Stolen from greygirlbeast to keep myself from having to work until I've finished my coffee.
( whateverology )

I've been drawing a wombat every day for the last month, and the people who have seen them have been ecstatic about them. So now there's a site.

The Daily Wombat

And a t-shirt based on one of the most popular wombats:

Part of the reason I don’t write in my blog more often is simply that I am extremely conscious of its public nature, and I don’t tend to presume that anyone cares about my nattering enough to bother filling someone’s feed with my daily routine. Someone recently pointed out that by subscribing to a feed or adding me to their friend’s list, they show that they do in fact care, and want to read my blather.

Here’s my problem, and I think it is one that is holding back my writing in general. All writing is artifice. Every word we write is, in some sense, a pretense, a pose. I get very self-conscious about the constructed nature of my writing. I try to simply experience the scene, and record it, but I always see the wires. It makes it difficult to lose myself in the story, because I worry too much about whether or not the reader will similarly notice that the castle is merely a façade of paste and plaster.

Avoiding that self-consciousness is, I think, the key to succeeding with my writing. I feel like the writing equivalent of an anorexic, staring into a story and seeing different words, awkward words, where others insist everything is fine.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

So this old man is going through our dumpster, and my boss goes out to see what’s going on.

He’s looking for boxes, pulling the empty cardboard boxes out of the dumpster, and stacking them to take with him. My boss decides to be nice, and offers him some of our extra boxes that haven’t made it out to the trash yet… But those boxes aren’t good enough. He refuses the free (and non-trashed) boxes, and continues to rummage around in our dumpster for stinky, stained cardboard boxes.

Did I mention the pharmaceuticals company next door is using our dumpster?

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

Here’s a design I did for Ziraxia recently. It’s available for sale (only 16.99), and every Shadow Factory shirt that gets sold gets me royalties and helps my day job. Also, some of the shirts on the site kick ass. ;P

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

I just put up a new design up on Ziraxia, incorporating some of Kat’s art for the site. Bob’s just too damned cute NOT to be on a shirt.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

There’s this idea that I’ve been running across a lot lately… A sort of antithesis of the ”Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy, wherein a person’s criticism of a book is discounted because they’ve “never been published,” and are therefore not qualified to judge the work of someone who has.

I’m running into it a lot in the wake of Robert Jordan’s passing, and it’s ridiculous. Certainly, there are people who are not qualified to level criticism at a book or its author(s)… You see them on Amazon all the time, complaining that a book is something it quite simply isn’t, or that the book sucks because the author wasn’t solicitous enough in some online encounter. I’ve even seen people over there complaining about a scene that just doesn’t exist in the book they’re reviewing (in at least one case, a scene that existed not only in another book, but in another book by a completely different author.) But to assume that someone isn’t qualified to hold an opinion or act as critic based on the fact that they aren’t published (or, if they are, that they aren’t as successful as the author in question) is a straw man. As for the David Argument of “4 million Chinese people can’t be wrong,” well… yeah, they can. As much as I argue that some things are actually successful because they are good, it’s never a sure bet that something is good simply because it’s successful.

I just don’t buy that you have to be a writer (or a particularly successful writer) to recognize when something just doesn’t work. At some point, even a writer has to become a reader.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., aka Robert Jordan, has died..

I’ll admit, I was never really a fan of his work. I can’t speak to its quality, because the first book simply never grabbed me. I know that a lot of people (including many of my friends) enjoyed his work immensely. I feel a sense of attenuated loss, a kind of echo. Despite not being affected by the man, or the stories, in any measurable way, I feel this strange sorrow. I fear it isn’t an altogether flattering empathy with humanity, or anything of the sort. My knowledge of the man and his work is purely academic, but I feel a certain amount of respect for him, simply because he affected the number of people that he did.

Every post I’ve seen by a fan has had this furtive undercurrent of “what will happen to the Wheel of Time?” Each of them feels that it is inappropriate to mourn the loss of the writer in this, the loss of the man. But I think in large part, this is the best tribute to the man. He spent a large proportion of his life creating the Wheel of Time, and though he did not finish it, that it has affected his readers enough that they are (in no small measure) mourning the loss of the word, the story… It is a tribute to the work. I am, a bit selfishly, glad that I never did get into it, because I don’t have to suffer this loss as keenly. However, it is also a tribute to Jordan’s fanbase that the “what will happen” mentality is being treated as inappropriate. Despite their love of the words, each and every one is entirely aware that a man was also lost.

Farewell, Mr. Rigney.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

Every once in a while, I’ll post designs I’m fond of from some of the designers over at Ziraxia.

For example:

Ok, granted… That one is by me, but I really like it. ;P

How about this one?

Who wouldn’t want to wear one of these, really?

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

GameSpy has an interview that goes a bit more into what to expect from Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. I’m not sold on the D&D Insider subscription idea, and it seems like there’s a trend toward player-created resources being co-opted by the company that creates the game, rather than leaving it to grassroots efforts like, well, Ex Libris Nocturnis. I find that a bit worrying, to be honest. Not just because I run ELN, though as much as certain competitors have attracted some of our users, the revamped forums at White Wolf’s own site didn’t exactly help. ;P

Anyway, fan sites have always been an integral way of making players feel like they are giving something back to the greater community of gamers, and getting recognition when they do. That they were never as large, or all-inclusive, is actually a positive, because the sheer scale of what Wizards is proposing not only makes it harder to be noticed, it is more intimidating for a new person looking to contribute. Not to mention that, if Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Forums are any kind of indicator, a central (and though I hate to use the term, mainstream) gathering point demonstrates John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory quite handily.

