And Then

Feb. 21st, 2012 08:22 pm
ravenswept: (Default)
So you know when you ask a little kid to tell you a story, and often it involves little more than just whatever they make up right then and there? That's the concept behind And Then.

Part story, part MST3K, part meta, AT would be a short children's book where anything can and will... make no sense. Ideally it would have lots of pictures, as part of the fun of the story would be seeing what's being told at the same time as things get changed due to story convience.

It would most likely start fairly simply, a young boy is asked to tell a story. So he starts simply, a boy on a farm. Who decides to become a hero. With his pet dog. Who is really a wolf. Who is really big enough to ride on. Because horses are for girls.

He decides to go slay a dragon. Because that's what heros do. And then the dragon comes to him!

A big green dragon?

It's not a green dragon. It's gold.

Why gold

Because. And they fight! And the dragon opens his mouth and-

Breathes fire.

No! A cannon appears! Because it's not a real dragon! It's a flying pirate ship that only looks like a dragon.

And so on and so forth. And yes, the idea would be that the "adult" being told said story interjects here and there just to question the train of logic of a five year old; the pictures, when not picturing the story, would be from our, the reader's, point of view, so we're looking down at our story teller from time to time.

Spoiler warning, if you really care enough, the ending would ideally be a non-ending. The whole things just builds and builds til it's a huge two-page or more spread of a epic battle of awesome until the kid just runs out of steam with,

"And then... and then... everything exploded.

...

BOOM!" with his hands up, laughing, running around and out the door. The last bit would have the kid leaning in from the door long enough to say "TheendI'mgonnaplayoutsidenow,okaybye."

Yeah. That's it. That's my latest story idea.

....

BOOM!
ravenswept: (Default)
Seriously? Seriously? What the hell is going on, because I thought I got a new computer so this kinda shit would stop happening.

I got a virus - the oh-so fun "This is really your computer, and you have a virus, you should totally download this program you never had before to get rid of it, and oh, if you don't, I will never let you actually access the internet again, LOLthnxL8r" virus (also known as the Win7 virus), right before the New Year. Took it it, had it fixed, didn't take three days.

Not 2 half-assed days later, same fucking virus. And it's not like I was cruising any questionable sites or anything, this was just my daily jog; sites I visit regularly. Sites I don't get virus' from.

It took Best Buy over 3 goddamn weeks to finally "fix" it; I put up the parathesis, because I only got an email saying they were actually getting to it a week before I finally got it back.

SERIOUSLY? Why so long? The first time was almost nothing, and I've had to take my computer (old one) in before too and it has never taken this long. Was it because I actually bought the warrenty/repair program? I'm being fucking punished for brining my computer in? Is there a limit to how many times I can bring my shit in to get fixed before you actually do it right? Does the time frame expand expontentially the more often I bring it in? Will it take 2 months next time?!

And now, to top it off, I'm currently in a Barnes&Noble because for some odd ass reason, the neighbors wifi connection (which I have permission to use, mind you) either isn't on or my computer won't connect to. Which it never had problems with before my having taken it in. It can find other wireless networks (all of which are protected, paranoid neighbors), but not the one next door.

Fuck this month.

Screw 2011

Jan. 1st, 2012 06:30 pm
ravenswept: (Default)
Well... what a year.

I'm ready to forget it for the most part.

Not that it was "bad" so much as there was a lot of backtracking more than forward movement. I didn't hit bottom, but numerically I did hit zero, and half way through the year had to restart myself.

And really, I think that's what I'm going to do with 2012; restart myself. Nothing drastic, but a sense of making myself stronger. There's a lot of crap I went through over the past year that I wouldn't have had I just not... "been myself" seems harsh, but there were better ways of handling it. And now I'm in more a position to make happen what I want.

I'll do a full year review later, but for now here are, not resolutions, but things I want to make happen:

- Become more confident

- Focus my attention

- Fear less

- Act sure

- Direct

- Focus

Abstract, but still specific. There's a lot to do, and time keeps seeming to pick up speed.
ravenswept: (Default)
Well, shit.

