Emoticon

The second RunBinary story is now up. Month Two is now covered. Whew.

"Emoticon" started from a mix of two things: first, some really cool mobile phone design concepts I saw on Digg. They could be twisted and wrapped around things and velcroed on to you. I just thought they were cool, and represented where we'll really start popularizing wearable technology. I tried to find the link, but I can't. Second was a line that popped into my head as I was walking upstairs one night. "She smiled at me, so I sent her an orgasm on my mobile." This is often how I'll get story ideas; one line just comes to me and I build a narrative around that core idea. The line never actually made it into the story, but it should be clear from reading what I extrapolated from it. Intimacy at more than arm's length.

I'm very happily married, so it's really not my scene, but I've watched people surfing social networks like MySpace, trolling for any kind of relationship they could find. I figured if the social networks move fully into the mobile space (as they already are in Japan) then that aspect would survive and most likely even thrive on the transition. Love, once removed and casual.

Anyway, that was the basis of the story, but in actuality it became far different. I hate when authors try to explain everything about their work, so I won't. I'd love to hear what people infer from it. Just, thanks for reading!

Done!

The next RunBinary story is done and ready to go out! I'm still not 100% happy with it, but I never am. It's called "Emoticon" and it should go up around midnight February 1. I started working last night on the next story, which I'm tentatively calling "TwoPont." It's a hugely ambitious project, and I'm frankly not sure I can get it all done in a month. If not, I have an older story I might do a quick re-write on that fits the RunBinary theme called "Excommunication" for March and put "TwoPont" out in April.

This is actually turning out to be a lot harder than I thought. Not just the scheduling and the writing, but staying on the RunBinary theme all the time is kind of limiting. Still, it's doing what I wanted it to do: forcing me to write and come up with new expressions of similar ideas. Guess we'll see in a couple of months if I can keep it up.

First Draft Done!

The first draft of my next RunBinary story, "Emoticon," is done. Yep, I'm cutting it a little close, but I think with the weekend I'll have plenty of time to revise. I don't know if I'm happy with it. Like I always do I'll probably look at it tomorrow and think "What the hell did I write that for?" Then a week after that I'll look at it again and think "Why, that's the greatest thing ever written!" And the cycle will repeat until I've forgotten I've written the story. It's a little long for my tastes and kind of meandering, so for the revision I'll be looking to cut some material and tighten the points. Only five+ days left!

Cirque Du Soleil

My wife and I went to see Cirque Du Soleil on Saturday. It was the first time either of us had ever been, so in spite of its comically-serious reputation we were excited to see it. We showed up just a few minutes late, so we had to be seated after the first act, about ten minutes in, three rows from the stage. The big tent they erected in Atlantic Station at Midtown is pretty intimate, so we were pretty much flush against the stage.

I always feel bad when I get front-row seats at things that this. I'm very tall and I know this has got to piss off whomever is behind me. When I go to crowded movie theaters and sit down, invariably I hear a distraught sigh. Even in the stadium seats! So I turned around during intermission and apologized to the people behind me for being so tall. I know, I know, I paid for the tickets just like they did and it's not my fault I'm tall, but still.

The show was pretty amazing. Lots of high-wire acts, acrobats and jugglers. As entertaining as the show was, I ended up musing more about the life of a Cirque performer. Are they recruited? Do they try out? What's it like having to perform perfectly every night or risk having you or someone else seriously injured? Are they all wannabe ballerinas or serious about French theater? There were a few technical mishaps; the jugglers lost two rings, which rolled into the crowd, and during a particularly spectacular acrobatic act with a square frame in the midle, one of the outer bars snapped loose, nearly throwing the acrobat off.

It ended up feeling shorter than I had expected, even with the thirty minute intermission, but all in all I had a great time. (The asinine parking system at Atlantic Station could be a completely different blog post.) It actually game me some great ideas about a game I pitched at work, so I'll have some interesting new stuff to add if Lazzo greenlights it.

The Diamond Age...and Sci-Fi?

Apparently, George Clooney and the Sci-Fi Channel are teaming up to produce a miniseries of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. (Link) My first reaction was "Cool, Stephenson's awesome!" Then I remembered.

Did any of you catch Riverworld, the Alex Proyas adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer's brilliant cycle of books? I did, actually before I read them, and even though the movie was a horrible pile of crap, I was convinced to give them a chance after reading the short story "Riders of the Purple Wage" in Dangerous Visions. Sci-Fi butchered that story beyond simile. What about Earthsea? Dune? (I actually liked their version of Dune pretty well, except that the lighting, sets and compositing were all incredibly horrible.) My point is...they're going to ruin it.

Maybe it's because I still haven't forgiven them for canceling Farscape, but any classic story Sci-Fi touches seems bound for mass-market dumbing. Karen, our former supervising producer, and I snuck into the Comic-con Sci-Fi party with some other Cartoon Network friends in San Diego last year. It was on the rooftop of a posh hotel. Everyone there was dressed to the nines. Teal'c from Stargate SG-1 was hitting on women -- more than one at the same time. People in suits and slinky dresses were mingling and networking. Some guy from Battlestar Galactica (which I have yet to watch) tried desperately to suck up to us in an ultimately futile attempt to get on Family Guy. It hardly seemed possible that anyone there was a real bona fide sci-fi geek.

