Bright End of Nowhere

I am pretty close to drunk at this point, but whatever, it's kind of a "holy fuck, the boys and girls in blue got the asshole alive" and "fuck yeah, we're alive!" night.

So, because I'm drunk right now, I'm going to run my mouth on Unpopular Liberal Opinions right now.

Hi, yes, I spend most of my day indoors, unable to go to work based on the MBTA shutdown, the MIT advisory against staff coming in, and the stay-in-place advisory for Cambridge. After getting dinner/drinks with some people displeased with that, I respectfully tell them to stuff it. Yeah, okay, the militarization of police is a concern. The fact that there were MPs at T stations this week: also concerning! But guys, maybe it's just me, but as an MIT alum, I wanted the goddamn asshole taken alive. I was quite happy to comply with police and the state government asking me to stay indoors, even though North Cambridge is at least 3 miles from where things were happening in Watertown.

They killed one of ours. And sure, call me an asshole or whatever because I only got this worked up after the MIT officer was killed instead of thousands of other human beings every day. I don't care. Officer Sean Collier was one of ours. And he died to keep my campus safe. I don't know if people realize that the MIT Police are actual cops. And they're actual cops who will and do go to bat for students against the Cambridge PD, saying that some things are an internal issue and will be handled by the Disciplinary committee. Or that the CPs are honest-to-god more concerned about student safety above all. I've dealt with them before, and even when we complained about it, some of the best people we could have looking out for us.

And if staying indoors would help police and government agencies catch Sean Collier's killers, than I was more than happy to comply. Even beyond "oh shit, there's people with no compunction against hurting hundreds with guns and explosives running around". Yeah, even where I was, I heard the grenades and explosive ordinance these assholes were throwing around.

These people, as a whole, give so goddamn much to keep us safe. And yeah, they fuck up sometimes, and we call them on it. But we don't say "thank you" enough. They do so much for us, but we only recognize them for their failures. We don't tell them "thank you" enough for the times they succeed.

And I don't give a shit if you say that "only 4" people were killed in this shit that went down this week in Boston by these two, and that maybe I should pay attention to the rest of the world. A comment on Twitter I saw today sums it up: "Homeboy killed an MIT cop, now being hunted by machines built at irobot by MIT-trained engineers."

Officer Sean Collier was one of ours, and he died keeping my multi-national community safe. Martin Richards was 8 years old. Krystle Campbell lived in the next city over, which in Boston terms, is probably about 10 minutes away by car. Lu Lingzi died so far away from home, coming to our shores to make the best of herself.

And tonight, I drank to the dead, and I drank to the living. And when the entire bar busted out singing along to "Sweet Caroline", we were singing and drinking to the city as well.

beanpot asked for an expansion of a discussion I had with her today about the gaming industry, women, violence, and ethics. As this is a topic near and dear to my heart, as well as somewhat close to an essay I've been meaning to write for approximately forever, you are about to witness a very lengthy essay on the topic. Look what happens when I don't have homework.

( Into the Looking Glass: Games, Women, Violence, and Society )

So, in a fit of boredom the last few nights, for some reason, I found myself scrounging around the 'net for old-school Final Fantasy fic. Specifically, FFV and FF:Tactics, and moreso of the latter. The problem is that I have no idea where any new sort of archive for FF fic is, or if it even exists, now that RPGamer.com stopped accepting fanfic in 2007 and the GIA shut down (and now I've dated myself. Win.)

I trawled through ff.net's Tactics section (yes, I was that desperate). And it was sort of fruitless. I found some old fic (2005 or earlier) that I remember liking, but that was less than a handful. My frustration was growing.

( And now I'm going to rant a lot )
And now I'm wondering if I really want to write Tactics fic. Because Meliadoul and the rest of the Tingel family need some love. And seriously? So do characters from every other FF that came before 7.

Maybe I need to go pop FFIV into my DS and start playing. Or pop Tactics into the PS2, and replay it in all it's broken English glory. Old-school games need love too, you know.

EDIT: Because I can't type and spelled her name wrong 3 times. *facepalm*

If I ever decide to write something involving time-travel (especially something where it is possible to effect past events relative to the story's present), somebody tie me to a chair and smack me in the face with a bokken until I realize am being an idiot.

Really. Getting hit repeatedly in the head will ultimately be less painful than trying to figure out the physics of time travel.

(I've been watching Journeyman. I like Journeyman. It's amazingly smart and has some excellent dialogue. It does time travel better than almost anything else. Except, well, between it and Heroes, the phrase "I hate time travel!" is coming out of my mouth a lot.)

I have a couple of things I could do:

• Work on 15-minute mini-lecture I have to give on Friday to my Intro to Astronomy class on particle physics. Problems:
  
  • Figure out topic. Currently leaning towards black hole theory and GR.
    
  • Figure out how to make LyX do the Right Thing for slides.
    
  • Figure out how to explain all this to people who would probably freak out if they saw an integral sign.
    
  
  
• Finish writing up Spearhead run for Friday night.
  
