athenemiranda:
-I have started taking Grendel on daily three-mile walks again. We quit at the start of December, I think. One of the houses on our loop still has a McPalin sign out on the lawn. It is damp, sagging and wrinkly, and it makes me smile.

-we seem to have our roadtrip all sorted; we're leaving on the 18th and planning to return on the 22nd or 23rd. Grendel will be sad. Grendel can live with this.

-I have no spine. So I think I'm done tweaking, even if it is all a bit meh. Fortunately I have something new to work on while babysitting tomorrow morning. Currently it is still even babysitting-suitable, partly because I can't figure out how to stop them failing at life for long enough to get to the fun parts. >< They're just watching TV and deciding what they're not going to talk about, ever. They are not the most fun pairing to write. I kinda love how unfun they are. They are, in fact, David and Frank. The one who's terrifyingly depressed because he really wants to not be a videogame character but can't figure out how; and the one who, should you line the entire cast up in ascending order of derangement, would be the furthest to the right.

(ironically, I think you'd get Psycho Mantis propping up the left there. He's so very aware of the fact that he's in a videogame and imparts this clarity into all his actions. You may array the rest between Mantis and Frankie as you wish.)

-while poking at this, I realised that I'd suddenly forgiven David for lying to Naomi, something I've been mad at him about ever since I played the original MGS over eight years ago. This is all about Strength, the Eighth, and the stilling of the great beast - the removal of one cogwheel from the vicious cycle.

athenemiranda:
-provisionally settled at 9150 but to get there I had to remove a few hundred that were only leading to more trouble. If I have a spine I will add more words tomorrow.

-unfortunately there's another unspeakable thing brewing in the back of my head. Well, three, really, but two of them aren't trying to kill me yet, so that's okay.

athenemiranda:
aihal says:
ooh, I haven't tried on my new underwear yet!
aihal says:
erm
aihal says:
did I type that out loud?
the rain transformed says:
it's okay, I won't tell anyone.
the rain transformed says:
:)

cryo, posting in new_shit:

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athenemiranda:
I hoped that scene would be nice and fluffy.

But they seem to think it isn't sex unless one of them is bleeding in three places.

*le sigh* This thing is almost 9000 words long now, and there's only one scene needing serious work that I *know* about, although part 4 as it stands is probably a giant let-down and may yet get more content. We shall see.

athenemiranda:

This may be the most fun pairing to write, ever.

It's the constant oneupmanship and scheming that does it. Oh god. You know, I have no idea how people managed to do writing research before the internets. In the past two days I've had to look up the overland distance between Hanoi and Berlin, the dates of the Watergate hearings, photographs of the Russian embassy in London, and the names and release dates of every film released in the UK in 1971.

They are taking up residence in my head, I don't know how permanently, and arguing with the others about the soundtrack. I suddenly got the urge to listen to bad country music, then realised they were all glaring at one of their number, who was nonchalantly polishing his spurs... (The Pussycat does not like him. At all. The Owl has rolled up her sleeves and prepped the pea-green boat for a holiday. They will return once he has left).

Someone else is cultivating a boycrush on Jack, and is trying to steer him from heavy metal into hiphop. What? Sendalin is merely exasperated: "If you think that's the most bizarre thing he's ever done over a boycrush, you have no idea. No. We are not having a foursome. They cheat at bridge, for hell's sake."

"You cheat at bridge."

"No I don't. I'm just very good at it. See, this is why I lie all the time - it's the only way to get anyone to believe a word I say."

I've found a middle ground. It involves looping The Prophet's Song over and over, and occassionally getting up to pace, dance, turn cartwheels. I have no idea why.

athenemiranda:
It is better to light a candle and grab a knife than to curse the fact that you have no idea where the heat gun is.

M is making STENCILS, ohnoez.

athenemiranda:
-am having altogether too much fun in my own head.

-having fun in own head and having fun outside own head are processes that very much feed each other if you let them. We went pottering about with Colin (who is taking a brief break from being Utah's only Geordie) and Melanie this evening. I had thought Melanie to be a lovely person who I had not so much in common with. Found out she's a giant LOTR and Bones slashgirl. Omg.

-have flipped from using Deadjournal as a word-processor to using yWriter as a HTML editor. It is a little bit easier to keep organised. I hate proper word processors and do most stuff in Wordpad (in point 8 TNR, nearly always), but sometimes I end up drafting shit in private Dj entries instead, and one of those times has been lately. At the top of my journal I keep a locked post full of outlines, sekrits & other random crap connected to tdt, and I should probably move that into yWriter too.

