Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Thorin N. Tatge's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, December 17th, 2009
11:23 am	A song I dreamed about I woke up from a dream a few hours ago in which I'd heard a song, as part of a movie soundtrack. At first, the song felt so familiar that I thought it was an existing song. I soon realized that it wasn't, but it felt like the rune must be a real tune...yet the longer I was awake, the more convniced I was that I'd dreamed up an original tune. Amazingly, I dreamed not just the melody, but the guitar chords that go with it, even though I don't play guitar. For a while after I was awake, I could actually remember the whole tune to the chorus, complete with a very strange but beautiful final chord. I wasn't just imagining that I did; I actually sang it aloud in bed as well as I could reproduce it with just my voice. But I made the mistake of not recording it, and now the tune is lost. All I recall is that it lingers on a high note in the middle of each bar and lingers on a middle note to connect each bar to the next, and I think the interval between them is a major sixth, but it changes after the first few lines. The lyrics I recall are: The head finally falls The moon [or "The sea"] finally shines Oh darling, darling [Something, something] The head finally falls The skin finally breaks Its kin finally takes Away the [something] What led up to this? Earlier in the night, I dreamed of being on a vacation retreat somewhere with lots of people (including members of local SF fandom), and at some point it went wrong, and the officials who ran the resort or whatever started herding us into a field and then up some stairs, and things had been ominous for long enough that I thought they might be planning to kill us all. No answers were forthcoming, but they pretended everything was still fine. So when we reached a landing outdoors and everyone else turned to continue up the stairs, I sneaked away to a building looking out over a cliff. Somehow I was discovered, and ended up going for broke and attacking three guys, possibly killing them. I climbed through a window into the little building, and opened the blinds to see a cliffside vista with the sea below, and I climbed through another window onto a ledge outside. At some point in here I'd been replaced by my raccoon character Reba (the first time I recall ever dreaming of her), and she had somehow acquired a styrofoam cup of Life cereal and some milk, and some other food as well, all of which she insisted on quickly eating while the other guards discovered what had happened. They broke int the little room and then Reba was about to dive into the sea. But then I woke, and later I dreamed of going repeatedly to a stage production of a fantasy story, only it always ended early, and each time I went more of the scenes had been completed. The scenery was eerie and haunting, as was the story. It had some connection to the movie Labyrinth, and at one point I heard the 'actor' who supposedly played the canine knight Sir Didymus in that movie ranting about how he just wanted to play himself--a violent, voracious beast--instead of the self-controlled knight. A stage show within this stage show (I think) brought to mind the above song, which (in the dream) I'd originally remembered as being from Labyrinth and later identified as having been featured on the preview of another (nonexistent) movie on a Labyrinth VHS tape years ago. The video featured puppets of mice on the masts of a ship, and also bat puppets, in a mixture of ordinary filming and stop-motion. They were presumably singing about the end of the rule of humanity--the head that was finally falling. And in the distance was another ship crewed by men in costumes and armor, their enemies. I wish I could remember that tune. I'd write the rest of the song if I could. Current Mood: fascinated (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
12:48 pm	Christmas list Here are some ideas for anyone who wants to give me a gift for Christmas (or for my birthday on the 2nd). * Warm winter clothing. A balaclava would still be nice. Maybe a scarf that doesn't curl up annoyingly from the sides like my current one does. And is there such a thing as a nosemuff? * I don't have the patience to learn a serious musical instrument, but I could always learn more casual or easy ones. A harmonica may be serious to some, but it's easily played. A stylophone looks fun. Maybe a brush for my drum. Or some curious noisemaker. * Books are classically nice presents because you know just what to do with them and they involve you in them. (And the way I see it, you can enjoy them once or twice and then regift them later!) I wouldn't mind reading something by Charles Dickens other than A Christmas Carol. That Choose Your Own Adventure book #45, You Are A Shark, is still out there. Some bridge fiction would be cool (that's fiction incorporating the card game, something I'm thinking of doing in my current novel). I loved The Kings' Tales by Phillip and Robert King, so another book by them would be great, for example. Also, my godmother recommended a novel called Book to me, which is a tricky title to search for if ever there was one, and I don't remember the author's name. :} * Physical puzzles (but not burrs or jigsaws) are fun. Maybe a Japanese Pocket Puzzle. * I could still use posters (or even framed pictures if you want to go all out). My preferred themes are animals, landscapes, and colorful abstract designs. * Marbles in 2 to 6 colors by that I can invent games for my six-on-a-side hexboard! And maybe a game to go with them. (I have to report back to mbala eventually.) * Is Peter Gabriel's music good, and to my liking? Could be. I loved the end song from Wall*E, and liked what I could find of his stuff for free on the web. And just for fun, here's a link to the 'blog' of my character Reba of Rivermill, who has posted a Christmas link of her own. Current Mood: scared (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
11:52 pm	November Wrap-Up So then, the tale of November 2009. November is always NaNoWriMo before anything else, and, as reported, I managed my 50,000 word goal, making me a five-time 'winner' at the event. It was actually pretty easy. I made the Fibonacci sequence my lower limit for each day's wordcount, and for the first few days, I didn't write any more than that--1 word, 2 words, 3, 5...But soon enough, I got into the swing of the novel and it took off. It's called The Kaliko Shelf, and is a sequel to one of the more obscure and strange branches of What Is Best? Disappointingly, I didn't finish the first draft during November, as I'd hoped to do. I only managed 57,000 words, which is a bit over halfway, and now I'm plodding ahead. At some point I hope to make a run for it with the plot, creating a respectable skeleton that I can enjoy fleshing out later. But so far, my attempts to do that have failed, as it seems more natural to just keep writing at the pace I've been going. That may be for the best. I went to only three regional events during NaNoWriMo this year. The first was the big 28-Hour Tour, which I posted about previously. The second was a write-in at The Loft, a notable literary center downtown, and the third was the Midnight Countdown on the 30th, at the IHOP across the street from the Mall of America--suitable because, as I said before, the MoA was a significant part of my inspiration for The Kaliko Shelf. These latter events were decent but not grand in any sense, like the tour was. I was disappointed not to be able to attend the Thank God It's Over party, as I was working then, and so I finished the month feeling like I hadn't successfully connected with my fellow Twin Cities participants, who seem to have so much comeraderie with each other. I was pleased to see that they're starting up a new writer's group, though, which I intend to visit at least once, as it will give me an alternative to the one I'm in. The Homework Hub program is settling pretty well into its new piecemeal staffing arrangement. At last, we have enough people for each two hour block of time to keep the younger grades and the older grades separate. The volunteers are all friendly and capable. The only problem is that, as one would expect from a volunteer staff, they often don't show up. (Usually they at least call in.) This reached a ridiculous level on November 3rd, when everyone failed to show up at once, leaving just me and Jason P., a Learning Center fixture, to handle all the students of all ages for the whole shift. It was a busy shift, too, with 40 students signing in. Moreover, Hennepin County had ravaged--I mean upgraded our tech systems, meaning that we now had new computers without our accustomed software, and with even less ability to configure them than before, and with bases so large that they can't fit as many on the upstairs tables, meaning that one of the tables used for tutoring younger grades is mostly lost. And the phone numbers were all changed, and the PA system was cruddified (since fixed), and the free printer was taken