ChrisTalbot.com

You know what Blogger is missing? It's something key for blogs with several team members. The only way to get out of a team blog is if the admin removes you. You can't remove yourself.

I'm not too sure about this whole team blog thing I wrote about the other day. The Pickerville Co-Op has begun, and it's attracted a whopping total of four members. However, the only requirement so far for being a member is spending time growing up in Pickering as a kid.

That doesn't leave a lot of room for mutual interests. So far, two topics have come up. With the concern of insulting people, I'll still state: Neither of the topics are all that interesting to me. I'm not American, so I only care so much about playing the "who's going to be president?" guessing game. And I don't watch TV, let alone crappy ideas that come out of the CBC ... like this Greatest Canadian thing, which was the second topic. I think the Greatest Canadian is a stupid thing to do and just shows how insecure Canada, as a people, really is.

Personally, I think the best team blogs have a theme that all of the team members are enthusiastic about. Y'know, something like music or movies or politics or world issues or games or whatever. Frankly, outside of growing up in Pickering, I don't know that the four of us have enough in common to find a good theme. Therein lies the big issue with the Co-Op right now -- random topics of interest to maybe all or maybe only a portion of the contributors.

The Law came up with an idea for a team blog, and I think he was somewhat disappointed when I turned it down. Essentially, it would be a blog about movies that become books and books that become movies -- which are good, which are bad and what do we like and don't like about them. I don't care enough about that topic to warrant writing for a site about it. Now, maybe a team blog generally about movies would be more to my interest. Better yet, why not one specifically about science-fiction movies? That would be cool.

My first experience with Excel Saga came in the summer when Logan dropped by with the Imperfect Collection (ha ha) and showed me the first couple of episodes. It's probably one of the most insane animes ever made. Well, I picked it up myself because it piqued my interest and I've been starting to watch it this morning.

Gotta take Excel in small doses. ;)

The second part of blogging a novel at Blogger.com is up.

In Biz Stone's column on National Novel Writing Month and writing a novel using a blog, he mentioned Chris Baty's book, No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. I looked it up on Amazon, and I'm thinking of picking up a copy of it.

While writing a novel in a month's time comes off as quite a big undertaking, it doesn't really seem too big. I've known people that have engaged in the weekend novel writing challenges and come out with rough drafts of their novels. Back in college, I read about a guy in South America who wrote all kinds of westerns and action novels under various pseudonyms. The guy had hundreds of pulp novels on the market, and he was a master at pounding these things out in a day.

Yeah, that's right. He wrote novels in a day. Granted, they were pulpy, and they were short novels (about the size of Louis L'Amour's short novels or a small Harlequin romance), but he still was able to do it. I remember in the article, which I wish I could find (it's probably buried in all of my college crap), the reporter asked the guy how he gets through writing blocks. I believe the guy's answer was: "Dynamite." Essentially, when he came to an impasse in the story, he blew something up, which shuffled the story along into something else.

Hmm... All this talk of pulp novels and crap has me thinking I might just grab Baty's book and give this thirty-day novel thingie a try. To keep things going, I might even go the blog route. I could think of it as a serialized novel, and if a couple of my friends read it, they'd probably give me shit when I wasn't producing fast enough. Tempting. :-/

My vacation is going to be wasted. I know it. That's what happens when you choose a slacker-style, stay-at-home vacation. You end up staying indoors, watching DVDs and playing some EverQuest. Here's hoping I at least get out a bit this week.

I am thinking of swiping Jacquie's car for the latter half of the week to do some running about. I thought about maybe taking in Shaun of the Dead one afterntoon if it's playing at any of the local theatres. I also might hit Wyldstar tomorrow or Thursday and see if any of my titles have come in.

Actually, I just did a Wyldstar run on the weekend. It had been awhile. All of my titles were in, although some of them had been out for a couple of weeks or so. Still, I should go back and get a comic book storage box. The piles I've been creating are getting a tad too large and fall over if a mild wind goes through the room.

The idea of serializing fiction through a blog is something I've been thinking about for awhile, but I don't really know that it's something I want to do. Seems Biz Stone at Blogger is considering using his blog for writing a novel, though.

Sean (Wilson, that is) has started up a co-operative blog called The Pickerville Co-Op. Rawl, yours truly and possibly some others have been invited on to contribute. I guess the idea is just a shared blog for a group of people that knew each other in Pickering. Not sure how this is going to work out. :-/

I'm on vacation this week, but it's one of those stay at home, do next to nothing vacations. So it's not overly exciting. Today I just watched some DVDs, did a quick Wal-Mart run with Jacquie (she was off today for a doctor's appointment) and did little to nothing else. Yay!

Here's an interesting article written by Henry Jenkins, the director of comparative studies at MIT, that takes eight myths about video games and debunks them.

I just tripled the RAM in my gaming machine (from 256 to 768 MB), and now EverQuest runs like a charm on my machine. It looks much better, experiences a lot less lag and just runs much more smoother.

