That feeling when you realize a podcast hasn’t updated in eight months, because they changed feeds and you didn’t notice. Well hello there, backlog.
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Writing Journal
With the rewrite finished, I’m back to the spot where I can start writing new goodness again. I need to do some re-ordering.
First, the phone call with the officer about Natalie clothes shopping for someone else needs to be moved later, much closer to where Susan has her last face-to-face with her sister. If not then, it needs to be right after the vampire vs. demon battle. Maybe then, so the tension about her sister is kept fresh. It doesn’t belong in the middle of Susan’s conversation with the scavengers, though. Also, moving it means that I don’t have to rush it.
Then there’s the battle itself. How do I work the transition between the conversation into the battle? Maybe I could have them knock Susan and Adam out and lock them in a room, then have them wake up mid-battle? How do you knock out a vampire? Well, it’s a place to start.
Did I have a reason for Susan to go and speak with/confront her creator? Other than displaying that she’s come into her own? I can’t for the life of me figure out why I put that in this chapter. Let’s not even mention the complication of writing a character that’s loosely based on someone else’s LARP character, when I was never super friendly with that someone. Better to remove that cameo entirely.
That also means that I won’t be splitting up the character party. Good Thing.
Fringe is the fringiest!
I really should let you know that I own Fringe, in its entirety, on DVD. So… context.
The series starts out with a fairly straight-laced government agent stumbling into/being assigned to some Weird Shit. No, not Dana Scully. Weirder Shit. Turn the dial to seven or so, right off the bat.
Don’t get comfy, though. You remember all that crazy philosophy and pseudo-science you used to dream up with your friends while under the influence of one intoxicant or another? Not only is it real, viable, and provable, it’s vanilla. Try harder. Go deeper. That’s all real too, and not only is the government agent going to subject herself to it to solve this case, but she was subjected to all of it before, as a child. Turn that dial to 11.
We’re not talking Chosen One, but we’re not far off.
Or is the swindler son of the scientist the one that two universes have been waiting for? Is it both? Neither? Or, wait, was my first working theory right after all?
Then, there’s the last season. Not only are all bets off, but there may not have ever been any bets in the first place, because the bets were tallied and paid out ages ago. Just tear the dial off, throw it in the street, and run it over with a car. It was like watching Akira, but harder to make sense of. I want to, though, I want to.
I recommend this show to anyone who doesn’t run screaming the instant I open my mouth about it. WATCH IT.
New kind of favorite
I’m not sure I’ve ever called a comic one of my favorites because of how much I’ve learned. If I haven’t, this’ll be the first time. Go Get a Roomie has earned it.
For those of you that are new to the Skippy, I’ll tell you – I love webcomics. I read a ridiculous number of them daily, and I keep up with updates using RSS.
Roomie is a lesbian that believes, to her core, that love, platonic and physical, should be shared without shame or jealousy. But, as hard as the character tries to convince both her friends and herself, readers are left with doubt. Chlove is a great writer, letting us know that none of the characters are as two dimensional as they initially seem. In fact, every single character is deep and rich and full, and different enough from each other to be easily distinguished.
The webcomic updates several times a week, and is an open-ended just-a-little-NSFW not-quite-slice-of-life story. I highly recommend it.
OHAI
Welcome to the world, Conor Mac Crampton! I can’t wait to meet you! Your mommy and daddy are going to make great parents.
Hang up and drive!
As I’m sure has been well established by now, I’m particular when I buy things. Picky, even. I had my car for several years before I was able to find just the right one. And then, to rule out possible mistakes, I asked for it for Yule from my might-as-well-be-sister.
She always gets me precisely what I ask for.
My car came with a mounting disc. I’m not sure if the previous owners had a GPS, an MP3 player, or a phone mount; all that was left was the disc. Also, it appeared to be fused to the dashboard – the two were one. So, I needed a phone mount that had a long enough arm to be mounted to the disc, and wouldn’t let go of the phone on bumpy road, or anything else that would make me a sad panda.
Enter the iOttie Easy One Touch 2.
Two years of casual research later, and I stumbled upon this bad boy. Pressure-triggered switch activates the clamp on the phone, and the rubber grips hold my Otterbox tightly in place. Push on the releases, and the phone comes right out. A bumpy road is no match for its Kung-fu Grip.
It has multiple joints, a telescoping arm, and can make me a perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Okay, maybe not that last one. And sometimes the joints need tightening. THat’s just the nature of road vibration.
So, overall? VERY happy with it, and I’d recommend it to other picky shoppers. Give it an eyeball, if you’d like.
Talking shop
Not writing shop, this time. Not even parenting shop. I want to talk about my other creative outlet, of late. Sharing video games.
Let’s put aside the question of whether or not playing video games and sharing the experience even is creative, and assume for the moment that it’s been answered in the positive. Let’s talk about hosting and sharing platforms. Let’s talk about monetization. Let’s talk about audience availability.
I’ve been uploading my gaming videos to YouTube because that’s where my vlog went. Everybody knows YouTube, and every social media, blogging, mobile, and console platform bends over backwards to make sure videos play and play well. They’re huge, and despite their roots in small-time producers, they’ve shifted focus to their subscription service (YouTube Red) and their live TV service (YouTube TV). This has, by necessity, changed their attitude toward advertising.
I’d only heard of Twitch in passing, and had considered it a place for more hardcore gamers than I’d ever be. I started watching when a friend (more so since I started watching, to be honest) returned to streaming as a job, and discovered that I’d been really wrong. Twitch has streamers that are at all experience and intensity levels. They have competitive communities, communities surrounding fandom, and non-toxic communities, just to name a few. The only things they lacked were video archiving for viewing later, and an app that was anything other than frustrating. But I had YouTube for that, so I started live-streaming to Twitch, and exporting to YouTube for non-live viewing. And it was working great! I was even bringing in some pennies from ads on my more popular videos.
And then I logged in to YouTube’s Creator Studio and got a banner notification that my monetization had been revoked. They had removed it from all creators with less than 10,000 total views. This would have happened earlier, but there had been a bug and I’d slipped through the cracks. That was all the communication I received.
No grandfathering in of current creators, no heads-up emails, no appeal. Now, this is entirely within YouTube’s rights, and makes sense with the business pivot I noted above. That didn’t make it any less irritating.
So I started looking for alternative platforms, with no luck. Until I took a look at my past videos on Twitch. Some that I’d thought deleted were back, all the way to August. There was a new option for collections, which is their implementation of playlists. The decision came down to this – was I ok with the trade-off of a less well-known platform and a problematic non-browser viewing experience for great communities and a business model focused on sharing gameplay?
Yes, I was.
So, I’m going to be uploading and streaming through Twitch for all of my gaming stuff. I’ll still be putting my vlogs on YouTube, and my blogging will stay here.
Let’s see how this goes!
Local Politics
I’ve voted in the primaries, and here’s a quick breakdown of who and why:
Lansing Mayor – Andy Schor. Not only does he have a plan, he has a downloadable PDF on his site detailing his plan. DETAILS. Twenty-three pages of details!
City Council, 4th Ward – Brian T. Jackson. He wants to focus on social justice. He has a practical, straightforward outlook that appears to me.
City Council, At Large – Kathie Dunbar, incumbent. I like what she’s been doing, and I want her to keep it up. Kyle Bowman. He wants to focus on police relations with the community, and police accountability to the community, including measures like personal cameras.