One False Step

Yeah, I know.

My classes ended last week. I defeated my Government class with ease, but rolled too many 1’s in math and failed my will save. That’s alright, no one’s surprised. Only taking one class over the summer, English 2010. I hope I can write intermediately.

Speaking of writing, I finished a story I’ve been working on for a few weeks. It’s somewhere in the realm of sixty pages unedited. I really want to get to work on the second draft, but apparently it’s best to wait a few weeks for best results. Let the story stew, and come back later to see if it tastes the way it’s supposed to.

I read the book On Writing recently. My opinion of Stephen King has been, for years, that he wrote useless fluff a la Danielle Steel. I had never actually read a King book, but I’ve seen the miniseries for The Stand countless times and it’s very important to me. Despite this, I never took a second look at a book of his until On Writing, which had been suggested to me so many times I could no longer ignore it.

I should note that at one point in the book, King likens Heaven to a large library of limitless books. He goes on to liken Hell to a large library of limitless Danielle Steel books. Soon after starting the book I realized I had been wrong all these years. He really is a great writer. The first half of the book is an autobiography, detailing all of the events that led to his career in writing. It starts with him writing an incredibly unauthorized book adaptation to a short horror movie he had seen, selling the copies for a quarter each. These sorts of things always begin with humble beginnings, of course.

The second half of the book focuses more on the actual writing process. He gives some great advice about how to organize your thoughts, the kind of attitude you should have when you start writing, and how to keep yourself from getting discouraged. He recommends the famous book The Elements of Style, which he says is the best book on the subject he’s ever read. He also says, and this is something I really appreciate, that sometimes it’s okay to ignore the “rules” in his book (or any other book about writing) every once in a while as long as in the end you’ve written a good story. I’m reading Elements now, and there’s definitely some good things I can take away from it.

King also notes that between the first and second half of On Writing he suffered from writer’s block for the second time in his life (the first time occurring during The Stand). He says his problem was fixed when he was hit by a van. Good to know, I suppose.

I’ve decided I want to be a writer. I can say that now, with confidence, after years of sleepless nights with no clue about how I want my life to go. The idea’s been kicking around my head for years, but these last few months have really opened my eyes. Of course, one rarely just becomes a writer, it’s almost never a question of choice and more a question of opportunity. So I suppose what I should really be asking myself is what do I want to do in the mean time? I’m leaning toward teaching high school.

The first time I ever thought about being a writer was back in the apartment we lived in when we first moved to Salt Lake. My brother and I used to play Magic the Gathering, I was probably about nine or ten years old at the time. Aside from what I imagine were really awesome cards (Our decks were so awful, now that I think about it), I really enjoyed reading the little flavor text quotes that some of the cards had. It surprised me that so few words could sound so wonderful together, or make me think, or make me laugh.

It may seem weird, but for some reason this set me on my path. When I was a little older, RPG Maker came into my life. This consumed much of my time. So much time. I can’t even believe how much time. I told myself I wanted to design video games. I wanted to learn to program and make games like the ones I loved. I still do, to a small degree, but my interest has shifted mostly to the writing aspect. While I’d like to be a novelist or a journalist, I’d also love a chance to write a movie or a game. Programming, by the way, still interests me, but it’s only in the back of my mind and something I couldn’t see becoming a career.

I don’t know how things are going to end up. I may change my mind again at some point in the future. Politics still interest me very much, but that tends to require some sort of law degree, and law degrees tend to require some sort of money. So this is the path I’m on for now. I hope it works out for me. I hope I manage to entertain someone.

“The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.”

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan

I saw Watchmen.

I liked it, I think. I definitely have some mixed feelings, but I think they’re generally positive. It’s as close as I could imagine anyone ever getting it. My biggest complaint was the music, actually. They use several well-known songs that completely take away from the atmosphere. Of course, they were mostly songs I like, but not in that context. The biggest problem was the ending theme, which was a veritable sin; a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as molested by My Chemical Romance.

(Incidentally, this was the look on my face when I heard it.)

