Warpwizard's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Warpwizard's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Thursday, July 14th, 2011 | | 11:47 am |
Still Not Dead
Man, LJ is half-alive. Not very populated. Might lock this journal to stop the torrent of spam, until I start posting regularly again, if ever. Real life is real life. Still not happy enough to write much. Getting slowly better though. I have to upgrade things soon in any case, after that anything is possible. Hope everyone is doing well. Current Mood:  working | | Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 | | 7:36 pm |
Still Alive
Heh, not only applies to me, but I recently played and finished Portal. Great game. I'm not interested in the "advanced" maps though, too frustrating. Lord Raa is still alive too, the irritating bugger. Here's some of his recent ficcage: Snake in the Horse's Shadow 09: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5362943/9/Dead Man's Hand 01: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6035157/1/Haven't read them yet, so I can't comment. No new writing from me. I'm slowly gaining momentum in the real world, hopefully things will continue to pick up. Recently hurt my back, though I'm now recovered. Man...yes, hurting your back is as disasterous as legend would have it. You don't realize how much you use it until you can't, and you find you can't move, hardly at all. NASTY! Hope everyone reading this is doing well. We continue to live in interesting times. | | Sunday, January 24th, 2010 | | 1:49 am |
LOL
"Little Shigure...Big Crisis" = LOL | | Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | | 1:57 pm |
A couple of things
Almost 1000 (unique, I assume) visitors to my few paltry offerings on fanfiction.net, according to their traffic tool (which is kinda nifty)! Previous months seem to average out at around 150 to 200, so I'm assuming I got a review on a site with some decent traffic or something...even that many people is surprising considering I have less than 10K words posted on FF.net. I guess people are really, really bored these days? That led me to check my stats on Mediaminer, where Payback has almost 90K hits, which again is surprising. If it were an original fic and those were actual people rather than just hits and each one was willing to give me a dime for reading it...I'd have some money! :) I mention these things just because I really have no way of evaluating them sensibly, so feedback is potentially useful. BTW, I've just turned anonymous commenting back on. I'm considering setting up a simple site and writing some original stuff, with a Paypal donation button...my personal fantasy world has a Pokegirl-like area in it, I'm thinking I might be able to create some entertaining time-killer. Making some money from it would be nice too. I guess the point of this post is I'm having delusions of popularity or perhaps adequacy. Anyone care to vote either way? :) Working on some writing right now, Harry Potter fanfic, a couple songfics and a fic, working title "100 percent magical weapon" that refuses to leave my head for any extended period, so I pretty much have to keep working on it. Or rather playing with it. Idea file for that one is the size of most people's entire story. It seems to attract a lot of my best ideas and keep them for itself. It started with the idea of a "magical gun" that is 100 percent magical in its operating principles and thus legal under the usual Ministry of Magic type idiotic laws. It's since broadened to include all the fun things about being a super-powered vigilante group, like gear, vehicles, having a tricked-out base...that sort of thing. I've got so many good ideas for nifty magical gear that I'm kinda worried that the opposition will seem underpowered. Hm...I'm thinking I can get around that with some Rorschach's Blot type breeziness. In other words, don't take things too seriously. I've recently come to the (perhaps obvious) conclusion that my predilection is Thinking. I enjoy the figuring out of a story more than the creating of it (Doing), which is simply a ton of work. Still, it is nice to have the feeling of completing something, even if only a chapter of a fic. Anyhoo, I'll go back to my tinkering. Give me your thoughts if you care to share them. Current Mood:  sick | | Friday, January 15th, 2010 | | 12:31 pm |
Kenichi and character transition
Just thought I'd post about something I just noticed in reading the Kenichi manga. A very rare thing, actually: convincing character transition from typical powerless loser to hero, without the character becoming generic and flat. One cool thing about the Kenichi manga is that not all the characters are likeable, sensible etc. People do things for cowardly reasons, like becoming Kenichi's kind-of friend, but then when Kenichi treats them like a real friend, sometimes the fake friendship transforms into a real one. It's a hard thing to pull off, but the author does a great job of giving things depth and complexity. Kenichi has gone from someone who would wistfully think of fighting to save someone, to someone who will actually do it, without it becoming a cliche, mostly because he takes a lot of punishment in doing so. It's a silly manga, but the themes of bravery in the face of adversity and others are very well done. You believe them. That's the real trick of writing and in this case the manga really works for me. Hm...a good counterexample would be Bleach. I used to be a big fan, and I still think it has a lot of great characters, and is quite funny a lot of the time, but the progression of the main character, Ichigo, just felt like an endless generic powerup saga. It had no reality to it, so Ichigo becoming more and more powerful just seemed arbitary. He did have to train for it sometimes, but since all of it is very comic-book mystical, it's difficult to relate to. Today he can slice through cars, tomorrow buildings, next week *time itself*. I made that up, but you get the idea. :) | | Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | | 7:50 pm |
Greatest Disciple Kenichi
LOL! Such a good manga. You can tell the creator loves what he does. It has "heart", which is awesome because like most martial arts / fighting manga stories, "heart" is a major philosophical element of the story. What is really irritating is reading a manga like Tenjho Tenge or any of the many others that have no heart at all, but all the characters go on about it. This comes off as pretentious and flat, which make it very irritating to read, as opposed to Kenichi, where not only do the characters have heart, the art itself is full of it, thus making it funny and lively. | | Saturday, December 26th, 2009 | | 3:12 am |
Merry Dayoffmas
It's been decent here. All computers are working well. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is a neat game. Hope everyone is doing well. Almost 2010. Glad to be in a new decade, the last one was pretty rough. Current Mood:  tired | | Saturday, December 19th, 2009 | | 8:31 pm |
People Still Use AOL mail...
