nanowrimo and writing nanowrimo, panicking 11:22 pm
Well it seems NaNoWriMo starts in about 40 minutes and I have bugger all planned, I wonder much progress I can make with random idea generators, copious amounts of alcohol, and intense hope?
I shall try to keep this thing updated with my progress every other day, but the humiliation may become too great for me to handle and I might fall quiet.
The following nonsense is a not at all exaggerated account of my thought process earlier today when I was in Subway.
Oh dear it appears to have happened again, those dark green bastards are probably laughing at the thought of what is to come right this second, not that chilli peppers are generally known for thinking of course. But the point stands, there are far too many jalapeños on this sandwich and the guy that serves me can’t seem to understand the word “less than last time” I can’t complain of course because what if some awful thing happened to him, for him to think this monstrous mass of green hell-fire is an appropriate amount for consumption? For all I know he suffered some form of trauma and stuffing immense amounts of jalapeños in his mouth is how he deals with it, oh god I’m awful for even thinking about complaining. I better just pay for my sandwich and sit down t…SHIT! I ordered a fucking footlong didn’t I? Shit shit shit, why am I taking this? Why don’t I get back up from this table and give half back, that’s a thing people do right? But it does look awfully tasty…Maybe it won’t be all that spicy right? And I do have a drink here, that should help somewhat I think…
Okay okay I’m almost halfway done, the hardest part is over and I’m not sweating all that much, just the home-stretch now. I bet that fuckwit who served me has never even been traumatised, I bet he doesn’t even need to work here he just does it because he gains some sick enjoyment from watching people sweat, he probably fucking hand-glides or something in his spare time. Shit shitting cockballs I’m full, I’m fairly sure I no longer have a mouth and I’m only half-way done, I wonder if anyone in here would mind if I threw up?
So, right, okay, I’ve got this just the very end of the sandwich left. I think I may have thrown up in my mouth a few moment ago but I’ve still got this, that traumatised, hand-gliding, alien son-of-a-bitch behind the counter isn’t going to get the better of me I’ll wipe that smug look off of those slimy eye-stalks. Wait I…I can’t see any more filling at the end there’s no ham, no pepperoni, no salad…Just a dark green mass, cunting hell there must be five fucking jalapeños down there, this can’t count as part of the sandwich right? No one would hate me for throwing it away, oh but that’s what he wants isn’t it? That fucking alien wants to beat me so he can take down the rest of us, if I don’t finish this sandwich our entire society will collapse! Just go for it Alex, just shove it into your mouth and show that mother fucker who is the boss.
Wohkay time to leave, but first is this a burp or me throwing up…good, good, it was just a burp time to walk out of here proud. Oh but I brought a cookie as well I should really eat that, I mean it’s nowhere near as filling as a sandwich right? I won’t regret this.
I regret everything.
I may have been a tad delusional towards the end, as I’m fairly sure there are no aliens serving at Subway.
General D&D, D&D 4.0, DM tools, Dungeons and dragons, table of punishment 9:58 pm
So it seems that I have been convinced into running a D&D campaign for Mr’s Dent and Watkinson, so my natural inclination was to go back to my old notes and find the most horrible and degrading things to put them through. Unfortunately all I could find was the table of punishment, an interesting little thing similar to the wandering damage system which I came up with when starting a campaign with two notoriously troublesome players, though one of said players actually managed to make use of some of the results I still find it an amusing list and would like to share it with whatever minuscule number of people will view this.
To use this table to simply roll, or have the player who is the target of your ire roll a d20, then either calmly work the result into the game or shout incoherently until everyone understands what is happening.
And there you have it my dear and possibly non-existent friends, the table of punishment, a device which was not wholly successful but still amusing enough to make it worthwhile.
General Anthropomorphizing, Atheism, Politics, Religion 2:44 am
So, I would like to discuss something which I have been noticing more and more lately, the apparent need to blame things on inanimate stuff. I think I began noticing this trend back during the referendum in the UK over the AV system, both sides of the campaign were saying silly things like “AV will mean more back door deals!” “AV will make MPs work harder!” both these things being ridiculous of course as these are activities whose frequency rely solely on humans. However, that was a debate in the realm of politics a place where anyone will say what they think someone else wants to hear to get want they want, what has really begun to annoy me lately are the opinions certain atheists I have run into on-line hold about religion.
Now, I should start this paragraph by stating that I am an Atheist, though I hold to the opinion we can not know whether there are gods or not, at least with the currently available evidence. But onto that which have begun to really annoy me, the propensity for many Atheists to attack ‘religion’ for making people a certain way when in nearly every case the much simpler explanation that actually makes sense is something far different, other people made these people this way, whether it was their parents, or a particularly charismatic preacher or a friend/significant other. But I would like to address a particular case, where a person was complaining because his sister thought she was going to hell for “not feeling the holy spirit”, this person was up in arms about religion making people feel this way instead of looking to the people who were actually responsible, whoever it was that taught this woman the erroneous belief that Christianity states you need to feel something which could be attributed to god before you know you have been accepted by him/her/it.