away and the system for printing changed, and on top of all that, it was election day, meaning that there was extra traffic in the library, and the Teen Center was closed to accommodate the election, meaning that the bored teenagers had extra reason to clutter the Homework Hub areas. It was awful. Not surprisingly, this was the day I developed a sore throat, which lingered and worsened and became a cold that lasted about three weeks. And just as I was finally over the cold, I stupidly touched my right index finger to a hot lightbulb and got a second degree burn. The blister formed and drained within a few hours, but I'm still wearing a bandage (which I change frequently) to cover the area where the top layer of skin hasn't grown back yet. But speaking of election day, I voted, happy that the city of Minneapolis was finally using ranked-choice, or IRV, ballots. I did research into all the races the previous night, and when I looked at the sample ballot, I was disappointed to find that only three choices were available in every race, so that a vote couldn't rank them all from top to bottom. In particular, it means a person can't choose to vote for one of two major party candidates in a race after ranking a large number of others first, which one might be tempted to do. From a mathematical perspective, my aesthetic sense was offended, as this is like ranked choice voting for schoolkids who aren't ready to fill in a grid. Bah. But aside from that one day, Homework Hub is going well. On the Tutor.com front, I resumed work after a two-week break in which I tried to relearn calculus and learn some statistics. I still haven't been doing nearly as much tutoring with them as I probably ought to. But I did have a delightful surprise--I'd won the monthly award for Best Communication. My mentor was happy with my correspondence with him, and his nomination of me won out, so that meant a little bonus in my paycheck and a warm feeling. In November, I finally got to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which disappointed me a fair bit, although it had some neat bits. The writer and director seemed to really not get it. The story felt unstructured, and the style felt like it was basically a Hollywood formula action movie underlying numerous random concessions to absurdity, the fan base, and Englishness. The BBC series was better, though I barely remember it, and the audio drama was much better. I also finally read a Tarzan book, Tarzan and the Golden Lion. It was much like I'd expected, based on the way my father talks about the series and the story he made up for my bedtime stories when I was a kid, vague elements of which have stayed with me. On the 2nd, I went to the second "Open-Mic Night" at the library for adult English students, mostly from Somalia. I was lucky to arrive at the right time, and to stay outside long enough to be let in. I ate some fancy vegetarian pizza and listened to the students read the stories they'd written and had published in the Learning Center's little magazine. Then I read a poem of my own to wrap up the night. I don't think most of the immigrants understood most of my poem, but I think they appreciated it anyhow. I tried to emote and also act out as much as I could. Everyone had a good time. I had a good time at the MN-Stf meeting on the 7th, which attracted plenty of gamers. I got to see a couple games I'm heard of but never seen, and I learned a fun and suspenseful cooperative game called Pandemic. The next day, I visited foxfeather and mbala in Rochester for the third time. They keep getting cool new stuff. This time, I got to see their 25-watt laser in action, and together we all engraved a piece from my Blockhead set with a Celtic knot, and then went to Lowe's, got some wood, and made a game board with hexagons and dimples for marbles. Wow! I also met their friend, Mirrdae, and their new African Grey parrot, Vegas. I sang a song for them that I'd composed on the drive over. And we watched a Russian fairy tale movie and had scrumptious white sauce chicken pizza, with zucchini and spinach. And on Friday the 13th, the Bluebird of Happiness celebrated her 2,990th birthday. On the 18th, the same friend who showed me the touching anime of the goat and the wolf (and later RPed with me in relation to it) gave me a personalized game he'd taken a couple days to program--a web browser text adventure/Rock-paper-Scissors game. Wow! On the 21st, I went with my parents to the home of chirosinger and Graham Leathers, where we enjoyed a performance of John Huston as Charles Dickens reading A Christmas Carol, before he embarked on the meat of his seasonal tour near and far. What a delight! I drove my parents to the airport on Thanksgiving morning, so that they could visit my sister and her boyfriend's family. I'd stayed up to do so, so slept through Thanksgiving Day, but I went at night to the Courts of Chaos and ate of their leftovers and joined the second on the second floor for bridge, which is a game I hadn't had the chance to play for quite some time. On the 27th, with my father away, I hosted the weekly game party. It was nice. I relearned a couple of games I hadn't played in years, and then got to play Robo-Rally along with a very appropriate Robo-Rally mix CD that one of the players, Will Pell, had created and brought. I spent most of the 28th at mplsfish 's Post-Thanksgiving feast. I brought my laptop and poked at my novel, but I was too distracted by the interesting conversation (mostly political) to get much done. I kind of regret not joining in, risky though it would have been. The food was great--I brought zucchini fingers and spinach hummus dip--and I spent some time with the kids, as well. On the 29th, I went to filking at skylarker 's, a nice affair with six of us present. To this I brought an eggplant casserole and brown rice. I sang the song I'd made up on the visit to mbala 's weeks earlier, and a new parody I'd written of "Tit-Willow" from The Mikado. And the next day of the month was the last, and I had my first pumpkin pancakes, and blew a noisemaker balloon whenever someone reached 50,000 words, and joined in swaying for We Are the Champions, and counted down to midnight. And now it's winter, and the last month of the year has begun. Current Mood: jubilant (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
5:39 pm	I'm thankful for being such a NaNoWriMo badass!! I hit 50,000 words this morning, just before driving my parents off to the airport. I'm now a five-time winner of this thing! (For those not in the know, being a 'winner' doesn't actually mean competing against anyone else, just meeting the wordcount goal.) I have yet to finish my novel, The Kaliko Shelf, but I'm a little over halfway done, and I intend to pick up the pace and complete a rough draft (the second half of which will be somewhat skeletal) by the end of the month. Woooouooooooooo!! Current Mood: accomplished (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
7:10 pm	Comparing my novel to Apocalypse Now I saw Apocalypse Now Redux over the last couple of days. When I watched the original years ago, I fell pretty much asleep partway through. This time, I stayed wide awake, and I'm glad I did. The middle of the first act confused me a fair bit, like any war movie would. I didn't really know the characters and there was so much noise I couldn't tell what exactly was going on. But by the time the riverboat got underway, the movie settled into my comfort zone and I came to appreciate the brilliance of the pacing, the writing and the acting. It really is a tremendous artistic work. The silly, almost animalistic behavior of various soldiers/sailors (especially Lance) kept reminding me of my platypus mercenary character. Indeed, I want to get back to playing him now even more than before. 8) But the structure of the movie actually reminded me more of the novel I'm currently working on. Lots of stories are about quests, and many of those quests, like Apocalypse Now, are episodic. What makes this story a bit more distinctive is that it's an open-ended quest. The characters are going deeper and deeper, and it's ultimately unclear what they'll find when they get there. The boat's crew don't even know how far upriver they're going, or why. It's true that we know Captain Willard's mission, but he's the first to admit that he doesn't know what to expect when he finally runs across Colonel Kurtz. Technically the main character's destination and goal are fixed. In essence, though, they're both big unknowns. Open-ended quest stories are arguably not quests at all, but testaments to the power of wanderlust, or whatever force is driving the journey onward. Before watching the movie, I realized that I seem to like that structure--or is it a theme?