So my project, which was to review Pirates of the Caribbean 3, then record it, to test out voicecasting, has foundered a bit.

Oh well. I'm still here, I'm still alive.

Continuing my trend of finding things to hate in all places, I have now seen Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, sequels to the movie Pirates of the Caribbean 1, a movie I thoroughly loved and enjoyed and watch semiregularly. The effect of the latter two movies was so vast and so well-woven as a story as to create a holistic whole that weaves together a complete tale, an absolute perspective, where I now look back and utterly hate Pirates of the Caribbean 1.

More as I get it, but if you're on the internet, you clearly loved the movies in question and don't want to hear my opinion on the matter.

Of new characters created since Issue 11, Willpower is of course the most popular. But that's most likely because it's the new set.

Of all the non-Willpower tanks created since issue 11, Invulnerability is still the most popular choice for tanks. And again, more people are actively playing Invulnerability than anything else, including Willpower.

That's not any kind of statement to how good or balanced Invulnerability may be, just that any arguement for change based on perceived popularity is erroneous.
- Back Alley Brawler, 28/03/08 08:00 AM

I'm posting this here so I can quote it whenever I want to.

SO! Gross dental factoid today. See, I found out what that odd taste in my mouth was. As it turns out my abcess is deflating. Not by some wonderful natural method like, the body processing the abcessy-stuff into bits-of-abcessy stuff and turning those bits-of-abcessy-stuff into more useful things, like a children's swing set for all the little red blood cells to play in.

Oh no. It's gone for more of a direct route and is uh, leaking pus into my mouth. Through one of my teeth.

A good solution for this would be to eat stuff, since that would put something in my mouth that doesn't taste of dead cellular waste, or as one could phrase it, 'blood poop.' BUuuuuUUUUUuuuUT my swelling is so great I can open my mouth roughly the size of a ten cent piece. Meaning that anything I eat has to be able to fit into a change purse. Bite at a time.

How's your day being?

My toothache has turned into an abcess, which due to standard operating procedure in Australian medicine, meant I had to spend eight hours yesterday going to the hospital and taking three bags of intravenous antibiotics to attempt to combat the swelling and prevent a spread of the infection to my brain.

Yes, I was worried as fuck.
Yes, I'll be fine.
Yes, I have antiobiotics.
Yes, I have painkillers.
Yes, my face looks like I have swallowed a shoe.
No, I don't want attention drawn to it, thanks.

I spent an hour reading an article today about how the 21st century is making us sick.

Then I spent an hour gushing to one of my friends about how beautiful, amazing, and intelligent all the wonderful people in my life are. I just... I don't have words for it right now.

I love you all, I really do. Dorky and silly and shit and there'll be a snarky response to this in a week, but you're such awesome people and I really don't ever make it clear enough to you guys how much I value you, how much I value that you let me into your lives in even the tiny ways you do. I may never achieve anything with my life, as maybe the bad launch that I got winds up pitching my existence as a foul ball straight into the bleachers of history, but the people with whom I associate with are doing the thing that I personally set out as my goal when I was fourteen years old.

You are making it so that every day, if only through the small efforts you make, the world is a better place for having you in it.

You're just fantastic.

In the past four days, I've been privy to, supposedly, four different women asking:

* For gay crossdressing ponyboy porn
* For counselling on loneliness
* For information about male masturbation techniques
* For my thoughts on a discussion of long hair vs bald, and yes, I do mean on the head, and yes, on a woman
* For an explanation of how Evolution works
* For a discussion on greek symbolism and how gay the Spartans are

Yes, okay, sex is the common link, more or less, but I'm still kinda wondering why me.

You may know that I'm no fan of religion if you've ever, say, breathed within five feet of me. One of the reasons for this is that, in my experience, religion is the ornate process of lying to people in stages. You start by lying to yourself, then you lie to your kids, then you lie to the world, and then you wind it all back to lying to yourself again, all with a smile on your face.

Expelled, a movie by Intentional Design advocate group The Discovery Institute, really is all that I could say about this matter. Welcome, people, welcome to lying for Jesus.

And it's not that Expelled is even a good film with a bad message. It's a bad film with a bad message - delivered through lies. It really is the trifecta of religion.

Really: Go look up Expelled, on the science blogs and through NCSE. It really is a truly epic wall of lulz.

It is sad and embarassing that this is what it took to shake me out of my funk regarding posting in this bloody blog. Not only is it for a movie that was critically acclaimed, nominated for multiple academy awards, but it's for a movie that has been out for so long that I got it by DVD rental. Not only is this review too late to be useful for what reviews, ostensibly are for (to give you, the reader, a chance to decide if you want the product or not), it's also not even useful for what reviews really are for, which is a chance for the reviewer to gain some satisfaction out of publically waving his opinion around and watching as people dance to his tune like kittens in the There Are No Cats In America sequence in American Tale.

No, it's Michael Bay's Transformers, a Michael Bay film by Michael Bay. The original script outlined in four shades of red, white, and blue, this movie is a competent showing in the Buy All Our Playsets And Toys genre, which had the added bonus of having wonderful, sweet, childhood nostalgia to fuck over on the way to masturbating Michael Bay's patriotism all over the faces of young children worldwide, especially those in other countries who have no idea what the hell he's going on about.

I kid, of course; the film was not excessively American except in that it thought America was awesome, high-octane vehicles and massed violence is entirely okay as long as nobody sees a nipple, and that Foreign People Are Hilarious. Now, I don't want to sound racist, but the second that the little Arabian kid blithely said 'yep!' when asked if he had a phone at his home, when they lived in the middle of the motherfucking desert and were up to their knees in sand and camel spit, my first thought was: Phone is the name of his pet camel. You can't have the old-worlde charm and coincidentally have what apparently turned out to be a mobile phone which gets perfect reception to a call-center in India when the nearest broadcast tower has had the shit kicked out of it by superpowered intergalactic robots. It just jars me, especially when people are sitting in clay huts with natural light as their lighting.