A great many people give personality and abilities to things which simply can not influence the world beyond what people do in their names, but has humans we feel the need to place blame somewhere, blame which is preferably not on ourselves or people we are close to in order to preserve our image of ourselves as near perfect beings. It is an unfortunate situation, but besides complaining about it on little-read and little cared-for blogs there is not much I can do but wait for humanity to slowly get smarter generation by generation and hope I live long enough to have all my thoughts, opinions and general blatherings validated so that I can be recognised for the awesome person I know I am.
General 10:05 am
I was watching dogma with my dad, when during an ad-break, he said;
“Black jesus, god is a woman and now these two angels killing a lot of people? I bet this film got tonnes of complaints” and I replied with some vague agreement, but then after thinking about it I realised why? Why should it have received a lot of complaints, I know that it did, but why was this film, mostly respectful to Christianity, seen as such a challenge to people’s beliefs?
I suspect it is a combination of human nature and that at it’s core, Christianity is a simple/easy religion; there is a god who will send you to hell if you break certain rules, however god’s physical embodiment or his son came to Earth a long time ago and tried to teach/show people how to live a good life, in the end dying for humanities sins so that people would just have to believe that this man was the son of god and show genuine repentance for any sins committed to get into heaven.
As a doctrine, that sounds inoffensive enough and shouldn’t bring about the strong outrage at Dogma that was seen, however, human nature meant that the at first simple church became a great lumbering behemoth, people of power within this church added complexities not needed just to keep their job of guiding people more interesting, then these people quibbled over largely unimportant things. But these quibbles spiralled out of control and the church split a great many times into many different factions, and they taught their followers their particular version of the doctrine and the habit of thinking in a certain way, thinking certain things, formed. But unfortunately, a great many people’s first reaction to seeing something that shows that their pre-conceptions, their habits, could be wrong/different is anger and hatred.
For some reason, people feel the need to always be on the “Right side” or for others views to be shown as silly or wrong and will resort to deplorable tactics to maintain their fragile worldview.
I’m ending the post here, because I am beginning to ramble and have lost my original point.
General Anecdotes, aunt, car, car journeys, cousin, Family 1:07 am
So my beautiful and not at all boring readers, I have some knowledge to implant into your fragile and overtly yellow minds. During an awkward car journey with my aunt and her daughter I realised that the majority of my anecdotes are only funny if the lucky person hearing me speak was involved in said anecdote, this seems like a problem to me, a problem I hope to rectify by turning my vast and unsinkable writing prowess to the task of making shit up.
I came to this stunning realisation because earlier in the day, the aunt who was kind enough to give me the lift was regaling myself and other family members with stories from my family’s past, stories of which I was more than happy to listen to seeing as I have always found learning more about my family fun. Well that’s a lie, I haven’t always found learning more about my family fun, for example;
Earlier today I discovered something disturbing, my cousin once removed (my cousin’s son) has a son, a son whose birth I clearly remember happening whilst I was at college. The child being only two/three years old has been immutable to my mind, but today the subject of the child’s sixth birthday came up and I would not (and still fucking won’t gorram it) accept that the kid is nearly six years old. Now, either my entire family is lying to me in some twisted ploy to gain some intangible benefit from my confusion, or my perception of the passage of time and my memory of events is rather badly warped, I suspect that the first one is correct.
See? Most of you won’t have been around for the described event and will have found the entire thing uninteresting, but if you were there, the memory of me throwing chairs into walls has probably just sent you into gales of laughter! So, once I have polished the story of that time I single-handedly defeated like, fifty ninjas and then went on to sleep with all their wimmins, I’ll post it here for the internets to see in a grovelling apology for my poor anecdotes.
Next time on semi-coherent sentences, we get to see some furiously typed thoughts about the various denominations of Christianity and organised religion in general.
General August, Birthday, computer, consistent, December, high quality, laptop, nanowrimo, published 5:25 am
Clearly this post is nothing curious, it is just a post in a blog that is regularly updated on time and of consistently high quality.
So, things that have happened;
Expanding on point one, I wrote a novel called “Past lives” which was about a human who had been re-incarnated as an arch-demon and, like much of my work, it was quite awful. Aside from the lack of a coherent plot, I found reading it after completion labour-some, whereas I am very much of the opinion that reading should be enjoyable and easy, of course I hope that editing might help somewhat but I doubt it will. So I will probably be cutting the first 30,000 or so words and then run with the last 20k, which switched the focus from the arch-demon to the political and religious struggles of a race of beings in the same universe as the arch-demon (and it was implied that the race was created by said demon) a section I found far more fun to write and read, I think I can work the past lives and goat themes into it as well, which sort of makes it the same novel.
There is little to be said for the short stories, they were revisions of work I had sent out before and had rejected, but unfortunately my revisions appeared not to satisfy the almighty deciders.
My Birthday was fun, I decided to go with something lower-key than previous years (my birthdays are spoken of with reverence and fear amongst those I drink with) and attended the Halloween parties of two clubs, I developed a small entourage of new friends who I met that night who decided to join my group. Aside from an interesting encounter with a barmaid from the first club at the second club, I have little else to report.