Dsojourn2...I cannot email you a reply, the "mail subsystem" will not let me. Get a real email account, like Gmail. :) Current Mood: sleepy | | Friday, December 11th, 2009 | | 1:40 am |
| | Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 4:36 pm |
It's alive!
Computer is back, repaired. Seems to be okay. Logic board *and* graphics card failure. Marvelous. I may write something perverted in celebration. :) Current Mood:  pleased | | Sunday, November 15th, 2009 | | 6:05 pm |
Computer Died
Hopefully I'll be back online this upcoming week. *sigh* It's always something. :) Current Mood:  aggravated | | Saturday, October 31st, 2009 | | 12:20 pm |
Review of Haruhi 2nd season (spoiler warning)
Review of endless eight: Holy shit was that boring. I watched all of them, sort of meditating while doing so. The good: Great visuals. The bad: Aside from the utter waste and tedium of creating 8 nigh-identical episodes, the real pisser is, all of that and the payoff is that Haruhi wanted to do homework with the SOS-dan? She held them suspended in time for 600 years for THAT? Come ON. Lame. I'm not saying she and Kyon should have gotten all love-love, but....fuck it, yes that IS what I'm demanding, after the endless hints. Sometimes ya gotta go to the logical conclusion. Review of the boredom of Haruhi: The good: For starters, it's not endless 8. The bad: the art is very generic, though not bad really. It looks like K-on! which makes the girls very cute, but not in a distinctly Haruhi way. Overall: The whole 2nd season felt like a fanfic version of the first season. That's really the bottom line. Not a bad fanfic, but nothing like the utter quality of the first season. I was a bit pleased by the darker hints dropped in the last few episodes, but after all that wasted time it just comes off as a tease.
If future Haruhi releases don't measure up, I'm going to have to write the whole thing off as a could-have-been. Sad. :(
Current Mood:  contemplative | | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 4:58 pm |
Finally saw the first "new" NGE movie
Finally got around to seeing it, with friends to boot. Wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting an actual new version of the story, perhaps keeping the best "show piece" shots from the original anime, like the details of the angel attacks etc. Not like that at all. It's a shot-for-shot retelling of the entire TV series, with much more elaborate CGI, art and animation. Gorgeous visuals. Amazing how well the original structure holds up. Looks great in its full-realization version. Hm...let's break it into positives and negatives, from my personal perspective: I liked/was impressed by: - the visuals. Looks fabulous. At least the big-scale scenes did. - The music and audio in general was exactly the same, but that "same" still defines flawlessly awesome, so it holds up fine. The music of NGE sounds "classic" to the point where it seems odd that at one time, you had never heard it before. It's like you've always known it. I disliked/was unimpressed by: - the fabulous 3Dness of some of the visuals makes the flat, manga-like shots look REALLY flat and manga-like, to the point where I sometimes found it almost jarring. - the story suffers a bit from being recut for compactness. It's like watching the series on fast-forward, where the speed is just enough for it to feel a little off. Like watching those old films where everyone moves herky-jerky. Neutral point: shown in such a fast-forward fashion, some of the subtlety really is ground off the plot: the whole situation Shinji is thrust into is clearly insane and heavily rigged from behind the scenes, that much is obvious even to the vast majority of the characters involved, with the possible exception of Maya. She's just too sweet and innocent to be that self-aware. I refuse to believe otherwise! :) Overall my reaction is pretty neutral: I was impressed (as expected) by the visuals, so a mild plus. Since it was a pretty much 99% faithful retelling of the original story, shot-for-shot even, I was disappointed in the story aspect, mildly, so a mild negative there. The sped-up feeling of the story is another mild negative, only countered by the fact that this is NGE damn it, so we end with an overall feeling of, "Yeah, glad I finally got around to watching it." Not that impressive Gainax. Another couple of fanboy generations and you might have to actually come out with another totally awesome anime rather than just keep milking this one. :) Current Mood:  awake | | Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | | 3:14 pm |
| | Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | | 10:04 pm |
Long Discussion Thread You Might Be Interested In