Well, one of my goldfish (both fancy types, not feeder fish) just tried to commit suicide. He (or she?) has been acting weird the last couple of days. When I was on the phone (with my mother, thankfully, so it was easy to put her on hold), the fish just flipped out ... literally. Some frantic swimming, a jump, and the next thing I know the fish is flapping around on the floor (which is a good five-foot drop from the top of the tank). I thought he/she was dead. I put him/her back in the water, and after just kind of floating at the top of the tank for a couple of minutes, he/she was back swimming around with the other one.

Fish are insane.

With Jacquie attending her weekly T'ai Chi class last night (I think I've spelled that right) and leaving me alone in the house, I took the opportunity to watch Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. The images from that disturbing documentary are still haunting me this morning. In a way, watching Sick was like watching a car wreck with horribly mutilated bodies strewn all over the highway. You know you should turn away, but morbid fascination keeps you watching.

Still, Sick was an excellent documentary, even if it made me cringe several times (male genitalia mutilation makes me squeamish). If you can get passed the sometimes horrific scenes of mutilation, what you will find is a documentary about a man dying from a horrible disease and the bizarre ways that the finds to cope with it.

Funny enough, Jacquie called me "sick" for even buying this documentary, but I personally think I stumbled onto a gem.

My parents are both big fans of the game Dominoes (the version with 12 dots to a tile side), but frankly, I find the game rather boring, easy and extremely predictable. I just don't enjoy it. Unfortunately, Jacquie likes the game, and somehow I almost always get sucked into playing whenever a game starts up. I generally get dragged kicking and screaming to the table, though.

By about the third round of play, I'm bored, so I start making my own fun. I construct buildings with my tiles. I flick the OFF switch on that little filter between my brain and my mouth, which basically everything I think, I say. That turns me into Mr. Obnoxious ... or Mr. Funny, depending on your sense of humour. And the switch stays off throughout the whole game. It takes a long time to play a game of Dominoes (part of the reason for my boredom).

Here is an excellent trip down Nostalgia Lane from John J. Miller at National Review Online.

What's the deal with vampire moviemakers scripting bloodsuckers as walking around in daylight? It just throws the whole vampire mythos for a loop and kind of kills some of the mystique around them. Night Hunter, which I watched last night, turned out to break the whole "vampires as nocturnal critters" rule. Still, it was kind of a fun B-movie that mixed martial arts action with vampires. Fun stuff, but not shot very well. What gave the director the idea that shaking the camera during combat made for good action scenes?

There was a message in my Hotmail account from the good Rawlio today. Well, it was kind of from Rawl. It's actually from the people at JohnnieWalker.com, but Rawl gave them my email address. I guess there are Johnnie Walker taste tests (tasting parties?) in Toronto in November, and I get the feeling Rawl wants to go to one of them. It's supposed to be free, so I figure ... hell, why not, eh? Some free Johnnie Walker over a couple of hours downtown? Sounds good to me.

I didn't expect much out of Vampirella when I sat down to watch it last night, and what I got lived up (or down?) to my expectations. I came across Vampirella as part of a double-feature DVD of vampire movies (the flip side of the disc being Night Hunter, which I have yet to watch) when my brother and I discovered a little DVD shop in Markham almost right beside the Tiger Direct store.

It turned out the place was really a rental store, but it had a shelf of DVDs for sale. Aside from the Vampirella/Night Hunter DVD, I also got what I hope will turn out to be a documentary gem -- Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I love bizarre and obscure movies. But my real guilty pleasure is probably quite obvious by now. I love vampire movies, no matter how bad they are.

Jacquie, her brother Rich and I went to see Shark Tale yesterday. Well, I would highly recommend avoiding this turd of a movie, as the story is predictable enough that you'll know the ending before the flick even begins. And for a comedy, it sure as hell is not funny.

I think Hollywood is going just a little bit overboard on the CGI animated feature film thing. In the Shark Tale previews, there were three (count 'em) trailers for CGI movies -- The Incredibles, The Polar Express and some movie about robots featuring an all-star cast (and I think from the same yahoos that made Shark Tale).

So that was last night. In the afternoon, Logan dropped by with a copy of Lady Death: The Motion Picture. While it could've been great, it suffered from poor dialogue and crappy voice acting, which is kind of weird for the production company. ADV Films has actually turned into a really good anime producer in terms of voice actors. Unfortunately, this American-produced animation obviously wasn't given enough thought in regards to dialogue and voice acting. Too bad.

Lady Death did have one good thing going for it. Nipples of death! ;)

I heard on the news this morning that the Liberals narrowly averted a non-confidence vote yesterday. I heard this on Jack FM, so there was a bit of colour thrown in for good measure. The DJ in question who was reading the news made a guess that no party was quite ready to send us voters back to the polls so soon after an election (and risk our wrath, no doubt). Wait a few more months and we'll see what happens. Minority governments in Canada never last more than eighteen months, and most seem to last less than a year. Martin's been in for only what -- four months? He's still got a little while before he gets ousted (and I'm fairly confident it will happen before his term is up, although I wouldn't put it past the sly son of a bitch to stretch out his term for a record length as a minority government leader).

