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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jul 4, 2009 23:02:59 GMT -5
Lost Lexicon Alert! Okay folks, in honor of USA's birthday today, I think it's important that we own up to a few linguistical errors. Our spelling is different than many of the original Brittish spellings. Color may never get its U back in our nation's popular spelling, but we need to remember that it used to be there. But there's one word that American's spell differently than our friends in England where American's actually use the earlier version of the word. You heard me right: Aluminum is an earlier version of the word than Aluminium. So the next time you pick up an Aluminum can, be content in the knowledge that someone in England would pick up an Aluminium can, and they'd be mangling the English language just as badly as we do when we mispell gaol. ...or, at least, you MIGHT be able to be content in that knowledge... if there wasn't an even earlier term that had even MORE seniority! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! So, um, yeah. Start saying Alumium Can now? ...yeah. Merry July Fourth. ...because fireworks probably use Alumium.
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Jul 9, 2009 10:28:31 GMT -5
I've seen this word so many times throughout my life, but it was only in the last month or so that it means the same, and is pronounced the same, as 'jail.' I always thought it was pronounced with a hard g, and a slightly more pronounced o, and that it was only used hundreds of years ago.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jul 15, 2009 12:06:10 GMT -5
The first time I saw Goal was when I was in middle school playing through all of the Infocom games. I played Douglas Adams' "Beaureaucracy" and when my character fell into a "Goal" I had to figure out from the context where I was.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jul 15, 2009 12:06:45 GMT -5
Happy birthday to me! :-D Saw Harry Potter last night as a birthday present.
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Jul 15, 2009 16:03:29 GMT -5
Now how are we supposed to wish you a happy birthday if you don't put your birth date in your profile?!
P.S. Happy birthday!
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jul 16, 2009 2:26:33 GMT -5
I've tried putting it there, I have. But apparently, once this website thinks it knows your birthday, it won't listen to any possible suggestion that it might have gotten your birthday wrong the first time.
Unless they've changed that with the most recent update. I should check.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Sept 9, 2009 18:13:43 GMT -5
At exactly 5:50 PM, Central Time, today, (twenty minutes ago) I finished the rough draft of a book!
It only took 10.5 months, but I finished my NaNoWriMo project. That may not count as a "win", but I'm elated. :-D
I'm gonna hit the town and do some low-budget celebrating. Then I'll come back and watch Glee. Then I'll forget about the book for a week.
Then I edit.
...yay?
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Sept 30, 2009 13:01:49 GMT -5
There's a great blog up now by Amanda Palmer about the relationship between artists (us) consumers (still us) and money. You can find it here but I should warn you that Amanda Palmer's website (and this very article) has some mild Not-Safe-For-Work content (though in that particular article it's just the language, so unless your boss is actively reading your websurfing it shouldn't be too bad.) The article is called "Why I Am Not Afraid To Take Your Money." To be perfectly honest? This is something that I've been thinking about a lot. When asked, I have always claimed to be a capitalist pig and proud of it, though that's not entirely true. There's a lot of built-in shame about being a capitalist in this day and age. I'm certainly not a capitalist because I thought it would be the popular decision. And I'm definitely not a capitalist because I want to get rich. My various socialist, liberal, conservative and anarchist friends just sort of shrug and accept me, though, and I'm grateful to them for that. The point of my thoughts on money were stirred up a bit by Amanda Palmer's blog. I'm certain that she wouldn't claim to be a capitalist, but she's tugging on those particular heartstrings. At what point did it become a crime to want money? Our fiction is filled with misers and rich emperors and dragons who guard their money and keep it all to themselves, and no end exists to the amount of more modern stories in which corporate executives are trying to force Poor Jo to sell his burger stall so that a more fiscally healthy mall can be errected in its place. I think Joss Whedon referred to the rich businessman who does whatever he wants as a "stock villain" though I'm positive that someone else used that term to describe it before the commentary track for Angel's first episode. I think a big part of our problem is that we're throwing the baby out with the bath water. (Or maybe we're throwing the piles of swimming gold out with all the Scrooges who swim through