VERY early on was Bob and Decker would be sci-fi guys working on a fantasy planet.

3. I use Halo references to refer to stuff, even though I’ve never been a fan of the series.

4. There are much more clearly defined antagonists in here. Also, Decker remains a relatively protagonist flavored character in the final work.

A preview of things to come

“You think they’re a threat?” Decker said, eyes quickly sizing up the people in the crowd. Some of them were either well armed, dangerously muscular, or some combination of both.

“Might be,” Bob replied, “How much face will we lose if they overcome us?”

“… Probably all of it, but over the course of a few months. Because corpses decay.”

“I’ll handle this. Not that you couldn’t, but you didn’t show enough initiative just now.”

I’m working on a novel!

Technically, I’ve been doing such for quite some time now, and I think the job’s nearly complete. The writing process began in the middle of 2008, reached its conclusion in the middle of 2010, and everything up until now has been revision and publishing research. Right now, the draft’s length is approximately 72,000 words – not incredibly long, but it should give prospective readers a decent bite to chew.

A few things about the contents:

1. It’s a science fiction novel, in that the main plot thread is about a first contact scenario.

2. It’s not written as a comedy, although you might find some humorous sections.

3. I plan to write at least one short story that takes place in the universe. I have also written a rough outline of a possible sequel, but I don’t know if I want to write it out ccompletely.

4. I’m hoping I can get the work out before Fall 2011.

5. I am initially going to publish this as an eBook. If desire is high enough, I’ll try to get a physical copy out.

More details in the future.

Making “adult” fare out of children’s shows

So for sketchy reasons, I know that there’s a children’s show about this fellow here, named “Handy Manny”. He goes around fixing stuff for people. Very simple, generally with plenty of morality for the kids.

But as a writer, I can see this basic plot being twisted in many horrible ways. You might see some bizarre fanfiction where the man is ten feet tall, has godlike tools, and a Mary Sue complex. Then, there’s the lemons, which turn it into a bawdy sexual orgy tale that makes parents vomit, then their kid sneaks into the room. She can barely read, but it’s okay, because she’s in this show’s intended demographic. She’s like “Ooh, it’s a story about Handy Manny! Aw… the print is so small…” and then starts scrolling through the page. Then there’s a disturbing illustration. Twenty years later, the girl has become a successful but neurotic buisnessman with strange stress related issues and a psychologist is trying to help her uncover the cause of them. But I digress.

What if the series took place in a post apocalyptic world where natural disasters have culled much of the human population (obviously not our mechanic friend and his anthromorphized tools), rendered great amounts of land uninhabitable, destroyed much of the rest of the life on the Earth, yet the basic premise of the show stayed the same? There would be a lot of depressing subtexts and theories you could make.

My take on my own idea: “Manny and his tools are unable to cope with the idea that so much of their lives have been vaporized or otherwise destroyed by the apocalyptic events. Therefore, he travels from place to place, fixing people’s small appliances, furniture, and so forth in a desperate, yet futile attempt to restore normality to a world which deep down, he knows that he alone can not fix.”
Depressing, isn’t it? Arguably there’s a lot of ground for storytelling, but the only way I’d recommend to do it would be in the same morally heavy handed way that your average kid’s show does, or perhaps in the mold of a Greek Tragedy, in that Manny’s desperate attempts to make things right make things worse. Perhaps he consolidates power as a tyrant and tries to force his own views on the wastelanders. Perhaps he takes on a job far too large for him to handle and we see him waste away over several years trying desperately to finish some Herculean task.  But yeah, it just goes to prove that you can dredge darkness and terror out of the most innocent things. But we’ve also seen lighthearted joviality and humor derived from “maturity”. Ever seen “Saturday Morning Watchmen”?