-writing being such an intermittent thing for me, it's always weird how it's changed since the last time I did it. Currently I seem stuck in a slightly whimsical sort of third-person, tending to lots of passages of a few hundred or a thousand words (though I know I've not done what will be the longest chunk of this mini-project yet); I want to try going to first-present in the next thing on my to-do list. Also, I'm more chilled about it than often; I have what I know well in hand, and am cool with the stuff I don't know, like how the damn thing ends.

-I am drinking crazy amounts of tea lately. I want to start running again, but am currently having too much fun in own head to want to leave the house simply to be alone and healthy with my dog.

retsasid:
i'm not a big fan of relationships. i haven't been for a long time, ever since i realized that 99% of them end badly. i'm not one of those people that thinks love is worth a 99% chance of having your heart broken; personally, the pain of heartbreak is enough to dissuade me from pursuing relationships. instead, i let them come to me. (un)fortunately, one did.

it's been less than three weeks and i'm already reconsidering the wisdom behind this decision.

the vulnerability i feel is absolutely ridiculous, and i hate how much i'm effected by what i think he thinks of me. fucking shit, man.

athenemiranda:

Happy new freaking year. I've been doing good, in non-fannish-obsession terms, mostly because my magical shiny people make me happy by spending time with me, sending me emails, etc. I did some pottering around with Dani earlier, which was precious and I need to do more often - she lives ages away from here now, but works not so far away at all.

Unfortunately, in fannish-obsession terms I am doing even freaking better. I wrote cracky pornfic for the first time in a couple of years and people liked it; now I'm working on something even crackier but maybe with less porn. Worse, we have been replaying stuff, and Matthew has gone over the Persistence easy versions of the two way-old 2D Metal Gear games from the late 80s. The first has little to obsess over. The second is full of BATSHIT FANNISH GLEE about how deranged Jack and Frank are, about ninjas and cyborgs and jellycopters and chocolate and hairspray and especially about children.

It's the headfucking omission that's getting me most right now. In those two ancient-of-days videogames there is never, at any point, any indication that David is Jack's son. They just retconned it into MGS1 and hoped no one would notice.

WTF.



After failing to sleep last night because Matthew was having fantastic hot-cold fever dreams, talking to me about mad clowns and pushing me out of bed, I got up and (in spite of all my intentions to WRITE) spent the entire morning talking to Chris. He has, I guess in response to my declarations of > , been trying to convince me that Metal Gear Solid 2 is the best game of all time.

It is, partially, about Art and the endless fucking question of how to make videogames do it. I admit I underappreciate the meta levels of what's going on with Rosemary and Raiden in that game -

Look. It starts with the idea that the best way to do videogame art is to be be telling stories/generally DOING ART STUFF that can only be told/done in the medium of videogames.

Most of the juicy emotional stuff in MGS1 is there because of Kojima's obsessing over solidity - about what happens when you take a 2D sprite game from the 80s, take its themes and some of the object layouts and characters, and put them in 3D. You take a protagonist who was a simple cipher - and in the 3D 'verse, suddenly he's a very emotionally disturbed human being, who claims to have no family, no friends other than two other recurring characters - his relationships with whom are characterised by betrayal, violence and HEADFUCKS - and eventually manages to claim his own first name and an ability to live beyond game mechanics. (NAOMI <3)

MGS2 turns it up a notch, makes gameplay about gameplay and takes the internal batshit of MGS1 and plays it out between Rose and Raiden rather than internally. Rose is pretty much begging Raiden to not be a cipher videogame character, and the less of one he becomes the more of one she becomes.

I'm sure this is all very great and arty but it fails because I hate their fucking guts. And if I can't bear to even really think about what they're doing because they're so crap, then it is not fucking art.

[It is very fortunate that Raiden's guts were removed by SCIENCE and replaced with cyborg ninja parts because now I LOVE HIM and use him as an MSN ICON and am generally in wuv. But I still hate Rose and think everything she said in Part 5 of MGS4 was a giant fat lie.]

The other thing I hate is the insistence that for art to be art it has to waste time talking about fucking art. HATE. I don't care what your bullshit does to push the envelope of what's considered 'art'. If all it does is make comments about mediums and their boundaries, if it has nothing to offer about life, you can shove it back into your ass. And this is why, however dreamsical and self-referential and deep MGS2 might be, I think it is outarted by 1 & especially 3 because both of those had gameplay moments that can still make me cry ;___;

[But in MGS2, George is there to pick up the loose end Jack left at the end of the 1980s and remind the world that videogames don't cause violence, violence causes violence. God.]



Also, I belatedly noticed that the techhead trio there are basically the Hellenic Fates; Sunny spinning the wheel, Emma measuring and Naomi cutting the thread.



And I haven't even mentioned LittleBigPlanet and its downloadable package of Metal Gear costumes/levels. OH DEAR GOD. PLUSHY CYBORG NINJAS WITH WOODEN SWORDS AND BIG SAD EYES. HELP ME ;___;