The Indian guy? Oh ho ho. The Mexican soldier? Ho ho ho ho. In the end, however, there were lots of white, American individuals on hand who were able to keep everything all in hand. Thank god for that!

I exaggerate for comic effect, really, but I was annoyed by just how White the end cast was. Every major character was Really White, and there were jabs at these other cultures. It felt very Team America, that the Indian guy was in a call centre, the Mexican guy was hoodoo superstitious and started babbling at length in Spanish, and when called on it, hollered angrily about his culture, displaying his fierce, Latin temper. The white guys could be anything from clever-ish secret agents to hardworking, down to earth dads to monkey-like hippies and badass jocks, but the racial minorities showed up as exactly that.

This spicy racist tinge leads us to Everything Important Derives From America. I can handle the fact that Whatsisname Witwicky (lol) was one of the first guys to explore the Arctic circle. That's pretty sensible. American exploration wasn't exactly common during that era, what with most stuff being already discovered, and oh, yeah, the whole wars-and-death thing, but by and large, that was fine. That he found Megatron over in the arctic ice was pretty cool, too - explaining why we hadn't all been killed in our sleep at the age of nineteen after producing two children already. So I can handle that.

But apparently, J Edgar Hoover, owning bigger balls than even Teddy 'Bad-Ass Motherfucker' Roosevelt, pulled MEGATRON HIMSELF out of the ice and dragged his somehow-still-frozen ass down to Arizona and Nevada, and walled him up in eighty bazillion gofillion tons of concrete, presumably then taking the opportunity to make a joke about how FDR couldn't pull that shit off - what with not having any fucking legs. This would have all had to happen sometime before 1935. Think about that.

Now, I'm pro-LGBT as much as possible, but you can't tell me a guy who wore a dress for fun was badass enough to do that to Megatron, especially when you have to take into account the fact that Nevada's lowest winter temperature isn't cold enough to freeze ice. 40 degrees farenheit, at the lowest, and somehow, with that whole 'war' going on, 1930s American found the time to develop refrigeration tech good enough to keep a gigantic motherfucking robot on cryogenic stasis for the whole time. The Arctic Circle? -40 degrees in the fucking summer. Arizona's a mere eighty degrees hotter in the motherfucking winter.

Still, good job he did, or the whole movie might have had leave snug and warm America to go find the plot Maguffin that was driving the whole story, which would have been really annoying, what with there being no convenient way to move any of these characters across long distances at high speeds. Air Force One had this information on it, which makes complete sense, and there couldn't possibly be an easier way to get access to it, despite the Decepticons having technology that could hack it in a few minutes and it later being stated by a really stupid Australian hacker that 'even a supercomputer making a brute-force attack would take years at it.'

This brings us on to a character competing-

Oh, and while I'm at it: FUCK YOU, conspiracy theorists! Oh, we had to have fucking Megatron to reverse engineer our fucking velcro and zippers and modern cars, because, apparently, by 1935, when mankind had already taken to the skies, it hadn't been made clear that people are actually pretty fucking clever. We needed an alien hand in the whole affair to keep us from somehow eating our own poop. God, it's almost as stupid as someone who would say 'even a supercomputer making a brute-force attack would take years at it.'

While I'm about the subject, the unfortunately, kinda-hittable dope who voiced it merits some attention for her stance regarding Frenzy's-

Hang on, Frenzy, oh, fuck, Frenzy. For a start, I didn't know he was Frenzy until eighteen hours after the movie and a friend mentioned him. He pretty much invalidated everything I ever liked about Transformers. By making his transformed form so liquid and so flexible, it meant there was no real point of refernece between his two forms; or rather, his many forms. As demonstrated by Bumblebee when he was trying to pick up a girl, Frenzy could just happily turn into any old thing.

That actually really hurt the mystique of the affair for me. Being able to transform into things was very much integral to the series for me, and being able to turn into one thing was part of that. If they're robots who can turn into anything, it diminishes the novelty of being robots who can turn into one thing. Frenzy's ability to be anything small - and then resembling that object not at all when he's transformed into his robot form - was a real blow to me for the fun of the series. It also meant that the forms they used as disguises became more irrelevant.

If you haven't noticed it yet, I'm trying hard to remember the name of the silly Australian bint who played the irrelevant hacker that sprayed that stupid line. Ironically, I find, she's not from neighbours, nor is she from Home and Away. She's, like, apparently a normal Australian actress who was on headLand, which would mean something if anyone I know had ever watched it. That she's the star of a show nobody I know watched in a movie I didn't like as part of a plot element that didn't matter from a country that everyone forgets seems to be fair grounds to exalt her into a vaunted status of being the most irrelevant thing in the universe.

Protip For Miss Irrelevant: Brute force hacking is slow. These days, probably, so are supercomputers. We're probably at Ultracomputers. Just, please, for the love of god, when you have to make a line to prove how in the know you are about the computer systems that are supposedly running our country don't copy it from fucking War Games.

