CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOM STOPS, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WORDS

20 Things I Noticed While Driving to Oklacon

Smiles?  What? Oh, its FIVE MILES, derp

My trip to Oklacon 2012 is now over and I had a fun time.  Due to a lack of access to the tubes while I was there, everything is going up late, so ‘bear’ with me as I get caught up. 🙂

  1. I have to start off with the oddball store names I saw on US 281: “Aristacats,” “City Drug,” “Mr. Cut Rate,” “Stop-n-fetchum,” and “Feedlot Restaurant.” Best one? “Scooter’s Adult Bookstore.”
  2. If you are in a small town, isn’t it presumptuous to call yourself a National Bank?
  3. Taking the scenic route was a good idea, lots of beautiful country to see.
  4. “Mountaintop Land Bargains” – not sure if company name or actually selling land on mountain tops.
  5. If the speed limit sign outside of a town has a red border around it, it means they ain’t fooling around!
  6. Best thing ever: “Pie happy hour”
  7. I was so happy to finally see a “Speed Limit 75MPH” sign.
  8. I think my heart skipped a beat when I first realized my cell phone signal was gone and it wasn’t coming back for 3 days.
  9. Passed by a store called “The Store.” And I thought the HEB marketing department was lazy.
  10. I’ve seen town names on water towers, but a silo?  I guess you have to work with what you have.
  11. Stuck behind a slow pickup after about two hours, surprised it took that long.
  12. A restaurant named “Hamburger Hill?” REALLY?
  13. I saw a bunch of classic cars pass by at a stop light in a small town.  It must have been Homecoming Night.
  14. Cutting horses?  Its a cry for help, methinks.
  15. Dear Dairy Queen, please make all of your restaurants like the nice one south of Mineral Wells. Thanks.
  16. “Keep Mineral Wells crazy?” Maybe they should have a furcon. NOTE: The next few are after I entered OK.
  17. “Bridge ices before road?” Thanks for the science lesson, roadsign.
  18. A lot of casinos here, hmm.
  19. Dafuq are ‘jake brakes’ and ‘engine brake?’
  20. When I first saw a 25MPH speed limit in a little town, I expected to see a horse-drawn buggy somewhere. I never did so I concluded that they were just being jerks.
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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOMIZER9.COM

Oklacon 2012 Journal #3: Road Trip!

I will drive 500 miles

One of the bigger challenges of my trip to Oklacon is going to be the drive: according to Yahoo Maps, the shortest route from San Antonio is more-or-less a 500 mile straight shot up US Highway 281 to Roman Nose State Park.  While I will be bypassing the messes to be found in Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, there will instead be lots of stopping at lots of small towns along the way.

Being from a small town myself, I’m okay with that.  It is going to be nice to be out on the road seeing things besides gas stations and fast-food joints.  Also, given my intolerance for spending long times in the car, there will also be plenty of opportunities to stop for rest, drink, food, and attending to certain biological needs. 🙂

This will be the first true test of my new vehicle.  Just going to Houston was a pain in my 2005 Dodge Neon (aka The Reliant) and I was not looking forward to taking longer trips in it.  I’m hoping that the increased interior space and more comfortable seating found in my 2012 Honda CR-V (aka The Excelsior) will make the trip more pleasant.

The thought of the fun to be had at my destination should be enough to keep me going, but if all else fails, there’s always coffee.

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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOMIZER9.COM, STEAMPUNK, WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT

Oklacon 2012 Journal #2: Vacation From Myself

Rockin the 8-bit tie!

I have resolved to start taking more ‘real’ vacations; a ‘real vacation’ being a trip during which I go somewhere or do something that I have never seen or done before.  Thus, I will be attending Oklacon later this week: it will be the first road trip I’ve had in awhile, barely my second furry convention, and my first ‘outdoor’ convention.  As such, I’ll be camping for three days and some new friends will be coming along.

While that is all fine and dandy, it also occurred to me that I could also take a vacation from myself.  I attend fan conventions regularly, but I’ve never really gone through the trouble of putting a costume together for a convention.  Granted, I’ve tried once or twice but its was still me, just wearing an 8-bit tie or a half-assed steampunk-type outfit; no glue, no gears, no goggles, so no steampunk.

As geeks/nerds/otkau/what-have-yous, I think we’re fortunate in that regard.  Like the Rekall sales weasel told Quaid in Total Recall: “What is the same about every vacation you’ve ever taken?”

“You!”

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CAMPING, CONS, FOOD, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOMIZER9.COM, TECH

Oklacon 2012 Journal #1: Off the Grid

Furries under the stars!

Oklacon is just a few days away, and I am in the process of getting things ready: making a list of equipment to bring, topping off stuff with fuel, getting warmer clothing out of storage, making sure I have plenty of batteries, and so on and so forth.  In viewing various posts here and there I had heard of something called ‘cell phone hill’ so on a hunch, I decided to check Sprint’s coverage.

Yikes.  It looks as if I’m going to be outside of Sprint’s coverage area, so I’m going to be roaming, which probably means no data.  Now, I presume that no data means no internets, and I find myself just a little bit apprehensive at the thought of really being ‘off the grid.’  As you may guess, I’m one of those people that is always checking my smartphone or laptop for e-mails or Facebook posts or tweets or comments on my blogs (like this one!) and so on and so forth.