--in my NaNoWriMo novels. My '04 novel is about a westward quest to find the edge of the (magically flattened) earth, some unknown distance away. My '07 novel involves characters delving conceptually deeper and deeper into their magical project, moving irreversibly through successive iterations of the world. And my '09 novel is about a character going up and up, trying to find the top of a building whose height is indeterminate. They all involve different levels of uncertainty and darkness, but there are common elements. Episodes contributing to a mounting theme. A sense of wonder connected with the impossibility of knowing what will appear next. Changes in the atmosphere as the journey continues. As I watched that movie, I felt like the filmmakers had grappled with the same kind of task I'm grappling with in The Kaliko Shelf. I felt inspired because the style of the story resonated with me. And by the way, Redux contains a very interesting sequence on a French plantation that I don't think made it into the original Apocalypse. It impressed me especially because of the quality of the atmosphere and the conversation, as well as the effortless way it flows from dinner into...something else. That episode has a character so different from anything else in the movie, but the very fact it's so different makes it highly compelling. Kind of like the fact that the branch of What Is Best? my current novel is based on was so compellingly different from everything else in the book that I couldn't leave it alone. I think NaNoWriMo is good for open-ended quests. Because the author is just as likely to be looking for the answers as the characters are. Current Mood: creative (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
2:23 am	Arasha no Yoru Ni Yesterday, I was introduced to an anime film called Arasha no Yoru Ni, or One Stormy Night. It's apparently fairly well known, but I'd never heard of it. The story is about a goat and a wolf who accidentally befriend each other and the trouble (and joys) that leads to. I watched the movie on YouTube with subtitles. It touched me, and so I watched the movie again today with the unofficial English dub. It was different in a lot of ways. The main characters' personalities, especially that of the goat, seemed subtly different, which changed the story equally subtly. And more importantly, the dialogue was different in a lot of places. Some lines were less interesting, but more were richer and added new ideas. I liked the dub a little better than the subtitled version overall. There are apparently tons of wacky fan videos based on this anime. Here's my favorite: ----- On an unrelated note, this is a tongue-in-cheek effort to create the most annoying song in the world: Oddly enough, I liked it and laughed quite a bit while listening. And I even listened again later. Most remarkably, I think it may have convinced me to shop at Wal*Mart this Christmas season for the first time in my life. Current Mood: touched (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
1:41 am	Back from the Tour! The 28-Hour Twin Cities NaNoWriMo Writing Tour was this weekend! I skipped the first stop and made it through 23 hours of straight write-ins, from 3 p.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday. I enjoyed the company of my fellows, met a few new people, and managed to write an amazing 16,000 words--the most of anyone who participated, as far as I know. There were some intriguing happenstances. I ran into one couple and one individual that I know at Merlin's Rest, the way station leading up to midnight. I saw recent mayoral runner-up Papa John Kolstad and his band in performance, which I had -not- been expecting: How cool! Denny's was a troublesome stop, as the manager wasn't happy with a large group coming and not buying as much as normal customers. I got rides with three different people during the tour, during which we discussed our works in progress. I called Matt K. about a hypothyroidism recommendation (and caught up in general). I called my godmother, too, in order to have someone to talk to during one of the legs I walked, along Lake Street. I got queasy five times not too long after eating or drinking something, which was frightening, but I never got too nauseous. I loosened my belt when I had to and held off on food for a while. At one point I ran up and down the block outside the Blue Moon for the cool air and to let off energy. What did I eat? At Uncommon Grounds (remarkable place), I drank a Spunky Monkey (mocha with banana) and ate a banana and sandwich I'd brought. At Blue Moon, I had a macchiato and a chicken salad sandwich, which was really good at the time but gave me pause later. I wandered at Merlin's Rest from area to area, eating nothing but extra fries and reading notes from the book in which I'd scribbled ideas in October. At Denny's I had a Grand Slam breakfast, just for the sake of doing so, since I never had; for the record, there is nothing whatsoever magical about the experience. At Perkins I had a piece of peanut butter silk pie, which I ate awkwardly in increments while cozily wedged into a booth beside a neighbor. At Nina's, I celebrated hitting the month's halfway point of 25,000 words with a breakfast sandwich. Not wanting to get anywhere near eggs at that point, I had sausage, tomato, spinach and provolone on a croissant, and it was wonderful. I also had a kiwi friot I'd lugged all that way. Finally, at the megamall's Barnes and Noble I had a peppermint hot chocolate, an apple, and a pizza-stuffed pretzel to wrap things up when all was said and done. I participated in three Word Wars. In the first two 10-minute wars I managed around 450 words, which was average. For the 15-minute one at the very end, I put out an above-average 750 words, but they were an utter mess and I'm a bit worried about whether to keep or change the piece of plot they advanced. In general, though, I've been very happy with how my novel has developed. When it was all over, I strolled slowly across the heart of the Mall of America and wandered for a while before making my way to the transit station and busing home. I was nice and relaxed and sleepy when I finally arrived. Current Mood: accomplished (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
11:33 pm	24-Hour Twin Cities Writing Tour Tomorrow, I'm going to be embarking on the great 24-Hour Twin Cities Writing Tour, punctuating the middle of NaNoWriMo for its third proud year! This is a traveling gathering of writers, mostly with laptops, moving from place to place around the metro area and typing away furiously at their novels. Technically, it's a 28-Hour Tour, but I'm going to be skipping the first stop. I attended last year's tour for just two stops--the middle of the night Perkins stop, and breakfast at Nina's Coffee Cafe in St. Paul. Before that comes The Depot in Hopkins, Uncommon Grounds on Hennepin, Blue Moon on Lake Street, and the nearby Denny's (a controversial stop for its failure to handle the Halloween Countdown event properly). After Nina's comes the Barnes & Noble at the Mall of America, a fitting place to end the day given that my novel is about the Megamall to end all Megamalls. I'll be active from 2 p.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday. I'm not usually much of a coffee drinker, but I'll indulge for this occasion. I've had practice staying awake for long periods of time, though, so I should be all right. I'm expecting to bump my wordcount up by at least 10,000 words...and since I'm at just 15,000 now, I need it. Wish me luck! Current Mood: excited (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
3:46 am	October wrap-up October is clearly the perfect month for Halloween, since I noticed this year that the weather reminded me of it all month long.  It's been a dramatic and exemplary fall from my perspective, with bright, wet, sploppy leaves, temperatures chilly enough to be demanding without being so cold I wish my face were covered, and just  enough rain to keep things interesting.  Now that it's over, National Novel Writing Month has once again begun, but I've been holding off on my novel until making this post.  So far I've written just the minimum 2 words my Fibonacci goal sequence allows.  So that I might free my creative passion, here was my October. The month's first highlight was the Twin Cities Pagan Pride Festival, an event I attended with skylarker , who won a dealer's spot there for winning a contest to create art for their program book.  I gave her a ride, helped her set up and clean up, and watched her tables intermittently, and in exchange she gave me some space for selling copies of my book--as well as the new experience of being behind a vendor's table.  I sold five copies, and I enjoyed the music in the adjoining room, as well as the snippets of panel discussion I managed to attend.  I saw a surprising number of people I know there. :)  It was a delightful experience, as much fun as it was work. I went to two meetings of my writer's group.  At the first, the group critiqued a story I wrote a few years ago and had sent to three magazines.  Some readers found it confusing; others found the structure choppy.  I couldn't disagree.  The story struck me as much weaker than it did when I wrote it, which seems to happen 60% of the time with me.  It probably means I'm getting stronger as a writer, but it's also disheartening, since I can't leave a thing lying around without it degrading on me.  