There's more stuff I disliked. Lots more. I could write a book, but things like Jazz being racist, the rushed pace of anything that resembled character development or introduction for characters I liked the look of, in favour of demonstrating something about Sam Witwicky that I personally didn't give a shit about are all pretty well covered by just watching the movie or checking anywhere on the internet. However, there were some things in the movie done well, competently, or that appealed to me despite their general nebbishness. With that in mind, I think it's worth mentioning some stuff I liked:

* Barricade was well done. He didn't cheat on his transformation, he wasn't a name referenced to someone else, and he felt very nice and menacing.
* Bonecrusher getting his motherfucking HEAD cut the motherfuck OFF.
* Megan Fox
* Megan Fox's navel
* Megan Fox's hips, breasts, lips, and face, but only during action sequences
* The way that Megan Fox looked horny as hell during the action sequence
* Peter Cullen
* Hugo Weaving
* The inserts of 'You have failed me, Starscream' and 'One shall stand, one shall fall', but definitely the fuck not 'more than meets the eye.'
* Optimus Prime cutting Bonecrusher's head off. I know this is like pointing at the same baby twice and calling it twins, but c'mon, when did you ever see Optimus prime do something so hardcore?

In the end: It's a bad teen flick which accidentally turns into a decent action flick an hour in, features two people getting peed on unnecessarily, and may or may not make you feel like you wasted two-plus hours.

Remember when Disney films didn't suck?

As far as the list of banned books I've seen banned in what I think of as 'places like here ' - ie, America, Britain, and Australia - I have to say I've been surprised. For example, you can't buy a copy of American Psycho in Queensland at all. A holocaust denial book called Did Six Million Really Die? which I don't think I'll miss being unable to read, but which nonetheless stymies me as to why we, in Australia, have banned it. I mean, surely the solution to stupid books is smart books? If we start excluding literature on the basis that it's stupid and unfounded then we're doing the work of writing a disservice. Would it not be better to publish better books, to inform and direct, rather than to simply tell people they can't put this shit up?

We've allowed What the Bleep Do We Know?, an idiotic ramshackle docudrama about a supposed channeler whose pet spirit, Ramtha, is ostensibly a god-warrioress from Atlantis. We've allowed Natural Cures, a toxic anti-medcial screed by a dingus who wants to convince people that the sun doesn't cause skin cancer, but suncream does. Tell that to my uncle, who has skin cancer, and who hasn't used suncream. You might have a tricky sell there. We've allowed every one of Sylvia Browne's spoors, John Edward, and yet, I can't buy a copy of The Truth About Uri Gellar or The God Delusion in my local store. I can't find a copy of a classic piece of literature like The Call of Cthulu or The Metamorphosis, not a single piece written by Bertrand Russell (let alone Marriage and Morals), but I can be sure that I'll be able to check out Deepak Chopra's latest assault against us in the reality-based community.

That the Australian government bans books surprises me. I don't know why, but for some reason, I thought us smarter than that. I thought that, much like with our ridiculous rules on pornography, if you could claim it as art, you could get away with. The awards and acclaim offered to American Psycho would surely fuel it as an 'artistic' book, and Australia, with its fourteen-year-old collective consciousness (trying desperately to act like an adult in front of all the other governments, hoping nobody notices its voice cracking or its pissant-soaked pretension) should surely be able to get along with that.

Consider, we allow Irreversible, a French film which I have not seen, but is renowned for featuring a very graphic, multiple-minute rape scene. That's not okay, so we're allowed to watch it. That's messed up right there. However, a two minute video of a young woman consensually giving head is considered too dirty for our modest eyes. We can broadcast Saw, but Sirens gets screened an hour later, to protect the kids from the sight of Elle McPhereson's generally mediocre nipples.

I'm stunned, but I shouldn't be.

As for banned books, this stemmed from my noting that there's a list of books the Catholic church bans. This led to a list of some example banned books - like how Mein Kampf is only distributable in Germany as an example of historical significance, and nobody's allowed to make new copies until 2015 (for copyright laws). I can understand entirely that The Satanic Verses has been turfed out of most Muslim nations, 'cos when your knickers are as elaborate as the burqua suggests, it takes an awfully long time to untwist them. The Bible? Makes sense. It's been banned and burned all over the place at varying times.

Get this, though: Catcher in the Rye is banned in US schools for claims that it glorifies prostitution and rebellion, and that it uses foul language. That's fucked up, right? I mean, the book is a fricking icon of literature - and there's foul language, sex, and rebellion in To Kill A Mockingbird too - worse, there's rape.

(Again, rape's okay, consensual's not. I'm not sure what that tells me about my lawmakers and the supposed guardians of our moral compass.)

Anyway, moving on from there, I found... to my amazement, Lady Chatterly's Lover is banned in Australia. Not was, is. Hopefully it's never enforced, but that's fucked up right there - it's hundreds of years old porn - but at least it'd get the perverts reading. Are Anne Rice's Snow White books banned? No? Well, I can GUARANTEE YOU, having never read Lady Chatterley, that it's better written than anything Anne Rice has puked onto a page. De Sade is studied in textbooks, for god's sake.

But here's the most fucked up one: The Lorax. Yes. The Doctor Seuss tale about the weird dude who lives in a tree. Yes, it's banned. Not in Iran. Not in Kuala Laumpur, or Benin, or Djibouti or some other nation where his name might be something utterly rude. No, it's not an obscure antireligious message for the Swiss, nor a scathing rebuke of the Norwegian Muslims.

No, the Lorax is banned from American Schools.

Hang your fucking head, America.

After that little revelation, it's almost not worth mentioning, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is being challenged in Florida - yes, the state whose authorities brought America George W Bush's idiot-king reign is trying to ban a book about a dystopian government that controls its people through fear and oppression.

About the only thing more ironic that could be done is for the government to ban Farenheit 451.

(Bonus funny: South Africa banned Black Beauty because - yes! - the title had the word 'black' in it.)

I've found to my sincere displeasure, the City of Heroes name entry caps at 20 characters. This surprises me for two reasons.

