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  • Aditus

    Talk Talk

    By Aditus

    Conversations. Sometimes it’s too much, sometimes too little, formal, informal, clumsy, artificial, with another word: difficult. Let’s practice, Shall we? #253 Someone is on the bus. The guy beside them fidgets the whole time with an irritating tinkling bangle while telling them, it seems, their entire life story, including very personal things. It’s time to pop in the earbuds. When it’s time to get off the bus, the talker has disappeared and the strange bangle is now on th
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Movies

Christmas Shopping and Star Dust

Well, it is the end of another day and time for a little stream of conciousness. I have officially completed my Christmas shopping. I hate Christmas shopping for my family because, frankly, if someone in my family wants something, they go get it. But, as I said, I'm done. I now just need to spend the evening tomorrow wrapping everything. I will also spend some time in the kitchen cooking up some gifts for some friends at work.   Stardust (and the Simpsons Movie) hit DVD today. If you hav
Myr

Myr in Movies

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Life

Every Which Way But Loose

Well. It has been one hell of a day today. Nothing bad happened. Nothing great happened. But the day moved along fairly quickly. Getting out of the driveway this morning was a grand adventure. I had to dig my way to my car. The snow was to my knees. The snowdrifts were to my waist.   I got stuck and had to rock my car back and forth a little. Once I was lined up, I had to pretty much gun it, cross my fingers and hope for the best. The fishtales of snow streaming out of both sides of
Myr

Myr in Life

2

Damn those garden pests anyway

(I should know better than to throw out offhand little things. Geeks, like magpies, are distracted by shiny things, and I'm very much a geek...)   "I'm so glad you could make it," Harold said. "I've tried everything I could think of, but my roses keep getting worse!"   "Don't worry, Mister Hargrave," said the gardener. He was wearing a green t-shirt with the 'Jake's Lawn and Garden' splashed over the left breast pocket. "I'm sure we can find out what's going on and get it taken care of."  
TheZot

TheZot

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Cheating is good

I was going to spend some time here whining about opening scenes, 'cause I hate 'em. I really, really do; they're annoying, and hard to get right, and even when I do manage a paragraph or three that doesn't suck they never go anywhere. I mean, I get as far as: Harold took a sip of his coffee as he looked out over the deck railing at the lake in front of him. The soothing warmth of the drink flowed through him as the first rays of the rising sun bathed the lake's waters in rich orange ligh
TheZot

TheZot

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Life

Shopping on Weekends... mmm

I try to avoid shopping as much as possible. On occasion though, I simply must go to the store. At times like these, I'm thankful for Wegmans. If you don't have one in your area, Wegmans is a grocery store chain here in the NY/PA/NJ area. They tend to cater to middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. They have also been consistently in the top 10 employers in the USA for the last 10 years. (including number 1). Anyway, they tend to have the higher quality teen males working for them.
Myr

Myr in Life

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Gaming

Gaming online and Gay-bashers

As some people know, I enjoy gaming when I get the time. While I'm not head-over-heels in love with FPS's, I do have Halo3, and a few similar games. Gay Gaymer (For boys who like boys who like joysticks), has a little video showing how bad it can get for gay guys online. (Part of it, was the purposefully named "gayboy" gamer tag. Still, it is rather shocking... I bet even for a sailor. I'll ask Dan. ) http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2007/11/29/ne...ive-trash-talk/   When I'm xbox live, I h
Myr

Myr in Gaming

5

Hit over the head with subtle

The current Ben and William story I'm working on set this one off. I sent off the draft for their most recent story to a good friend of mine for a read through. He's straight, and while guys doing each other isn't his thing, neither does he much care. (Which is cool, though occasionally somewhat embarrassing for me)   The boys, of course, are a couple, and more than willing to boink each other at the drop of a hat. (Ben keeps a bag of hats around, just in case) Regardless, in the few stories o
TheZot

TheZot

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Need a beta reader or three

Right, as I've threatened recently, I've another Ben and William short I'm working on. (Though does it still count as a short story if it's 9K+ words? I dunno)     Anyway, I've been trying to stretch some with this one and have a more deliberate structure and theme to the story. That's a good thing, I think, assuming I managed to do it, but it makes it tougher to tell; with a good adventure story you just have to make sure that the thumping happens in more or less the right order, the descrip
TheZot

TheZot

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So just die, already

It's a grey and drizzly saturday, and I'm sitting here rewriting this goddamn fight scene. Again. This is its third go-round, and it's pissing me off. This is S&S stuff. It's supposed to be straightforward, "kill the monster, take its treasure, move on." I mean, there's formula. Possibly sacred formula, I'm not sure -- the genre both demands it and is antithetical to it, which might make it obligatory to acknowledge and ignore it -- but definitely formula. You'd think it was easy to follow,
TheZot

TheZot

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I hate it when I forget the moral

It's damned annoying, that's what it is.     Not, in this case, a "what the heck was that moral, again?" but more a "damn, I had a moral and I lost track of it!"       I mean, here I am, typing away, pretty much done with the story and I realize that the big end fight scene (c'mon, it's a sword'n'sorcery story, fight scenes are obligatory) is disconnected from the rest of the piece. I have what I think is a pretty nice setup, and I managed to let the banter side track me.     Pesky cha
TheZot

TheZot

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Life

Worshipping at the Alter of the Mouse

Well everyone... it hasn't happened in 14 years...   I'm going on vacation.   I will be worshiping at the Alter of the Mouse in sunny Orlando, Florida.   Please behave. I do not intend to be online at all and if anything happens that requires me to get called on vacation... let's just say that you will no longer be a member...   I have lots of plans and lots of stuff on tap for when I get back. I should be nice and refreshed after 9 days away from the Internet and depressing news. I a
Myr

Myr in Life

3

Dates in the mirror are closer than they appear

So I've been beating up Busted, and I've been finding (as so many people do) that making it good takes a whole lot more work than just making it exist. I'd planned on having it done and shopping it around by the end of the year, assuming my HR department was OK with it. I'm not sure if that's going to happen now, unfortunately. It may, given that it's not yet Halloween, but I'm not holding my breath.     Still, the work going into the rewrite is definitely worth it. Even if the book ultimatel
TheZot

TheZot

4

I stink!

