A summary of a good day

I have had a good day. I've played video games. I've written. I've played video games and written while on my hammock. I really love that hammock.


I finally got some finalised work done on scripts for my proto-webcomic. I had to rework some stuff but, thanks to the magic powers of my thinking-hammock, I think the intro worked out better as it stands now than before. I'll have to type them up (you didn't think I'd used a laptop while on my hammock, did you? I know I'm a geek but I'm not that bad) and I may even post them here.

Another thing I'll have to post here is that video I've mentioned. I was meaning to have it uploaded for tonight but some stuff went crazy with the formatting and now I can't get it done in time, based on previous experience of uploading to YouTube. Anyway, I'll link that tomorrow. Or maybe we'll have TWToday's first ever embedded video. Exciting.

As I said earlier, today has been a good day. Even the weather's picked up. As I remarked to Skippy (whose thoroughly fried iMac has been taken away for servicing, just so you know) via email earlier, I keep expecting dead cows to rain from the sky just to maintain the balance of Scottish weather.

Scottish weather is remarkably like the Force.

Only crap.


Tomorrow, I'll be examining the innards of a large number of old games consoles with Sam, from whom I recently received this email:



Wish me luck.

Actually, forget luck. Wish me a suit of bomb-proof armour.

Short, yet dull

Well, having just added Amazing Super Zeroes to Bookmarks Toolbar Folder > Webcomics > Current, I can now say that I read 100 webcomics on a regular basis. I really ought to get round to writing my own, like I've been saying I'll do for, oh, over a year.

I'm serious. I've been refining characters and planning plot arcs in my mind for this webcomic idea of mine for more than a year now. It started out as a Penny Arcade/Ctrl-Alt-Del clone with some characters based on myself and some friends and then it evolved rather rapidly into something with a decade's worth of stories and about 20 characters. In fact, it pretty much underwent Cerebus Syndrome entirely in my head.

My total lack of artistic talent has hampered any real progress, as well as my laziness in all things.

That's it. I'm writing the first gorramned script tomorrow.

Or maybe I'll turn it into some kind of prose and write the first chapter. Or the first paragraph... frak, the first sentence would be a major improvement. But I really shouldn't set my sights so low. I'm gonna write something about this tomorrow, and I don't mean another blog post apologising for not having done anything.

I don't need to apologise to you people.

Anyway, that's about it. I seem to be running out of specific topics pretty fast, probably because I'm doing nothing at all other than sitting around all day reading loads of webcomics and watching DVDs. Things may liven up in the future. Or they may not. We'll just have to wait and see.

Crud, I've already referenced Shakespeare in a title

I really need to stop doing these so late. Skippy (who I'm convinced is the only one who actually reads these) says they're good or funny and if I prod the people around me in Computing enough, they mumble their amusement. Still, I feel like I could be doing much better but, alas, not tonight. For you see it is now, as I type this, almost 20 to 12, meaning I have 20 minutes to come up with a topic, write it and upload if I am to adhere to challenge.exe. See that? That was self-referencing. I hope to do it a lot more once I've built up a bit more self to reference.

Anyway, the reason for my lateness tonight is a fairly simple one. English homework. More specifically, an essay on Act 3, Scene 3 of ((Othello)) detailing the techniques used my Iago to manipulate the titular character and his subsequent change in personality. Sounds dull, doesn't it? It's not aided by the fact that I was off school the day we were told what to do and by the fact that it was technically due on Monday. Various circumstances have allowed me to keep putting it off till tonight, when I dutifully spent several hours alternating between typing a paragraph, reading a webcomic (added about three or four more newish ones to my big list of ones that I check for updates and I'm in the middle of another's archives) and just generally slacking off.

All this has led me to one conclusion. I don't like writing. Nobody does, or at least nobody should. I like thinking. I can come up with ideas for comic strips, blog posts, essays on Shakespearean literature, who knows what else, but I very rarely sit down to type it all up, because the process is quite a tedious one to me.

Perhaps it's more the tedium of the subject as I find myself enjoying this little mini-essay of my own topic to be more enjoyable than any essay that's ever really been directly assigned to me for any purpose.

Then again, perhaps it's simply the principle of the thing. I consider myself as having taken procrastination to the level of an art form. I can put off anything until the last minute and still, quite amazingly and in ways I don't quite understand, pull it off. Usually. I get the impression that this English essay, put off too long after having read the section, may be a load of drivel. Of course, I believe that about every English I've ever written, I've just normally managed to write drivel that matches up with the drivel on the answer grid.

I'm really not a huge fan of English as a subject. It seems that I'm very often looking for meaning in passages and sentences where there are none, assigning oceans of depth to puddles of mediocrity and giving words far more weight than they can possibly bare.

I could rant and rave on my problems with English lessons and teaching for hours and, assuming I don't have any more essays for a little while, I may well do at some point. For now, suffice it to say that I consider Skippy, the only one in our year to have completely dropped all things English, a wise and lucky bastard.

Actually, I've come to a conclusion, a curious thing for me to do. I like this whole, train of though, writing whatever pops into my head style of writing. With any luck I can develop the whole writing scripts thing because, as I've said an embarrassing number of times before, I do want to write this blasted comic. I hate writing that someone else has told me to do, that doesn't make sense to me and that isn't about something I enjoy. Thinking back over the years, most of the best writing I've ever done at school was on a topic I either picked or enjoyed.