I guess we’ll have to wait for December’s Races and Classes preview to find out much more.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

I’ll actually write up some stuff shortly, but for now, I just wanted to link to Kat’s Flickr Page, because it has a bunch of pictures of us at the con.

I’m actually working on a short story. And I picked up Changeling: the Lost. It’s really good so far, but I’ll write up a real review for Ex Libris Nocturnis as soon as I’m done.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

So you may (or may not) have noticed I’m posting again. I’m actually working in web design again after what seems like forever, and I’m spending a lot more time working online. I also haven’t had a lot of time to write anything, so I began to feel a bit atrophied, intellectually and creatively. I feel like I’m starting to open up again now, with the work I’m doing on Ziraxia. We’re shooting to launch the pilot program this Wednesday. If you’re reading this, you should keep an eye out. It’s going to be fun and cool, and hopefully successful, so I can continue to work on it.

I’ve been having these dreams of an old woman. Her skin is dry and dusty, and precisely the color of mice feet. Her hair is unkempt, long and surprisingly thick for her age. It hangs like sheets of granite, shot through with calcite veins. She sits in a faded burgundy velvet chair, in a dress that is so faded and worn that it has become colorless. She never speaks, or rather, she has not spoken yet. Every dream I’ve had has been pregnant with the waiting. The possibility of speech is almost stifling. Maybe she’ll talk to me soon. 

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

I’ve been arguing with Sleep again. It seems we’re not talking now, since I think that, all told, I only got about twenty minutes of sleep last night. I’m trying to go off of caffeine again, but yesterday I broke down and drank a big cup of coffee because my head hurt so bad. Considering how much of a resistance my body had built up to its effects, it would amaze me if that were the sole cause of last night’s insomnia, since it has only been a week since I started pushing away from soda and such.

Oh, keep an eye on Ziraxia if you’re curious about what I’ve been doing for work.

Anyway, I know this is a boring entry, so I’ll stop it here. 

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

No, no, not Forrest J. Ackerman. Wizards of the Coast announced that Dungeons & Dragons is getting a 4th Edition. Considering how long 2nd edition lived, it really seems like the new editions are coming more and more quickly…

I kind of miss D&D, to be honest. I have a lot of fond memories of the vast worlds I created with my friends back in the day. I know after our Scion game ends, we’re planning a game of Changeling: the Lost, but it would be nice to break out the D&D books and put together a campaign again. Of course, we’ll have to play 3.5E, I neither want to wait for May of next year, nor have the money to spend on reinvesting in yet another new edition of a game for which I already have an insane number of books.

It will be interesting to see how they work out the web-based tools they’re setting up to go with the new edition, though.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

At the recommendation of Tycho, I downloaded the Bioshock demo from Xbox Live tonight. I’m so far out of the loop when it comes to gaming news these days that I knew literally nothing about this game before I read today’s news post on Penny Arcade. I’ve never played any of Irrational’s2k Boston or 2k Australia’s games before. I’m one of the unwashed masses that never touched System Shock 2. Now, granted, Tycho pushes the game like it’s an artistic achievement fit to tickle the lower intestine of Roger Ebert, and to be fair, it’s a pretty game. A very pretty game.

But would I go that far? To be sure, it is art. The character design is interesting, if disturbing in the wrong way. (What’s up with the bunny ears? They aren’t creepy. Really.) The graphics are breathtaking. The fire on the water at the beginning of the demo was gorgeous, even on my standard definition television. But it’s a shooter built on the Unreal engine. How deep can it be?

Intensely, and I’m not talking about the underwater setting. This is the most narrative FPS I’ve ever played. The voice acting is quite good… Honestly, the only real complaints I have may be an artifact of the “demo” process. Certain things don’t quite gel in the narrative flow. The first time I used an enhancement, I wasn’t quite sure why my character would just randomly inject himself with electricity… I mean, I know why, and if Bioshock was a normal shooter, I wouldn’t give a damn. But it presents you with a world that seems complex and cohesive, and then your character just decides hey, that rusty syringe full of trapped lightning looks damned inviting. I gotsta get me some o’ that!.

That said, I can’t wait to pick up the real deal… But that’s going to be a while, since we’re spending all our money on Dragon*Con.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

Rest in Peace, Kurt Vonnegut.

Crap.

I hate Myspace. I only have an account there because I have friends that will contact me in no other way.

Now, here is the (just out of beta) latest competitor for the hearts and minds of Myspacers everywhere.

Virb is, at least, far more tasteful than Myspace, and as such, it will probably fail. But I WANT it to succeed. Myspace is the current incarnation of Geocities; the slum of the web.

This is me. Friend me, if you sign up. I'll update my account when I'm not at work. ;P

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Yes. It has come to this. I'm reposting memes rather than writing real entries. My soul is hollow.

10 things starting with the letter ___
Comment, and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter in your journal and give out some letters of your own.

loli_tschai  gave me "G."

Ghost - Our albino hedgehog. He was the bestest.

George Orwell - 1984 and Animal Farm are both amazing novels.

Gary Numan - Totally underappreciated.

Green Lantern - <3 Super Heroes

George Romero - "Zombies, zombies, zombies, we're going to see zombies, eat brains, eat brains!" - Foamy

Guitar Hero (1 and 2) - Got the second one for Christmas. Kat and I have been playing cooperatively. It rules.

German - I still want to become more fluent.

Greg the Bunny - Great show. Too bad Fox killed it.

Gnomeregan - I had to find a way to reference World of Warcraft.

Glam Rock - Roxy Music, Brian Eno, David Bowie... I love me some old school Glam.


And that distracted me from the cold calls I have to make today. Yay for sales days.