Life is for the living, and I am somewhat still alive.
I have an adapter for the laptop again, yay! That means it'll be a lot easier for me to work on things again. Now if I could just kick this depression, I'd be back to full steam.
I'm listening to Jenny Lewis's new album, Acid Tongue. Okay stuff I guess, but I feel like I've moved on from all this so much that it's hard to make a connection with it. After all that went down, it's just hard to muster any enthusiasm for these things. I gave the last RK show in our area a miss, and I'm probably not going to the Jenny Lewis show in October either. I might have made the effort if Pierre was opening for her in our area, but he's only doing the West Coast leg. Rilo Kiley was the soundtrack for a lot of things that went on in my life for the past five years or so - but now it's pretty much just familiar pretty noise. So it goes. Working for them changed some things, brought me to some places I might not otherwise have gone, so no regrets.
I think this next chapter of my life is primarily a selfish one, anyhow. I'm focusing a lot of my energies internally, trying to work through some of this current of hopelessness that's run through me since the finances have taken this down turn. The way this world is going, man it's hard to think of what things will be like if the Republicans win this election. How can so many people be so blind to how bad the past years have been going? The downslide of our life has pretty much paralleled the downslide of the country - and no, we're not in a depression, are we? Just because everything's so damn bad with no end in sight. For all that McCain says he's about change too - the only thing he's changed are his lines.
Anyhow, other than trying to break the downward spiral, I feel that this is my time to start seriously focusing on my writing. I need to get the second comic script together, and finish the intro for this first comic. I'm definitely going to try NaNo this year - the poll seems to have Hans in the lead, but I'm pretty sure that won't be my option. Too much research needed on that one . I might work on Of Falorn, because it's a descriptive action type story and I need to work on my ability to pull that off. But I'm also thinking about the vampire novel - I really really want to revisit that, and fix a lot of the amateurish mistakes I made when writing it the first time around. Then there's the sequel to Tequila Sunset, which I've got almost all worked out in my head and just never set down. The first story pretty much wrote itself, so this one might do the same. I do want to finish What Simon Said someday, but not now I don't think. Victor Charlie is another possibility, I forgot to even put that one on the poll. More Michael is always appealing, but now with the comic - I feel like I'm giving him enough time as it is and I don't want to get too ahead of myself with the second series. Endless Summer - it would probably do me a world of good to finish that, because the events that it's based on are something I need to make some sense of anyhow.
... you know, I really don't like a couple of these songs. Godspeed, and Trying to Love you. The vocals are kind of painful. And Carpetbaggers - the part that used to be sung by Jonathan Rice in the live version, it just doesn't come through right on this version. And it's more polished and less real, if that makes sense. It's not so bad in Jack Killed Mom, but it's still a noticeable difference - it seems like in order to get the Special Guest Stars in, they cut out a lot of what made the songs good in the first place.
In roleplaying news, we're thinking about a new game, based on the Oregon Trail and using the Serenity RPG system. My WWII game is dragging like crazy, and the Buffy game is slowing down to a near standstill. Panfandom seems to be the way to go these days - but I'm not sure I could stand the crack inherent in that.
Facebook is pissing me off hardcore - they've always had some major inconveniences built into the system, like how you can't see anyone's page that isn't in your network. What the hell is up with that? Makes it very annoying. One of the things we tend to do is friend people for our musicians on Facebook - and they have this arbitrary limit to how many friends requests you can make per day. At least they tell you when you're approaching that limit, so you can stop and pick it up again tomorrow. But for some reason, even though we followed this procedure we usually do - they shut down one of our musician's pages saying that we were 'abusing a feature' or whatever. Eff you, Facebook. We wrote to them to try and straighten out the problem, but how are you supposed to network on Facebook? It's pointless to build their special 'band page' until you actually have a network of friends to try and get them to fan it - because in Facebook land you can't invite anyone you aren't friends with to fan your band page, either. It's like a vicious circle of crap-that-doesn't-really-work. Myspace isn't much better really, but at least you can SEE and FRIEND people. Grr. So far they haven't written back , but that could be because of the weekend. But I hope this doesn't turn into one of those have-to-track-down-contact situations.