Is it just me, or is the radio always better when other people are listening to it? More than a reasonable number of times I have been in someone else’s car and there’s been a pretty decent song playing. I’ll ask them what song it is, and they’ll tell me it’s on the radio. I’ll make note of the frequency and tune to it later (or sometimes the next day during the same timeslot) and it will be, most of the time, awful.

I used to read the Salt Lake Tribune a lot in high school. I read mostly the electronic version now, but I occasionally pick up a print copy. The Tribune has a humor columnist named Robert Kirby, who, over the years, I have come to think of as a rather peculiar uncle who shows up every few days to say something quirky and walks out, leaving everyone to think for a moment. I know when I see his name that I’m going to have a good morning. He always manages to express his opinion, make a damn fine point, and make me laugh every time I see one of his columns. The Tribune has been pretty disappointing lately, but not Mr. Kirby.

Why is it that people with iPhones always feel the need to prove something to me? This happens all the time to me at work. These people make hotel reservations over Expedia about ten minutes before they show up. Now, the way Expedia reservations work is that Experia will fax us a letter with the guest information on it, which we then enter into the computer. So these people come in, give me their name, and I tell them I don’t have a reservation for them. They’ll look surprised (and offended, for some reason) and whip out their iPhone to prove me wrong. Of course, at this point I realize they’re just idiots for not realizing that the system is more complicated than “Press button, receive reservation.” I go to get their reservation from the fax machine, and when I return they’ve pulled up their confirmation with Expedia. This has happened at least five times in the last few months. It’s not just at work, either. Whenever someone with an iPhone wants to make a point, they pull their phone out, stupid grin on their face, and slide their finger across the screen. I am reminded of the commercial that probably caused all this, and also how things probably went down. Those are links.

“I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can’t stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.”

I wiped out all of the old posts and comments. I was sad to see some of those pages go. That’s okay, though. Comments are back on for now.

I installed a copy of Puppy Linux on my flash drive the other night. I didn’t do this for any particular reason other than to see that I could. It’s a very interesting idea, the operating system and all associated files and accounts are all entirely on my USB drive. So I can plug this drive into any computer and load up my account.  Now, this really does nothing for me. I have no need of it, but I thought it would be fun to try out.

The other day I searched Google Images for “oscillating cylon eye” and two of the results were from my website. It was kind of a surreal experience, though admittedly not very interesting. I suppose that’s why about 50% of my hits come from people searching Google for Comic-Con pictures. I recently got a hit from someone searching Google for “San Diego Coma Con,” which sounds to me like the most boring convention ever. I’d love to see the after-party for that one.

Sterling got me thinking about what my top ten albums of all time would be. It’s a very difficult decision. It also opened a spirited debate; Is each disc counted separately, or as one slot? For example, the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack is 4 CDs but is clearly one volume. These are the kinda of preliminary questions that must be resolved before we can move on to the more important issue.

Yeah, I don’t have anything interesting to say. This picture makes me laugh:

Battlestar Galactica is back. I’ve been really amazed at how much information they’ve revealed in the last few episodes. I mean, these are the last episodes period, but they seem to be revealing a lot of information fast, and I’m wondering what’s left for the finale, “Daybreak”.

I have returned in full force to World of Warcraft. I never intended to quit it in the first place, so I don’t consider it weakness of character to fall back into it. WoW is one of those things I can do for months at a time and then get completely burned out. A lot has changed since I quit last, it’s a much better game in a lot of little ways.

I’m still getting about fifty hits a day from spam keywords, I’m thinking of destroying the archives and starting over. Maybe I’ll actually update then.

Went up to Idaho with Sterling. His father lives in Pocatello, my brother in Blackfoot. My brother and I don’t ever really have much to talk about, but it’s really good to talk to him about nothing. Sterling’s dad’s always got some wacky new story. People in Pocatello think that people from Salt Lake City are evil.

Mountain Dew released sixteen ounce cans. Are you excited? I’m excited.