The second meeting, on the 28th, was preparatory for NaNoWriMo.  I enjoyed myself for the first half, chatting with the people near me about their ideas, but for the second half I sat alone in thought, listening to everyone in the distance, and eventually reading Time Magazine.  I guess I was tired.  The next night, after work, I made it to the end of the official Twin Cities NaNoWriMo Kick-off party, which was a blast.  I met and re-met certain key regional figures, filled in the Self-Published or Non-Human Main Character lines on people's find-the-name activities sheets, and sold a copy of last year's book to an admirer, who warmed my heart by saying, having read the rough draft of my '06 novel, that I should publish that one, too.  (After a good deal of revision, my friend.) On October 14th, I made it past the Probationary period at my online job with Tutor.com!  It was exciting to have managed that, but the sad truth is that I'm hardly less nervous about it now.  I did a few shifts for a few days, and then got worked up over my spotty knowledge of Calculus and Statistics and wound up taking a break for two weeks while I studied up.  Thank goodness for flexible scheduling.  I'm now back at it and feeling somewhat more confident about my knowledge, but who knows how long that will last?  I was pleased to find that my Calculus book from college is easy to follow and, in my opinion, quite well designed, despite the fact that it's printed in just four colors, without photographs.  I don't have a Statistics book, though, so I've been relying on the internet, which has been shaky.  I don't know whether the fault lies with the internet or the field of statistics itself. :\ Meanwhile, my tutoring job at the library has been challenging, but not too unpleasant.  I've met a number of new volunteers, all of whom have been great--when they show up.  That's the thing about a volunteer staff: attendance is quite spotty.  Due to program cuts I'm no longer able to run a weekly game for the Teen Center's patrons.  I did get two games in during October outside of Homework Hub time, though--one overdue game of Magnet Maze, since I didn't want to end on the disastrous one that happened during the summer, and one game of Secret Number which I ran on Halloween afternoon.  (The secret number was 1331, and there were five pairs of bisected clues leading to it.  The kids, even working in cooperation, were unable to solve it, but they did find all the hidden clue cards.  I'll know to make the next round easier.) If you recall the entry I made on October 6th regarding the three year anniversary of the demise of Endless Round MUCK, you may be interested to know that the former friend in question actually -did- contact me later in October, although apparently not in connection to the anniversary.  He left several nostalgic messages for me on AIM but left me no way to contact him, which apparently is what he wanted. :{ The middle of the month was host to lovely ConVivial, a relaxacon that I enjoyed more than almost any fallcon I can remember.  On Friday I enjoyed the amazing rendering of the musical automaton fantasia Animusic as well as various other intriguing animated shorts, redrew an author's goblin character for a T-shirt template (I'm kind of into goblins at present!), played the Steve Jackson classic Tile Chess, and watched as other con-goers assembled my mystery jigsaw puzzle, after which we puzzled together over its solution.  On Saturday I went on a nature walk through the Minnesota River Valley, tasted some lovely apples, heard about good books people had read lately, heard some rockin' folk at the Brother Seamus concert, and played a bunch of games.  I'd brought things to do on my own in case I got bored, but I never really did.  Kudos to the organizers! Speaking of games, I've been winning a ridiculous number of games for the last month and a half or so.  I didn't keep a tally during October, but I'd estimate that I played about 30 games and won 27 of them.  That's counting games of all sorts, so long as they're the type with a clear winner or winners.  Including familiar favorites (like Set, Zendo and Star Traders), challenging games (like Princes of Florence and Uptown), games I'd never played before (like Time Pirates, The Stars Are Right, and new favorite Scrappers), one game of Tile Chess I should totally have lost by rights, and even the single game I'd played most often without ever winning (Blue Moon City, now 1-7).  Woohoo!  I don't mean to brag--I'm just saying, this is ridiculous. I've been frustrated by my inability to get my ducks together enough to submit some poems to poetry journals and electronic magazines.  I've got some issues here, apparently, since it shouldn't be that hard.  I really wanted to have some stories or at least poems floating out there in consideration-space when November began, but I don't.  Sad.  Maybe a miracle will happen and I'll manage to revise and submit some during NaNoWriMo.  :( My air purifier died.  The motor went dead, specifically.  Capriciously, on the 27th I took it all apart, screw by screw and chunk by chunk, until I got down to the heavy motor in its core.  Amazingly, once I'd isolated the motor, I was able to get it working again.  But then I screwed up the job of putting it back together, fastening the wheel on backward, and by the time I'd gotten it apart and back on correctly, my finger was cut and the wheel was sticking enough that the motor could no longer turn it.  The thing proved unsalvageable after all, which was really frustrating after I came so close. The month ended with a stellar Halloween.  The MN-Stf party at my house fell on Halloween proper for once, which seemed to boost attendance.  I dressed in my beaded clock vest and black pants, numerous chains of paper clips, a little clock pin, four suction cup balls, and random bits of string, one of which served as a leash for my beanie scorpion, whose name is now Max (after Maxwell Planck).  I told people I was dressed as the first experimentally verifiable result of string theory.  I seem to have a propensity for costumes that are hard to maintain, and indeed, this one grew more and more tangled as the night wore on.  My yellow 'fundamental particle' vanished entirely, and my scorpion became entangled with my attire.  As I did two years ago, I spent some time on the porch roof, singing eerie songs to Trick-or-Treaters and occasionally tossing candies down to them at appropriate moments.  My performance was a bit weaker than in '07, but I got just as much attention from onlookers, including a number of people who snapped my picture.  I also enjoyed meeting kids at the door, bantering with them about their costumes or greeting them with kazoo and drum rather than voice.  The party was a hopping good time, too, nearly lasting until Daylight Saving Time swept us back an hour. And there you have it.  Now it's time for me to go and write 49,998 more words.  Wish my imagination fertile times, will you? :) Current Mood: ambitious (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
3:53 am	Addenda to September wrap-up I forgot to mention three highlights from September.  First, I got to run a new game at the library's Teen Center, which I called LIghtning War.  I brought a bunch of toys for various kinds of competitions, each of which had a basic and an advanced version.  Examples: a game of rolling a marble along some hinged logs, a Rubik's Revolution, a game of racing a marble along an obstacle course.  Other events included Connect Four, Jenga-block stacking, and simple stone tossing.  There were five teams of two kids/teens, and we chose match-ups of two teams randomly.  A simple trivia question gave one team the 'Edge', which let them choose an event and have a slight advantage in it.  Each winning team collected a glass stone.  Once all ten events were played in both modes (although in practice we had to cut it a little short), I ran one last round of my older game Simon's Revenge, using the stones they'd collected as lives.  The winning team got jigsaw puzzles from the collection.  (One of these went to the Youth Coordinator herself, who'd decided to play and who returned it to the collection.)  The game was a a fair bit of work, but good fun, and I'd like to do it again. Second, filking this month was a field trip to the home of a new member, Paul O'Connor.  His hospitality (and upside-down pizza) was delightful, and his house was nice, except that for some reason the living room made for poor acoustics.  I'm glad we got the chance for the variety in locale, though--not that there's anything wrong with our normal location. Third, I paid a visit to cari_rose and crytel before work on the 23rd.  Although we didn't do much, I remember leaving with a satisfied feeling.  They're kind enough to welcome me in anytime they aren't otherwise disposed, which can make an outing for work into a pleasure. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