First, I was surprised to find that I'd never encountered this cap before, or even assumed it might exist. Then I looked over the roster of my character names and realised that the longest, letter for letter is Copper Of The Lamp, 18 characters long. I'd never approached it before, but, as you may notice below, my actual names tend to be short (I surprise myself with how many one-word names I have, too: D-38, Shamat, Wander, Atavism, Cataplex, Charonis, Shortbow, Windsaber, Battlebriar and Redgauntlet).

This translates to an average name length of 9.94 letters, or as close to 10 as makes no difference. Half of the maximum, so perhaps one might consider, 'average'. I found that few of my names are slap-dash. Those ones I am least satisfied with, incidentally, would be Jakob of Malleus (pulled out of nowhere) and Copper of the Lamp (an Aladdin reference that nobody gets). My favourites amongst my crop are foreign words or outdated ones - D-38, Atavism and Shamat.

Secondly, it surprised me just how I hadn't noticed this amongst my surroundings, either. There are some long names I know - Adrienne Hunter, for example, weighs in at an impressive 15 characters for what is by all accounts a totally real name - but by and large, nobody I know even approaches the maximum character space. Odd, huh?

The two names I was after were for a matched pair of characters - the Knight of Long Knives and the Knight of Broken Glass. Of course, both of these names are markedly insensitive, but I was going to use them as individuals wearing the 'reality' of the event - people who weild power based on the suffering and the pogram. Avatars of injustices, revenging themselves on the world, as it were.

Of course, Knight of Long Knives is 21 characters long. Knight of Broken Glass is 22. I considered using German, but then you lose the Night/Knight dichotomy. Cristallnacht and Nacht der Langer Messen (if I recall correctly) do not parallel Cristallritter and Ritter der Langer Messen (24 characters, if I have my German right!), which is a shame.

I wonder if it says something of me that I'm invigorated or inspired to write characters by tragedies and atrocities. It's something about the events that evokes with me, inspires some deep and abiding sense of puissance, some extra power that I simply did not know or recognise before, hidden in what is otherwise completely normal words.

Anyone else find that? Capitalising something can make it Mean So Much More (a turn of phrase I extolled to mock Mike Flores, in fact), but it's true, isn't it?

"There is an unfortunate vice with those individuals inclined towards feeling sympathy and empathy, which is to feel for another's pain, to want to help and to soothe, without ever really considering whether or not that pain is entirely what that person deserved."

At what point do you throw in the towel?

At what point do you look at the person, shake your head and go: No?

At what point do you realise that this person wants you to heal their wounds, wounds they inflicted on themself?

At what point do you recognise that you're being used, that you're not helping them, you're just hurting yourself, that you are facilitating bad behaviour?

At what point do you break it off, throw up your hands and say: No, enough. You're not ready for normality. You don't need my help, you need some kind of martyr, you want to suffer, you want to be nothing more than your own neuroses, and I'm sick of it, and I'm sick of you hurting me so you can feel whole? I'm sick of justifying your suffering by making you think this is 'getting help.'

At what point do you quell your native desire to help, suffuse your ideals and your morals and recognise that in the relationship, there are two people: one who gives, one who takes, and that this will never change, as long as you let it be that way? That you are no longer being used, you are being abused, and that it's all at the behest of the ribbon-dancing hurt, the laughing and lighthearted moments of 'nice' interspersed with bitter, self-invested hatred, as once again, they fall back into the abyss, and make all you worked for, all you tried to do, mean absolutely nothing and leave you both standing in the darkness, while they insistanty look at you with the simple expression of: Well?

At what point do you let people have the loneliness that they work so hard to have?

One of the things I've found defining my ability to write and plan for storytelling is a certain core inspiration formed of music. If I can't get a musical sting going for a piece, I just can't find myself doing anything of note. For this reason, I've found musicals and orchestral pieces even more appealing than I used to. Once upon a time, musical pieces were only interesting to me as part of their whole, and orchestral pieces failed to tell a story.

Now, however, when I hear an orchestral piece... it gives me images. Hearing the Hell March, I sat back and closed my eyes. And I saw it.

A snarling juggernaut, with a bullet-like head, vast black eyes that had the expressionless soulful depth of a horse's, without any of the silent benevolence; its mighty tusks that reach well along the length of the monster's head, curling up, the kind that would pierce into a person so easily, until the eye panned back and saw the scale of the thing, well over thirty feet tall, enormously mighty length of it, spiralling away; huge arms that clawed its way forward through the ground, its skin a riddled network of craters like a battlefield.

Along its hide, scuttling like symbiotes with scintillating, almost piercing tones of their moving legs, metal spiders, each the size of a man, but none of them so even so much as a scavenger on this thing's hide.

And it opened its mouth, and it gave a roar, and the roar was as the death of nations, the song that ends the world; and it clawed its way forward, not walking, but simply writhing and consuming, a constant and neverending terror, with people making homes in its wake thinking "It will never be back, surely - we have survived the worst that there can be!" only to be wrong within their short, painful lifetimes. It feasts upon industry, it destroys the soul, and it rules the planet, though it is mindless, witless and soulless.

It is not good; it is not evil. It just is.

And the eye pans back, and standing in boots and fatigues, at ease and canting his head curiously, is the white-haired old man with the shoulders of a young buck. And he drops his cigarette, and crushes it out with a boot, and he murmurs:

"It'll do."

Not all music does this. Not all scenes flow from songs. But you'd be surprised how a song can find you a place to start a story. Songs that make no sense can let you have fun with rich, deep imagery. Songs that make absolute, pure sense can be retwisted around. Consider the song Cecilia (which was at the time, very controversial because of its reference to oral sex). Imagine it sung by a woman - it changes the tone of the piece significantly while maintaining its story.

