Shane's Blurty

Subject:	Ninja not quite vanish
Time:	7:18 pm.

58 days is a long time to go without an entry.

Part of the reason, I suppose, is this simple fact – I have another journal.

It’s true. I update it only slightly more than I update this one.

But – and here’s the kicker – both have very similar entries. Which means they tend to be pretty redundant.

So the question is, what exactly am I going to do about that?

I’m not completely sure, to be honest. But I hope to have my mind made up by the weekend.

I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	My Obit
Time:	1:27 pm.

This is from my old team.

Effective June 9, 2003

wataru of ___, IT Group, New Accounts Team has passed on to that Programming Team in Storage Capacity we know as the Conversion Team. Paul will be remembered by his former teammates for his sick sense of humor, his interest in death and the occult, and a morbid delight in anything that has to do with Zombies or various other quasi-dead beings. We will miss his Gothic outlook and knowledge of Medieval History and culture; we just don’t know why we will miss it. Since we no longer are able to blame things on SNAFU (Systems normal, Andy F_____ up) we will now be able to blame everything on Paul (we know he left a Gremlin in the system and we won’t forget it). We truly regret that we will never get to find out if Paul knew any jokes other than sick ones. Programmers have nightmares; Paul was a nightmare. May his code rot in storage and infect all it comes in contact with.

And now - my response to the whole affair

Ok, first off, my interest in death and the occult – purely professional. Also, my delight is limited to zombies, and does not include other “quasi-dead beings” for matters of personal taste.

Gothic outlook? Please. I took one of the Goth tests – I’m a low 24% Goth if my memory serves.

Little do they know the Gremlin is not going to actually do anything dangerous. It’s just going to leave a strange smelling funk in the mainframe. Don’t look at me like that – he needed a place to stay and I have three cats with sensitive noses.

My code will not rot – it’s been carefully embalmed.

And I do know jokes that aren’t sick. Here –

What did the fish saw when he swam into the concrete wall?

Dam.

HA! I kill me.

Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Exposition
Time:	10:11 am.

I adhere to a sporadic update schedule, don’ I?

Last week ended fairly quietly. I finished more things up here at work. Took the on call pager for the last flippin’ time on Friday. Today, round about 2:00 pm, I hand it off and I never have to see it again. Hopefully, at least.

This whole week has been fairly quiet here at work. One things does bear mentioning as far as work goes, though – Tuesday.

Tuesday is the normal day for the team meeting for New Accounts. I was told to attend this one last meeting. I walk in, sit down, and am immediately told that the team wants to go get ice cream as a mini “been great working with you / get the hell off our team you freak” party. So we load up and head out to this ice cream parlor called Graeters down the road.

I can recommend the peanut butter chocolate chip. And the Black raspberry chocolate chip. One scoop of each in a waffle cone….ah, bliss.

I’m given a little obit, to mark my passing. It was pretty funny – once I get home I’ll post the highlights.

I might almost miss these guys. Except for the fact that I’m not really going anywhere and I’ll still be sitting next to most of them, of course.

Home the past week and a half has been fairly quiet as well. I’ve been talking with some of my friends a lot, mostly about life problems and issues and such. Mine and theirs. A lot of theirs. Things seem to be looking better, at the moment.

I gave my cats a flea bath last Sunday. I need to do the whole apartment – flea bombs, flea powder for the carpet, another flea bath, some flea treatment of some sort. I’m not sure if that will happen this weekend or next though.

That’s all for now.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Stepping out of the shadows.
Time:	12:35 pm.

Wow, almost a full two weeks without an entry.

Since the rejection e-mail there hasn’t been a lot of interesting stuff to happen. There’s been interesting stuff, mind you, but a lot of it falls under one specific category that I’ll tell you about in a minute.

First the mundane stuff.

My CD collection is still being sifted through, but now that I got rid of my old ISP, I can start gathering together the songs that I want off a bunch of the CD’s and thin it out a lot more. I still need a bookcase though – just need to figure out where to put it.

Work is work, as most people would guess. There’s isn’t a lot to report there, really – I’ve gotten some stuff done, I’ve been given more stuff to do. I’m taking of next Thursday and Friday so I can go home.

thewriter01 and her husband are having a small ceremony at their church for their 5th anniversary, and they invited the best man. But since he’s sick, I’m going instead.

Kidding. I’m the best man.

Speaking of

thewriter01, she has a couple of things for me to read over and critique for here. I’ll probably see about doing that this weekend sometime. I’m also planning on re-witting that zombie story I posted a while back – that is probably going to be a Sunday or Monday thing. Today, though, I’ve got a little shopping to do – my sister wants me to grab her some hematite rings – and then it’s off to the movies. I’m probably going to see Identity, and later today my nephew and I are going to check out Matrix Reloaded again. I might try and squeeze another movie in there too. Or I’ll just walk over to Barnes and Noble and sit among the books. Mmmmm….books…..

There’s no such thing as too many books.

That’s the mundane stuff. Now on to the good stuff.

( I made a new friend )

That’s all for now, folks. Since I won’t be doing much over the next couple of days, I’ll try and make updates a little more frequently. And I’ve got a weird little bit of prose I’ll post in a few too. I keep looking at it and thinking “post-apocalyptic romance.” I don’t know why – there isn’t enough there to call it that. But still, the idea is there.