Crud, 5 minutes to. Time to wrap this up, methinks. If anybody but Skippy reads this, write a comment. If Skippy reads this, write an actual blog post, you wise, lucky, lazy bastard.

Blasted linear time!

Today's post is going to be a rather short one as midnight draws ever closer. I have a topic which I will no doubt touch upon tomorrow and I was halfway through writing the post when I realised that I couldn't do it justice in a mere fifteen minutes of hurried typing. I really need to start doing these things earlier in the day. The same often applies to my homework.

As a quick aside, today's Woodle, found below, is drawn by Sam Stafford, who will be paid the princely sum of £1 for his efforts, and written, again, by myself. I have plans for these “Negotiation” comics. And webcomicking in general. I've touched on this before and certainly will do so again in the future, but I really like webcomics and I'm planning to do one of my own, or at the very least write it, owing to my total lack of artistic talent. Maybe I'll find something I've scanned in and put that up as today's image. Unfortunately, you won't be reading this if I do, because you'll go blind.

Like I said, this post is pretty hurried. I will try to avoid them but life often gives you what you try to avoid. My personal theory is that the universe is simply a very advanced Sims game, played by God an "intelligent designer" (can't piss off the pseudo-scientists, now, can we?). Everyone loves torturing their sims from time to time, right?

Image: Nah, decided against it.

Jumping the shark at the third post

One of these days, I'm going to have to take the time and sort through the various web pages that I have bookmarked in Firefox. I have been consistently putting off the task for months and the number of bookmarks that I have has probably doubled ever since I discovered the TV Tropes Wiki, a fascinating website which covers various clichés and overused plots in not just the world of TV but in videogames, comic books, etc. I'm currently making my way through the entire website (and have been doing so for weeks) reading each of the entries and bookmarking the ones that I hope to avoid or reference in my own fiction writing exploits (more on that later, when I, you know, actually get around to writing some of it).

Anyway, while looking through my bookmarks, I keep noticing the sheer size of the number of webcomics I read and am planning to read. A subfolder of my “Webcomics” folder marked “Current” contains precisely 75 webcomics which I go through every day. On yet another of these hypothetical future days I'll have to go through them and reorder them according to their update schedules so I don't have to go through the loading pages closing 60-odd tabs every Tuesday.

As I said yesterday, I intend to use these weekly doodles (aha, the mystery behind “woodle” is solved) to credit myself as a webcomic writer but I do have some greater plans which I will now describe nebulously, for three reasons:
1.I hope you will be intrigued enough to, well, be intrigued by it and all that it entails without realising that, as I've already said, I really haven't done that much actual writing for it.
2.The additional pressure of the two people who read this blog being intrigued by it will be enough to get my frickin' artist off his lazy ass and do some of the concept art I've been asking for since last July!
3.I get to use the word nebulously, which is just an awesome word.

I guess the topic for this post has now really become webcomics (expect it to come up again), so I may as well tell you about my own views on webcomics, because you already know your own and I can't really write about anybody else's.

I first got into webcomics when Sam Stafford, my good friend, close collaborator and dogsbody, pointed me in the direction of Ctrl-Alt-Del. Fairly videogame oriented and perhaps not the best comic out there (though certainly very good and successful), it was enough to get me intrigued and lead me to poke around this big Wikipedia list of webcomics. Now I'm not going to get into the whole “there's a bunch of Wikipedia editors out to get webcomics” thing, and I'm not explaining it either, but suffice it to say that led me to a few gems such as Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire and and Sluggy Freelance, which really showed me just how well long, linear stories and arcs could be accomplished with webcomickry (please note: webcomickry may or may not be a real word, the author is in no way responsible for any kind of situation in which you may be dumb enough to use it in general conversation and can't explain what it means).

There are a few others (well, 73, not counting the couple of hundred which I have links to the archives of with the intent of reading them at some point) which I count myself as a fan of and perhaps some day I'll list more of them. Although they run the gamut (another great word) of daily gag strips to complex decade-spanning (don't believe me? Read Sluggy Freelance) plots to utter nonsense that's inexplicably funny, I definitely prefer the plotted, more character humour based ones to the more off the wall ones.

I've actually developed a system for determining if a particular webcomic is going to have much of my beloved character development. Look at the cast page, many comic have them, and see if there's a female main character. Nine times out of ten, the protagonist will be a 15-25 year old male who will have an awkward relationship developing with any female character for the first couple of years at least, thus ensuring some level of plot arcs and development, hopefully without too much angst and drama. In badly drawn black-and-white.

Come to think of it, awkward clearly mutual attractions between fictional which seem never to pan out bug the hell out of me. I can just about tolerate it in series where it's a very occasional sub-plot, such as O'Neill and Carter in Stargate SG-1, though even that was pushing the limit towards series 8, any show where it's a major factor will eventually reach the stage when you can look beneath the TV while watching it and quite clearly see a shark.

Since I've now written over 800 words of this tripe (I've written shorter English essays) and I still need time to format it for the interwebs, I'll leave you, still with next to no knowledge about my crazy webcomic plan. Fare thee well!


Image: Why does the iSight camera in my iMac invert everything?