(I do have to mention that one of the more pleasant people I've ever met at one of those things was the lead actor from Eureka. Karen had seen the pilot only a few days before and had begun talking to him about it when he was pulled away by someone else. About half an hour later he actually sought her out, apologized for being pulled away and we engaged in what turned out to be a forty-five minute conversation about the show. Very nice man, I need to watch that show.)

My point is, I'm not sure the people at Sci-Fi have more than a marketing manager's understanding of the genre. When you stepped into (or rather on, as it was held on a boat) the Adult Swim party, the whole Adult Swim vibe was there in spades. Minimalist, strange and a little grungy. The Sci-Fi party was all flash and plastic, which unfortunately shows exactly what their attitude towards science fiction is. Shallow and marketable.

Though Diamond Age isn't my favorite Stephenson work (Snow Crash? Cryptinomicon?) I think I'm going to hate what they and George Clooney do to it.

Progress and Broken Glass

Work on the next RunBinary story is steaming along -- note that I said steaming and remember that steam engines aren't all that fast. It's actually turned into a more plot-driven story than I originally intended, which means that the draft is running longer and longer as I plot out the narrative. This is exactly why I rarely outline before writing. It's usually two or three pages in before I know what the story's really about. But I'm fairly happy with the results and hope that I get the bulk of it done in time to do a revision or two before February 1. I had actually hoped to get this story done early so I could have extra time with the next one, which is already a lot more involved in my head for a variety of reasons, but I guess you can't rush this stuff.

Over the weekend my wife car was broken into outside our house. Tammie has been off on a shoot all this past week (she's a film student) and she's borrowed my Element, so I'm the one stuck with the green '97 Geo Prizm with no driver-side window. That's not really true; I did get the window fixed about five hours after it happened, but the window people messed up the lock and don't have time to fix it until Saturday, so I'm still reserving the right to bitch. The thing that gets me is that whoever broke into the Prizm tried to steal the radio, but only managed to get the detachable face off. I just have no clue why you'd break into a car to steal a radio when you have absolutely no idea how to actually steal a radio. Not to mention the fact that that radio is, like six years old. You couldn't trade that thing for a week-old plate of hummus. Still, I guess it's a good thing a lot of criminals are stupid. Got to give our education system props for that, I guess.

Something New in Games

The other day I walked across the street to take a look at the new space all my old cohorts at CartoonNetwork.com just moved into. It's very nice -- cube farm, but nice and new. A bit corporate for my tastes, but hey, where I work there's a Santa Claus chained to a pole with candy canes shoved through his eyes, so perhaps my view is a bit skewed. While I was there I ran into my friend Matt, who's the head writer on the upcoming Cartoon MMO project. We talked about video games for a bit and he made the comment that while all these next-gen games like Gears of War are really well done, he's waiting for something new.

I bring this up because it's something I hear all the time. On nearly every game site I visit there's some journalist there bemoaning the lack of innovation in gaming -- why the hell doesn't someone come out with anything innovative, damn it! So when Matt brought up the fact that he was tired of playing the same old thing over and over, it got me thinking about that again. What is this need for something new?

The novel was invented somewhere around a thousand years ago, and has yet to see any significant improvements beyond the printing press ("just a gimmick!" I imagine some Renaissance scrivener sneering. "A delivery system does not good content make!"). Basketball, Football and Baseball have been around for decades and people are still playing it. Think about that. The exact same game being played for decades without getting old. With very small variances, the same game passed down from father to son. The feature film shares a similar pedigree of non-innovation yet enjoys healthy attendance. Why?

Because, in my opinion, it's not about the method of play, it's about the experience. No new game genres have been invented for the last ten years. Honestly, I think that's a good thing. I think it's unnecessarily dismissive to say that, for instance, the First Person Shooter has been done to perfection when it's only been fifteen years or so since it arrived on the scene. Every FPS may just be a variation on a theme, but that doesn't stop each one from being a unique chance to do something actually new with the content inside. Just as Seven Samurai is Magnificent Seven is A Bug's Life, there can be wildly different, and equally viable, takes on the same theme.

But why would the lack of innovation be good? Because now people can actually start working on doing new and original things in previously established genres without the rug being pulled out from under them. Imagine trying to write a book where the rules keep changing ("Write right to left, no, left to right --no, everyone's writing in spirals these days!"). You'd end up with a muddled mess that had to copy anything that achieved any kind of success in the new format, which is why there are so many space marines and humanoid mutant aliens with machine guns in FPS games. I think Assassin's Creed is a great example of how games can still be innovative while not breaking the platformer genre wide open. Introduce more freedom, add realistic quirks that make you feel like more of a badass (cutting down platforms to cover your tracks) and develop complex AI behaviors like social stealthing and you've got what looks like an amazing experience to play -- that isn't anything actually "new."

I just think the continuous call for innovation stems from growing up in a time of lightning-fast growth in the gaming indstry. So much changed so fast that we're like ravenous rabbits with ADD. Give us more, more, more! When, in fact, we're not really even done with what we've been given already. Many gamers bemoan their 8- and 16-bit glory days, but for me, games have never been as good, or had as much potential, as they do right now.