Regular Spelling
Thoughts on language and more

Late Night Relaxing

So, I'm in training at my work again, will be for more or less the next four weeks. So late schedules again, getting me home around midnight or later, and removing my time for doing stuff at night with my regular schedule.

Other than that, I recently finished the third Otherland book, but I won't be starting the final one until I'm back out of training again, because I don't want to haul around my big hardcover book to and from training class every day (I had been just leaving my book sitting on my desk at work, which wasn't a problem because my team has assigned desks).

I really don't have anything else I want to say right now, though.

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 -0500

Communication Failure

I've pretty much gotten to the point where I don't really care about my spelling in Messenger anymore. It has become riddled with mistakes, such as "sining", "secinds", "celan", and "everyting".

This is usually only when I'm tired, though, and don't want to go for the backspace key.

Plus the fact that messenger is rather informal communication, and it simply doesn't mean much if I have something spelled wrong.

And also, oddly enough, Google Toolbar says "sining" is not spelled incorrectly.

In other news, now the blog has been running long enough that there's a lot of entries, so I'm switching the archive display back to the default of monthly.

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Something From Nothing

It's been a while since I last updated Skewed. While this should come as no surprise given my promptness on this so far, there have been some factors that have actually contributed to this more than just sheer abject laziness. One has been my acquisition of a XBOX 360 and playing of Dead Rising and unlocking achievements I had been wanting to play on it for some time, in addition to my preparing an XNA project and beginning to write the storyline for it. Another reason, accounting for this week, was of course the Brawl release and my rushing to completely unlock everything for it as soon as possible. The main reason is more my laziness choice, though, because the next section I have to write, while necessary to move the story along and needed for later in this chapter, it in and of itself is an incredibly weak peice of storyline and I haven't really wanted to dredge through it, probably ending up with something similar to the part I've hated the writing on the most, the degeneration monologue filler.

However, there is another, far more pressing issue, that's been sitting at the back of my mind through all of this. At the moment, in StoryLines, I have about 36 cards from the beginning of this current chapter to the end of the Storm arc of the story, and about ten less than that unfiled cards for the third arc. (For reference in the picture in that previous blog entry, I have rearranged that a little since that picture, but at the moment I'm working on the second teal card, sitting in slot five). The problem, though, is that those unfiled cards are just that - unfiled and unplaced. I haven't really had any idea what I want the overall goal to be in this last arc, other than a few things I want to have happen, the ending, and a few flashback scenes to finish up the now-probably-will-never-be-finished Project L that this story spun off from and how several of the Immortals got to be that way. They will be interesting, but without any other real sort of goal it would make for an incredibly weak final arc, with my planned ending likely not lending enough weight to push back in the favor against what the rest of that arc would turn in to.

As I've mentioned before, much of my planning of stories takes place as conversations, because my thought process for storytelling is for a more visual media then straight writing (why I'm a game developer, primarily). Often I'll just have throwaway conversations in my head between characters, dialogues that are merely for my humor and are quickly thrown away later and forgotten. However, occasionally something sparks from these, and I end up with something useful. And, on even fewer occasions, I have a real gem that ends up becoming exactly what was needed. This is what I think I have here, based on just some joking around in a conversation about the Kai season of Higurashi (since I plan on touching back on Hinamizawa once more to retcon the incorrect guesses I had made before Kai aired revealing the rest of the story), and as I just thought more into one of the things said the other fragments I had cards for just fell right into place with it, and it all makes sense.

So, I don't have it all planned out yet, but I do now have an idea of where I'm going. So now I can move forward with confidence, and really rock the ending of the story.

P.S. Can anyone tell me why the Google Toolbar doesn't recognize 'dialogue' and several other words? Or toolbar, for that matter.

EDIT: Actually, looking at it now, I think I had skipped that teal card completely. I am on the Black card in slot 9 now (slot 8 on my current version of the map with some of the other cards moved around).

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0500

A Little Carried Away

As I've mentioned before, I use a MediaWiki installation to organize my AnacondaSoftware projects. I'm about to announce a new project on the DevBlog, once a particular mod for phpBB 3 gets released to replace the function I was using in Coranto to cross-post my news items on the AnacondaSoftware site on the forum under phpBB 2. So in the mean time, I've been doing some organizing of my pages on that wiki into their categories, and filling in some information.

One of the reasons I love wiki's so much is because of the simplicity of cross-linking articles, with the Mediawiki coding style in particular. Throw up a couple brackets around a word, maybe a pipe if you want to link to a different article that the word is, and bam, linked to another page, with the ability to create that page when following the link if it's not already existing. The problem comes, though, if you just leave them for later, continuing on to come to them later, you will end up building up a lot of dead links. At the moment in my development wiki, I have a total of 65 pages. However, I have a total of 120 non-existing pages, nearly twice the number of pages that exist.

It will take a little time to clear down that number, and making those pages will just create new dead links too, properly filling the pages out. And the cycle continues.

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:00:00 -0600

Kool-aid Redux

Some time back, somewhere between June and October of 2003, before I began working Tech Support, I was on the verge of working as a salesman. Not just any ordinary one, though, it was one of the predatory ones, CutCo. I actually wrote about it in my fake blog, From the computer of J. Millen.

Reading it now, its apparent the Kool-aid still hadn't worn off yet when I wrote that entry. Anyway, I was reminded of it just now reading letters of complaint about another company that uses the high-grade stuff in their Kool-aid, Kirby. And this gem here, clearly from one of their zombies, is just gold:

"You have probably had a bad day. you probably are not very smart. you seem like you are not a very assertive type person. it seem you have a hard time communicating with people when talking to them. I believe you are a very small individual and you are trying to make yourself feel better and bigger by hurting other people with your words by telling false and untrue stories. "

Now I'm half tempted to look for some more materials - and especially more training descriptions - for these and similar indoctrinating companies, because I plan on going into something similar later on in Skewed.

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:00:00 -0600