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oh my god, josh, you suck at life!
Okay, so.

krabapple just sent me The Best Text Message Ever. I was looking for my last Best Text Message Ever, which she also sent me, and ended up re-reading the entry I posted it in. The entry is about Oregon Trail, and how Josh is the crappiest wagon leader ever who kills everyone and never makes it to Oregon.

"It's been almost a year!" I thought to myself. "Maybe Josh is a better wagon leader now! Maybe he has learned from his mistakes!"

THIS IS A FALSE ASSUMPTION, INTERNET. JOSH IS ASS AT LEADING A WAGON.

I did not even make it to "disk two" this time! CJ died of Typhoid, Donna and Sam drowned, and then Josh died of dysentery. Like, one right after the other!

The moral of this story is, don't ever let Josh Lyman take you to Oregon.

The new Best. Text message. Ever. is:

Good night from the alternate world of lesbians! :D

Current Mood: shocked

A Graham Chapman Picspam (Yes, we have nudity!)
Being obsessed with Graham as I currently am, I thought I'd share with you all a picspam.

If you missed the subject, YES, WE HAVE NUDITY. So probably you shouldn't look at this while a boss/professor/parent is perched on your shoulder.

( 56 Graham Chapmen pictures in half-assed somewhat sequential order. )

Current Mood: enthralled

SW Crossover With The D.C. Universe???!!!!
That's the rumor going around! We'll see if someone confirms or deny but it looks like D.C. might be teaming up with Dark Horse and Lucasfilm for crossover fun:

http://www.examiner.com/x-2730-Star-Wars-Examiner~y2010m1d5-Star-Wars-and-DC-Comics-crossovers

I can see it now: The Dark Knight Vs. The Dark Side! I'd personally love to see a Sandman universe/SW crossover.

Go Sell Crazy Someplace Else- We're All Full Up Here
Right, so having read an intriguing post regarding people looking for rp buddies, I messaged this person. They didn't seem insane within the first five minutes of the conversation. They seemed friendly, articulate, intelligent.

Then we started discussing chars and potential scenarios for rp and they interrupted me to ask if I had an image for the char. NOT a photo. They suggested I 'go to Deviant Art and select an image there are tons there.'

I was slightly bemused at the prospect of being requested to go and find an illustration of a pb on the spot. Right, so this person's a bit weird, I thought to myself. I cautiously suggested, 'Well, I have some stuff _I've_ drawn, I could send you a jpeg if you like.'

This, I was informed, 'might result in my char being rejected.'

Yes, rejected from an rp session via AIM. I figured what the hell, this person is obviously a twat, but I confess I've a bit of professional pride since I'm a freelance artist, so sent them a jpeg anyway.

I got this response: 'Your drawing style looks like Joe's. Suspiciously so.'

I have no idea who 'Joe' is, and so asked the other person to clarify just what the hell they were on about. I also mentioned that since I am an artist, the insinuations that I'm some sort of plagiarist are highly offensive to me.

Their response was, 'Oh no no I don't mean you're a plagarist. I have to ask Joe something.'

By now I was irritated and said I didn't think this was going to work out. Their response was, 'No wait, it's okay. Joe says it isn't him. Sorry for the misunderstanding but you can see why I have to be careful.'

So, after blocking and deleting this person, I am still left with the burning question...

Who the hell is 'Joe'!?

Current Mood: curious

Notebooknotes: Writing DO ANYTHING

DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

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If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

Home Again, with Additional Dog pictures.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/home-again-with-additional-dog-pictures.html

posted by Neil

I'm home.

This is the weather the dog likes: crisp, cold, weather that puts him in mind of wolfish ancestors hunting on the steppes.

Me, I put on long underwear and dozens of layers over that, and top it off with the sheepskin Uigur hat I haggled for in Xinjiang, and trudge in the snow behind him. It's frozen on top, so you crunch and rock and hunt for ruts that already exist as you walk, or you teeter-totter across the surface, half-falling at every second step. While Cabal is happy in a world filled with sharp smells and frozen rivers, and he bounces over the ice and snow with joy.

