Magical animal

Today I learned that if you slice it thin enough, and cook it long enough, ham still does not satisfy a craving for bacon.

You'd think, coming from the same animal, that you could make it work. But no, you can't.

Pity. I have lots of ham, but sadly no bacon.

And no, this is not a metaphor for anything. It's about my lunch.

Meeting word count quota is easy...if you cheat

Today I learned it's very easy to double your daily word quota when you can steal half of them from something you've already written.

I restarted my novel from page one on the first of January, giving myself a 1000 word daily quota.
I'm using the Don't Break The Chain method to keep track of my progress, and so far I've got one two-day break in my chain, yesterday and the day before.

But today is January 13, and I've got 23,000 words written on "The Crack of Venus: The Secret History of How Galileo Galileo Saved the World in the Year 1633" -- that's almost double my quota even with two skipped days.

Of course, much of that is adapted from previous drafts of the story, so it's kinda cheating.

But hey, whatever works.

Incidentally, I'm really liking the way it's flowing now. It's a book I'd enjoy reading, which is really the only benchmark of quality that I can apply. It's not for everyone, but it is for me -- why would I want to write anything else?

Nerd alert

Today I learned that throughout my youth I was role playing with the wrong people.

I should have been playing D&D with these guys.

Atonement is boring

Today I learned that Keira Knightley has no boobs. No, wait, I already knew that.

Today I learned that film reviewers are not to be trusted. Atonement is heavily lauded by the film reviewer types, yet I walked out of it feeling a lot like Elaine on Seinfeld at a screening of The English Patient.

Come to think of it, the reviewers loved that movie too, and it was also boring as shit. A lot of similarities between the two, really.

I guess in its defense, Atonement is a chick flick. I'm sure if you liked The Notebook, you might also enjoy Atonement.

I didn't.

Half-Life 2 is a very good game

Today I learned that I really should try to keep up with the times. Half-Life 2 came out, what, over 3 years ago, and I only got around to playing it now.

And it's the best computer game I've ever played.

Don't get me wrong, there's something special about the Grand Theft Auto series -- those are some good games -- but they're uneven. For me, the fun of those games comes from just driving around and doing stuff. The actual scripted game, in all its pseudo-non-linearity, is secondary.

But this Half-Life 2...it's completely linear, but I love that about it. It works because the whole thing is so cinematic, it's like participating in a movie. A really good movie that's full of action, suspense, surprises...it's awesome.

The level design is out of this world. I just can't believe how well designed this game is. And although it's linear in that there's only one way through, it doesn't feel that way a lot of the time because of how much is happening. Many times you want to stop and admire what's going on around you, but you can't because people are chasing you and the adrenaline's pumping and you just have to keep going.

The puzzles are also excellent. Tricky, but not frustrating. There's always enough clues to work out what needs to be done. Always enough health and ammo, but not too much that you're not constantly worried about running out. A good assortment of enemies that increase in difficulty enough that it never gets boring.

So many games just get boring out of repetition, and try to increase difficulty by making the badguys annoyingly difficult to fight or by throwing a crapload at you all at once. Half-Life 2 manages to avoid this, and that's wonderful.

The innovation of the "gravity gun" opens up a whole bunch of possibilities for puzzles and obstacles. You can pick things up at a distance with the gravity gun and bring them to you. Then you can either drop them, or hurl them away. Or you can shoot a pulse of energy against something nearby to smash it/hurl it. Simple mechanics, but man, they can be used so many creative ways.

And it plays smoothly, looks simply incredible (even with the graphics turned down on my antique machine), and the audio is terrific too. Really great voice acting, with a top notch script too. Good music. Good ambient sound.

There a vehicles too, and unlike most games of this type that have vehicles, they don't suck. They're fun, challenging but not frustrating, and add a really vibrant element to the game's story as well as the gameplay itself.

There's just nothing to complain about with this game, except that it took me over three years to play it, and after it there are two more sequel chapters to play.

People have been telling me to play this game for years; I'm glad I finally listened to them.