I'm listening to Jenny Lewis's new album, Acid Tongue. Okay stuff I guess, but I feel like I've moved on from all this so much that it's hard to make a connection with it. After all that went down, it's just hard to muster any enthusiasm for these things. I gave the last RK show in our area a miss, and I'm probably not going to the Jenny Lewis show in October either. I might have made the effort if Pierre was opening for her in our area, but he's only doing the West Coast leg. Rilo Kiley was the soundtrack for a lot of things that went on in my life for the past five years or so - but now it's pretty much just familiar pretty noise. So it goes. Working for them changed some things, brought me to some places I might not otherwise have gone, so no regrets.
I think this next chapter of my life is primarily a selfish one, anyhow. I'm focusing a lot of my energies internally, trying to work through some of this current of hopelessness that's run through me since the finances have taken this down turn. The way this world is going, man it's hard to think of what things will be like if the Republicans win this election. How can so many people be so blind to how bad the past years have been going? The downslide of our life has pretty much paralleled the downslide of the country - and no, we're not in a depression, are we? Just because everything's so damn bad with no end in sight. For all that McCain says he's about change too - the only thing he's changed are his lines.
Anyhow, other than trying to break the downward spiral, I feel that this is my time to start seriously focusing on my writing. I need to get the second comic script together, and finish the intro for this first comic. I'm definitely going to try NaNo this year - the poll seems to have Hans in the lead, but I'm pretty sure that won't be my option. Too much research needed on that one . I might work on Of Falorn, because it's a descriptive action type story and I need to work on my ability to pull that off. But I'm also thinking about the vampire novel - I really really want to revisit that, and fix a lot of the amateurish mistakes I made when writing it the first time around. Then there's the sequel to Tequila Sunset, which I've got almost all worked out in my head and just never set down. The first story pretty much wrote itself, so this one might do the same. I do want to finish What Simon Said someday, but not now I don't think. Victor Charlie is another possibility, I forgot to even put that one on the poll. More Michael is always appealing, but now with the comic - I feel like I'm giving him enough time as it is and I don't want to get too ahead of myself with the second series. Endless Summer - it would probably do me a world of good to finish that, because the events that it's based on are something I need to make some sense of anyhow.
... you know, I really don't like a couple of these songs. Godspeed, and Trying to Love you. The vocals are kind of painful. And Carpetbaggers - the part that used to be sung by Jonathan Rice in the live version, it just doesn't come through right on this version. And it's more polished and less real, if that makes sense. It's not so bad in Jack Killed Mom, but it's still a noticeable difference - it seems like in order to get the Special Guest Stars in, they cut out a lot of what made the songs good in the first place.
In roleplaying news, we're thinking about a new game, based on the Oregon Trail and using the Serenity RPG system. My WWII game is dragging like crazy, and the Buffy game is slowing down to a near standstill. Panfandom seems to be the way to go these days - but I'm not sure I could stand the crack inherent in that.
Facebook is pissing me off hardcore - they've always had some major inconveniences built into the system, like how you can't see anyone's page that isn't in your network. What the hell is up with that? Makes it very annoying. One of the things we tend to do is friend people for our musicians on Facebook - and they have this arbitrary limit to how many friends requests you can make per day. At least they tell you when you're approaching that limit, so you can stop and pick it up again tomorrow. But for some reason, even though we followed this procedure we usually do - they shut down one of our musician's pages saying that we were 'abusing a feature' or whatever. Eff you, Facebook. We wrote to them to try and straighten out the problem, but how are you supposed to network on Facebook? It's pointless to build their special 'band page' until you actually have a network of friends to try and get them to fan it - because in Facebook land you can't invite anyone you aren't friends with to fan your band page, either. It's like a vicious circle of crap-that-doesn't-really-work. Myspace isn't much better really, but at least you can SEE and FRIEND people. Grr. So far they haven't written back , but that could be because of the weekend. But I hope this doesn't turn into one of those have-to-track-down-contact situations.