I've broken 20,000 words in NaNo, but that's still behind the quota. And the novel? Sucks. I haven't even named all the princesses yet. Even I'm having trouble telling them apart. I've come up with a reason for them to go dancing every night, but as is typical me, it's incredibly weird and doesn't make much sense.

And get this.

I've made the love interest a woman.

In the fairytale, there's this peasant who gets a job at the palace and eventually learns the secret of the princesses' worn out shoes, so then he gets to pick any of the princesses as his bride. And I went and made that character a woman. Goddamn, just when I thought I'd write a story that DIDN'T include any elements of myself. Do I write ANYTHING (other than fanfiction) that doesn't involve homosexuality anymore??

Anyway, I saw the new A Christmas Carol in 3-D yesterday. Man, it was cool. I'm a bit of a Christmas Carol geek - I've read the book over and over and I own at least a dozen different film versions, so I was really excited about this one. The visuals were AWESOME in 3-D, the camera was so fluid, flying over rooftops and through the snow, beautiful. It made me almost wish there was such a thing as motion simulator movie theaters. 95% of the dialogue was lifted straight out of the book - I could have done with more originality there. Sure, Dickens' dialogue is brilliant, but, you know, we've heard it before a billion times. I also could have done without Scrooge shrinking and getting a Chimpmunk voice. Sure, it was different, but it just felt too weird. Plus Scrooge getting chased by a demon carriage and zombies (yes, zombies), although it was visually impressive, almost gives off the feeling that he was simply frightened into changing rather than that he genuinely wanted to change.

But other than that, it was great. I'll probably be seeing it again.

Muppets is still my favorite version, though.

Oh, for the previews I had Alice in Wonderland (that looks AWESOME!!!!), Avatar (more awesomeness), and . . . Toy Story 3. This time it was a real trailer, not a teaser. It showed adult Andy and everything. God, it began so SAD, like "AUGH! NO!!!" It looks like Woody and the gang will be given to a daycare and the kids there will abuse them and then they'll try to bust out (and hopefully return to Andy). Well, that's better than my fear that they'd be in a daycare center forever. I (and, I'm sure, millions of others) want them to stay with Andy, maybe go to his own kids or something like that. Anyone who's seen the first too movies can tell you that Andy loves Woody and Buzz too much to abandon them forever, and hopefully he'll realize that.

Well, Pixar's never produced a disappointment, so I'll give the movie a chance, but I'm still very skeptical.

Instead, more action figure antics.

( Spock Prime and Bones take a more active role this time... )

Less stupid, but just as pointless - this afternoon I decided to check a used CD shop for the Beatles albums I didn't have on CD yet, and turned out they were having a buy one, get one half off sale. So I picked up Please Please Me (only owned on vinyl), Help, Let It Be (both of which I had never owned, but had most of on various compilations on tape or vinyl), and the third anthology. Now all I need to complete the set is Abbey Road, which I'd only owned on tape. Have just ripped them to put on the iPod, and am going all eeeeeee over some of these songs I haven't heard for ages. "There's A Place", "Two Of Us", "You're Going to Lose That Girl", "I've Just Seen a Face"... I don't even know which songs to go back and listen to repeatedly first. :D (Also, speaking of "Two Of Us", LOL at "Iiiii dig a pygmy!") And it definitely makes me want to pick up the guitar again.

Probably more stupid but less pointless - last night I was bored and unmotivated, so I thought it was time to play a video game, but couldn't think of any game I'd been meaning to replay that I actually felt like replaying at the moment. I decided on FFXII, because I knew I'd get into it fast - except then I couldn't find my PS2 memory card. Since akatonbo and I both had PS2s when we moved in together, one is in the living room with the TV, and the other is hooked up to my computer's video capture, and I thought maybe my memory card was in there...

It was not, but Shadow of the Colossus was. I hadn't actually started playing it yet, but the other day I had been calibrating the video capture, and grabbed it because it was near the top of a stack of used games and I knew it would be pretty, therefore great capture material. ...Suddenly realized "Wait - why haven't I played this yet?" And since one of the games under heavy consideration for replaying had been Ico, seemed appropriate.

To sum it up, I fumbled around forever before I figured out that the colossi might have more than one weak point (you don't even want to know how many times I stabbed that first one in the leg and wondered why it had stopped working), wandered around taking in the scenery and lighting effects, and spent an hour and a half fighting the third colossus - one hour of which was a single attempt after I figured out how to do it, but kept falling off. XD But boy, did it feel good when I finally took that thing down. Definitely time for a break then, though. That was over 12 hours ago - think it's time to go find another monster to climb. :D

Hello pearlswine denizens!

