“The city of murderers is safe for travelers and strangers.”
Category: Conspirators
He even managed to include the Secret Bonus Criterion! (dog sex)
Over on the Facebook feed, Stephen kindly took it upon himself to respond to my last post with 101 words that simultaneously satisfy all my plot-criteria:
Melinda looked down at her gun. “I had no idea this had so many bullets in it,” she yelled. “Turns out I’m pretty powerful, even though I am a woman.”
A pause for dramatic effect, then: “Now if I can just quit being so sad all the time, I can find out who had sex with all of my dogs.”
Melinda had thirty dogs.
Suddenly, her phone rang! It was her best friend who said, “I had sex with your other best friend yesterday!”
Dramatic pause. Then she (the best friend on the phone) said, “My desires are tearing us apart!!!!”
So that’s that, I guess. No more need to read stories! Thanks, other stories, you can go home now.
In which scrolling through Google Reader gives me a mild heart attack
Rian Johnson is posting like twenty pictures a day to the just-created Brick tumblr, for some reason. Happily, today he included this DVD-cover fan art that I did back in 2005. I always meant to clean that up and redo it; I had a couple other ideas for doing similar treatments of different scenes, but I don’t remember what they were now.
I’ve been thinking about Brick a lot the last couple of days, actually, because it’s occurred to me that I have pretty simple tastes in terms of plot. Give me any of the following and I will squeal with delight (double points for setting it in high school):
- Emotionally crippled badass tries to get to the bottom of things (Brick, Neuromancer, Veronica Mars)
- Young woman comes into her own and learns how dangerous she can be (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Privilege of the Sword, Bone, everything by Robin McKinley)
- Tenuous network of friends and lovers collapses under the simple pressure of human desire (Lovebot Conquers All, Battlestar Galactica, Magic for Beginners)
And, of course, the latter is why I love Scott Pilgrim. Take away the video-game trappings and the fight scenes and the hipster music references and the fourth-wall humor and… okay, don’t take any of those, they’re great. But the real reason I have such an aching priapism for those comics (which I didn’t pick up until 2008! GAH) is the way O’Malley spends so much care and attention setting up what we in the Indie RPG Club call a relationship map. He gets you to like everybody in it, gives them each their own petty little wants, and then lets them tear each other apart.
Not that I would know anything about what that’s like.
Skip this one, Mom
In mid-writing session:
Brendan: It’s a pretty old joke structure, but as Tina Fey has pointed out, if you get to a certain gag density people don’t notice that kind of thing. Many of the jokes in Arrested Development are groaningly old, but nobody notices because they come so thick and fast.
Brendan: … This is the part where you make a joke about coming thick and fast.
Stephen: I WOULD TOTALLY COME THICK AND FAST WITH TINA FEY
Brendan: There you go.
Stephen: BOYOYOYNG
Thanks to everybody who commented on the project management software entry, by the way
A few weeks ago I attended my second Go Play Northwest, and as before, it was one of the best weekends of my year. I played a lot of games, and wrote up reports on some of them, including Attack of the Crimson Apes (with Danger Patrol), Steam Tank versus Marble Army (with Principia), and Saga of the Goblin Headbag (with Lady Blackbird). I also ran a game of Rubble (discussed), and played my second game of Mythender (discussed, although it may not make any sense). I played just enough of a game of Anima Prime to make me want more.
Finally, I played in a game of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach adapted to take place on Wall Street in 1986, which was very funny and which we will never discuss again.
I did manage to go the entire weekend without playing a single game with Jackson Tegu or Joe McDonald, which, I mean, what the hell guys. They were (along with John Aegard and the Richmond-Smiths) two of my most potent catalysts in getting involved with the Pacific Northwest gaming scene, and now they’ve retreated back to their frozen Canadia. This will be rectified, gentlemen!
GPNW alone is enough to make me reconsider moving to Seattle every year. Then I try to get anywhere in its blighted hellscape of streets and quickly discard that notion.
Three things make a roundup
- Holly presents Towards a Critical Framework for High School Musical, which comes perilously close to accomplishing the formidable task of making HSM interesting to me. (As the author notes in the comments, though, it may already be too late.)
- Leonard is creating an free, online-only speculative fiction anthology called Thoughtcrime Experiments and he’s paying big bucks for stories! I can’t submit because I’m a first-degree acquaintance, but other people can, cough ahem guys.
- Oh, right, and MY SISTER’S GETTING MARRIED
And topical as shit too
Okay, so the season break lasted a little longer than we meant it to. But we’re buffered up, geared down, spitshined and BACK!
Sequel to Stephen’s: a gentleman by the name of Gabriel had the clever idea of taking all the words in the Proserpina stories, minus her name, and doing up an eerily well-informed wordle.
White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith
I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”
If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.
The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.
I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”
I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)
The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.