Auto Repair: damned if you do, damned if you don't

Today I learned that replacing the gas tank on your car can be expensive, but it's still less than what I imagine it would eventually cost by not replacing it. All it takes is one guy wandering past and tossing a cigarette butt and...

Eventually it's going to reach the point that it's no longer worth repairing it. After all, it's 13 years old with over 310,000 kilometers on it; it owes me nothing. But as much as I can't afford to keep fixing it right now, I can less afford replacing it, so it shall continue to be held together with band-aids and duct-tape until something changes.

Let's hope the change that comes is the ability to get a new car, not the necessity of it.

Boxers + Longjohns = Bunchy

Today I learned that boxer shorts underneath long underwear are not comfortable.

Not So Bad A Writer After All

Today I learned I'm not such a bad writer.

It all began when my computer warned me I'm running out of hard-drive space. In cleaning things up, I found a folder that contained all my personal files from the computer I owned before the computer before this computer. Which is to say, the computer I got in 1993 when I moved to Guelph.

Them was some old files in there. Old, and largely forgotten.

Among certain files of note was one containing a smattering of poetry, the best of which I sadly did not compose but were simply poetic things my friend Grog blurted out that I transcribed, such as:

"Facts of Life"
Lenin, look at him
He was a bad mother fucker
Look at the shit he did

And:

"Some Women I Know"
No eloquent son of a bith am I
They have big hairy balls
The size of coconuts

That's good stuff there. I wrote some poems too, but I won't quote mine, since they suck. I am definitely a writer of prose, not poems.

I was heavily into conspiracy theories at the time, and I wrote a Theory of Conspiracism too. It wasn't a real theory, but rather more of a story about a guy who wrote the theory where the story is told almost entirely through footnotes inserted into the theory's text. It's interesting. It's not great, although there are moments I really like. But looking back through the mist of a decade, I can really feel how I was trying to find my voice then. I remember exactly when I wrote it: I'd just sold my hemp store, and didn't have another job yet, and had gone off the Prozac, and was actively trying to find myself.

Like I said, it's interesting.

I wrote more stuff about the guy who wrote the theory, too. He was Professor William Needle, based on an old pseudonym I used to write under. I still use the name all the time, in various ways. Anyway, I think the best was the abortive convocation speech he supposedly gave when accepting an honourary degree. The degree was revoked shortly after he was dragged from the stage before he could finish his speech, hence its abortive nature. I think I'll post that one over at my LiveJournal.

There was also the novel I began writing behind the counter at the hemp store, called Morph. It's about a guy in Waterloo in the late 90's who owns a computer store; one weekend he takes some strange drugs and never comes down from the halucinatory buzz.

The very best line from it goes like this: "Language fails me like an aging Volvo, that is to say suddenly, permanently, but not altogether unexpectedly."

I really like that. You can taste the Douglas Adams influence right there.

Anyway, I was pleased to find that the stuff I wrote over a decade ago still amuses me. Theoretically, the stuff I write now should be even better, although at the time I'm writing it it never feels that way.

Apparently, a lot of writers experience the same thing.

But the timing of my discovery, that after some time I can appreciate my own work, was fortuitous. I began the new year by starting the new novel I've been working on anew. Again. I realized some time ago that the thing holding me back from finishing it was the voice I'd chosen to write in. The narrative voice was godlike; in fact, it was meant to be God telling the story. But I wasn't having fun with it, and a new way of telling the story occurred to me and excited me.

I'm using my own voice. Imagine that. And yes, Professor Needle now has a role to play in it too.

So I'm energized to keep going with this one until I finish it, and to help me I'm using Jerry Seinfeld's "Don't Break the Chain" method. I'm using a calendar and checking off each day I write, the idea being that over time there will be a long chain of checked days, and I'll keep writing something every day just so that there won't be any breaks in that chain.

Conveniently, there's a Don't Break the Chain gadget for Google homepage so I can see my pretty chain every time I open Firefox. Sweet.

You know, I think I might even use Google Documents to write it, too.