7:27 pm	September wrap-up The last month of summer felt appropriately transitional for me this year.  September is when the school year begins, which meant the resumption of my job at the library under new circumstances.  It also meant more activity at Tutor.com, where I recently started as a Probationary Tutor.  In essence, last month I was starting two new jobs, the stress of which made it harder than I expected to get anything creative done.  I also did very little marketing of my book, although to be fair there's no rush with that.  The book will still be around whenever people decide they want to buy it. :-} Homework Hub resumed with a shoestring budget.  I didn't get a pay cut per hour, but I'm working fewer hours, as the program is no longer held on Saturdays.  Each library now has only one paid tutor, relying on a staff of volunteers, most of whom come for just two hours each week.  I have the most volunteers to keep track of, since my location is the busiest of the eight.  My job title has changed again, too.  I started three years ago as a Homework Helper, and then became a Homework Hub Tutor when the programs of Minneapolis and Hennepin County libraries merged, and then a Lead Homework Hub Tutor, and now I'm a Lead Homework Hub Mentor.  (During the last two summers I've also been a "Gaming and Tech Lab Coordinator" and a "Puzzlemania Coordinator".)  On the 8th, we held our first lead tutor meeting at the recently remodeled Sumner Library, and in the first three weeks of the program I met a lot of new people.  The program started out understaffed, and now we're pretty much doing all right, although there are still some days when I go through four or five throat drops to keep myself out of pain from all the talking.  It's been necessary to move the younger students from upstairs to downstairs after the first shift due to insufficient staff to maintain two areas, and it's then things sometimes get chaotic.  I'm up to it, though.  Making sure the volunteers are pulling their weight while still being polite and recognizing the gift of their work--that's a little tricky. I'm much more worried about Tutor.com.  I have until the end of the month to escape Probationary status and, as my mother put it, 'level up' to the Tutor 1 designation.  In some ways the job has been fun and easy, but in other ways it's been nervewracking.  In particular, the dilemma I've been facing for weeks is this: Calculus is my weakest of the subjects in which I qualified to tutor, but more than half of my session requests are for Calculus, because they're short on people who can teach it.  I've had some painful problem sessions in the subject, but if I drop it from my list of subjects, I'll probably get significantly fewer sessions.  Statistics is similarly problematic to a slighter extent.  I'm trying to solve the problem by refreshing my knowledge by doing web worksheets, rereading my old Calc textbook, and asking a helping internet friend for clarification when I need it, but it sometimes seems like there's far too much to learn.  My Mentor has advised me to do as much tutoring this coming week as I can, and I hope to, but I'm just so nervous every time I log in.  Each session might be easy or it might be one that embarrasses and frightens and flummoxes me.  I'm not sure what will happen. Enough of that.  Time for an interactive fiction review.  Turns out I'm not the only NaNoWriMo participant who went the non-linear route.  There's one Jeff Kirchoff who created a complex and silly and fairly engrossing online interactive novel that, as a connoisseur of sorts, I spent hours and hours reading ALL of late into the night of the 9th.  It doesn't have a lot of meaning or literary merit, but I did find it worth reading.  Then there's The Lost Sword, from the tragically flawed Paths of Doom series.  I've read all four of the books in that books I was given now, and each one finds new and astounding ways to be decently written but horribly designed.  This one takes the utterly lopsided structure and occasional typo in the page directions that wrecked others in the series, and ups the ante by reusing the same three or four generic and arbitrary unhappy endings something like five or six times each, accessible from all sorts of different branches.  They don't always make sense, depending on where you're coming from, but they aren't the only poorly grafted sections in this book.  Oh!  And we can't forget the illustrations scattered completely at random through the book, without necessarily being anywhere near the appropriate pages of text!  With this kind of crappy work on the market, I hope buyers of my book appreciate the work I put into ensuring continuity and balancing the structure to be aesthetically pleasing. As mentioned in a previous post, I made two trips Uptown, first to get a birthday gift for my mother (nothing more exciting than socks, but I also cleaned the bathroom) and later to mail a package to my erstwhile friend Steven, who turns out to have made a new life for himself with a beloved wife in northern Alberta.  I distributed business-card-sized ads for my book, bought some used CDs for skylarker , got a Cost Cutters haircut, and tried out Milio's subs while I was there.   The next day (while my parents had their birthday dinner) I attended a MN-Stf meeting just for the heck of it and had a good time, for the first time in quite a while.  My dad and I caught the Minnesota Zoo's Africa exhibit on its last day.  (I was more impressed by various more playful critters such as the otters, snow monkeys and prairie dogs.)  Oh, and I not only got to see a binturong (though it was sleepy), but I got the great treat of watching a southern three-banded armadillo in action, which is exactly the species I play on Chimaera MUCK!  It was terrifically cute and clarified my ideas on its appearance and behavior. An internet friend in California made my day when he reported enjoying several of the card games I invented and posted online, as well as my Cosmic Monopoly powers.   Not only did he teach them to his family, but he even suggested that one or two of them might become popular at his school.  WOW!  I was utterly tickled.  In other card game news, I visited my godmother and wound up playing cards with her and a depressed friend, apparently giving them the best time they'd together in weeks.  I paid her another visit a couple weeks later,a nd after we had a bike ride together, I got to meet someone she met on vacation in St. John and who's now staying as a houseguest, a young free-spirit adventurer type, who turned out to be a fun guy.  She also loaned me a rather cool metaphysical mystery movie called The Nines (4.999 out of 6.999 stars). For me, September 2nd is Ayn Rand day--as the date features in Atlas Shrugged, I go back to reread some of her fiction on that day each year.  This year, I kept at it by rereading two of her plays, Think Twice and Ideal.  I finished Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning (a story of cultural misunderstanding in Burma which reminded me uncannily at times of my unfinished 2004 NaNovel) and paged through a spoof cookbook called Critter Cuisine.  I re-watched The Big Lebowski and found it not as good the second time.  Milk was a good movie, though, and Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night turns out to be just like The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, only not nearly as polished. I've been playing a fantasy version of Big Brother in my head, in  which I mixed the cast and challenges from Season 11 with five invented non-human contestants and a bunch of crafty twists.  My favorite character, Reba, was evicted today; how sad.  But this, I think, goes some distance toward explaining why I like reality TV gameshows, which some people are surprised to learn. Summer lingered long and ended all of a sudden, with barely any transitional period at all.  And wow, it almost seems like a dream that there was snow on the ground yesterday.  That ain't right.  I'm looking forward to fall--to having a great Halloween and a sweet NaNoWriMo. The sense of change is good, anyhow, and if it weren't for the inevitable winter waiting, I'd be all for this chilling autumn thing. Current Mood: nervous (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 28th, 2009
8:20 pm	Whoops! Summer went away all of a sudden. A few days ago, it was clearly summer.  Last night, it was clearly fall.  (I waited a day to make sure of it, but yeah, it's fall, all right.)  That's an unusually quick season transition.  Normally I consider there to be a period of ten days or so between seasons where things are in flux.  Not this time. Current Mood: accepting (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 25th, 2009
8:13 pm	There are zero peoples here Why is there nobody at Dream Park tonight for games?  A game party is not a party without guesties. <frown> We've been averaging about ten guests on any given Friday.  And tonight is even a nice night with nothing major, to my knowledge, going on.  There's always a good deal of randomness in who, out of the forty or so attendees who range from semi-regular to sporadic, will show up on any given night, but this is statistically bizarre. Current Mood: puzzled (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
