Street Urchins, Old Windbags and Infinity Blades

Nice clouds... reminds me of those warm Summer nights growing up in Bangkok, studying underwater calligraphy with the rest of the orphans and street urchins. Ah, that amazing mix of heady aromas down by the wharf: the smells of hot onion soup, rotting fish and unbridled religious ambition... those were the days...

They weren't my days, but they were somebody's days, perhaps...

My days were spent sorting baseball cards and reading comics, if memory serves. But that's another story... There were a few heady aromas involved as well, but I won't go there...

Greetings, y'all. Dave the Perpetually Scattered here, with another quick blast of literary hot air. One day I'll write something of substance here... one day...

I've been wrestling with this year's Christmas script the past few nights. I came up with (what I believe to be) a fitting sub-plot to weave into the play, plus some (hopefully) good ideas for a few additional scenes. At first, I was actually fearful that it wouldn't come together right, but I've got some good momentum going now, and I'm feeling good about it. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the script will be too ambitious to produce in the time we have between now and Christmas Sunday. If we can pull it off, it might be our best play yet. And that's saying a lot - we've put on a number of great plays...

I'm just glad Skyrim doesn't come out for another month! Man, if I had that game to distract me right now, I'd never get the script done... the more I see of that game, the more amazed I am by it, and the more I want it, want it, want it.

Does this guy look bored to you?

So, my youngest will be having her 6th birthday party soon. Since it's so close to Halloween, we're making it a costume party again this year. That will likely become the annual tradition. She wanted to make it a Transformers dress-up theme, but we felt that would be a bit too constricting (not all kids are obsessed with Transformers like she is), so we broadened it to include superheroes as well. Still not sure what I'll dress up as, if anything. I was thinking about going as Hancock (from the Will Smith movie of the same name), but I doubt anyone will "get it". Any ideas?

I was watching Rugby on the television the other day when we were at On The Border (for Taco Tuesday). That game is impossible to understand. It's one of the great mysteries of life, like the stock market, the tax code, love, and how they get the bubbles into carbonated water.

I'm not sure how I feel about this new Jack Vale video clip. He has on an ultra-realistic "old man" mask, and does some serious pooting in a Target store somewhere...



I admit, I laughed quite hard, but I felt guilty about it. Shall we take some time to try and analyze why I'm so conflicted about it?

Yeah, I don't think we should, either...

One of my favorite photoshops from my archive... no sense letting it languish there!

So, after spending a few weeks reading "book samples", I finally read a full book this past week! Just finished reading Spellwright, by Blake Charlton on Wednesday. I wish I could summon the inner "whatever" necessary to write a full book review, but I think I'll just summarize. Gotta save my creativity for tonight's attempt at finishing the script!

The story centers around a dyslexic wizard, who may or may not be some "chosen world hero" type of character. The magic system is quite cool and well-developed. Magicians study certain magical "languages", and cast spells by writing sentences (if you will), forming the letters within their very forearms, arranging them into sentence-spells, and casting them out of their fingertips. It sounds wacky, but the effect is quite cool. Picture the Emperor from Return of the Jedi, casting that lightning out of his hands to sizzle Luke Skywalker, before Darth Daddy chucked him over the rails. Now picture words streaming out of his fingers instead of lightning. You get the idea.

Only a curse has been placed on the main character, which causes him to misspell the spells (lol), often with devastating negative effects. As you can imagine, the story deals at first with his disillusionment over his disability, and then his quest to have the curse removed so he can fulfill his destiny (which may or may not actually apply to him).

It's a good book, with some good ideas. The magic system is good, the action and local settings are good, and the writing solid. Yet the story itself had issues for me. A lot of the plot developments and "twists" seemed very forced to me, and the world-building was quite ham-fisted in places. Granted, this is the author's debut novel, so a certain amount of leeway should be granted, so he can develop and mature. Still, the ride was enjoyable (if tedious in places). And though I enjoyed it, I'm not sure I enjoyed it enough to move on to the next book in the series.

So, yes, yet another series starter that I won't likely pursue further. I should go back over my book list from the past two years and check it out. I bet there are very few series that I pursued past book one. Odd. I don't feel like I'm that particularly hard to please.

I've begun a new novella by Brandon Sanderson called Infinity Blade. Believe it or not, it's a tie-in story for a video game of the same name that is available for iPad. I have the game, actually, but (surprise surprise!) I haven't really played it much yet. Sanderson was apparently paid a tidy sum to crank out the novella, and it was only $3, so I popped for it. It's quite good, actually (as expected from anything by Sanderson). I'll let you know my thoughts in the next post I make.

Did you know that among the latest trends in Japan is a dental procedure to make your teeth crooked? The anti-braces, I guess. Apparently, the thinking is that girls with perfect teeth are unapproachable, but girls with crooked teeth are more down-to-earth and less intimidating. Crazy. Don't know if it applies to guys or just the females. Check this article out for more info, if you don't believe me..

OK, well, I think I'm done for tonight. Off to try and finish the Christmas script. Squish me luck.

Dave the Daunted