Computer went boom for some unexplained reason, it apparently broke my surge protector as well, so I was unable to use some of my electrical devices for a day (I was shaky and irritable by the end of said day) and then I managed to spill milk onto the laptop that replaced the computer, but luckily it survived my technology destroying rampage and now sits proudly before me, being polite enough not to insult the awful awful words I type onto it.
I lost a lot of work on my old computer, but I am kind of glad, I had gotten bogged down in trying to improve it, or just sheerly depressed and uninspired whenever I read it. So I am using the laptop as something of a fresh start for my writing, hopefully the catalogue of work on it will be significantly better than that of the computer.
I would like to thank the people of the writers block for guilting and pressuring me into writing this pile of words, and if you read this and dislike it, direct your hate at those guys, this post was totally not my fault.
I suppose I should ressurect the tradition of posting the first paragraph of lyrics from the song I was listening to as I completed this post.
“Like a wheel I keep on turning
Straight ahead, it’s got me burning
The melody — the dignity,
Something is speaking to me
Night is cold and my soul is battered
Not afraid for the first time now that I realize
We coincide, I’ll never belong to the tribe
And a song is calling me to this ship of fools”
General 11:06 pm
The other day I wondered what I would do if I won the lottery, it was no surprise to me that is was mostly “secret evil mastermind”
Now then on to things you likely care nothing about, gaming and my penis TV shows. As a gamer I haven’t been doing much lately, I’ve been playing Dragon Quest IX which is fantastic and whose puns are quite good in places and I keep meaning to start playing Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn but DQ keeps distracting me.
TV! Or television, whichever you prefer. I have been unscrupulously enjoying the new season of House, although I wished he had remained hospitalised slightly longer than two episodes, I quite enjoyed the shift in format. Burn notice is something else I have been trying to catch whenever I see it is on, although I haven’t watched enough of it to form a final opinion. The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother continue to be stalwarts of my weekly viewing, BBT because it is still highly amusing and HIMYM because of my man-crush on Neil Patrick Harris, although I still find the show quite funny something hasn’t quite clicked with this latest season for me.
Oh and something I am looking forward to so much more than anything right now, A Game Of Thrones, the show is looking set to be awesome, hopefully I can forgo having my head explode from excitement before the show starts next year.
I was considering writing a couple of proper reviews on some of the shows I mentioned, but then I realised I really did not want to do that.
General Inception, Late 1:55 am
I’m only an hour or so late! Don’t hate me too much, I couldn’t take it!
Anyway today/yesterday I did a number of things;
Broken down into four things it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was a fun day and when the friends likely to read this get to go see inception I might even write some god-awful review of the thing.
I thought I had something else to say, but it looks like I forgot what that is…..Bah I’ll write something better than this piece of trash later.
General 11:55 pm
So, today I was given a subject for this blog and that subject was Blogging, this did not help me write this post.
When I first started blogging, it was that crappy myspace thing and it was purely because one of my friends blogged regularly (well, mostly regularly) and I thought it might be a good idea. However, rarely was it that I had something to write a blog about, I could not and still can not sit at a keyboard and write without a subject in mind and coming up with subjects is something I apparently find difficult.
I just remembered something, way back when I was writing the myspace blog I promised two people short stories if they followed (or whatever it was called) my blog, I began writing one of them and got quite far with it, but I never completed it and as such never gave ever of the stories to these two people, I feel absurdly guilty now.
The person who suggested I write about blogs also suggested I write about my love life, but that it far too crippled by self-doubt for me to actually put my thoughts into words and then give said words to the wilds of the internet.
Onto the next suggestion, social life! Something which is generally awesome for me, I go out drinking when I have a bit of money with whoever will come out (this doesn’t happen nearly often enough) and I am lucky enough that those people who come out I can call friends. I have my games of D&D, well games of unnamed tabletop RPG as we use our own rules, which always prove entertaining and get me out of the house and being awesomely creative again. Now I should probably talk about the people I hang out with, or at least a few of them, top 3 or 4 in the list of friends.
Kimothy: I met the illustrious Miss Staples back in college where she somehow worked her way into the top 5 within a few weeks (cutting a certain someone’s wrists by accident helped), a feat unmatched as of yet (at least I think, my memory for these things is kind of bad) one of the few friends who I always seem to manage to find something to talk about with she has been a constant pleasure to know and hope that we continue to be friends for a long time
The Wells brothers: Out of all my friends, these are the two I’ve known the longest, I met them back in infant school (ages 4 – 7 for those outside the UK) and share so many memories with them it is ridiculous. Without the influence of these two I doubt I would be quite the same person I am today, another pair I hope to have around me for awhile.
Jeff: Met back when I was but 15, we became better friends two years later when I was in college, spending many a free period involved in amusing antics which kept college from being too awfully boring for me, I find myself surprised that I can find nothing else to say about this fellow beyond that he is a good friend and as those above, it would be a shame to lose him.
I could probably write more, but I don’t want to go on for too long, and beside, I really want to use the title >_>