The best example of this I can find is in my City of Heroes character Fatal Harmonic, who has had music defining his themes throughout his existence. After I got the 'core idea' of the character, at level 2, he was always a city-and-music based shaman. This means every spell he casts, every charm, every trick, is itself a song, a beautiful little tone that's got its own applications. Warriors who charge into battlefields do so with a soundtrack, invigorated and empowered by that rising surge, that messianic sensation one gets when in the throes of a true performance.

Ironically, the 'biggest' musical trait of Harlem's is probably in how he seeks romance. The CD Girl plot has been closed off and, well, yes, I'll have my own little pity-sob about that some time or other. Right now, I'm listening to Out Tonight from Rent, and I find it inspiring.

While I'm at 'inspiring'? I want to make a Mercenaries/Dark mastermind, inspired by the songs Khe Sanh (Cold Chisel) and Round Eye Blues (Marah). Fantastically neat stuff there.

Musicals also feature this kind of depth. There's The Genuine Philanthropist, from Gilbert and Sullivan, which describes an utterly odious character who can't work out why nobody likes him, who sees virtue in all the horrible things he does. Curiously, this satirical little spod reminds me of Swift's 'A Modest Proposal', which really defined satire in the era.

No matter how abusive or horrible a person is, they will almost always justify it away to themselves - either by comparing what they are doing to what they could be doing (Chris Rock refers to this as being a 'low-expectation-having mother-fucker;' the kind of African-American populace who defend their bad habits and situation with comments like 'I take care of my kids.' Rock's rejoinder is: 'You're supposed to. What do you want, a cookie?'), or by rationalising away their behaviour as somehow good; as if they deserve special treatment, as if they are somehow disadvantaged, or as if their scenario is somehow beyond their control. You can find this, I've noticed, in a lot of people who do nothing but blame others for their problems. On City of Heroes recently, I've had to deal with - and recently cut off contact with - an individual who insists that no matter what passes, it was not their fault. It's always someone else, something else, it's what we asked for, if I knew what that person knew, I would think differently. What I find funny is that I have friends who think I'm mean to this person by ignoring them.

This idea - that it is meaner to a person to ignore them than to deliberately antagonise and humiliate them - amuses me; ultimately, I think it's disrespectful to people to show any one person more respect than they deserve, to treat them better than I think they deserve: in doing so I cheapen the entire idea of respect and hurt all my other friends by inference, showing it is not, in fact, real respect. This is me rationalising, I am sure, my desire to be nasty to someone who I think is a dickhead. But dickhead status notwithstanding, my point stands - if a person has done something to earn your ire, if a person has genuinely behaved badly, the solution is not to 'be nice' and put up with it - the most courteous thing you can do is to bring it to their attention, and if you do not feel it will solve anything, then you should politely excuse yourself from their presence. Then - and this is an area where I have difficulty, for I am SO inclined to violent bile and anger - when you have closed contact, do not talk of them. It is an odious practice, and one I try to stifle so very hard in my case, to speak of someone in a way you would not speak to them. I obviously fail - and that is why I find myself lucky to have gracious friends who will help me reign myself in - if only by their example.

You know who you are.

A good healthy bitch is a fine thing - it clears the head and keeps you from saying the spiteful things in the heat of the moment, letting you approach a thought with a fresh palate. But to consistantly talk about someone when they are not around, to have nothing but mean, niggardly things to say in their absence, and not being willing to approach them and say them face to face - even if just because you do not think they will listen? That's gossip, it's divisive, and it reflects badly on me. It destroys my friends opinion of me, too - what might I talk about when they are not around?

"A sense of duty is admirable in work, but odious in friendship; people wish to be loved and respected, not endured and tolerated." - Bertrand Russell

In RP, a rule I have is that nonconsensual happiness is as bad as nonconsensual unhappiness. The exact brother of that note is that, out of character, being unduly mean to someone who doesn't deserve it is just as bad a social behaviour as being unduly nice to someone who doesn't deserve it. Being nice to people for no well-explored or explained reason simply shows that you have no means to discern, and embraces the odious christian ideal that says we as humans either cannot make qualitive judgements about the behaviour of others, or worse, that a nasty person is really not that different from a nice one. I find that idea when employed in reality to be utterly immoral - the idea, for example, of a Christian mother forgiving her son's racist murderers, as though that somehow means anything. She wasn't the person murdered, and in a sane, moral society, there would never be any question that those people should be apprehended and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

(There's a corollary to that; If she is somehow saying that her forgiveness does not in fact preclude any change in action - ie, she still wants the murderers apprehended and prosecuted, without any alteration in course because of her 'forgiveness' - then it's nothing more and nothing less than a self-aggrandizing gesture, a kind of spiritual masturbation, continuing the trend of Christianity in making 'sacrifices' that are ultimately nothing of the sort. This kind of behaviour ripples through almost all religion, but I find Christianity especially bad for it - a self-aggrandizing and vulgar viewpoint, starting with a God who created things to talk about how awesome he is, then moved on to his son, who he murdered and then resurrected, as if somehow this introduced some mechanic that he, an infinite and omnipotent being could not already achieve. I mean, who's he trying to impress? The other gods he refers to in the Bible?)

People in this world should be accorded the respect they deserve. If I have wronged you, offended you, then I wish to hear of it, and I wish to see if we can resolve, explain, or coexist with these differences. If we cannot conduct ourselves respectfully of one another - or even of our differences - then we should abstract ourselves from one another. If I have but one person who calls me their 'friend', but who deems me odious and obnoxious and does not respect me, then I do not consider them a friend at all - they are tolerating me for what little they can see in me of good, or because of traditional habit, or worst still, they are parastically claiming friendship to receive something. I expect nobody in the world falls into this last category, mind you.