Of course, I think the world needs a series of Lovecraft style horror-romance novels, but that’s just me.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Dubiously Cool
Time:	11:33 am.

Yesterday, I received my first ever rejection slip for something I wrote.

Oddly, this makes me happy.

Mainly because it wasn't that horrifying an experience. The story in question was for a superhero anthology. After I had sent it off, I began to wonder if it was a proper 'fit' for what the publishers were looking for. There's a lot of potential in the story, and as a result, there's a lot of loose ends. Lots of things that could happen that don't happen, things that I alluded to that would probably make for a better story if I focused on them a bit more. The story is slowly spawning it's own little niche in my head, the characters getting more detailed, the situations expanding. I like how the story is growing. But - for the purposes outlined in the anthology, it isn't quite where it needs to be. So - my first rejection slip.

And that's ok. It's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the story. Its a good story, and it will get told. It just needs a little more work.

Still, I got my first rejection slip.

Cool.

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Opening Scene
Time:	11:22 am.

Amazingly enough, there are actually a couple of things that may be at least moderately interesting that happened in the last few days. Let see.

1) First and foremost, I'm switching ISP's. I've got a couple more things to do before it's officially done - switch over my address book, for example, and alert the people on my IM lists. At least the ones I can still get in contact with. This doesn't really have an effect on this journal, though.

2) Found out that there is a chance that I will be transferring to a new team here at work. This is good, to a point - no more on-call pager, but I'd need to work the occasional weekend. Nothing is official, but my name came up in conversation. I'm kinda hopeful.

3) I've been working (half-heartedly, I'll admit) on a resume and work sample for a game designer in Canada. I've almost got the sample finished. The reason I'm only working half-heartedly is that, even if I get offered a position, I don't know if I could take it for financial reasons. Then there's the move, which would be north and 2 time zones west of here. And I don't know if I could get the cats across the border. Still, I'd like to try.

4) Saw X2. Twice. I like it. I dub this yet another good superhero movie. Not as good as Spider-Man, but hey, they tried. Besides, I'm biased - I'm a webhead.

5) I share an apartment with my nephew while he's in college. He gave me rent - for 5 months. Which allowed me to pick up a new bookcase without wondering if I'd make all the bills this month, and that is a good thing. I rearranged the books as well, and I need one more bookcase. Currently, I've got a stack (more like four or five stacks) in the floor that consists of Tolkein, Harry Potter (which I still need to read at some point), and Lovecraft (fishy goodness). Plus then I need to figure out what to do with the paperbacks.

I picked up two CD's over the weekend too - DJ Krush "The Message at the Depth" and Sophie B. Hawkins "Tongues and Tails". I grabbed the DJ Krush disc for the song "Aletheuo (Truthspeaking)". The Sophie B. Hawkins disc? I had the tape and I enjoyed it. I listened to it this morning here at work. I played out a fight for a story while listening to one of the slower songs on the album - superbeings fighting while a slow (roughly 80 beast per minute, for the musical types) love song plays in the background. It worked. Trust me.

I read a lot of webcomics. For anyone who's looking for something funny, well written, and sometimes sick and twisted (gotta love sick and twisted), check out Something Positive. Perhaps you've heard of it.

That's all I have for the moment.

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Establishing Shot
Time:	7:20 pm.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't adhere to any sort of update schedule.

So it's been, what, a week since my initial post. Little has happened so far. The main highlights of the week can be boiled down to four things.

1) Started clearing out my CD collection. I've pulled about 30 or so that I have no further want for, and about 100 more that I only want a song or three from. So, once I get those songs, my collection will be down to about 2/3 its original size.

2) Made work for myself at work. This is actually a good thing, because I bore easily at work. I program for a living - nothing exciting though. I work at a credit card company for private label cards - store cards basically. There's a particular portion of the system that should be rewritten. I've brought it up several times. I finally got tired of mentioning it and just asked if I could go ahead and do it. So now I won't be bored for a day or three. Hopefully.

3) Finished a story. It's a zombie story. It has icky parts, but not a lot. Most of it is just a little fun with an interesting idea I had about why zombies come back. Why was I thinking about zombies, you ask? I like zombies. And spiders.

Yes, I realize that makes me a freak. I appreciate your noticing it, actually - I do try, after all.

4) Got a challenge from a friend of mine,

thewriter01, to write a "noble, honorable, and heroic zombie story". As in the zombie is the noble one. She doesn't think it can be done. Little does she know. Heh-heh-heh.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Fade In
Time:	8:15 pm.

Greetings and Salutations.

I've never been all that good at writing journal entries. Probably because nothing much goes on in my life. I tend to think that very few people outside of myself would care to know whats going on in it - and those that would care usually hear about it over the phone.

As such, I can't guarantee that the content of this journal will be all that interesting. I've heard that writers are interesting, but I'm thinking that is a myth.

And for the record, my nickname here in the Blurty-verse is Wataru, which is short for one of the characters in a story I'm working on, which, as

thewriter01 mentioned, is Wataru Jones, Two Fisted Ninja. So, while I myself am not all that ninja-y (not at the moment at least), for the duration of my stay, anyone who cares can call me Wataru.

Or Shane. Either / or is good.

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Blurty for Shane.

View:	User Info.
View:	Friends.
View:	Calendar.
View:	Memories.
You're looking at the latest 9 entries.