In anticipation of James hopefully getting a new Xbox 360 sometime in the near future I began writing a list of games that he has to play. A few months ago I made a half-baked, off-the-top-of-my-head list and e-mailed it to him without much explanation of why each game in the list was must have. So here it is buddy, posted right here in my blog for you.
As promised I am going to talk about Stargate: Universe in this post. It’s what I said I’d do yesterday after realising that J-to-the-T practically challenged me to do it. I would like to point out that if you like SGU feel free to voice an opinion in the comments. But please don’t try and intentionally start an argument because I’ve had them all. And to be quite honest I am sick to death of them.
Return of the blog! That’s all I am going to say about the long absence, the second of which has occurred in the short time since I started recording my thoughts again. It happened, it had perfectly valid reasons and now I am moving on from it and back to a (hopefully) daily schedule of rambling like a lunatic.
I had a plan for episode 8, I really did. Last night I managed to write a good ending for episode 7 and even a good beginning for episode 8, but now that I’m at the meat and bones of the episode, I don’t know how to not make it suck. Everything I have thought of so far just seems exceptionally lame. Unfortunately that’s what happens with big concept episodes and it may take a long time to get to 30 pages, a lot longer than I would like. A good(?) analogy would be someone trying to bake a cake. They know what ingredients they need, they have them all in front of them, but they can’t figure out how to put them together to make a great cake.
As you may or my not have read at my Facebook page or in another blog, my laptop died shortly after I went on holiday to Newcastle. It was quite a traumatic time for me as the best I could manage was surfing the ‘net at work (which was restricting, by and large thanks to a prohibitive block on anything interesting) or on my phone, which was useful for keeping tabs on Joystq, io9, Facebook and my e-mail. And pretty much nothing else at all. I’ve had my laptop back for a week or so now but catching up on everything has taken so much time I haven’t really had time to blog anything substantial. So I thought rather than write any kind of crappy micro posts I would wait until I could post something awesome. Or, you know, at least something long.
Yesterday was the first official day of my holiday, and I spent quite a lot of it attempting to re-capture my lost youth. It was also the day that I had a real kebab for the first time in months, because in the south they really don’t know how to make one. And I was having such fun that I didn’t even have time to write a blog update. So here is that update now, at 8AM (though probably later, as I have still to write it).
I don’t personally think it’s unreasonable that if I have a ticket that says it’s for Newcastle, read a coach timetable that says that the coach I’m about to board is going to Newcastle, and board a bus that says Newcastle on the front, to expect to end up in Newcastle. In fact I would go so far as to say that the coach, as a requirement, should stop in Newcastle. National Express, however, disagree. That’s how I ended up in Blyth, rather than Newcastle.
I honestly don’t know how computer games get their claws into me as much as they do. I have several examples of some very different games that have caused me to lose hours of my life in what I perceive to be the blink of an eye. The first and most obvious game to have this effect on me is Champions Online, naturally. The second game that consumed me whole and spat me out was slightly more puzzling.
I’ve never really been any good at beginnings, which as a writer is a terrible affliction. Once I get going I’m usually unstoppable (ask my long suffering fiancée). But beginnings have always stumped me, to the point where a lot of projects that I have attempted to begin haven’t begun because I haven’t figured out how to begin them.