I have recently had a number of people talk to me on the subject of my behaviour towards them, as if they are surprised at how I treat them. One of them was surprised by the fact I was so avidly interested in her opinion, finding her critique of my writing so desireable.

To her I noted: She gives good critique. She has an engaging, brilliant mind, a grand eye for creativity and characterisation, a love of language and its many uses, and she also has self-esteem issues. I felt it not only appropriate for me to ask for her critique, because I do want it, but to also make it clear to her why I wanted it.

Because that's all we're doing, really. We're giving each other little slivers of our lives, little shards of our time, piece by piece, showing one another that we find each other worthy. Be it ten minutes of writing or three years of living.

We give.

I hear a lot of writers and roleplayers are against this 'discipline' idea. It's as if somehow, a story is better served by being organic, by growing under tender blossoming hands, as though every story that grows is a beautiful, precious flower, and that daring to impose rules on it, daring to impose structure, is somehow a dreadful thing.

I can't really refute that, aside from pointing out that those people who can't work for editors are generally only appreciated while they're dead, and are also the kind of utter tosspots who spout that old writer's lie of 'only writing for themselves', or while we're at it, the 'sanctity of ides'. Find me a prolific, imaginative, creative writer who reads only their own work and writes only for themselves and I'll show you an autistic egomaniac.

(I realised, recently, that I have made literally thousands of dollars writing. In Australian Currency, I have made almost five thousand dollars, which is while not enough to live on, is a damn sight more than 'nothing'. That I have earned money for writing articles, and being enjoyed by readers is not really any kind of credential for commenting on creative arts, I suppose. That I have read and enjoyed books is also no measure of my skill. I have read Orson Scott Card, I have read Douglas Adams, and I have read Terry Pratchett. I have read Gemmell and Hunter Thompson and more, and I can say this much: practical work is so beautifully valuable.

You can observe it in Pratchett's work, most easily. The early books were haphazard, a little mish-mashed, and very unformed. You can almost hold up individual books as iconic cornerstones for when a concept was first established. Prior to Mort, death was actually a very different person, abdicating things to Scrofula. Prior to Sourceror, Wizards were a very varied bunch with a lot of different arcane wigglings - instead of the plump, rotund, and slightly useless old men we're so fond of now. This process of kaizen-like writing is quite pure, and in its own way, quite organic, but there is a discipline factor to note. Pratchett doesn't break from his own continuity often, and given the general silliness of his universe he has a lot more leeway to do so than most.

My fiction is, I feel, better. I feel I have become more refined, more analytical, better, really, as a writer, thanks to my time writing for Starcity Games. I have to say, while it ended on a sour note, and it started off rocky, there was this period - where I was, admittedly, not writing alongside Rivien and the Battle Royale was in full swing - when I was having a hell of a lot of fun with it.

Ironically, it made me enjoy Magic less, as a game, but I loved the writing. I felt at times that some of the things I said were wasted, that some turns of phrase were too subtle, too clever, for my audience, and that was a vice; I should not think so little of those who read me. There are those, I am sure, who find me impregnable as a subject matter, but if anyone catches what I really mean, then perhaps it works. I know I shied from being too obvious.)

As writers and roleplayers, though, one thing we need to bear in mind is discipline. Many people say such silly things as: "I'm just playing the character, I'm just reacting how they would!" which fails to completely understand that their circumstances are utterly under our control. The example I cited was fairly simplistic, but consider the following ugly situation spiralling out:

Man gets drunk. Man drives home, drunk, and crashes his car, killing a passenger.

Now, a roleplayer could claim that because the man is an arrogant, proud sort, he wouldn't secede control of his car. Because he's an alcoholic, he'd totally get drunk. And because he's a good friend, his passenger might not doubt him. This seems to be the 'organic' way to handle this, the 'right' way. The thing is, both players might be quite annoyed by the way it's going to turn out, and it seems people are utterly unaware, utterly incapable of working out ways to circumvent these bad situations. If you don't want this situation to happen, dear roleplayer, you have many options available to you, options that are discrete and subtle and require no 'breaking character' to manage. You just need to remember that not only are the big things of a character's life under your sway, so are the small things.

If the man in the above example cannot find his keys, he cannot drive his car. If he cannot find his wallet, he cannot buy booze. If his friend is unconscious, he cannot get into the car. If his car fails, he cannot drive it. These are the many little serendipitous things that make up day to day life, and we, the players, control them.

Recently, a fellow roleplayer, a player in the organic school, voiced sadness that things were out of her control. I pointed out that they weren't; that she had the means to very much control her life, the means to step up and do more, to change the course things were on, and to take command. She earned so much of my respect by agreeing with me, by nodding and noting that, yes, funnily enough, she was not so helpless.

I have a serious grudge now against writers and roleplayers who deliberately act in a way that obstinately fails to take into account the responsibility they have to themselves and to others. I cannot say they should not do it, but I can say that I want nothing to do with them as players. If your plot is this wild, errant thing that you cannot control, cannot bring to a close, cannot force to a head, then I'm not going to play with you. If your games cannot achieve a point, cannot actually tell a story instead of cycling in their own constant, maudlin loop of not-quite-resolution, not-quite-conflict, time and time again, then I think you're a terrible GM and I have the right to hold that opinion. Hell, I believe it might even qualify as an expert opinion.

Remember: We are not helpless. We are all storytellers, we are all gods of our own little worlds. We need to stop acting like we aren't, as though being helpless and uncontrolled and irresponsible somehow is superior to being wise and clever and creative. There is nothing truly creative in just reacting - there is just doing what other people direct you to do, deliberately or otherwise. You're not creative, you're not a character - you're an NPC in your own story.