Besides, Martin still needs a bit of time to hang himself for one of the other parties to step forward and have a chance of winning a federal election. Not that I want to see the Reform ... er, Canadian Alliance ... er, I mean Conservative Party get into power. The religious wrong (as opposed to right) isn't really my cup of tea.

In addition to my silly attempt to swim away from my pursuers in Gulf of Gunthak yesterday, I did something else yesterday that might not be considered the cleverest thing to do. I'd been hearing a bit about the Plane of Justice, which is an entry-level Plane of Power in EQ. Jacquie spent some time there last week with her druid, and in a group, she said it had pretty sweet XP. So I decided to pop in just to take a look and then go back out.

Well, the planes are somewhat different than normal zones. The entrance isn't necessarily the exit. So there I was in the middle of the PoJ graveyard looking around with no visible way to get back to the Plane of Tranquility. Thankfully, my trusty laptop was beside me and I used it to find a way out of the damn place. I thought I was going to have to camp out and wait for Jacquie to come port me out with her druid. :P

Too funny: Cybersex Gone Wrong

The big reinstall went fairly well. It took a good portion of the day. All told, I think around five hours before everything was done (including the reinstallation and update of EverQuest).

I took EQ out for a spin a little while afterwards and nearly got killed. You see, the last time I had crashed, I was in Dulak's Harbour. Well, I popped in, got big-time lag (there's something about that zone) and started getting wailed on by a bunch of mobs. I didn't have Spirit of Wolf up because I had been in Greater Wolf Form when I crashed (and wolf form goes away when you close the client). I threw SoW on ASAP. A quick run for the thankfully-nearby zoneline and I was at 77 percent health. Then I had to get through the Gulf of Gunthak. That went bad. My Superior Camouflage spell failed at the wrong time and I trained a dozen mobs around the zone and out to the Nadox zoneline (but not after trying to make a swim for it to the Stonebrunt zoneline, which was just one of the stupidest things I've ever done in EverQuest -- for non EQers, dying in the water is bad, as you gotta swim down and risk drowning just to get your corpse; thankfully, I didn't die). I managed to survive this ordeal, though I'd dropped to 22 percent health by the time I zoned into Nadox.

Anyway, all seems well with the newly-cleaned gaming machine, but I really need to find some loose cash to upgrade the RAM. I'm sure having only 256 MB of DDR in my machine isn't helping my lag and crashing problems any. I don't have any idea what a new RAM chip would cost right now. I really should find out and then get some.

Funniest thing is I haven't purchased RAM on its own in several years. Generally, by the time I need more RAM, I also need a new processor, a new video card and everything else, so I just go buy a new computer. However, I made a vow to keep this system for a few years and upgrade it as necessary. So how's this for being a lameass? It's been so long since I bought RAM, I don't know what I need to consider when buying it anymore. I suck as a computer geek.

My gaming system has been acting up lately. Jacquie and I popped onto EverQuest last night, and the client crashed three times in an hour-and-a-half. The last time this happened was about a year ago. The solution? Wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything, from Windows on through the software. While I'm working today, I've got the reinstallation going on beside me. The hard drive format is about a quarter of the way through. This'll take hours.

It was a busy weekend. Friday was spent out at The Bear & Firkin in Pickering for Rich's birthday party (Rich being a player in my D&D group). On Saturday, friends Iris and Gord were in town, so I got to spend some time with them in the afternoon and at dinner at my parents' place. Then Rawl and I headed downtown to meet up with Brad (who I haven't seen in awhile) to check out amateur comedy night at ... oh, hell, what was the pub's name called? I don't remember. I just remember the food didn't set well with me. Bleh.

Come to think of it, the comedy didn't set well with me, either. The comedians just weren't very good. Still, it was a fun night out.

Last night, Jacquie and I stayed in and watched Kill Bill (both volumes), which was the first time we'd ever seen the movie (er ... movies?). I'm still trying to decide what I thought about Tarantino's latest effort. It was fun, but you had to buy a whole lot of things that just didn't make sense (like how the hell did The Bride travel with a sword on an airplane -- especially with the damn thing sitting next to her on the plane?). Suspension of disbelief was surely a must. For fight scenes and violence, though, Kill Bill ranks pretty far up the ladder of American martial arts movies, though. It beat the hell out The Matrix and its sequels.

It's clear to me I haven't really set foot outside of the house in a few days. I remember waking up earlier this week and being cold. The window in the bedroom was open, and I could feel the chill in the air. The days leading up to the chilly morning were warm. I'm pretty sure of that.

This morning, I had to go outside to take Jacquie to work so I could get the car for the day. As we were getting ready to walk out the door, I noticed she was wearing a jacket.

"Is it a jacket day?" I asked.

"Yes. It's cold in the mornings and warm in the afternoons now," she said (that's more of a paraphrase than a direct quote).

Damn. I grabbed my black denim jacket and threw it on. I walked outside and shut the door. There were dead leaves on the ground and it was cool outside. Wow. Autumn sure snuck up on me.