Wanted to apologize for the absence of comics over the last couple of days, and let you know that there will be a slight delay for comics over the next few days.

It's kind of a funny story, really. I'm doing NaNoWriMo -- the National Novel Writing Month. Sadly, the other night, when I was at a write-in--an event held at different locations where NaNo writers get together and write like fiends for a couple of hours a night. Unfortunately, Tuesday night, one of my fellow writers came back to our table with a large caramel latte. I had my back turned, but heard a gasp escape from my writing partner. I turned to my computer, only to see my little iBook covered in large caramel latte!

We immediately cleaned the computer and I pulled the power and the battery, and I left it overnight to dry, after getting all the coffee out from underneath the keyboard. I hoped (and prayed, in my secular way, to the universe) that all would be well.

Sadly, I turned on my computer last night, and there are problems. My keyboard is dead, and I don't know about anything else. So at the moment, my only Internet access is at work--where I am often busy, um, working. I should still be able to get the comic up, it just might be delayed a little while until I get my home computer issues resolved.

Thanks for your patience, and for your awesome comments! I always enjoy posting the comic and seeing your entertaining posts.

Jim

And directly related to my previous post regarding young Vulcans knowing the work of Lennon/McCartney...

Outtakes from RP, #1:

Spock: *playing the lute/harp-thing* It would be more recognizable with a vocalist, I imagine. Since we had mentioned late twentieth century Earth, the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney seemed appropriate.
Jim: ...Wait. Is that "I Want to Hold Your Hand"?
Spock: ...
Jim: Are you Vulcan-flirting with me?
Spock: *clears throat, changes to "Let It Be"*

...We discuss a lot of weirdness like this that the characters are too smart to actually do. XD

Scruffy!Spock plotamari: I got past the minor block I had in writing it, the night before last at work, just by giving up on trying to make the scene meaningful or relevant to the plot and writing it anyway. It gave itself relevancy all on its own, and told me exactly the next scene I needed to write, and how to make that one more relevant too. I love it when my characters are smarter than I am.

So I wrote some yesterday morning after work, in bed, without the laptop plugged in, and the batteries ran down. Then I took my laptop off to work... and realized I didn't bring the cord, and the batteries were almost dead. Quickly renamed the file (because "adoptavulcan.txt" is somewhat more conspicuous in the recent documents list than "09-11-11.txt"), stuck it on a flash drive, and worked on it on the work computer. Not nearly as much as I wanted to because they were doing some upgrades and reboots, and I didn't want to chance having my text file up there when the remote techs decided it was time to do stuff on our computer. Had to wait until they were done.

Even so, when I got home, I compared text file sizes from the laptop and the flash drive. Before tonight's remote work, 156k. After tonight's work, 172k. Wrote more when I got home, now 180k and a total word count of 32740.

...I think I'm going to add a new tag to my list with this entry. XD

I'm beginning to wonder if I should just start posting this serialized as I write it, because I've been doing that for kink memes for the last year and a half anyway - no beta, no editing, just posting every time I get to a good stopping point. And it's worked out decently. On the other hand, everything longer than about 20k total words, I have gone back and edited or made additions to at some point after I finished. But on the bright side, the edits were for embellishment, rather than because I wrote myself into a corner, contradicted myself, or changed my mind halfway through about some detail of the plot. And this thing is mostly outlined in my head as far as what came before - it's just what's yet to come that reveals what came before that's up in the air.

I'm just... weirded out. I never wrote things in a linear fashion until kink memes ate my life. It was more writing the interesting bits, then going back and filling in the blanks.

Anyway, even if no one else ever reads this thing, I'm having so much fun writing it. (PROTIP: The way Spock shoots pool is totally revenge for the way Kirk plays chess.)

I had previously posted regarding my city's non-discrimination ordinance, and the ridiculous tactics the opposition was trying to use to get it shot down, and how generally pissed off I was about it. (And actually, the fact that there even had to be a vote on something so basic.)

I did not post a follow-up after the election, simply because most people who were interested in such things were following the story in Maine, and although the news was depressing out of Maine, my hometown generally got a little byline in the national news coverage, saying that at least Kalamazoo, MI had passed a non-discrimination ordinance, so the gay rights battle wasn't moving backwards everywhere. And it passed by a much larger margin than I was fearing, so overall? I'm pretty darned proud to have lived here my whole life, at the moment. (Kalamazoo County, at any rate, if not always in the city itself.)