them.) So often we forget that it's not the money that's the problem, it's the acts of the dragon who guards it. We slay the giant not because it's a rich giant, but because it's terrorizing the landscape and because it's stealing the money from everyone else. Tycho Brahe once wrote something called "The Webcomics Manifesto." I didn't want to read it at first, becuase I generally find myself rejecting the manifesto entirely based on just how snobby and eager to punch anyone who disagrees with them they are. (Seriously, go read most manifestos. I can honestly imagine the writers of most manifestos punching people. Not all, but most.) I actually wound up enjoying the Webcomics Manifesto, however. While there was a bit of dragon slaying going on, Tycho (like Amanda) was definitely in support of the *other* kind of money collector. The ones who create fascinating works of wonder and intrigue and say to the world, "Here I am. Do you like it? Feel free to leave me some of your cash if you do, and perhaps I can make something else tomorrow." Now that I'm moving on from writing my first book, I'm faced with a couple of tasks. I need to edit the book, that's the big one. And I need to edit some of the other smaller stories that I've been refusing to edit while working on the book (those should probably take the priority spot, actually.) But I also need to get to work on my next project, designing a series of radio-drama-style podcasts to put online. It's going to be a lot of hard work. And I'm going to be asking a lot of people to help me for free, from the voice actors to the studios that'll help me record (that sounds fancier than it is. I'm pretty much just going to ask the radio station that I volunteered at in college if I can use their second studio, and maybe the recording room at the radio station where a relative is working right now.) That's a lot of people donating their resources and time for no charge. And in all honesty, I'd like to be able to eventually pay them back for tendered services. So when I set up that website for people to listen to the adventures of the crew of the good ship Tundra and their xenoarchaeological Expeditions to the ruins and jungles and castles of alien worlds...I may not be charging you to download the files. But you can bet your treasure maps that I'm gonna have a donation jar so that people can give me cash if they like what they see. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep working in retail, and hopefully in substitute teaching if things work out. Just long enough until I can turn the tip jars and soon-to-be-edited stories into a viable sources of income.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Dec 3, 2009 13:09:47 GMT -5
Well, something of mine's just been published in a visible way. :-)
Published might be the wrong "spirit" to say it in, but it's technically accurate. There was a contest for an online video game to let players write quests. I wrote one, and it won first prize. The prize included not only coconuts but, happily, the inclusion of my quest into the game.
And people seem to have enjoyed it, too. Bozbik the Face Breaker is now an official Zork character, and I couldn't be happier. :-)
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Dec 3, 2009 23:56:40 GMT -5
Congratulations, Affy! It's a great feeling, innit?
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Dec 5, 2009 19:42:00 GMT -5
Indeed. I even had a player figure out what my account was to ask me for the solution to one of the puzzles. Heh-heh-heh...
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Mar 18, 2010 14:07:19 GMT -5
Amazingly, stuff has actually been happening with writing.
To begin with the bad stuff: I've given the book to several people who were all willing to look over it! (Yay!) Sadly, while the flesh is willing, the spirit may be forgetfull, as I don't think any of them have passed the first chapter yet. I need to figure out a way to motivate my readers so that they can get through it and tell me where the boring parts are. (Imma go out on a limb and just call "Chapter 1" the first of the boring parts.)
The good news, though...
Not having a book to worry about means I've been looking into other things. I started by rewriting a story called "The Firsy Day" that Asimov rejected a while back, and have sent it out. Here's hoping that the polish added (and the new name) will work better at this second venue.
And, of course, Script Frenzy is coming in April. I'm excited about Script Frenzy as I plan on creating a series of radio drama scripts that I intend on recording and putting online in classic serial audio adventure style. I'm thinking they'll be free to download, that seems the safest way to start out.
The downside? The last four months have been murder for getting online and just chilling. My City of Heroes account is all-but unplayed.
Somehow, I've managed to be here more often than I did during "The Great Affy Absence of 2006", but I was fully expecting it to be like that again. Here's hoping I don't do that anytime soon.
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