When you built a new house, you killed a goat and buried it under the northeastern corner to make sure that it would be a good, safe place for a home-spirit to live. At that moment, I was sure I was some kind of goat.
A damp-eyed woman who hasn't been able to figure out how to print and tells me at length how this other library has more user-friendly computers and she never has any problem printing anything there, for all that I keep trying to reassure her that she could have asked me for help at any time.
Two cocky emo kids, boyfriend, girlfriend, come in with a swagger and carting a carton each of green tea. They put down only one of their names on the wait-list and swagger off. I call the name, no one shows, but they swagger-straggle back five minutes late. "What, was I skipped?" the boy snaps.
A middle-aged woman in a pink shirt and dark hair with dyed fuchsia highlights speaks no English and does not know how to sign into her email. We communicate in hopeless hand gestures and occasional half-understood words in our respective languages. I want her to type in username and password and this means nothing to her. She wants me to run and fetch a staff member who speaks Spanish and this means nothing to me. Eventually, we find ourselves a wise-eyed little boy with the powers of being bilingual. Fortunately, after our first sally, I know enough to understand that if she glances at me, I run and get the staff member. Or, at least, the little boy.
A very, very tall young man in a reflective, cross-here style yellow/orange vest and a bike helmet, and with more than a little "air of Napoleon Dynamite" informs me in no uncertain (or quiet) terms that first priority for Internet usage should go to people "actually doing stuff" rather than "kids playing Internet games." I tell him I'm hardly in charge of net policy. No, really, volunteer. No, really, policy isn't open to argument. When he finally growlingly sits down to wait, the mom-and-kids that had just signed up in front of him hastily unsigns out in an offended huff and hurries away before I can say anything.
Adventures.
Also, my sweet, overstimulated Border mix Ivan needs to learn that you do not sprint across the backyard at 25 miles per hour when there are metal chairs set out at unpredictable intervals. I still don't know why he was sprinting across the backyard, since no one'd thrown a ball or stick or Frisbee. He was probably just bored.
In any case, he ran forehead first into the sharp edge of a chair arm, sent it flying, and yelped and hunched and looked pathetic for about thirty seconds before he started to forget he'd just beaned himself. Since he was bleeding (very mildly), we took him inside for basic first aid, but I don't think the shock of actually breaking skin will keep him from barreling heedlessly into things in the future. Ah well.
Hit 25K today. If this were National Novel Writing Month, I'd be halfway done early. Unfortunately, this is not, and I am nowhere near done. But progress is progress and this is more than I've written straight in ages. Verily aye. Time to cue the romance bit. Hahah, romance.
So, my brother acquired it as well as the "gore patch" to reduce splatter to zilch, so I thought maybe I'd give it a whirl. It didn't (still doesn't) look like my sort of game, not to mention my time for video games is growing less and less by the month. Hello, novel, and hello, killer semester of graduate school, and who knows what else. So this may be as much a review as I give it.
For all the original Fallout games were always clever, at times brilliant, at times moving in that troubling way, you occasionally got the impression of a cabel of college boys creating a piece full of stuff they wanted to toss into their creative writing and programming classes, but would have gotten too-interesting reactions to. Exploding toilets, anyone? So, yeah, Fallout could be as sophomoric as it was haunting, but it was sharply written and even its farce was pretty funny. And much as I like Deus Ex, which I'm playing in starts and spurts right now, I could wish that it took itself a little less seriously.
Like the first two games, Fallout 3 begins with an animated sequence accompanied by some old-timey song (successively: "Maybe," "A Kiss to Build a Dream on," and "I Don't Want to Start the World On Fire") and the refrain, "War never changes," voiced by the incomparable Hellboy, as it always has been. And then comes the opening narration over a slideshow. All intros of all three games are close enough to be brothers, but Fallout 3's intro is oddly the least disturbing. You can compare 'em here if you like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkBNKa2K
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SxRNua0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9oGlwOk
( And then the game begins. )
. . . that the point of video games that allow you to pick stuff up is not to throw random junk at random passerby.
Writing 3,000 words a day is a serious marathon run. I am hoping that I get used to it, like a long distance runner gets used to banging his ol' feet against the pavement for hours a day.
I am in the position of looking over my old LJ interests and having no idea what half of them mean, but lo! This is of importance-low. In lieu of 'having a job' and 'earning money between rough semesters,' I am attempting to write a young adult novel for publication. And, verily, the draft bore more resemblance to fantasy-horror than sweet fairy-tale adaptations for young readers, but I cannot be bothered with that until I am done. Yesterday wroteth I 3,000 words and I intend to keep up that pace until I am finished. Or die. Which may be more likely. But onward.
This is an odd point to begin my pretentious essay set with – I don’t believe that excess or lack of excess makes a movie, a print, an anything immoral or moral in itself. Rather, the more excess you employ, the more likely it is that your artwork will be in some way ridiculous, intentionally or otherwise. A movie filled with shooting is not necessarily more immoral than one with a single shot, but it may be far more tedious. For me, what the art is about, what it celebrates, what it condemns, whether it is thoughtful or brainless, whether it seems to want to inspire discussion or emulation or what have, is more important than how explicitly it is depicted. I would say that Star Wars: Attack of the Clones is less moral than Glory, for all one is PG and one is R.
However, while it may be my upbringing speaking, I tend to believe that most art, most stories, are better understated than overstated. A quick flash of death, or a shot that allows the audience to come to their own slow realization rather than making it explicit and further explicit is, for me, more effective than a bloodbath. As David Mamet warns for movies, whenever you show a graphic sequence, you run one of two risks: either the audience will find that the sequence looks real and be troubled in a way that takes them out of the story, or they will find it looks fake, which takes them out of the story. I think this potentially applies to everything gore-related – and sex-related to an extent. When you write/draw/film/program excess, you have to take a step back and think why am I including this?
I remember from my more active drawing days (aaand my more adolescent writing days. More adolescent, I swear) that pushing against the limits of what you think is quite in good taste and/or easy for your grandmother who prefers Capra to all later directors is kind of fun in a raw hee hee, see what I’m doing way. And there are plenty of cases where a little excess is all but necessary – and genres that are defined by excess. Ultimately, people paint on the canvas that best suits them and they most enjoy and I’m not one to judge people simply because they employ more “R-rated” material than I would personally. I’m more likely to get all righteous if the content, rather than the graphicality of the content, is what I would consider immoral, but more on that later. We ain’t quite done with excess.
( Behindeth the Cut )