The title is quite literal... I really stink right now.   Earlier this evening, I went outside to get something out of my SUV, and it was dark. That's fairly normal at night, so they say.   As I opened the rear hatch, I noticed something moving out of the corner of my eye, between the rear of the SUV and the corner of my house, just a couple of feet away. All I could see was a flash of white.   Then the smell hit... Ugh... I quickly figured out that what I'd seen was a skunk. It got me
C James

C James

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Teenagers in Iran tortured and executed in Iran, for being gay.

Teenagers in Iran tortured and executed in Iran, for being gay. May they rest in peace.   Let it not be forgotten that those two executed gay young men were not alone; there have been at least hundreds executed in Iran for homosexuality in recent years. There's a word for that, it's called genocide.     For anyone who doesn't know, Iran's president recently said that they don't have homosexuals in Iran. He and his ilk are trying to make that into a fact, one gallows at a time.   T
C James

C James

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Rewrites, rewrites, rewrites

And more rewrites.   I'm not dead, but you'd never know it from the postings, would you? When Real Life hasn't been getting in the way, I've been beating up the draft of Busted, trying to get it in shape to shop around for publication.   It's been a !@$! pain in the ass getting it ready, too.   I thought the worst part about this would be throwing out scenes. I've already tossed 30K words, the last third of the book. Not that it isn't bad; some of the stuff I tossed I really, really like.
TheZot

TheZot

1

Oh, Rats!

Oh, Rats!!!   In my prior blog entry, I described some of the storm damage to my house. Well, the good news is that I found a roofing contractor willing and able (they have 4x4's) to drive out this far. The bad news is they have only one 4x4, a pickup, and so it's been one or two guys working on the roof.   Sadly, none of them fit the stereotype of hot young shirtless roofers. Oh well.   There has, however, been an unexpected fringe benefit; I have house guests! Yes indeed, unexpected v
C James

C James

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Nature's Fury

In a normal year, Arizona's Monsoon season (summer thunderstorms) starts in mid-july, and ramps up by mid August, often resulting, here in the high mountians of northern Arizona, thunder daily, but rain once ever few days at most.   This year, a years-long drought has broken, and we've had rain daily, over a foot between mid_July and yesterday.   Yesterday, I had major damage to my house (wish I was joking on that). A thunderstorm hit, and in the mountains they can be very violent. This on
C James

C James

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Books

Harry Potter (SPOILERS!)

My goodness. The journey has at least come to an end. It's suprising the amount of things that different fanfiction writers got right.   Albus Severus Potter. Hell of a name for a son, eh?   I couldn't beleive the number of deaths.     Something else!! Bravo!
Myr

Myr in Books

4

Twists on an old standard

or semi-old standard, at least. Cliches always bother me, and I've been pestered the past week or so by some characters and a bit of plot. I'm not going to work on it now -- writing time's dedicated either to the rewrite of Busted (which is crawling along, dammit) or working on Wild Life, which I've put off for way too long -- but still, they interest me. Maybe they'll interest someone else, enough to do something with them.   In this case it's the "kid shows up on the doorstep a decade or mor
TheZot

TheZot

5

Ooooh! Spiffy-keen client side goodness!

As part of the forum revamp, it looks like the blog module now properly supports XML-RPC access. (It used to claim to, but I never had any luck getting it to work) That means client blog editors (like, say, ecto, the one I rather like. It's well worth the cost) work. Which means I can blog from the train, with a text editor that doesn't suck, and that has built-in spelling checking. (Though I do see the latest version of Camino enables that in text widgets, which is kinda nice)   Being able to
TheZot

TheZot

3

Rewrites suck

It's always so much easier to write things in the first place. Not easy, exactly, but easier. Of course, the problem is that the ideas for the new stuff don't stop when I'm struggling to fix the old stuff. (I've only managed to get to the point where Joe's found Stephanie, dammit)   So, while I struggle, have the last few pages of the thing that likely comes next. And all I need now is everything that comes before it. It's going to have to be pretty good, since there's definitely no happily ev
TheZot

TheZot

7

Is it right to mourn the words?

I've been re-plotting Busted (yeah, I'm keeping that title for now, as it's better than the replacements I've managed) and I've come to the part of the process I really hate -- chopping out the good bits because they just don't work.   Chopping the crap out's relatively easy. Embarrassing, yeah (I mean, I wrote it in the first place, and what was I thinking?), but easy. So that flashback scene to when Chris was a kid? Gone. Poof, and no worries.   Unfortunately it also means that Steve's ra
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TheZot

5

Werewolf stories always disappoint me

So much macho posturing nonsense. Bleah. I hate it when they start off all promising and go downhill too. (They're much like vampire stories that way. At least with vampire stories you know that they're going to suck...)   I made the mistake of reading one the other day. I swear, at some point I'm going to sit down and write one myself, but until then I'll make do with this scene. (I'm not sure if it works without context, but it's funny in my head)       Clay looked down at Max, lying in
TheZot

TheZot

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