Since I have a lot of crap going on in my life right now, I decided it would be a good time to cheer myself up by visiting a place in my hometown called the “American Computer Museum”. Somehow I’d never actually gone there before, which is sort of shocking when you consider the types of things I saw there:
Old phones!
Old switchboard!
There is no way this thing isn’t a Tricorder.
Replica of the Antikythera mechanism; this looked so much cooler in real life than it does in the picture.
This is a calculator.
And so is this, and I want both of them so I can figure out how they work.
Arithmometer, aka mechanical calculator. Did I mention that I want this also?
Actual letter written by Ada Lovelace, I may have possibly fangirled over this for about ten minutes. (Directly underneath was a first edition copy of Charles Babbage’s autobiography, complete with technical drawings of the difference engine– cue similar fangirling.)
I decided that the time was right to present the most ridiculous picture of me ever taken. This, my friends, is the Pike-o-graph. Eh? Eh?
This watch went to the moon. I now find myself endlessly curious about the effects of low gravity on the movement. *mental note to look into this later*
This thing was full of blinking lights and made clickety-clackety noises if you got close to it. I have decided that I must have one. (You know, like I decided with basically everything else in this museum.)
A room full of computers, including at least a couple Commodore 64s. <3 The big red cabinet in the corner is Computer Space, the first commercially sold video game.
ENIAC…
UNIVAC…
8 megabytes of storage on this baby! Never mind the fact that it’s like twice as big as me. Seriously, you can see my reflection.
There was so much stuff here; it was fantastic. Also I bought a book called “The Victorian Internet”. With a title like that, you just can’t go wrong.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I got a game called Warcraft III. I was super excited to play it because I was expecting something very akin to my beloved StarCraft but with better graphics.
…unfortunately, it failed to live up to my expectations. Not saying it was a bad RTS, but, well, when you’ve been spoiled by StarCraft there is very little that WILL live up to your RTS expectations. The lore didn’t exactly grab me at the time either (don’t shoot me, THAT WAS THEN AND THIS IS NOW), so Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, went by the wayside for a bit.
Enter DotA– Defense of the Ancients– a Use-Map-Settings game that does away with the RTS style of the original WCIII completely and replaces it with this really interesting game involving Hero Units and armies trying to advance to the other side of the map. And holy cogs, it was fun.
Also there was a hydralisk.
My favorite character? Netherdrake. I think they called him “Viper” or something, but he was a netherdrake, and I loved him. I messed around with a few other characters as well, but You Can’t Stop the Netherdrake.
Did I mention that they look ridiculously cool in WC3?
The gameplay had lots of deep little nuances to the point that the DotA forums were rife with theorycrafting the likes of which my virgin eyes had rarely seen before– there were dozens and dozens of items and upgrades, all with their pros and cons. And a chicken delivered them to you, by the way, which was awesome. I, for my part, ignored the theorycrafting and figured out what worked best for me and I don’t think I was too bad, either.
Before rez sickness tainted this icon, it was a really good item in DotA.
I played it online multiplayer a few times but the DotA community always had this weird sort of “ONLY SUPER PRO PLAYERS ALLOWED” attitude and so I, not wanting to burden any unsuspecting team with my nub-ness, stuck largely to a map that let me play against the computer. No worries, it was just as fun. Ultimately, that’s what I want in my games, you know?
DotA of course gained considerably notoriety with the release of the Basshunter song “Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA”, which, if I understand correctly, is Swedish for “We’re sitting here in Ventrilo playing DotA”. It’s what the entire song is about, and as everyone knows, the chicks dig Ventrilo at their LAN parties:
Have I mentioned that I have a thing for Swedish guys? No? Have you seen their curling team? …what? You know what, brb, I’m moving to Sweden. (As an aside, practically every male friend I have flies into a murderous rage upon hearing that I think Basshunter is eye candy, and I’m still not sure why.)
ANYWAYS, I haven’t played DotA in a while. I think it had to do with a combination of issues getting Warcraft 3 to play nice with Linux and simply moving on to other games, such as one that starts with a “W” and ends with a “orld of Warcraft”. Still, I look back fondly on that little game. You were one fun trip, DotA, and hats off to the gaming community that imagined you up.
Normally I don’t post on weekends, but this is too awesome to not share.