6:30 am	Cards along Lake Street I received my first shipment of commercial business cards Tuesday.  They were printed by 123print.com, and, after taking four weeks to arrive, they were horrible.  The colors, meant to advertise my book, were washed out and there was an unexpected white border around the image.  While this was disappointing, it wasn't hugely so, as I'd known there was a chance of the product being crappy.  I'd therefore ordered only 200, and for future cards I'll be looking into alternatives. I almost just tossed them out, but decided that, realistically, ugly publicity was better than none.  What's the chance of a person finding one of these cards, saying "Hm, looks ugly," and then later finding a better-looking card and thinking "Looks interesting!  Except--I remember those earlier lousy cards, so I'm going to take a pass on this book." <fwee goes the card into the trash>  Probably not gonna happen like that.  So I decided to distribute the cards quickly in clumps and be done with it. About a week ago, an old friend of mine that I thought I'd never hear from again got in touch with me.  He updated me about his life, and I agreed to send back some CDs he'd sent me.  I took advantage of the trip to the Uptown post office to stuff my back pockets full of advertising cards and leave them all over the place after I mailed the package, picking up a sandwich at Milio's on the way.  (The clerk at Milio's had recommended their tuna sandwich, but I found it boring.) The task was well worthwhile, if slightly disappointing in its own right, because it allowed me to realize just how hard it is finding legitimate places to leave cards.  Naturally I wanted to leave them in places where they wouldn't be considered litter; if outdoors, where they wouldn't just blow away with the next gust of wind, and if indoors, where they wouldn't just be tossed out with a routine cleaning.  I found a few places that seemed suitable, and took chances with small stacks in a few less permanent places.  In one case, my spirits were buoyed at a crucial moment when I asked a store clerk whether I could leave my card next to several other cards and fliers in the windowsill, and she said "Sure!" quite kindly. I made my way along Lake Street to Calhoun Square, a sad husk of a mall, and planted the last of the cards I had with me.  (I kept about 40 of them, just in case.)  Calhoun Square, on Hennepin Avenue, has been losing stores for years and years, and as such isn't much use to me anymore (although I did find a birthday present for my mother there only days before).  It lost its Games by James long ago, its Borders books more recently, and now, it seems, even the fossil store and Beeswax are gone--not to mention many places of less interest to me.  In a way, though, more pitiful than the mall's spotty, torn-up state was the sniveliness of the signage.  Standing signs in old metal frames proclaimed what construction they were working on now--repairing the escalators, replacing interior finish, retiling the upper level.  Large collages of faces and quotations about the merits of risk-taking and pushing forward adorned the walls.  Most sorry of all is their slogan: Calhoun Square--We Are So Open!  <sad chortle> Current Mood: amused (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
11:41 pm	August wrap-up Having newly published a book, August this year was primarily about marketing it!  I've done so in a fair number of places, mostly on the internet.  The most interesting of these was the MS Paint Adventures forum, a webcomic forum filled with creative people ready to join an interactive adventure at the drop of a hat.  I think I'll stay there long enough to participate in at least a couple of games--I've already created a drawing of my hapless spacebound armadillo character in MS Paint--and probably get around to running a game of two.  I may run my own version of ABC's The Mole, or something inspired by Mark Burnett's failed reality game show Treasure Hunters.  It's too bad I don't remember any of the games I used to run for friends in elementary school, which I bundled up into a concept I called Tunebox.  Still, I've got plenty of ideas from over the years I could throw in if I were in that kind of playful Gamemaster position. While others enjoyed the Fringe Festival, I struggled with the embarrassingly difficult task of designing a business card to advertise my book.  I'd already downloaded trial or free versions of a bunch of graphics programs of different kinds for the project of creating a book cover, so I fumbled through using a combination of several of them to create a business card that looks decent, but still isn't perfect.  It took me way more time than it should have, and I don't know whether I could recreate the process, which involved dumb stuff like taking screenshots of an open application and then cropping them. I need a layout program that isn't horrid.  Scribus just might do, but it seems to lack a completed public manual, and the interface for text formatting and colors is (apparently) really awkward.  People have recommended InDesign, so (sigh) I guess I'll probably look into that for my next (shudder) graphic project. Anyway, I eventually compared the choices for ordering business cards.  Some are pricey and some have terrible online reputations.  I eventually settled for trying out 123print.com, which has a bad but not terrible rep, and with which I could start small by ordering just 200 cards.  After an uninformative e-mail notifying me of a credit to my card (?), I just got word today, four weeks after ordering them, that my order has been shipped. I finished my summer program for the library, a weekly Puzzlemania event where I would bring out a couple bins of puzzles and various activities, lay them out, and supplement them with various different games from home.  I've been enjoying delving into the old classics from my father's collection, and the kids and teens have enjoyed them.  For the last day, I brought in a wooden Boobytrap set from the early sixties. Game parties have been going well enough.  I've been doing more RPing through AIM than through MUCKs, given that my campaigns are stalled and the spontaneous one-on-one sessions an instant messaging client makes possible are much easier to start.  (I use different text formatting for each character.)  I may resume use of my old Pokemon character, Serendipity the Lapras, and/or my enigmatic eccentric gentleman hyena character Roho.  I've been playing Eric the lab rat on NIMHmuck, which has worked out decently. Some highlights from August.  On the 10th I walked to the Uptown post office and mailed a package to my Zimbabwean friend with several copies of her book (along with one of mine) to sell where she lives now in Ontario.  I later had a great phone call with her in which she told me about the sexist payscales still on the books there, speculated on her future, and promised to show my book around to her friends.  At her suggestion, I'm planning to run one branch from What Is Best? as a serial on the internet magazine/blog she co-runs. On the 15th I went to the birthday party of cari_rose and alierajean , which was a great treat and I only wish I could have stayed longer.  I spent some time accompanying Carolyn and her new husband, crytel , to buy some things for the party beforehand, which may seem boring but was actually nice.  On a whim I bought a couple of bleu cheese and bacon beef patties, and later enjoyed one on the grill and traded the one for a bratwurst.  The party's outdoor sheltered-from-the-rain vibe was cool, and later we went inside for a spirited game of Werewolf that ended up with a social structure unlike any other I've played.  My group ended up losing, but we came really close! Filking on the 22nd was packed, with a dozen people present.  For the first time we had to break out all of Rich and Greta's table leaves, and we got guest performances from two friendly members of the a capella band Sassafrass.  The pizza was nummy, too.  Next time I definitely have to bring a hotdish of some sort to share, since I keep forgetting. Matt K. showed up for the game party on the 21st, and he was good enough to drive all the way here from Hudson, Wisconsin to accompany me to the State Fair this year.  I had a blast.  His wife, Emily, joined us for the latter pat of the day.  I took creative inspiration from the haunted house and jotted it down in a blank book while we later listened to some jazzy folk rock.  I saw the X-Zone for the first time, with a mixture of kids and twenty-somethings doing bike and board tricks.  The animal houses were great, Emily enjoyed the Fine Arts building, and Matt took it as a personal challenge to drink as many cups of milk as he could for a dollar.  He managed seven; his goal for next year is to make the Kemps people lose money.  We were disappointed by the very short Mardi Gras funhouse.  Most excitingly, I entered the Midway contest where you roll balls into holes to make racehorses advance, and I won!  I'd won that game two years before, in fact, but that was against only my godmother and a handful of kids.  This time I beat a full complement of adults and took home a big fluffy orange frog. Finally, I've started at last with Tutor.com.  The application process took weeks (although it didn't really have to), and then I waited for weeks longer before finding out I just had to resubmit my background check form.  I had my first shift on the 30th.  My very first request was a Calculus challenge problem I couldn't do, which had me scared, but after that I was able to handle all my students.  I haven't had very many so far, though, since I'm taking it slow with Tutor.com until I'm nice and comfortable doing the job.  My computer is ominously slow, which suggests I may need to do some techie thing like defragging in order to minimize lag.  But the flexible hours of this job are a delight.  I just need to make sure I manage to take on enough sessions in the first month and do reasonably well with them to advance beyond the Probationary stage. The school year will begin again soon, and with it the Homework hub program.  Our first meeting is on Tuesday. Current Mood: optimistic (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 24th, 2009