After banning nearly every English word from being posted in the comment box, and still receiving hundreds of spam comments a day, I’ve been forced to disable the system. Although I’m not sure that actually worked, so we’ll see. If you still want to make a comment, and I still definitely want to read them, e-mail it to [my full first name](at)onefalsestep.com. I’ll post it on here manually.

It’s 4:48 AM and I have school in a few hours, followed by six hours at GameStop. I no longer work the night shift at the hotel, but I’m finding it incredibly difficult to adjust to the schedule of a normal person.

Life continues. Sterling is dating a girl we went to elementary school with, which is slightly surreal. All around me friends are turning 20 (with a few 21’s and 19’s.) Nearly everyone’s in college now.

The Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was DMing has been put on hold due to scheduling problems. I have gathered a new party of heroes (”Team B”) to test their might. Should they prove to be legitimate players, they will (hopefully) meet up with Team A and the adventure will continue.

24 returned a week ago after its nearly two year break. I haven’t gotten around to watching the first few episodes yet. The show has been slightly disappointing for the last few years, but I still intend to watch this season. More importantly, though…

Battlestar Galactica returns in two days. I have never before in my life been so excited for a television series, the only thing to come close would be Doctor Who. Battlestar Galactica is… incredible. I really can’t explain the feeling I get watching that show. I remember fondly sitting at Sarah/David/Elek’s apartment with Sterling, watching the show on Sarah’s TV. David walked by, criticizing us for our choice in television. Two hours later, all three residents of the house, and two other guests were all sitting around watching it. “Push next, dude!” Unfortunately, there’s only half a season left. It’s taken all of my strength to avoid spoilers for this show, avoiding entire communities on the internet to keep the secrets safe.

I’m going to rest my eyes now. Don’t worry, I won’t actually fall asleep.

“Two protons expelled at each coupling site creates the mode of force, the embryo becomes a fish that we don’t enter until a plate, we’re here to experience evolve the little toe, atrophy, don’t ask me how I’ll be dead in a thousand light years, thank you, thank you. Genesis turns to its source, reduction occurs stepwise though the essence is all one. End of line. FTL system check, diagnostic functions within parameters repeats the harlequin the agony exquisite, the colors run the path of ashes, neuronal network run fifty-two percent of heat exchanger cross-collateralized with hyper-dimensional matrix, upper senses, repair ordered relay to zero zero zero zero.”

I haven’t had much to talk about recently. I don’t watch as much television as I used to, DC Comics makes me cry, and I’ve been slowly reading the same book for two months.

I have been playing Fallout 3, though. It’s very fun. Of course, the PC version is incredibly glitchy and the metro system turns me into the Hulk for minutes at a time, but it’s still very fun. I’m not a big first person shooter fan, but this is one of those exceptions. It’s more than an FPS, though. I was afraid Bethesda would put the RPG elements to the side, but it’s actually pretty faithful to the originals. In fact, it’s unfair to call it an FPS with RPG elements, it’s really the other way around.

The writing in this game is incredible. First of all, I can’t imagine how much dialog there actually is. I’m sure that if I played through this ten times I would never meet every character. On top of that, every character has several conversation trees to hear. For example, I was doing research on “excessive bodily injury” for a particularly annoying character. After accepting the quest, I stepped outside and jumped off the balcony. I climbed back up the stairs with a single unit of health and reported my findings. She asked me how I was feeling, and the dialog was as follows:

The latter two options were only available because I have a particularly intelligent, charismatic character. Another scene later in the game involved a woman waking up from a coma. She asked me, “How long have I been out?” I had the option of telling her the truth, “Only a week or so,” or “It’s been centuries. The world is a lush, green paradise once again.”

I’m playing a good character, like I always do. Ever since I told Tifa the flower wasn’t for her, I realized I can actually feel guilt for the way I treat virtual characters. I’m not completely opposed to play evil, but I always play good first and usually end up getting bored when I try to play through again as a morally questionable character. BioShock is a good example.

I told myself this wouldn’t be an all-Fallout post. I think I lied.

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”