Two of my friends who I have known forever got married today, because I’m old so that’s what all my friends are doing these days, so of course I went to the wedding and, afterward, the reception. It was the best of those receptions, one of those Super Geeky Types, which meant that the dance music consisted of stuff like the DotA song and Dragostea din Tei, which were promptly met with cheers upon being heard.
Now I don’t know exactly how and when this particular request got started, but at some point our little group of friends was standing around and someone wanted to know if the Safety Dance was on the playlist. Cue sheer panic from the bride and groom… “No, we forgot the Safety Dance”… followed by disappointment from the requestee…
And then, because my friends know me very well, all eyes were on me.
“Pike,” they said, because yes, people call me Pike in real life. “Pike… do you have the Safety Dance?”
Of course I did. It was on a CD in my car.
“Pike. Only you can save the wedding reception.”
So I got the CD. We queued up the song. Then we all did the Safety Dance, complete with the “S” motions with our arms.
“You know,” says the guy next to me halfway during the dance, “This song always reminds me of that boss in WoW.”
Ayup, that’s my friends’ circle for you.
And that is the story of How Pike Saved the Wedding. /deep bow
“Write a book” is one of those things that is on most everyone’s list of things they’d like to do at some point in their life, so much so that it’s almost become cliche, itself. Well as most everyone knows by now, I’ve written a few, and while I can’t claim to speak for the professional side of things seeing as I have not yet been published or anything, a lot of people still seem to be interested in the process I’ve gone through because they want to do NaNoWriMo or whatever. So here is my list of five things I wish I’d known beforehand, in the event that it helps anyone else! <3
1.) NaNo/Deadlines are AWESOME
Prologue Story:
When I was about, oh, 14 years old or so, my parents gave me a watch. It was accompanied by a little ceremonial sort of thing wherein I was informed that the present was because they knew I always made good use of my time. I don’t remember anything about said watch, I don’t recall what it looked like or even where it is now, but it was my first real “grown up” watch and I wore it everywhere, and thus launched both an obsession as well as the terrible feeling of nakedness I have if I am not wearing one.
Going without a wristwatch for a week while waiting for this thing to arrive was utter torture.
I digress, though. The point is that looking back on it I have no idea what my parents were on about when they said I made good use of my time. I really don’t. I mean yeah, I generally have a good idea of what time it is, because I am an incessant clockwatcher, but then I procrastinate… and procrastinate… and procrastinate…
Enter NaNoWriMo, which not only throws a deadline at you, but peer pressure, too. I dunno about you, but for me, this is a dangerously effective combination. NaNoWriMo’s little daily-word-count graph prodded me into writing 50,000 words in 28 days, all while I was working a full time job and trying to keep up with my WoW blog. In contrast, the seed of “Windshifter” had been percolating in my brain for at least a decade, through countless summer vacations before I even had a job. All that time to write, and I didn’t, because I had no motivation.
It’s funny because I had heard of NaNo before but never participated, primarily because I didn’t like the idea of having one’s creativity confined to a timeline. It sort of bothered my inner free-spirit-artist. Never again will I doubt, though.
Now, I will say that NaNo does not work for everyone. I know of some people for whom the deadline is a serious hindrance or distraction. But keep in mind that I felt that way, too, until I actually tried it. Any aspiring writer who has trouble with motivation should give this a shot at least once, in my opinion. If it works for you, the results will be amazing.
2.) Have an Outline
When I wrote my book for NaNo I quite honestly made it up as I went along. While a few of the characters had technically existed in my brain for years, they were completely revamped for this book, as was the entire story and even the setting of the story. The idea of my book when I started writing was very different than how it ended up being.
…somehow it managed to turn out all right (hopefully), but a lot of editing was needed to hammer everything into place. This all would have been a much smoother process if I’d had a basic outline (even just a couple sentences) that I was working off of, instead of just a nebulous concept.
3.) (If you want to be published) Don’t Just Write For “Everyone”
If you are one of those people who is of the mindset that your book is for whoever wants to read it, regardless of age, then congratulations, you are just like me and like tons of respected authors. The trick, though, is that publishers and literary agents don’t see it that way (did you know there are a such thing as “literary agents”? I sure didn’t, until I had actually finished my book. GG, me!)