***

Many years ago I discovered (via the currently hiatus-bound Fabulist) Jason Webley. I posted this a link to this song, Eleven Saints, a song Jason Webley wrote and performed with Jay Thompson...

Jason was pleased, and wrote to me to say thanks, and then, a couple of years ago, introduced me in email to his friend Amanda Palmer, with whom he was working on a project, as they worked to bring the music of two conjoined twin sisters they had discovered on the internet to the world. There were two songs out on the internet by the mysterious pair for a long time, but a new song, " A Campaign of Shock and Awe", crept out today: you can hear it at http://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn. Highly recommended, and not just because of the, y'know, family connections.

...

Right. I do not want to be disturbed tonight. Maddy and I will be beginning our New Year's catch-up by watching the first part of Doctor Who 'The End of Time'.

Labels: Evelyn Evelyn, more snow, dog photograph, Jason Webley

DO ANYTHING: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh

The serial version of the first DO ANYTHING book concluded today. It’ll be out in print in April, and it’ll look something like this:

4249360406_77ffae882e

I have a feeling this is going to end badly.
But! As some of you might have noticed, I am very slowly uploading all of my stories from my own website, off of the old blog, off of random places, into the A3O archive. I have the attention span of a gnat on meth, and cannot be trusted to maintain any website, so once all of this is one, I have a centralized drop box for fic, everybody will be happy because it won't be an awful hunt to find all the stuff I have put up all over the internet. As of now, all of the fanfiction housed on my website through the Harry Potter fanfiction is now up on A3O, and a handful of other things, including (I think) all of my NCIS fiction.

So here is where I am getting my ass into trouble:

Is there a story of mine you have been looking for? That's NOT -- I repeat -- NOT on my website? (If you're not sure about this, CHECK HERE FIRST.) Is it in one of my old LJ posts that got private-locked a while back?

IF SO, leave me a comment with this information, if you can find it:

1. Title
2. URL where it should have been, but is broken or whatever

This is not a guarantee or anything, but I will be working when I have free time throughout the rest of my week off to put stuff where it belongs.

This entry was originally posted at http://rageprufrock.dreamwidth.org/27562.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Current Mood: nervous

"How dare you ask questions! Can't you see I'm covering it up?!"
This is a while back in a group I'm in. This was back maybe within 6 months of it being made. This is shortly after a drama-bomb hit and some people went from writing yaoi-smut together to worst enemies. It may have all started just from a player ending a pairing since a bad-mod had her character slutting around. The 'sister' rp club was pretty much used as what to attack in it all.

So we had 5 mods. Main mod and owner of the rp is a sweet person that wanted to share the club with friends and run everything nice-nice. Unfortionatly her other-half at the time was BitchMod #1 and was rather domineering in how things should run. BitchMod #2 was the one previously mentioned as a bad-mod (and I've mentioned her in some other rants to boot) and was obviously her cohort and they agreed on most things. The next mod is an awesome person that was also friendly to everyone, and then our 5th was also sweet and friendly, but constantly busy and pretty much became a ghost (though I suspect she was the first to see the pair of BitchMods starting trouble and didn't want to be around for it).

So BM2 has drama happen so she and BM1 both declare sister club no longer so and overreact on anyone that transferred a character. Not everyone is banned from the game chat, but things are certainly in a hostile mood. One of these players that transferred a character still had at least one valid character in the rp roster of this game, however in the chat they were forced down to being a "visitor" rather than a club member. I was obviously scratching my head at this point, because while I had already butted heads with both BMs about a character I had apped, I hadn't yet been convinced they were completely vengeful and vindictive asswipes. I asked the game owner first on this situation, of why this player with a valid character was being treated like this (even after the player themselves told me I'd be better leaving it alone). Owner said I'd have to ask BM2.