I return to my tower, to brood and think thoughtful thoughts.

It's really easy to write a tragedy. Pifflingly easy, really. Take one person and be mean to them. It's the basic skill we acquire during primary school and it serves us well throughout our lives. Better yet, if you use big words to do it and have a decent grip of song lyrics and metaphor, you can make the audience feel ''really'' rotten, make people feel ''really'' bad. Which makes them think you really clever, as if somehow evoking people to sympathy is somehow tricky.

It's a kind of amateurism. Tragedy is to writers as the pop song structure is for musicians. If you can't write even a half-decent tragedy, you either lack the stones to go through with being mean to a character, or, more damningly, you can't write a character people like. It's just about taking something the audience doesn't want to happen and making it happen. If you do it in a roleplaying community it's even easier to do because there are only two kinds of roleplayers: Those who care about other people's characters, and those who don't roleplay much any more.

Transformation is hard. You have to show the thing that was, then the thing that is. And you have to show how the thing that is and the thing that was are the same thing yet different things. You have to juxtapose; the common whore becoming the exalted princess, or, if your tastes go that way, the other way around. You have to keep enough of the original thing around that the new thing doesn't look too new, too impossible, too different. But you can't just put on a new coat of paint and claim it's a transformation. The audience are cleverer than that. They see through the mask. They see past the demonic possession, past the wings, through the chrysalis and they look at what hasn't changed. A transformation has to blend together the familiar and the foreign and it has to so in a way that makes the soul marvel.

One of the few ways to do that is to break it apart to remake it. Smash up the character, ruin their life! Destroy what they have, and break it apart! Then, in the ruins, start sifting through the pieces. Leave behind what you don't want, leave behind what you didn't like. Then put the other pieces together and fill in the blanks with the new stuff. A transformation in simplest terms.

Sad is easy. Sad is really easy to do because all you have to do is evoke something bad. People are naturally sympathetic and empathic - all you have to do is exploit that. Talk about an abusive father (because everyone has a father). Talk about rage issues or brain damage or childhood abuse. It's all ham-fisted and simplistic anyway. Might as well club your way to the point, eh? Look at him! His dad abused him emotionally! Since people have dads and people can imagine what it's like to be abused, that much is pretty simple, isn't it? A little dance to follow, a sweet little song. How simple and how easy.

Rape is way too easy. I'm sick of female characters who were rape victims. Not to devalue those of you who're using the device, but it's just too done, too tired, too du jour. Oh, wait, wait, she acts tough but she's tender inside? You have a veritable world of problems to inspire that, or better yet, you could make a character who actually WAS tough, who, on the inside, was just as tough!

Homage is tricky. Crafting a mirror of a character while not just making the same thing twice is hard and it's hard for the same reasons transformation is hard. No new lick of paint. It's easier to set them in place, mirror them up to the point of beginnings, then set them in a different direction.

Harder than Tragedy and Transformation is Optimism. Optimism is unfortunately confused with naivete by the intellectual. It's a crime, really - the notion that happiness and hope and joy and all such things are somehow only in the purview of the diseased or frail mind, as if somehow being glum and dour and unhappy makes things better. As if the truly cynical ever achieved something. No, the cynic clings to his cynicism like a child to his blanket, knowing that it's easier than trying, easier than hoping. This world in which we live is horrible, horrible, horrible, and that makes happiness, optimism, and joy so much more precious! It's hard to hope and harder still to dream. The cynic refuses to do either, thinking that he somehow has embraced the difficult aspect of life, heartening himself with a swell of selfish pride. Look at me, he muses, I am cynical and bitter and jaded! How brilliant a person I am, filled with disdain and spite. It is as if I have forgotten about all the joys in the world, all the beautiful things in life that I cannot bring myself to speak on. Doing so would chink my cynicism!

Cynicism is, at its core, a philosophy of hating people, and that can only be truly achieved by hating oneself. I can't bring myself to do that - the person I am has seen too much good in those people around me, too much beauty and purity and love to ever be able to fool myself into thinking I am worthless. I may feel worthless at time, I may at times grit my teeth and think of the mean things I have said, but I am not the fullness of one act, the completeness of one moment. I am many things and none all at once, and no man is without a redeemable trait in his own way.

(What is worth noting is that in any moral society, however, those redeemable traits should not be seen as somehow counterweights to the horror or the tragedy or the misery of the past. Just as one should not feel sympathy and sorrow for characters and people who visit their own harm on themselves. Those who wallow in their own misery deserve no sympathy, and those who strike out at those who help them time and time again have proven how badly they want their misery to remain in its unvarnished state.)

To write an optimist, you have to write someone who approaches the world with his eyes open. You have to write a sceptic - someone who will embrace evidence and proof and will not shy from what he can see. If he does not do these things, then he can be no optimist, he is merely ignorant; if he cannot see the bad and hope for the good, then you have, in fact, supplanted pure optimistic hope with naivete.

So you have a sceptic, a person who tastes reality. And then you have to have him, with neither crutch nor prop nor silly divine excuse, want for the better. And the world around him must not necessarily agree with him. There is a latitude the writer has, the means to render the world in a way that makes things convenient. We must shy from such things, for if the world adjusts to the characters, then it loses its ability to translate to our own, and can teach and share nothing.

No; to write an optimist requires an aware character in a bad world. And it requires that person to, knowing full well what they do, to want to make a difference. To want to make the world better. To want to, step by step by step, make the lives of others better even if only in silly incremental ways. To dream by degrees and to embrace reality for what it is, but to just as urgently push it towards what he or she knows that reality can be.

And then, just as readily, you have to reward him. Otherwise, you, the author are simply crafting someone to fail, making someone to suffer. And that is useful in its own way, but does it truly speak anything of optimism? Does it murmur in the mind of anything but bitter schadenfreude?

