Articles

07/10/2014

You Know It's Going To Be A Good Day...

...when upon waking up you find a 10 quid note someone dropped and no one claims. :D

Got a Subway for breakfast, had some coke flavored caffeine called Monster Assault, tasty stuff, bought some caffeine pills, listened to some Dresden Files: Wight Night [that's what it should be called so unless you write it down it sounds like 'White Knight' or good hero instead of 'Wight Night' or soul vampire night], had a shower, got to the library and now just procrastinating before doing some college work.

Didn't go running last night because last weekend really did a number on me, I left it too late, and today I feel great, so go do an epic run tomorrow and it'll be far more productive.

Kinda annoyed at the skin on my hands at the moment because they got freeze dried by the cold autumnal air and the epidermis is dry and tight. Freaking annoying, though minor relief comes from licking them. Need some moisturizer or something but I hate how oily that shit makes my hands for hours. I once tried to power through that shit though and my knuckles are badly scarred from where the skin dried out and cracked and bled so.

Currently trying to listen to My Chemical Romance's final album called 'Conventional Weapons' which I've only found one or two good songs on - Boy Division and Kiss the Ring. The rest are just awful bland things which only serve to evidence that some bands should bow out before their fire burns out.

There is some pop music out currently which is sticking in my head, but I've no clue what the songs are called, only heard them when moving between shops which play the stuff, and have no desire to wade through the utter crap in the top 40 to find maybe two or three songs total which appeal to me.

Lady friend is kinda annoying me at the moment because sometimes she seems hot and sometimes she seems cold and I'm not sure where I stand, and I hate not knowing where I stand. Of course this laptop is slowly reducing my care of anything which isn't pure information.

The way my brain works is semi-psychopathic; I see the world as an assemblage of information. I don't usually feel emotion, not because I can't, but because there's so much momentum behind my thoughts that I get into specific head spaces of mental thought, and analysis and deduction of incoming and outgoing information is one of my favorite head spaces. I could be emotional, or I could be creative, or I could be rational, or whatever depending on what I focus on. To get work done, to interact with computers, to play games, I don't feel emotion or use imagination, I just see, think and do. And that's where my head's at right now.

For relationships of any sort this is problematic as my lady friend talks to me and I try to rationalize and solve what she is saying instead of caring. And when she's not talking to me and off doing other stuff I don't really care about her existence. I probably should care really, but I don't because I'm occupying a head space that makes me hyperational and want to be there instead of worrying about relationship bull shit.

I'd do very well to find someone who understands this sort of thing, has as much intelligence [roughly defined as memory, deductive ability, etc.], and can run in the same sort of mode and doesn't expect me to be all warm and caring and isn't all warm and caring when on the job.

The issue of course is that I'm so weird that my sort of weirdness isn't prolific enough to make finding someone like me likely. I have to try to make do with what is available in the human population.

My lady friend isn't an ideal mate, but I don't know anyone else that's better at the moment. That's the basis of most human relationships really. Imperfect but what you've got to work with.

No call back from the recruitment company the job center referred me to last week. Going to go see them tomorrow morning before checking in with the job center.

Watching S08E03 of Doctor Who. The Promised Land is starting to reveal itself, which is interesting, and the bickering between The Doctor and Robin Hood was funny. The issue is that I've seen multiple versions of the Robin Hood tale, including the Kevin Costner full motion picture, and found it a bit lackluster so. It's still not quite matching up to the first episode of the series though. Started on a high note, and the last few episodes will probably be excellent, but the center seems a bit underwhelming.

A while back when I had nothing to use but my iPhone I got into using an online forum called Reddit.

Normally I am loath to use forums because the people who use them have the mental functions of pet rocks and the moderators are a breed of Nazi that believes that if they can get away with it then who the fuck cares about rationality or reason when they can abuse their power and ban you for breathing.

However, since I started using it, apart from the occasional troll, being banned once for 'Slap Fighting' from Ask Reddit because a flamebaiter kept harassing me*, and once being accused of stealing porno pictures and reposting them on Tumblr and infringing on copyright theft** I've enjoyed using the site overall.

* Yeah, I got banned because someone went through my post history posting insulting and nasty replies when all I said to him was that I was not going to engage him and asked him why he was doing it. Like I said, mods are universally assholes who don't care about contextual circumstances. It's in their job description to not give a fuck.

** I do repost porn pictures from a subreddit called Gone Wild on Tumblr under another name, but only ever 1 image from any one person, I link to where I found it, and the people who post them don't give a flying fuck about who downloads and reposts them elsewhere anyway.