8:08 pm	News from the self-publication front! I don't really know whether to call myself a self-publisher now, because as many people define it, real self-publishing involves doing more of the work oneself--buying an ISBN, creating one's own store, and everything.  You don't need to print and bind the books on your own machines, but everything else.  Through CreateSpace, I had to design the interior and cover, and I'm doing all the marketing except for their automatic listing on Amazon.com.  So what I've done is mostly self-publishing, and some people would call it that.  It's not vanity publishing.  It's not quite subsidy publishing.  It's print-on-demand publishing, and I wish there were a better name for it, but if there is, I don't know it. :] Anyway!  I've been advertising my book in internet forums, with a couple interesting results.  I mentioned it on the Dinotopia Official Message Board that I used to post on a few years ago, and met a woman who's been working on her own interactive book.  She calls it a downloadable game book, and compares it to something done in the Star Wars universe.  I'm helping her out with it now.  She seems to be a bit of a novice at game design, but her art and layouts are fantastic, and she's open to feedback and even collaboration.  And Dinotopia is a rather awesome setting. Meanwhile, on one of the MS Paint Adventures fora, I've been actually "running" the book for readers, this being a more acceptable alternative to a straight ad.  I'd post a section and let everyone vote on which way to go next.  I had an average of maybe four people voting at each juncture.  Just a few hours ago, we finished the first run-through, and I asked whether anyone wanted to go back and try a new choice at any point.  The people on that forum are awesome--they just start up random text or picture-based adventures like wild and join each others' stuff at the drop of a hat.  It's hugely creative and smart, too.  I expect I'll hang around the forum and join another game or two, and maybe even run one of my own eventually.  I've wanted to design my own unscripted elimination gameshow ever since I started watching Survivor, and this may be the best avenue. Moreover, one of the MS Paint Adventures people gave me my first Amazon.com sale!  Now I know it's possible.  And THANK YOU to crytel  for writing a customer review!  That's really sweet!  In related news, just today I got my first payment from CreateSpace--for $26.20.  It's a start, and it showed up in my bank account sooner than I expected.  And I just called my friend from Zimbabwe, now living in Canada, and she loves my book and is chatting up all her friends about it.  I'll have to send an ad to the widely read blog she helps run.  And maybe I'll do the interactive serial thing with them like on the forum! Just fifteen copies sold so far (and four complimentary copies given out), but there are a lot of exciting possibilities here.  I just want those business cards I ordered to arrive! Current Mood: excited (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
10:38 pm	I have bookage! I now have copies of my book, What Is Best?, to be sold directly!  If you're interested in getting a copy, buying it from me in person is the better choice.  It means a couple more bucks for me, and it saves you $3.75 in shipping, on top of which I'll be glad to personalize your copy.  On Friday night I drew a couple of critters playing Quirkle for one customer. ~:-) I'm always glad to get e-sales, too, of course: https://www.createspace.com/3386003 Or read about it at my website: http://www.thorintatge.com/WhatIsBest I've only sold nine copies so far.  Which is disappointing, even though I've yet to do most of my marketing.  But I'm taking this primarily as a learning experience, and as such it's definitely been valuable so far. Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
5:08 pm	July wrap-up July began with CONvergence, always an exciting festival of surprises.  This year was the first I was attending without my parents, who were on vacation on the island of St. John.  As such, I was divorced from duties involving the Minicon room, and indeed, I only stopped into that room for a few brief visits.  It was just as well, since I was helping my friend Will run a room party on the 4th floor for the second year running, the SPIRE party.  He had no help but me, which made me feel really awkward, and the drive there and unpacking process were kind of excruciating.  When the party got underway, though, it was fun.  I found myself wishing I were running a party I felt more passionately about, because I found I enjoyed the process of brainstorming activities, playing host, and talking about the project with Will. Aside from SPIRE, the high point of CONvergence for me was the Video Game Smackdown on Thursday night, where judges declared which video game character would win in battles as sundry as the Zulus from Civilization versus the L-shaped piece from Tetris.  That's just the kind of battle that I amuse myself with when preoccupied.  Portal's GlaDOS was a terrific guest judge, and when the battle between Mario and Sonic came up, two judges actually battled it out right there on Super Smash Bros Brawl.  The final battle ended with three votes for Mario, two for Lara Croft, one for Link (not in the finals) and one for William Shatner (definitely not in the finals). Anyway, I enjoyed the con, although I don't remember a whole lot of it.  I went more deeply into some parties than usual.  I enjoyed several movies, including Ed Wood, and several fractional panels.  I noted that it was noticeably busier this year than even last year.  Last year's Friday night felt like a Saturday.  This year, even -Thursday- felt like a Saturday.  The shift to four days seems to have come just in time. I haven't been working this summer, except to go in to the library once a week to run the Puzzlemania program.  That's been going fine--I bring in slightly different board games and toys each week.  This month, though, I did finish the application process for Tutor.com.  After taking tons of tests last month, I finally got scheduled for a mock session to test my online tutoring abilities.  I was totally nervous leading up to it.  I ended up doing well except in one little detail--I didn't answer the 'student's' sample question correctly.  In my defense, it was a Calculus question, probably the hardest subject I'd qualified for, but it wasn't that hard a Calc question--just some implicit differentiation in a story problem--and I was ashamed at having to struggle so hard only to get it wrong.  The mentor working with me said I'd almost gotten it right, though, and had done well working with the student, so I passed to the final exam.  This was an all-or-nothing exam based on the training videos, but much harder than the review questions at the end of the individual videos.  To my relief, I managed to pass, and now I'm waiting for them to conduct a background check which could take anywhere from 3 to 30 days. As I announced the other day, I've finally published my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel.  (If you missed that announcement, you can read about the book at http://www.thorintatge.com/WhatIsBest .)  So far there haven't been many sales, but I've only made limited announcements so far.  I've ordered some copies for myself that I'll start selling in person as soon as they arrive.  I've also been updating my website, continuing to struggle with graphics programs, and looking into various marketing methods.  This whole process, while slow and often frustrating, is teaching me a great deal. I've created a new roleplaying character--Eric the lab rat.  He's a Wistar strain lab rat who's in it not because he's forced to or for the money (of which there isn't any) but for the betterment of civilization.  