No; you have to write a world that fights the optimist, and you have to give him success. Because it is the way of the writer to create these circumstances. Perhaps they do not make the world better the way they wanted, perhaps they do not think it enough. Perhaps there is more to be done. But the little victories are vital. Making an optimist in this vein, then spending your time kicking him is simple masturbation - an exercise in flaunting how cruel you, the author can be to the character who has done nothing to deserve it. And again - it is rendering tragedy.

I want to write love stories and stories of hope and stories of silly boys who try as hard as they can to love those around them and who, one day, one day, receive that love in kind. I want to write stories about women who do not need a rapist father or a murderer mother to appreciate the value of being strong, of standing tall and for whom the strength of a woman is no different to the strength of being a man. I want to write stories about lonely people who find one another. I want to write fantastic stories about characters who have sex that the reader really thoroughly enjoys, one handed if they want.

And I'm sick of people looking down on these kind of stories.

Date:	2007-09-04 17:28
Subject:	Song Meme! (Fox head)
Security:	Public
Mood:	calm
Music:	Freemind, GrayLightning - Tears for a Girl (CT OC ReMix)

Reposting this from my dA because dammit, I think it's fun XP

Song meme from Rain on Pavement... I'm skipping the instrumentals, because I have heaps of score music and OCReMixes on my list, and it would suck to skip five or six songs because the randomisation was unfortunate XP

Rules: Put your MP3 player or whatever on shuffle and list a lyric from the first 25 songs that come up (without cheating) and invite people to guess the song. GOOGLING IS CHEATING.

I'm also skipping the instrumentals, because I have heaps of score music and OCReMixes on my list, and it would suck to skip five or six songs because the randomisation was unfortunate XP

(Update: I am the nerdiest person ever. Nobody else would stop to think, realise that she had missed the perfect chance to use an ordered list instead of numbering things manually, then coming rushing back to make it right. O Fox, you are a true geek.)

Here we go...

1. "Moshi tatoe kimi to kono mama/Sekai no nami ni sakarau dake da to shite mo..." (Without hesitation, I believe in this love and live on/I'll tightly embrace your unbandaged wound)


2. "I rope them in, and tie them up, and bind them legally..."
   (The Arrogant Worms - The Ballad of Dan - guessed by Matt)


3. "Portraits hung in empty halls, with eyes that watch the world and can't forget..."
   (Don McLean - Vincent - guessed by Fletch)


4. "We don't play ska anymore/'Cus it sucks."


5. "What's the point in not conforming/If it changes you?"


6. "Not the insight/Not the outlook/Not the vision/Just the eyes..."


7. "And sore eyes fight to stay asleep/'Cus I don't wanna leave the comfort of this place..."
   (Creed - Higher - guessed by OffSide7)


8. "All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me..."
   (Elvis vs. JXL - A Little Less Conversation - guessed by Fletch)


9. "I just run out of things to say/I know you'd understand..."


10. "We were only kids, but then/I've never heard it said/That kids can't fall in love and feel the same..."


11. "Say after me/It's no better to be safe than sorry..."
    (Reel Big Fish - Take On Me - guessed by br1)


12. "And the message on his tombstone reads, 'he took that bullet well'."


13. "He wouldn't fall in love with those girls."


14. "It is your sorrow that has made a slave of me..."


15. "I hope you're all taking notes, because there's gonna be a short quiz next period."
    (Tom Lehrer - The Elements - guessed by Matt)


16. "Oh no - take it all in, the world's a show/And yeah - you look much better/Look much better when you glow..."


17. "I told the priest, 'don't plan on any second coming/God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slummin''..."


18. "It hurts me so - I found out too late/She was born in nineteen eighty-eight..."


19. "I'm sure that I can fix it/When I figure out the physics..."


20. "I don't think you unworthy/I need a moment to deliberate..."


21. "Why you're guilty for the way you're feeling now/It's almost like being free..."


22. "Kono basho wo wakachi aeta koto/Itsu no hi ka hokoreru no deshou..." (We both understand this place/And one day we'll be proud of it)


23. "Neon moreunda hae-do na o-neul-man-keum-eun/Neo-wa ham-kke hal geo-ya..." (Even if you don't know it/I am spending the whole of today, just today, with you...)


24. "When you think you've had too much of this life, well hang on."
    (REM - Everybody Hurts - guessed by Fletch)


25. "Having children's noble, but, boy, are they a bore/Making art is special, but, fuck, is it a chore..."

The other day I was looking for some candles to light in the lounge room, out of an unusal desire for ambience, and I remembered the candleholder my mum gave us, which still had half-used tealights in it.

It wasn't until later that I remembered why; it's the one that was on our bridal table, and those candles are the same ones that burned on our wedding night. I wish I'd realised that beforehand, and saved them for an anniversary or something; it'd be like the whole "saving the fruitcake" tradition, only we wouldn't have to eat nasty fruitcake.

Still, it was a beautiful thing to think about, just for a moment.

Also... the down side of young love. I'm lucky beyond compare to have Talen at such an age, but at least if you don't meet until 40, you've only got another fifty years or so to worry about all the horrible shit that could happen to them. I've got like sixty. I'm not really scared of anything, but I can lie awake at night trying to stop imaging what could happen to him.

(o_o);;;

Alright, I know other people have their own characters they'd like to run... but I think it'd be really neat if we gave Manticore's task force a try this weekend?

Also, Laurel, Steelcat and Knight Rain are both in the Faultline plotline, so if people want to sidekick up some lowbies and bash on some AVs, that'd be good, too.

So the call is out! Who wants to do what, with what characters?