So, I end up asking why the player's status is as such to BM2 in the chat infront of other players and mods. My assumption at this point was that it had actually been overlooked that he was still a valid member of the game. I however found myself booted and having to re-enter the chat, then being accused of "just trying to stir up trouble." Obviously the situation wasn't overlooked, and BM2 wanted to avoid any attention she could to possible wrong-doing to anyone on her part. Of course BM1 was behind her, but the owner of the group was more than a little miffed though. "Are you trying to say players can't ask questions?" Of course neither BM could confirm that infront of a bunch of players as well to the owner without showing what complete bitches they were. They could do little more than just say I was the bad egg trying to start trouble and try to ignore the situation happened. BM2 made sure to do any squelching or temp-banning of me she could justify when she could from then on though.

Thankfully BM1 eventually left and BM2 had her influence quickly diminished until the owner and other mod no longer gave a shit for her antics and eventually booted her from the mod-table.

Links for 2010-01-05

Charitable Front: Some Bay Area organizations appear to be part of a secretive group
"Mysterious organizations in the Bay Area profess to be advocating for liberal causes. In truth, they appear to be part of a secretive group with a bizarre radical past."
(tags:cult pol )
Sikhs strive to keep language alive
"The Sikh scriptures and the Punjabi language of many Sikhs were written in a script known as Gurmukhi. So to be fully initiated into the religion, you must know how to read it."
(tags:cult culture language history social )
U.S. Evangelicals? Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push
"…the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ?the gay movement is an evil institution? whose goal is ?to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.? Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior…"
(tags:cult crime )
Freescale promises bargain-price tablet this year
"Freescale Semiconductor unveiled blueprints for a tablet computer to be priced at less than 200 dollars (US) when it debuts later this year."
(tags:tech computing )

Launching The Burj

Curzon from Coming Anarchy took some photos of the opening of the Burj Khalifa, the new top medieval folly in Dubai. The thing about criminal lunatics who live like God’s just keeping their chairs warm is that, well, they do know how to put on a show:

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More at the link.

writing chat round-up
One day, before I die, I will be in the same room as

krabapple, writing a story, and I will shout, "

krabapple, come quick! My story's amazing!"

It will be the greatest moment ever. It will outweigh future weddings and child births and that time in the past I high-fived Felicia Day.

***

OKAY. SO. Last night was writing chat! I think it went well! I hope everyone had a good time. I know I did.

Before I get to my stuff, I'm going to encourage you guys to go read through everything that was written. There's some West Wing fic, Bones, Torchwood, Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures, Marvel Comics, a couple fandoms I wasn't familiar with, and a ton of great original pieces.

inocciduous wrote something lovely about Donna (Moss),

second_batgirl wrote a Marvel/Pokemon crossover of hilarity,

queenriley wrote heart-breaking Luke and Clyde conversation,

bookblather wrote a hilarious bit of Sarah Jane and Luke, and

solsticezero wrote a post-Journey's End Jack/Ianto that pushed all my buttons.

ruffwriter wrote some hilarious original detective banter,

ruecian wrote an achey, relateable relationship piece, and we all need to peer-pressure

quatredeathlady into telling us what's going on here.

And that is just a teeny, tiny sampling of what's over there!

This is what I wrote:
[nick of time] Torchwood - Gwen, Ianto (Jack) - in which there are four minutes until shenanigans ensue.

[who do you choose?] - original - Tristan (Deirdre, Alan, Danny) - In which I am a crappy writer who can't finish a ficlet in fifteen minutes and also Stephanie Sloane asks Tristan out on a date.

[good news] Gwen Has a Bad Day - Torchwood - Gwen, Mickey, Jack (Ianto, Martha) - In which Gwen has a Bad Hair Day to end all Bad Hair Days and will probably be setting something on fire soon enough.

[feeling sick] Flu Shot - Original - Alan/Danny - In which, once again, I fail to believably write my own characters and cannot manage to write an actual ending. Also, Danny has the flu, but it doesn't effect his ability to make crappy innuendo.

[useless, but beautiful] Torchwood - Ianto, Gwen, Jack - In which something good comes out of a long, hard day.

[a fragile connection] Words - The West Wing - Sam/Will (Iowa) - In which Will despairs and Sam keeps quiet. (This is set during Sam's first week in Iowa, bee tee dubs)

The next one will be on a weekend, I promise, and everyone is invited, as usual :) I'll post details in a few days/next week/when I remember.