I have come to the conclusion that you have to sort of balance the belief that your book can be for everyone but can still be marketed to a specific audience, because that latter one there is what the publisher is looking for. This is more complicated than one might expect, because for example, did you know that there is a type of novel known as “middle grade”? Yeah I didn’t know that either, until a couple months ago. From what I understand it’s the type of stuff you read in middle school. Well I look back at the type of stuff I read in middle school (Watership Down, His Dark Materials, etc.) and most of it falls into the “But that was a pretty deep book that I still enjoy as an adult” category, further muddling things up. As you can see, this whole thing can be pretty complicated.
As such, I wish I had known all of this before I started writing. I don’t think it would substantially change my book, but it might have helped to focus it a bit and perhaps given me some inspiration from similar books.
Man, this book is just an allegory for Linux! Pike must've written it.
4.) Your Main Character Needs Some Sort of Tangible Personal Problem/Character Arc
For the first draft of my book I went off of the idea that my main character was sort of a socially awkward geekface, and that would be his character flaw. Unfortunately I got some feedback that this didn’t work very well, because while being a socially awkward geekface is all well and good, it’s not really a tangible flaw, unless he stops being a socially awkward geekface at the end (which he really didn’t.)
Readers don’t really buy it unless the character has an actual flaw that manifests itself throughout the book and which said character learns from or corrects by the end. It sounds pedestrian and like something you’d see on saturday morning cartoons but there is a reason it’s pedestrian, and that’s because that’s really how stories work.
I managed to get away with this problem in the first draft because I had a secondary character (who I think could be argued as the “true” main character of the story) with lots of Emotional Baggage so I think I was able to keep the audience’s interest that way, but that is tricky to pull off and I think it’s best to make the most prominent character of your story have his own character arc.
And so here I am again doing tons of editing with a big ol’ scalpel which could have been prevented if I had planned this from the start!
5.) Ask Your Characters Questions
This is one of those ones that probably sounds either silly or insane, but it is endlessly useful. Learn how to pretend that your characters are real and that you are interviewing or chatting with them. Ask why they are helping your hero, or what their motivation is for doing some plot point that happens seemingly out of nowhere. This will help tons in the long run not only for making realistic characters but also for making your inevitable deus ex machinas seem not quite so deus ex machina-ish.
~
Welp, I hope that list was of some use to someone out there. NaNoWriMo is coming quick and it’s never too early to get a headstart on thinking about it. Regardless on if you plan on participating or not (and yes, I fully intend on doing it again… I want to make this a yearly thing from here on out, seriously), happy writing! <3
Ten days ago or so, the battery on my wristwatch died. Rather than buy a new one, I decided it was time to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: namely, I decided it was time to graduate from a cheapy Wal-Mart watch to a nice real one.
For the uninitiated (aka sane people who aren’t watch geeks like me yet), most watches these days are battery-powered by way of electrical pulses sent through a quartz crystal. This makes for a watch that is very highly accurate, but the downside is that opening up the back to look inside is pretty disappointing because it is made of so few parts. Clearly this would not do for someone like me who is enamored with the beauty of real mechanical action. So it was that I went online, discovered a very nice watch for a very nice price, and ordered it.
And waited…
and waited…
and waited…
And finally the UPS Truck arrived today when I was in the middle of eating lunch. I had the biggest ever smile on my face when I was opening the box and was met with the most beautiful object I’ve ever laid eyes on:
This is a real mechanical watch– it was painstakingly made the same way they’ve made ’em for hundreds of years. It will never require batteries, and it winds itself via a rotor that spins when I move my arm. It is not quite as accurate as a modern quartz watch, and I’ll probably have to adjust the time when it ends up a few minutes slow each week, but to me that is a small price to pay for the Epic Factor.
And for being able to gaze lovingly at little tiny moving pieces anytime I check the time ^_^
It is also gigantic. Here it is compared to the Wal-Mart watch that served me well for the past few years:
Size matters.
It’s heavy and sits a bit awkwardly on my scrawny wrists (which are already small to begin with because I’m a girl) and it’s a good half an inch thick– at the least. But holy cogs, it’s beautiful. No matter how much respect I have for your utilitarian quartz watch for being accurate and being a pretty awesome technical achievement in its own right– you really can’t beat having the whirring heartbeat of a real mechanical wonder on your arm.
