General
Generally I find that I do my best writing (or what I find to be my best writing, at any rate) when I’m either sick or very tired. Maybe it shuts off my filter for me. Tonight I feel a bit of both, but the words just aren’t flowing the way I’d hope they are. I’ve been staring at a blank page for hours now.
Sometimes the key can be knowing when it’s time to constructively procrastinate, and I think that time for me is right now. Back tomorrow.
So I went, I did the interview. Seems like a really awesome company with great people, several of whom I know from previous experience. Fingers crossed. It looks like an outfit I’d love to be part of!
No time constraints tonight, so back to the writing. Tonight The Price of Demand edit is calling my attention, so I’m going to put some effort into that and get back to Charlie’s time travel adventure in the future.
I love living in the future. I really do. One of my favorite things about this future we’re in is how huge geek culture has become and how it continues to explode with great content, like Felicia Day’s brand new Geek and Sundry channel over on YouTube.
Geek and Sundry first came to my attention by way of The Sword and Laser, a fantastic fantasy & sci-fi book club/audio podcast/GoodReads forum hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. Some weeks ago, they announced that they were bringing S&L to video as part of Geek and Sundry, so of course I had to check it out.
Sadly, The Sword and Laser won’t be airing on the G&S channel for another couple of weeks, but G&S itself launched today and they’ve got a bunch of other shows that are well worth checking out.
Firstly, Geek and Sundry is Felicia Day’s channel, so you’d better bet The Guild is represented. They’ve gotten together and made another music video, this one about the injustices many geeks had to endure in their formative years at the hands of “cooler” peers, and the cultural reversal that has left geeks increasingly popular lately. It’s a fun song and video, though by far the most serious of the releases they’ve done to date, dealing as it does with issues of bullying and abuse.
Felicia has another show, this one a weekly solo effort. The Flog debuted today, where she talks about stuff she’s into, highlights cool things she’s found around the internet lately, and goes out and tries things she’s always been interested in, sometimes for the first time. In her debut episode she goes out to learn the basics of blacksmithing. Now I’m no stranger to blacksmithing and crafting in general—I wield a mean pick in Minecraft—but she was doing this in the real world for once, not in a video game. She forged a real iron fire poker, and has it up for auction to benefit the FDNY Foundation. Pretty awesome stuff.
Felicia got Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Eureka & The Big Bang Theory) to host a show all about table top gaming. Yes, they still make games you don’t play on computers or consoles! This one is the longest of the shows I sampled at half an hour plus individual one to two minute interviews with each guest player afterward. It’s well worth the investment.
For the first episode, Wheaton has guests Grant Imahara (Mythbusters), Jenna Busch (Girl Meets Lightsaber) and Sean Plott (Day[9]TV) on set to play Small World, a German-style fantasy board game that’s something like Civilization meets Settlers of Catan with some Dungeons & Dragons thrown into the mix. You watch them play, get a feel for the game and how much fun it can be, get some instruction on the rules and some tricks for good play. It looks like it’s going to shape up to be a really fun show. It’s supposed to air every two weeks, alternating on Fridays with The Sword and Laser.
The last show I checked out today was Dark Horse Motion Comics, where they take actual comics and give them just enough animation to kick them off the page and into the video realm, with voice acting, sound effects and ambient background music to present the stories in a whole new light. Whether this one is for you will depend a great deal on whether you’re into the comic being adapted; this first one, The Secret, is maybe not my cup of tea, but I could easily appreciate how the format would (and will) appeal on a series that I’d be more inclined to follow.
Geek and Sundry isn’t the only such channel to pop up. Chris Hardwick, aka the Nerdist, has something similar in the works. I’ll undoubtedly be checking that out shortly too.
I did a bunch of offsite work and a bunch of editing today, so I don’t have much for Fiction Improbable this time. Back tomorrow with more.
Trying to write while both inspired yet uninspired. I’m having a lot of difficulty with the part of the new Captain Koell story I’m writing, and I’m also drugged up on Neo-Citran due to being somewhat under the weather. So I’m doing my due diligence in writing up this post, and I think that’s about it for the day. I’m going to get to bed at a slightly less unreasonable time and try to sleep.
Maybe this’ll help me get my sleep schedule back on track. Anyone who’s been watching the time I publish posts may have noticed it’s getting kind of crazy, given that I’m in the Eastern time zone.