I am not happy. This thing, a life thing, that I'd been aiming and shooting for has just decided that I cannot make good decisions in life and fucked me sideways while singing. Shit.

Strangely, I don't feel much either way about it for some reason. I should, the above says that I have something bubbling under the surface, but for as much as I want to punch a penguin I'm not really feeling up to giving a crap. Huh, apathy. Who knew?

So, instead of regailing you with emotasticness about how my life sucks and I can do no right, I will instead complain about women.

Women suck.

You know why? Choice. They have it. And as a male, I don't like that they do. It's not fair, why doesn't my opinion matter in all this? Granted, I'm a nameless peon and have no real say or voice in the matter, but a little symbolism of representation wouldn't hurt the cause, right? Oh, whatever, just because there's so many places a woman can go that a man can't does not mean anything. What happened to equality and all that? Oh, wait, that's only when women want to be equal to men, but when a man wants to have the same varity of clothes in his closet, fuck you, go to the pants and t-shirt aisle you damn male!

...what? I'm talking about fashion and men's lack of clothing options.

What did you think I was talking about? Weirdo...

But yeah, I love fashion. No enough to keep up with it, but from an artistic point of view (and I range pretty heavily on the asethic scale of looks) men get the short shaft of that world. Women: blouses, shirts, suits, shoes, shorts, skirts, pants, dresses, seperates, accessories, hats, shoes, ankle, kneehigh, thighhigh, wraps, shoes, etc. Men: pants, shirts, suits, shoes (single), and shorts.

I know I've massively understated and oversimplified it all, but when you think about it, there's really not a lot you'll see men where. T-shirts are everywhere, suits are worn to the office, and jeans are the easy to wear. Shorts too for warmer weather (longer if you're crazy or have no thermal nerves). And even with all that, there doesn't tend to be a lot of variety in terms of colors, prints, or cuts.

Women's fashion, however, is a multitude of color and whimsy. It's not just how one piece lenghtened or shortened can change the whole look, it's that that single piece can be paired with any number of other garmets. Men have pants; rare is the male (outside of Scotland) brave enough to wear the kilt. And I won't really dignify the manskirt. But women have any number of leg covering options, which in turn come in a larger number of fabrics, which in turn come in a spread of colors and designs.

I love shows like Project Runway where they create clothing from nothing; and sometimes given the materials, the designers would prefer nothing. I enjoy the creativity, how things you wouldn't think to use can create beautiful designs, how the same basic silouette can be altered again and again with just a few snips or a change of fabric. And then, just to fuck with their heads, a menswear challenge will rear its head and it's always the same thing, "I do not design for men." "This isn't what I do."

Really? This is what we get, pants, a shirt, maybe a jacket? And for some reason it's more fearful to make these pretty standard and basic clothing items for a man than it is the womans?

Part of the annoyance is walking down any sales street or mall or even a Target and seeing the size difference between what space is alotted for menswear and what is alotted for womens. The larger portion always goes to the womens clothing, because they have so much more choice. And specialty stores aren't even worth mentioning. For every Mens Warehouse, there are Raves, Forever XXI, Claires, Victoria's Secret, and some no name boutique.

Going back to design, it strangely is really hard to find good clothing options that look good on men. Women can flirt around with how much skin they show to look good. Men usually don't look all that hot trying to apply the same thought process to what they wear.

All this reflects back on culture, how people are raised, how the world is, how people see each other, and it's all a big clusterfuck. Should people be so caught up on labels and such that it hinders them from wearing what they want? No, but it's not likely to change. Would I wear a dress? Not unless there's a good amount of money riding on it.

Another thing that's irksome? The fact that women can and do wear mens clothes and can wear them just as well as their own, but men cannot do the same. Your girlfriend wears a pair of your boxer-briefs and a dress shirt and nothing else; sexified. Your boyfriend squeezes into your thong and semibra; well, how much you do you really like him? More practically, it's possible for a female to wear any range of items made for for a guy and still look good. But because of cut, sizing, and bevy of other considerations, the same cannot be said the same of men wearing that which was made for the female form.