Current Mood: cold

Stuck In The Middle

Of a 300-word column on comics for SFX. 300 poxy words. This usually means I’m going to have to scrap it and start again. It’s not due to file until the 11th, but I want to get it out of the way today, because I need to be producing some comics pages by the end of the week. Of course, at the end of the week, I’m planning to be in London to consult with a few people on a few things, so…

Provided London hasn’t been cut off by snow, of course. Extreme weather warnings are popping up all over the country today, and both London and Southend are pegged for "heavy snow" tonight — about a foot of it, by all accounts. People in other parts of the world are laughing their arses off at the very idea of that being "heavy snow," I know. But you can confidently expect this shambles of a country to fall over and play dead after a foot of snow.

Today I had a very, very strange job offer.

This turned up in my inbox the other day, from artist Sam Haney.

(Larger version)

4247849895_6a5860fcff

You too can send me dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which I check every day or two, at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

On Whitechapel Today (5jan09)

At my internet cave today:

* The Katie West Residency

* The Brian Wood Residency

Both here until end of Friday. Go and meet them.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Ace Of Space – return of the artists’ challenge thread.

* Free Paper Science newspaper from We Are Words + Pictures – oh yes. We do free stuff now.

* Comics on Sale This Week (Jan 6) – For people with a local comics store.

* SHUDDERTOWN; March 2010 from Image/Shadowline

* GHOST PROJEKT: Coming in March from Oni Press

Preview material for two new comics by creators who visit Whitechapel

* DJs lets post some mixes thread!

DO ANYTHING 026

Concluding the first volume.

Radio Masts

Clayton "Siege" Cubitt’s notebook is probably a lot nicer to wake up to than mine, you know.

tumblr_kvpq45HzfX1qz8guyo1_500

Good morning. This is warrenellisdotcom. I write things here.

yoshida jasmine hajime me-sensei desu desu
These are a handful of tidbits from Yoshida Jasmine Hajime's profile, a Japanese schoolgirl with the ability to transform into a satyr, which was registered in an 'Elite Advanced' roleplayers' thread on Gaia. The entire thing made up 6 1/2 pages in Microsoft Word. For some reason, she's also referred to as Me-Sensei.

( Next, the face exuded a very delicate feature of a visage with a look of a very wise elder of the sort. )

Current Mood: sleepy

Icon meme.

a_trill did a meme to avoid sleeps and I copied her.

( You know you wanna click. )

Current Mood: awake

Attention duelists!

*ahem* I mean... Attention, bad roleplayers!

Being indifferent to everything and everyone all the time and every other post does not immediately make you badass for it.

That is all.

Three in One!
So I keep meaning to write a rant, but real life keeps getting in the way, so today I finally get a chance and...

I’ve played on a predominately slash RP site ever since ’07, and honestly, I love it, the people that I work with are creative, literate and I get a lot of good stories going and everything is honestly fine and dandy.

But:

( [Bitchy Ukes, Asian Failness, Thread Death] )

Things That Make You Go Bwah?
SPOILER WARNING: For Dark Knight, if there's a soul left on the planet who wants to see it, but hasn't yet.

So, I'm adminning a Nolanverse Batman game, set shortly after Batman Begins and before Dark Knight. The Premise & Plot (which include the time it's set) are clearly labeled and easily available. I also have a chatbox, where I can greet potential players, answer their questions, etc.

One night, along comes a guest in the cbox who says she wants to play Rachel Dawes, and that she's filling out the app form. Great, says I. She's a complete FAIL with capitalization and apostrophes, which gets on my nerves, but I've seen great rpers with great apps who chat like particularly backward kindergartners, so I let it go for the time being. A little bit later, she complains that 'the site' is 'breaking up' her application. I have no idea what she's talking about, nobody else has had any problems at all, so I figure she's just using some weird text editor.