And now? It appears that Kalamazoo's support for the ordinance has inspired a bill to overturn the gay marriage ban Michigan voted into place in 2004, since it may indicate that feelings on the subject have changed. If this passes, it'll be on the ballot in 2010.

On the one hand, it's not asking for gay marriages to take place in my home state. It's just striking down the amendment that legally declares gay marriages invalid. But it's a step, and it would be incredibly nice to be married in akatonbo's home state and then come back to my home state and still be considered married.

I just wish I could believe voters would actually vote it out. Unfortunately, I don't. Despite the mostly Democratic state leadership for a while, and the larger cities largely embracing diversity and equality, large portions of the state are still conservative. And as noted, that election here in Kalamazoo? Was for an ordinance the city council passed unanimously, and then there was enough of a ruckus that a group got together to force it onto the ballot. (Which isn't a bad thing in general - I like to think most people are sensible enough to vote sensibly.) In other words, there are enough people in this city who apparently were so offended by not being allowed to fire or refuse housing to gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals just for being gay, lesbian, or trangender that they managed to get it on the ballot. And this is one of the big "liberal" cities.

But even so, I'm certainly willing to give it a shot. And if my city's progress inspired it, I'm even more proud of my city.

It is semi-canon for the new Star Trek movie that Vulcan children's education includes at least some knowledge of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. By semi-canon I mean that it's in an early version of the screenplay and in the novelization based on it. (And actually I'm not sure if that line didn't wind up in the movie, or if the dialogue during the Vulcan school-bowl-thing scene went too quickly for me to hear it. Maybe it's full canon.) Being a big dork of a Beatles fan, that in itself made me grin.

But now akatonbo and I have gotten to a point in RP where Spock is making use of his Vulcan lute (never mind it is SO not a lute, that's what they call it apparently), and it had been in the back of my headcanon even before the movie that his mother liked hearing him play Terran songs when they were alone with no one to get on his case about not being Vulcan enough, and oh hey - what Terran music are young Vulcans now semi-canonically quizzed on? Well that's convenient! So in addition to just making a bunch of stuff up which may be recorded sometime in the next couple centuries by people who aren't born yet, I can also use some of my favorite songs!

Except that I find myself being a little wary of which songs I choose, because Spock definitely wants to avoid giving anyone the wrong idea by playing love songs to them, or songs which someone might mistakenly assume are revealing his inner hidden emotions or some such. So I'm largely going by "what's a song that would sound nice as an instrumental, played on a lyre?" and secondarily considering lyrical implications (since he's not singing anyway), and I fear my bias for John is showing. All the songs that have been springing to mind easily except "Yesterday" are John's songs and I'm totally saving "Yesterday" for something. And sadly, I am realizing that a lot of the Beatles songs that Spock might approve of are... not Paul or John, but George. Can I assume he researched the topic of these 20th century composers further and became acquainted with their collaborative efforts? It is Spock, he's thorough...

But I think I may have already hit the jackpot of semi-canon intersecting with my own personal taste when I realized "DUH - Across the Universe."

And then I was thinking about this while I had my Beatles playlist on shuffle at work tonight and it pulled up a particular track from the White Album, and I realized - John wrote a song for his dead mother - and my brain basically broke.

Yeoman Rand is my new "work" icon, because I was watching "Charlie X" for the ontd_startrek rewatch last night, shortly after I had this conversation on the phone:

Phone: *ring*
Me: [place of employment], this is [name].
Idiot: *mumbles a question*
Me: What was that?
Idiot: Do you give head?
Me: No.
Idiot: Why not.
Me: I'm sorry, that's not one of our services. *hangs up*
Phone: *ring*
Me: *considers picking it up just so if it's the same guy, I can say "I'm sorry, might I recommend someone else who might be able to assist you in this? For instance, your mom?"*

So uhm. What does my job consist of? Making coffee, getting people snacks, doing all the things my coworkers can't be bothered to do during their shifts, getting harassed and hit on by creeps, and smiling pleasantly while I mentally compose snarky replies and fantasize about kicking them in the groin.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR.

The red uniform shirt is about as long on me as her dress is on her, too. Is it bad that I'm seriously considering tailoring it a little, taking it in so I can make it have the little flaps in the skirt?

...Kinda tempted to do some basketweaving with my hair, too, just for kicks.