I don't begrudge women for have the range of options they do, but I do wish that mens options weren't so limited based on what they think they have to adhere to.
ravenswept: (Default)
*preface note* i'm well aware of the implications lj has proposed with their soul selling whore-like actions media expansion to include twit and fb inclusion, but choose to trust in those who read my journal. granted, i'm not going to be quite as open, writing wise, but i'm not going to stop writing here*

Inner child doesn't mean being pregnant )

I will keep the kid side of me close to the top. There's no reason to bury it just because you grow up.

Empty

Jul. 23rd, 2010 10:55 pm
ravenswept: (Default)
Remember that post a few posts back, when I depressed the hell out of myself because I let my brain run to long on its own? Yeah, I seem to have the opposite problem right now.

I got nothing. Well, not true, there's thoughts, ideas, stupid short stories that I'm starting to get pissed about getting, when I have bigger projects that need work, but I let out anyway because I figure if I just go with the flow, they won't take up any more disk space and I can focus on other things, but right now...nothing.

Nothing I want to write about. Nothing that'd be interesting. It's a weird sense of wanting to just sit on the couch and stare at a blank TV until I fall asleep, all because I don't have the want to do anything better.

All this? Stream of conscious, only way to get anything down. And bloody difficult, that want to just veg and do nothingness makes typing harder than it should be.

And it whole experience right now is strange, because I do have things I could be working on. There's a short something or other, involving another nameless, faceless person, sitting alone in a room with a bottle of wine and a gun. Tigress is skimming along, most of the fixed outline is near complete. I actually have an outline for the still unnamed noir story, hopefully that takes off.

But I don't want to work on them, any of them. I don't want to force it, I've seen what happens when I attempt that. And it sucks. Sucks hard. This whole feeling does, it can go away anytime now.

One thing of note, if you want to call it that, is apparently I'll have to really bring out the big guns should I decide to go any further with that attempt horror story. That one, just a few entries downward. Yeah, I posted it on [livejournal.com profile] a_soc_k to see what kind of reaction I'd get off it, and god damn we have some jaded readers out there.

I can't say I blame them, I'm not too happy with it myself, looking back. Bad experiment, I think, trying to capture in a first-person perspective entirely in dialog. That, and following Saw, Hostel, and (don't blame me if you look this up, [livejournal.com profile] limiinal is the one who pointed me towards it) The Human Centipede, I'd have a lot of work making it something that actually be scary, or at least frightening. Especially in words, there are details that just are so much more... squicky when seen visually.

And Clive Barker has already beaten me to that punch. Hellraiser and all that.

But I'm starting to think I'm getting settled in first-person a bit. It's easy, falling into the mind of someone else. Not easy, always, getting that into words, but it's fun trying to convey how this person thinks, without actually saying it. Which is why I like the noir story more, it's a strange and fascinating dynamic where what she says and what she's thinking are often two different things. Or opposite things. Or the same, but still a lie. Maybe it helps that I know how it ends.

Okay, I've rambled enough. I mainly wanted to get something down here, I missed my self-appointed Wed deadline. I'd feel bad if I missed two in a row. Maybe.
ravenswept: (Default)
Know what sucks about liking soda so much? You drink too much, are still awake at one o'something in the morning, with only the sounds of a fan blowing not-so-cool air around the apartment and what I imagine to be the smoking, and possibly high, hippie-like neighbors laughing much too loudly even though it's against complex sound ordinance, and thereby letting yourself think much too long about things that will only get you down.

I'm not where I want to be. Few people are, and future ambitions aside that's not what I meant. At the moment, I'm waiting to hear back from the state licensure after much too fucking long so that I can go to work. I can't work without that license, so I'm stuck doing nothing until then...well, okay, not entirely true, but I have a job lined up already. My saved cash is running out, and I'm on a shoe-string budget as is. My writing isn't coming as smoothly as one could hope, which isn't so much a thing, being I'm not currently making money from it, but it's not helping.

And, of course, all this is when my Jeep window decides that it's going to burn out the motor while the window is "down", so now I'm ghetto fabulous with a trash-bag window.