Finally, she posts the app. And, sure enough, the character history section does indeed have carriage returns in several odd places. It's also in present tense. And it reads just like a wikipedia character history. So, I check and find that it actually is the Rachel Dawes wikipedia character history. In fact, it's the entire history, up to and including her death at the end of Dark Knight.

Needless to say, I rejected the app.

This has always irritated me....
So, I'm cruising for a new RP group, and I find your forum.

Small group, but very active, and they're begging for new people. I'm all, "Sounds good!" and app. I'm accepted, and start a post to intro my boy.

Three weeks, no response, and I know for a fact that many, many threads are being started and run around me. I check my post; yeah, it seems plenty open for someone to hop on in. It's marked open. I wonder what the problem is, but shrug it off.

I creep over to another open thread, make sure that it really is open, and slide in. Once again, I'm ignored. This continues on several threads for several more weeks until I just give up and let the mods know I'm pulling my boy.

Really, is it so hard to just throw me a bone? Especially when you're begging for new players?

Current Mood: apathetic

Did You Know There's Another Star Wars Galaxy Card Set Coming?
Me neither until today.

It's due out next month featuring another batch of original artwork. Read more about it here:

http://jediinsider.com/index.php?catid=8&itemid=12361

Post-Industrial Broadcast

Broadcast and network culture. (And Atemporality, which, like the term "post-industrial," you’re likely to hear a lot about this year.)

In my part of the world, in the 1960s, you’d come home from work — as my mother did, as Niki’s mother did — and the first thing you’d do is put the radio on. You’ve already selected the broadcast channel you want. You’ve found out the frequency from friends, from a magazine, or just twisted around the dial ’til you hunted it out and left it there. Radio Caroline, or Radio Essex, broadcasting off the Maunsell Sea Fort called Knock John. These are pirate radio stations, outside the control or mandate of the BBC. And you’ve left the dial locked to that frequency because it’s the only way you can hear the music you like. It’s music the BBC doesn’t play, and the BBC’s pretty much the only game in town, if your town is ashen, brick-faced Sixties Britain. Broadcast technology has gotten to the point where nutters like Paddy Roy Bates can lash together a kit on a concrete plug sticking out of the Thames Estuary and blanket the area in modern music. It’s on the verge of a consumer-society democratisation.

My RSS feed reader is tuned to several broadcasters. I’ve found out the web addresses from friends, from magazines, from twisting around a search engine until I found what I was looking for. These broadcasters send music directly to my main daily listening device, which is a X61 Thinkpad (as opposed to an ITT transistor radio). And, even though I live in 2010 Britain and have a few more options than three or four BBC stations, it’s still often the only way I can hear the music I like.

(My daughter comes home and puts on YouTube, clicking around playlists. YouTube is in fact the radio for her and her friends, right now to the shitty sound quality.)

We’re in the depths of the consumer-society democratisation of the relevant technologies. It is really not hard to be a broadcaster now.

There’s obviously going to be a rush of tablet technologies this year. These are largely going to be about the broadcast of magazines. This is going to be kind of a new thing: over-the-air simultaneous delivery of post-print journalistic/design digital objects to handheld devices. Without immediate democratisation. This is a thing that large publishing corporations would presumably be intent on controlling access to. This will, equally obviously, not happen.

This is something I’m going to be kicking around for a while.

writing chat thingy!
Hello, all. It is time for WRITING CHAT THINGY. As I have taken to calling it. For those who are new around these parts, it's a group chat where we share prompts to write fifteen minute ficlets. If you haven't come before but want to try it out, don't be afraid to stop by!

The name of the AIM chatroom is writingchatthingy. If you don't know how to get into a chat, drop me a line at magical is art and I'll invite you in.

This post is going to be used to post responses to the prompts. Please post [prompt] Title (if applicable) - Fandom - Pairing as the subject of your comment, just so I can keep things straight.

It will work like this: I will post a prompt and set a timer and you will have fifteen minutes to write a ficlet in response. It can be fannish or original, I don't particularly care. At the end of the fifteen minutes, we will pause to talk about how awesome we all are and then start again from the beginning.

So. I'm going to post this and I hope to see some of you soon!