Category: LiveJournal Archives

Yet another Icon… I’m making so many, I don’t think I can use them all. Makes me wonder if there are people out there using my icon for LJ or other such forums. It wouldn’t bother me, but I am curious.

New icon for Steve… it came to me in an instant!

It’s raining today, and that’s actually put me in a pretty good mood. It’s amazing how the weather can change emotions so effectively. I guess thats why it’s used so often in movies, but it becomes so cliché after a while. Like, I was watching Gothika last night, and the first 1/3 of the movie was all in the rain, a dark and stormy night. I’m thinking how appropriate, but how unoriginal. Why don’t paranormal suspense thrillers take place under different environmental conditions. It’s like a mandate, if there’s going to be some spooky, other-worldly, horrific event, there’s just got to be thunder. I guess it’s all about the good guy wearing white and the bad guy wearing black. Get the viewer in the right state of mind as fast and efficiently as possible. We’ve been trained to associate certain weather, times of day, colors, fashions, and other such nonsense with specific subtext in a movie (or on TV, or even in books) and the writers know this, so they know they can save time and energy (since at least in movies and on TV, there’s a budget on time, so you need to save as much as possible for the good stuff) by using hackneyed clichés to get over the simple concepts without having to spell it all out, then spend the rest of the time concentrating on their more original ideas. It’s effective, and it works well, but its overly obvious to me sometimes, and it’s at those times that it seems a little trite.

I was making predictions about the movie the whole time too, and while a lot were wrong, not all of them were. I signed up for www.whattorent.com the other day and it asks:

You are viewing a film. After about 15 minutes you can predict most of the plot for the remainder of the movie. You:

Absolutely Hate Predictability – Pretty Annoyed – Mildly Annoyed – Who Cares?

Since I answered somewhere between “Mildly Annoyed” and “Who Cares?” (it was a slider), I was pretty happy making my little predictions along the way. I started thinking, I should write these predictions down somewhere because it’s possible, since I never seem to have a good jumping off point for story ideas, that I could use these misguided predictions to write the screenplays I wish I was writing. Of course, half or my predictions are based on the fact that I’ve seen a lot of other movies, so really all I’d be doing is writing the movie that potentially inspired the one I’m currently predicting, but the names and dates have been changed to protect the copyrights. Oh well, what a vicious circle.

Its quiet, I need music. Though I didn’t think I’d be in here this long.

So anyway, I do want to write scripts, I want to write movies, but I never know what to write about. I just don’t have enough experience writing. I need start wirting just to write, even if it’s crap, just write endlessly. Most if it will be crap, but I need to make a practice out of it, I need to get my mind used to creating and developing, to thinking literally. I mean I’ve spent years writing for my games and developing stories for them, but I’m even kind of out of practice with that. Maybe that’s why a lot of my games have been slightly less than successful recently.

well, I tried my best to make a happy icon, but I found a clip that was too cool not to turn into an icon, so here it is… the suicidal penguin!

Okay, so I talked about the new groups and variations on my journal available and one that didn’t work My Blog and MoBLog Feed Together didn’t work. Well, I figured out how to make it a public friend group, so it may work now. Go ahead and click it and tell me what happens.

Well, I finally met mandroid and she’s pretty much as cool and
laid back as I anticipated. Its too bad all her other Denton friends backed
out and didn’t show up. I felt bad that my lame ass was the only one there
to keep her company. We knocked back a couple and chatted, her more than
me, me being all introverted and shit. She was funny and I had a good time
hanging out with her. I felt bad that Heather wasn’t there, I know she felt
“wierd” with me going off and meeting some other woman at a bar. ‘Manda was
sorry Heather couldn’t/wouldn’t come out too. I don’t think I was very
entertaining, I had planned to stay until 8:45 but I ended up taking off
before 8:30 even. Sorry ‘Manda, I don’t start telling the good stories
until the fourth or fifth beer.

We talked about work, movies, titty bars, rednecks, dogs, beer, etc. It was
fun even if I was a little quiet.

Now I’m hanging out in line for Hellboy,#3 in line baby! I’ll try to write
more this weekend.

“Jesus died for our sins, God Damnit!”

“We have one fucking life, no need to stress over it, just live it as best we can and find every little enjoyable morsel in the wrinkles.”

Well, my jaw and ear are feeling much better today. I started taking some antibiotics heather had left over from some other infection. Nervous as I am, I looked up the prescription and it’s actually one of the four typically given for ear infections, so I feel pretty good. The dosage is a little larger than I read for most ear infections so I’m only taking two a day instead of three. Things seem to be getting better for the weekend.

[geek on]

The game went pretty well last night in my opinion. Even when we stopped to bullshit and just hang out, everyone was involved, none of this “oh, well the four of us are going to talk about UO and the rest of you can go fuck yourself” kind of bullshit. Things were a little slow to start since a) it was the first session of a new system for all of us and b) Spycraft has what’s called a “gearing up” phase of the mission where you get extra money to buy equipment for the mission (in addition to your regular equipment) and that took a little longer than expected. I’m going to try to get the mission briefings ready ahead of time from now on and the players can make shopping lists before the session even starts. That way when it comes to the gearing up phase, they’ll already have a good idea as to what to pick up. It should make things go a little smoother. The session involved very few dice rolls, which I dont’ have a problem with, and everyone seemed to get to do their fare share of RP. It was still kind of the opening scene, so we’ll see what happens next time. I guess I never determined if this was an every week, every other week, or two on/one off kind of deal. I guess I should email everyone.

Okay, email away!

[geek off]

So tonight I’m planning on going to Cool Beans for a bit, and then possibly going out and seeing Hellboy (if Derek is interested. He mentioned something about it Wednesday, so I’m waiting to see what he says. He should be in the shop around 11 and hopefully be on ICQ/AIM shortly after that.

I had a lot of fun making Craig’s icons yesterday, so much so, that I’d love to spend some time this weekend making more. I found some new tools that make creating icons a little easier, including a little free application that will actually strip almost any video format down to a (long) series of jpegs or gifs. So I’m going to play around with it a little today while I mess with the GALMAC Brochure.

Anyway, I guess I should get to doing some work. Have fun boys and girls, and have a great weekend. Expect lots of pictures from me on my MoBlog