• Work on one of the following:
  
  • Bringing Down the House (SG-1 s9 apocalypse fic)
    
  • Scaling Bahamut (XAOSverse character study)
    
  • "Growing Up Gamer" (the previously promised essay on growing up as a gamer girl in the Midwestern US, and how gaming influenced my life in ways I'm still discovering)
    
  • The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns (XAOSverse fic I haven't forgotten about, even though it still hates me)
    
  • Mens et Manus (SG-1 s8 AU divergence fic; without writing a word, this thing looks freaking huge)
    
  • Travelers 0: Scattering Shards (XAOSverse Book I; please don't remind me how many parts there are to this beast)
    
  
  
• Ignore the strange conversation taking place between Montblanc (FFXII) and Sam Carter (SG-1) in my head.
  
• Watch Farscape (because Housemate #1 is awesome and got the entire series for me on our media server.)
  

I think I'm going to start posting any new Manifestos over here. Or at least cross-posting. At least, the non-political ranty type ones. You know, the ones where I pretend I'm 17 and anarchistic again. *eyeroll*

At the very least, I might start doing essays again. I've suddenly got the urge to write the one about growing up and life as a girl gamer. It's better these days, because I can walk into an EB Games or GameStop without being stared at like I'm a strange creature, but then I sometimes walk into one back in Milwaukee, and it hits me all over again. It also seems to be worse when I'm not wearing cargos, baggy shirt, and leather jacket. Anyway, yeah. I need to dig out my sources, but I think that one needs to get written. (I currently found my copy of utopian entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel, and it's currently sitting on my desk.)

Other fics are not so much stalled as being studiously ignored while I attempt to wrestle with quantum. Luckily, any jokes about quantum tunneling are perfectly acceptable in both universes, so I have little to worry about if it decides to take over my brain.

I'm getting frustrated by the Not Writing thing. I haven't written anything down since "Jacob in Reverse" (although I'm discounting notes for Spearhead), and I'm beginning to get frustrated. I suppose it could be a combination of moving and term starting so I don't have nearly as much free time, but still. A couple of characters seem to be looking like they want to talk to me, but haven't yet (although one in particular seems to be making me eat all the yakisoba evar).

I'd been doing a couple of XAOSverse character pieces just to get inside their heads. But lately, even that's seemed to dried up. I suppose there's been a few interesting directions taken, in terms of world-building (I may have figured out just what the fuck the Xaoskuim actually are, and it's only taken me, what, seven years?).

Bah. I'm just complaining. As I said a few weeks ago, I seem to be suffering from writer's block, and have just gotten smacked in the head with "Good god, man, what are you DOING? Get your ass to a pencil!" Except I've got my hands on the keyboard, and I'm still drawing a blank. I even spent an hour two days ago figuring out how to install emacs in Windows XP because staring at a blank .doc or .txt file was driving me insane (and I apparently though a blank emacs terminal was better?).

I'm half-tempted to start asking for writing prompts.

You know, when I complained about having writer's block, I did not need to come up with another WIP. For Stargate, no less. (At least this one might (maybe?) be short.)

Dammit, Sam Carter! What the hell are you doing? Anjirousu, stop talking to her. You're giving each other ideas! I know you claim to have nothing to do with this latest one, but this is totally something you'd pull. Don't think I've forgotten about the pirate-verse, Targasa.

I will be driven insane by two characters who live inside my head.

I think I've finally figured out the problem with "The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns", the previously mentioned XAOSverse story that's been causing me grief. The style is still a problem. It's very different than what I'm used to writing, but it must be written like this. It needs to have the lyrical feel of poetry while still being prose. That's just what it is.

The mistake I was making was believing that was the only problem with it. I thought, "hey, I should really write the short story about how the Skyrynians waited for the restoration of the House of Takski." I thought I could quickly pen it out while I was trying to get some other character pieces done. I was wrong.

It's not a short story. Or at least, its on the larger end of the spectrum.

Somehow, I managed to forget I'm dealing with, in the grand scheme of how I've plotted the universe, a span of 500 years that's essentially an information black hole. I have no fucking clue what the hell happened in that time period other than a few events and one particularly gruesome recurring event.

The amount of universe building that needs to be done is slightly daunting, and not really the material for the type of short story I was envisioning. We might be entering into the territory of the novella. Oh, you can hear my absolute joy. Or I still might be able to pull it off in a short story. I'm really hoping for the latter. It's just, I'm willing to think about the former only because it dawned on me just what exactly I was talking about.

Why can I just freaking write a story? Just, flat-out, write the damn thing? Because it seems recently, there is no consistent style between what I write. Everything seems to want to be written as some kind of experiment.

Normally, that's cool, that's fine. But come on. This is getting ridiculous. I'm playing with all kinds of styles and it's all becoming very hard. Because I really, really, really want to just go back to my happy default place of 3rd person limited, swapping characters depending on the scene. But no. The current stuff isn't letting me do that.

(This rant is brought to you by the current piece that's demanding to be written as a freaking fairy tale, lyrical, epic-poetry type...thing. I don't know. *throws hands up into the air* I CAN'T EVEN DESCRIBE THE STYLE, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO WRITE IT?)