I moved out from Washington D.C. in late March to Portland, OR, to be roommates with my best friend who I roommated with a few years previous. In D.C. I was more or less scabbing, living with my grandfather, rent free, while I went to school to try to do something more with my life than live at home (again, long story) and work a full-time job/part-time hours serving job; a job I had just quit, rather than let my budding sociopathy bear fruit and unleash all those nice little comments I hold back when you crack a stupid joke about the special or attempt to be witty to a server who, really, could care less. See, I've been out three years and still it comes back rather quickly.

I moved to Portland to attempt to be more...I dunno, adult. Parents aren't close enough to turn to if I need help, no family at all in the same state (well, not entirely true, I had an uncle who lived here, but I didn't know that until he had already passed away years ago, but I barely knew even him, so his family don't even register to me), a best friend who has his own issues and worries, and rent to pay. Hurrah, hurrah.

In the middle of it all, I find myself, in the damning quiet of not having anything to distract me, trying to figure out what I want. Not just for myself, but what is it I'm going for.

No girlfriend; I feel socially awkward as is, and while I can blend in fine with you normies, actually striking up a conversation with a female has never exactly been my forte. I can fake it, I can even flirt in fact, but actually making any move of substance; not exactly where I shine. I've only had one previous girlfriend, and that was a pretty serious relationship...for what it was, looking back at it, I was massively unmature enough to understand a lot of it. But it was what it was, and I still care for her, though not that way. We split on good terms, and hell, I jumped at the chance to have the honor of marrying her to her husband (good guy, fellow geek) when she announced she was engaged. Also, I had no money for a gift, really wanted to give them something meaningful, and it helped reconnect with her again. Somehow I ended up getting a gift from them for officiating, I'm still not quite sure how that works out but anyway...

Hell, I don't having many people I could even call "friend". My roommate is my best (male) friend, for all his pluses and minuses. My best (female) friend is one state up, I really need to get up to visit her come to think of it, and unfortunately we don't talk enough. What friends I still have from highschool are mostly names on Facebook now, those I made at work pretty much stay "work friends", of those work friends all of them are in different states now, and I'm too much a shy bastard to actively go out and meet people. An extrovert, I am not. Internet friends are internet friends, you take as much from them as there is. Some you know, some you think you know, others you delude yourself into saying their friends, but too many are just names that aren't theirs and words on a screen you have to try to place a face and voice to, and often there isn't one.

Geez, I tried to write this out to get it off my chest, when is the healing supposed to begin, eh?

But then again; words on a screen. When you don't actually talk to someone, nobody's really listening.

I think I need to not think for a minute.
ravenswept: (Default)
Being told you're smart is annoying. Yes, it feels good to know that others acknowledge the fact that you can retain what you've learned well and apply it to a given situation, but that doesn't mean you always need to hear it. You know you're smart. Shut up. Too often it feels like the person telling you is trying to guilt you into something. You aren't doing enough with your life, you could be in a better job, you aren't applying yourself to higher things. Hey, guess what? Not everyone wants more. Or at least not the more that you want. I'm sorry if you feel you've stalled out in life, but just because I may have the intelligence to have gone further doesn't mean I'm in a situation that would allow me to do so; or even if I was, I may be perfectly happy where I am.

I don't think that had anything to do with what I'm trying to say.

Rationalization. I consider myself fairly intelligent, and given enough foreknowledge and fact about a certain subject I feel I can often rationalize almost anything. I can play out scenerios hundreds of times with tiny changes that alter the entire outcome. I'll reverse engineer a decision or plotpoint and come up with why they went with that. But this is also annoying as hell.

This ability has gotten me into...well not direct, but has given me trouble in my life, in both personal and in my writing. The ever present "what if" hangs over my head constantly, and has me second-guessing myself as to whether or not I made the right decision. I know I've lost out on several occasions in my life that would have otherwise been much different had I just made up my mind, or not worried about the "what if" and instead focused on the "what now" actually presented. When I try to write, if I don't have a set idea of what I want, I'll have the scene playing like a movie in my head again, and again, and again, with those hundreds of tiny changes I mentioned and I don't get anything done because I don't know what is the best version to go with.