One of the subreddits is called No Sleep, and it's where people post scary and creepy stories from a first person perspective. OK, so it's rules [each subreddit has it's own ruleset] are retarded because you can't say...

"Good story, but insert critique of your narrative and compliment on structure here."

...without it being removed by the mods. You have to go use NoSleepOOC for that. No, in the subreddit itself you have to act like all the stories are totally legit and the posters are talking about real events as a form of ongoing roleplay. It's stupid, retarded, and ill conducive to proper feedback on creative work, but, like with Wikipedia, I have no control to make idiots grow the fuck up and see reason, so I live with it.

The reason I mention it is because what I thought would be a good idea some time ago is to turn the stories in No Sleep into anthology collections, books which could be constructed with artwork and sold in shops and online as eBooks, via Kindle and that maybe.

Some of them really are quite worth the read, and the entire process isn't that complicated for someone already trained in the design of computer games and their concomitant artistic assets.

You simply built the necessary artwork in photoshop, collect and edit together a whole bunch of stories once you have the authorization of their authors, and then publish the book via Lulu or any one of the self-publishing websites who take your money and publication dat and hand you a printed book in bulks of a thousand or so.

When I posted this I naturally started at the above base principles and got in return from other users a whole bunch of utter tripe way beyond a base concept about contracts and royalties and how it's a far better thing for a single author to seek self-publication [a hellish task which I understand requires 10,000 pitches and ten times that many rewrites or more before someone says yes, we'll take this] rather than contribute to a collected anthology, as though a novice writer doesn't need nor want to appear beside other works which encourage people to buy the volume because they know one writer and get recognition and cred.

I mean, I even got told by some stupid bastard that any author with brains wouldn't use a publisher or contribute to an anthology because the professional job role of publishers is to make money off the work of creative people.

Which is entirely true, if you take away a publisher's entire functioning workload of finding halfway decent authors, collating and editing their work, ensuring they deliver on time, making sure their work is advertised and distributed properly, etc. etc. Ya know, the entire role of administration of a creative work doesn't need to be paid for, and every author is naturally skilled in the task without any outside aid whatsoever.

I am a games designer and I design games. When you have publishers or anyone else, including programmers or artists, trying to do my job, they cock it up royally because they are not skilled in the task like I am. Likewise I don't really care about the majority of their job/s, constructing a creative artifact from a verity of sources not withstanding.

It's one thing to be a creative genius, but it's another to understand administration of creative artifacts, and someone has to pay for that service, and it's going to have to come from the revenue generated by the proliferation of the creative artifact, either to the author for doing a half assed job of it or to someone else for professional execution.

Anyway someone directed me to an eBook put together by, I think, the mods of the subreddit itself.

- http://nosleepebook.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/2014-ebook-issue-2/

I would download this and give my professional opinion on it's design, but the library I'm in doesn't allow for downloads from Mediafire [fucking idiot should not have used that when Lulu is free and available to anyone once they've made an account] but from what I remember when I checked it out on my phone a professional media designer like myself could do a lot better than this.

The point is that like most things I have an idea for making something and a lot of people show up to tell me it can't be done for a lot of bullshit reasons, think they're helping, and instead are just confirming my conviction that most of humanity needs to be fucking nurtured.

The issue I have with executing this idea here and now [apart from the obvious limitations on my time at present] is that this toy PC here can't handle running photoshop so I can't make the art assets. I can however run around No Sleep and pull together a whole bunch of stories and make a prototype then post that as a proof of concept idea on the forums.

If the authors have one iota of sense they will see my work and get on board. If they don't, and let's face it that I'm expecting that they won't, they'll go apeshit and tell me not to publish their work on the assumption that I'm trying to profit from it, because people are irrational morons.

NOTE: I'm making this note here as a preemptive I told you so [HAI DUDE FROM PAST SELF!] because from past experience I have the abilities of a prophet so I want to make it very clear that I saw this bullshit coming and have no intention of profiting from other peoples work, I'm just trying to create something here.

I'll still form the book, because if nothing else it'll look good in my portfolio as 'I made an anthology book, isn't it uber cool' even if the morons who wrote the content won't allow me to publish it so we can both profit from it's distribution out into the world.

Like I've always said, I can but try, and also like I've always said, the universe usually sneers at anything I try and tries to kill it with prejudice. Doesn't stop me from trying though, as evidenced by the fact that I'm still breathing.

Right, I need a widdle and maybe a drink and I really need to get some college work done, so I think I've rambled on enough for one day.

The above eBook and a few other projects [including buying merchandise from airport lost and abandoned luggage sales from auctions held in London, UK, and selling it on eBay] will have to wait until I have more time and money to invest in doing it.

Hope anyone reading this is having a nice day like me. :)