A bit of a clash of ideas between myself and Terdwilicker: http://terdwilicker.livejournal.com/23672.htmlI'm the Liberal, he's the Conservative, roughly speaking. Hippie vs. Gun Nut etc, whatever two poles you want to use. :) Warning! Controversial topics contained therein, such as politics, drugs and firearms. Proceed with caution. And if you feel like adding a comment, try to be constructive, please. No attacking either him or me. In a proper discussion, you should only attack positions, not people. It's an interesting exercise, using verbal logic and a bit of emotion without succumbing to the urge to use extremely pointed metaphors and needlessly inflammatory language. My post-mortem on the discussion: it feels a little unfair to analyze him right here in public, but it wasn't a private discussion so I guess I've got the right. I agree with quite a few of Terd's points, but I don't agree with his positions. I won't rehash the substance of that, it's right there in the actual exchange. What was interesting on the meta-level was how Terd seems to have a distorted understanding of the term "Hypocrisy". He uses it several times, each time incorrectly. He seems like the sort of person that prides themselves on their logic, but I found him to more emotional than logical. He also seemed to projecting an attitude of superiority onto me, whereas to my perception it was him who seemed to feel that he was superior, judging from the emotional tone of his language. I found this paragraph to be very illuminating: "Its the superiority thing you keep doing. Liberals are the way they are because it makes them feel superior, much as Conservatives do. Both like telling themselves they're better than everyone else. Liberals say it because they Feel Guilty. Conservatives do it because They Know They Are Right. Both are wankers. I'm a Pragmatist, like AZ. We've both seen the real darkside of mankind and know just how close it lurks in all of us. We don't believe in the fuzzy happy utopias, period. They just aren't possible when you have people full of lurking evil to populate them. " He projects "superiority" on to me, I guess because I seem to be a Liberal and that's what Liberals do, in Terd's world. What is interesting is that the underlying emotional tone of his various exchanges to me was dominated by the two messages he mentions here: he was effectively constantly shouting at me to feel guilty for the "evil I was responsible for", perhaps because since in his mind I am a Liberal he thinks I would be vulnerable to that as an attack, and he also seemed to "Know He Was Right" as he put it, which in my mind seems to indicate that on some level he acknowledges that he is a Conservative, which by the idealogical positions he holds he certainly is, just as by position I'm very Liberal. So essentially he's suffering from a bit of Cognitive Dissonance, which is probably where he gets the distorted understanding of what "Hypocrisy" means. Do you see the equation? Since he "Knows He Is Right", I am by definition "Wrong", but since I keep denying that, I am being a "Hypocrite". Except that since he's got a bit of Dissonance there, in that he doesn't want to think he's a Conservative, since they are wankers, which means that he has to give me a bit of a chance to argue with him, in order to keep up his self-image. So he's calling me a hypocrite when he really wants to go, "You're wrong!" But he's smart and logical enough to know that that is being outright unreasonable, so it creates a tension which is eased by the unconscious Dissonance. Get it? Again, thanks for the discussion, Terd, it was very useful on several levels. Current Mood: productive | | Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | | 8:42 pm |
Out of my cave, pimping Lord Raa
Your fiend has written some minor Kasumi/Ranma smut: How’s THAT for Love? Chapter 2:http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2880954/2/Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting lately, been busy with other things. Hasn't been much lemonyness appearing to post about anyway. *shrug* Oh: if you need diversion, get Plants vs. Zombies: http://www.popcap.com/extras/pvz/ Hours of fun! For the whole family! Especially if you are terminally fond of the sound of Zombies croaking, "Brains....." :) | | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 10:02 pm |
*sigh*
I'm remembering one of the reasons I stopped writing. It's hard effen work. Papering over the spaces between the ideas is often tedious. Vast amount of dialogue and description need to be written. And unless it feels just right, I won't let it go until it does, at least roughly.
Daydreaming is much easier. :) Current Mood: irritated | | Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | | 10:40 pm |
Pretty good HP/Dresden cross
Beyond Grave Peril: http://www.ficwad.com/story/82414 Doesn't have the extra style of nuhuh's fic with a similar start, but it's pretty good. Lots of magical combat. There's just something about the Dresdenverse that I love. It's comfortable and comforting to me, I don't know why. Certain writers seems to grok it the same way I do and it makes for great reading. HP crosses seem to work really well with it too. Current Mood: pleased | | Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | | 1:59 pm |
Star Wars names
"Kit Fisto"...porn star or Jedi master? :) Current Mood: amused | | Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | | 2:58 pm |
|
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