He believes that rats, being small and short-lived, are destined to be used as experimental subjects for humans, and is proud to live out his role despite the ailments it saddles him with.  I've started to flesh out the character in RPs, one of which has turned out to involve Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.  It's cool how things flow together like that--which is itself one of the main creeds of my MUCK, Chimaera. On the 12th, I went with my parents to my grandfather's 90th birthday and family summer fun day.  Those always begin awkwardly for me but turn out fun.  There were an ungodly number of water balloons, as well as Norwegian golf and other games and a really delightful small town spread.  Six days later, the MN-Stf picnic also featured Norwegian golf, which I don't recall ever seeing before that week.  At neither event did I feel inclined to socialize, instead enjoying the outdoor environs and the available activities and listening rather than talking. Game parties have gone a notch down for me this month, partially from slightly reduced turnout and partly because so many of the attendees are interested in games I haven't wanted to play.  They're still quite fun, though, and I have been getting games in.  On the last day of the month, I hosted while my father attended the Fringe Festival, and it was nice to have newcomers that one of the regulars knew from an internet forum.  I also played a series of solo Agricola games according to the rules for doing so, and managed to amass an amazing 92 points for my best game. Filking on the 25th was a lot of fun.  I broke out my Portable Sound System for the second time at filking, having finally found a way to convert MIDIs to MP3s (and having done some mixing in wav form along the way), to accompany my own parody of "Big Black Horse and a Cherry Tree".  Some filks don't sound right without the proper instrumentation.  Even more fun, though, was the special music party hosted by David Wilford and Erin McKee on the 27th in honor of touring guests Kathy Mar and Dean Dierschow.  Five of us from the filk circle made a field trip to attend.  It was a little smaller than other such parties, being held on a Monday, but on this occasion I -did- socialize, as well as enjoying a generous supply of food on and off the grill.  After successfully performing "Coca Cola 4ever" at the last party like this, I think my rule is to perform one of my own songs each night when in the company of accomplished musicians, and to content myself with adding percussion the rest of the time.  My filk of "Rainy Day People" was a bit shaky, but overall the music was great, and while Kathy Mar no longer performs the song I requested of her, her songs were fabulous to hear.  Unfortunately the night was cut short by a medical emergency, but it turned out to be quite all right in the end. I went to Uptown to exchange some money I was sent from Canada for U.S. dollars.  I was surprised to find that my bank, TCF, doesn't do that--it seems like such a basic function.  Fortunately, Wells Fargo exchanged my money for only a five dollar fee.  Another reason to potentially switch banks.  While in the area I ate a sandwich at Milio's and bought my first ever watermelon iced treat from an ice cream truck. In July I played the Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition, which thankfully was much smaller than the other Peggle games.  I read some Paths of Doom books I was given for Christmas and was impressed with some of the milieu while being very unimpressed with the structure and certain vital typos.  I was confused (though entertained) by Donnie Darko.  I found Prince Caspian was quite a good, haunting movie given the weak source material.  I later got together with a bunch of folks on NIMHmuck to simultaneously watch our source movie's direct-to-video sequel, Timmy to the Rescue, which was very easy to make fun of. I was angered enough by the fact that hideously dumb sequels are made (and most often marketed for a younger target audience than their originals despite plenty of existing kids' frachises that could be further milked instead) that I daydreamed about pitching a sequel to The Secret of NIMH to some producer.  I concocted gripping stories about enhanced rats and mice in my head while bussing and walking to one of the few mouse-owned entertaiment chains in the world, Chuck E. Cheese, for mplsfish 's son's birthday party.  I hadn't been to a Chuck E. Cheese since my own childhood.  It was a worthwhile experience--in some ways disappointing, in some ways thrilling.  The party was small, but the package was generous--everyone got lots of tokens to use in the ample games, on top of pizza, buffalo wings, and vegetables.  I spent extra money on futher tokens for extended fun.  And the atmosphere was fun.  I played with the kids while they were there and stayed late.  I didn't hit any jackpots, but I found a nifty game involving actual learning and skill, called Pocket Change, in which you roll rubber balls down a table toward slots, trying to score 99 exactly without going over. July is National Junk Food Month and National Ice Cream Month, but apparently National Pizza Month isn't until October.  Still, every July 31st, I long to start a tradition of ordering pizzas, a thing I don't ordinarily do.  This year, I burnt a fancy frozen pizza and followed it up with a nicely cooked cheaper one.  But no delivery for me.  Maybe someday. Current Mood: cheerful (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
2:16 pm	ANNOUNCEMENT: My book is available! At long last, the book I began work on in November is done!  It's a multifaceted philosophical fantasy adventure--and it's interactive, meaning that you get to decide which way the story goes.  You can read about it on my website here, or buy a copy here.  The price is $15.00 plus a very reasonable $3.75 for shipping.  CreateSpace will print a copy and ship it to you when you order it--despite what the order page may say, it's likely to arrive in about a week. What Is Best? was my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, and represents something I've wanted to write for a long time.  There's more information about it at the website link above, and I'll be updating the page, adding goodies as time goes on.  The front cover hasn't shown up on the CreateSpace store page yet; it should appear within a few days.  For now, then, I'll show you what the cover looks like: I've ordered ten copies to begin with to sell in person, and I'll post again when they arrive.  If I were to get some online sales showing up before then, though, it would be awesome.  I don't think you'll regret adding this book to your collection--I worked hard on it, and chances are it's unlike anything you've got. I'm all excited!! Current Mood: excited (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
6:19 am	A few things on my plate. I'm not really working this summer, but I'm not exactly idle, either...and now a bunch of stuff has come at once. I went to a writer's group meeting last night, only to find that I'd gotten the date wrong, and it was yesterday instead.  Just as well, since I wasn't particularly looking forward to admitting I didn't have the ad material for my upcoming book done yet.  I left my comments for a writer sharing her story at the coffeehouse, thinking the meeting might be today, but as it wasn't, those are wasted.  I'll probably e-mail her. My focus is elsewhere.  Tonight at 10 p.m. I have my first ever online job interview.  It's a Mock Session with Tutor.com, followed by discussion.  I just tried out the virtual environment, which was just upgraded, and it's pretty cool.  I'm nervous about this primarily because I took the tests for -all- the subjects, passing most of them, but only with the help of the internet.  I'll be getting a question from a staffer posing as a student, and I don't know which subject it'll be in.  I'm cramming to feel prepared, but I may not be.  It's like an exam where there's only one question, but it can be on almost anything...and it's open-book, but strictly timed.  :O The final proof for my book came yesterday, and it looks good!  That means it's finally time to set up my e-store and make this thing available to the public.  Expect to see an announcement soon.  The problem?  Aside from the fact that, as I mentioned, I don't have the advertising material done (though I've been learning Photoshop and Scribus), I don't have a web page set up for it either.  Which brings me to the next problem... I signed up for a year's hosting with iPower.com, a company with mixed reviews, and as soon as I did so, sure enough, they made their first mistake and hooked my domain to the wrong page.  This did not surprise my mother, who recommended them in the first place.  Now I need to work that out. And I also just (finally) got my contract for the little Puzzlemania summer program I've been running at the library.  I have to take care of the associated paperwork. Probably no surprise I'm feeling a bit nervous. Current Mood: nervous (1 Comment |Comment on this)