But when something is already done and over with, I can back track and see what might have been. This is the whole "twenty-twenty hindsight", knowing that the other choice would have been better, but more than that really. Knowing how a person reacts, or will react, can alter how you work with the choice already made. I'll look back and see that, had I just done this a little different, I would be slightly better off.

This whole thing makes planning ahead difficult, because I want to have it all set before me. If I do this, I want this to happen; should I say this, I want this person to react just so. If I go two spaces forward, I want the oppose to move backwards diagonially left. And to a certain degree I can predict what will come, and rolling with the variables is part of the whole game, but it skews the decided upon idea sideways, and then I'm left trying to get this whole thing either back on track or at least as close to where I want as I can.
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I haven't written in while...I'm assuming this, I'm lazy enough that I won't even check when my last post was. I believe this to be for a couple of reasons. Reason A, being that I haven't had the time for the past few weeks dealing with pre-Christmas life, and Reason 2 that I hate writing about my lack of writing about what I'd rather be writing about.

Let's see, what's changed in the past few days that nobody reading will care about; lost half my job right before Christmas (yay). That wasn't unexpected, and really I'm not feeling it that bad, but still it sounds depressing to write. I'm not sweating it, shifts at my primary employment will increase (and have, I don't know why I'm speaking in the past tense) and I'll actually be making more money.

Christmas came and went, and whoop-dee-fucking-doo. This year was not a holiday sharing mood for me, and I really wasn't feeling like hugs all around. I went out to my parents place, enjoyed the quite of the country; can't believe I forgot how peaceful it is out there. Got a few cool things, but we kept it small so there wasn't like major presents given or received. I did score a laptop carrier. Trying to find one for a 17" screen is harder then it sounds.

Then, I've decided, there are my New Year resolutions. Sitting down and thinking it out, I think I really need to set some goals for myself. I remember back in school, doesn't matter what year you pick, the teacher(s) would always assign you the chore of picking resolutions for yourself, and you would go and make a list to turn in so that you'd get whatever arbitrary grade they were giving. They were things that sounded good, but really you had no intention of doing. I look back and wonder why I never took it seriously. Probably because it was assigned, but really, why did I never set a goal for myself. Is this why I'm where I am?

And so, bearing past all that self indulgence crap above, here are my resolutions;

1) Learn to play the saxophone
I love this instrument, and kick my self in the ass when I think about why I stopped. I think it was a mix of young enthusiasm mixed with a bad teacher. The music teacher of the school, which was the band I was learning/playing with, was a guy who wanted to play college level bands but never had the talent or luck himself to raise that high and was stuck with private school elementary bands. He didn't try to teach the instruments so much as he wanted us to be a band that he could direct. And with kids who barely know their instruments well enough, I lost my interest in jazz sax. I want it back.
2) Learn Japanese (spoken)
This is just a practical one for me at this point. I love the language, and watch enough Japanese films (yes, more then just anime, though that does make up a large part of the list) that I'd rather be able to understand by ear then read subtitles all the time. Also, knowing a foreign language is always useful and looks good on applications.
3) Finish a story
Plain and simple, I suck. I need to finish one of any dozens of stories I've started over the years, and with more ideas coming at me something needs to be done. I want the feeling of achievement that comes from doing something from start to finish that you yourself have worked on. Something bigger then model building.
4) Get said story published
Directed related to resolution 3, as well as the main ambition for it. I want my name in print, plain and simple, and not on a wanted poster for blowing something up.
5) Achieve a higher state on independence then I currently have
I see this as having the monetary needs to have my own place to live, without roommates, and being able to pay my own bills without outside help. At the moment, I don't even have my own car. This sucks, and not just because I feel like a mooch.
6) ...
...yeah, only one other person gets to know this resolution, and you ain't it. I make this one for myself, because I do need it. It being what you don't know. And you don't because it's very personal.

Aaaaaand it past one in the morning, and s'long.

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