While the thought of not having access to the tubes is a little bit scary (I think I may have a problem), on the other hand, its something else I can take a vacation from, and it’ll probably do me some good…I hope!

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BUSINESS, CONS, CREATIVE, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Podcasting, PODCASTS, WORDS, Writing

Oh-De-Lay-Lee

I abandoned trying to keep up a regular schedule with anything creative awhile back. I had originally planned on doing an episode of my “300 Seconds” podcast  once a week, but that didn’t even last a month.  Likewise, I try to post to this blog once a week.  As I’m sure you may have noticed, Dear Reader, that doesn’t happen, either.  The only deadlines I can seem to keep are story deadlines for conbooks, and even then, I had a close call not too long ago.

Granted, I don’t have very many readers or listeners or what-have-yous (yet!) but I still feel bad whenever I get behind like this.  It also could explain why I don’t have many readers or listeners or what-have-yous.  I have cut down on the number of side projects that I have been involved with, but I need to double-down and get cracking so I don’t keep my audience (or potential audience) waiting.  I’m just like everyone else: I, too, get annoyed whenever some person on the tubes doesn’t update on a regular basis, and I should strive to not be That Guy.

So to the ten of you reading this, I’m working on it! 🙂

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Books, Computers, CREATIVE, JUST SAYING, RANDOMIZER9.COM, Seven Super-Short Sci-Fi Stories, TECH, Writing

Mac Musings

Buy me now!

I own a 24-inch iMac.  I bought it when I had some extra money on my hands and I wanted to see how ‘the other half’ lived.  I’d also had a Gateway crap out on me after just three years.  The iMac came with Leopard, which I obediently upgraded to Snow Leopard, and I haven’t upgraded OS X since.  Yeah, I know, I’m a terrible iPerson for not shelling out the cash for Lion or Mountain  Lion or Griffin or Hydra or whatever their next update is going to be called, but I have no desire to.  I appreciate that OS X is probably wonderful for people that ‘aren’t into computers,’ but I am not one of those people.

In addition to Snow Leopard, my iMac boots into Windows 7.  To further add insult to injury, I keep a Windows XP virtual machine handy in OS X for when I need to do ‘real’ computer work, because OS X just doesn’t do it for me.

I cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.1 and remember futzing around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS in order to play Wing Commander.  I remember making a 3.5” bootable floppy with a batch file I wrote called Kenny on it for those inevitable times when I would have to reformat my PC after poking at Windows 98 too many times with a sharp stick.  Plug n’ Play started out as Plug and Pray and we all wondered why we had to reboot our machines after changing the lousy screen resolution.  The Unix lab at the University was for Computer Science majors only and the servers had monitors that were as big as my TV set back home.  I remember the sysadmin telling us to clean out our core dumps when the drives filled up, and one guy being labeled “The JPEG King” because his directory was full of megabytes (yes, MEGABYTES) of porn, which was promptly deleted by the sysadmin.

Good times, and yes, I mean that seriously.  For folks like me, part of the fun of owning a computer is goofing around with it and watching what happens.  I don’t do that much anymore, partially because Windows 7 is pretty darn good, and partially because I’d rather be putting words together instead of spending hours under the virtual hood of my PC.

I completed the final text draft of my next e-book “Seven Super-Short Sci-Fi Stories” a few days ago, and all that remained for me to do was take those words, squash them into an e-book, and upload it to the iBookstore for all to see and buy.  Of course, uploading it into the iBookstore would mean I would have to boot into OS X and send the .epub file to them using Apples super-special uploader program (iTunes Producer) because it, of course, its OS X only.

The first time I had tried to do so for “The Rules of Tech Support,” I encountered a problem with the .epub file I was trying to send.  The file worked just fine in Kindle, worked just fine on Nook and even passed ePub validation, but it just wasn’t good enough for Apple.

Luckily, Apple technical support helped me make my file Apple-friendly and all was well.  I was a little miffed to find out that the problem was that one line was missing from a specific file.  This time, I knew that I had to add that one line before trying to send the file to Apple.  I added the line, recreated the file, and waited for the upload to complete so I could start waiting for someone at Apple to bless it and put it up for sale.

The second time, for “One Sheet Stories” the process went without a hitch, so I was baffled, because this time I got a different error.  Crap.

I sent an error report to Apple, but I knew from previous experience that I was going to have to wait until at least until the next day to get a response.  To Apple’s credit, I always get a response within 24 hours whenever I send error reports, but I wanted my book uploaded now.  On a hunch, I fired up the aforementioned Windows XP virtual machine, did the exact same thing I did in OS X.  I resent the file and was rewarded with success.

While I was happy to have accomplished my goal, I was irked that OS X had failed me where Windows had handled the task with aplomb.  Sadly, if I wish to continue publishing e-books onto the iBookstore, I will need to keep the iMac, but like any good geek, I will always have a backup Windows machine handy.

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CREATIVE, WORDS, Writing

Stories Write Themselves

My short stories usually begin with an idea that gets expanded into an outline, and then written.  While this works fairly well most of the time, sometimes a story will go off into a different direction than I had initially intended.

A fairly straightforward story might jet off into the Twilight Zone or one that was supposed to be funny will become sad.  It is often at these times that I will become stuck as I think over just which direction I want to take the story in.  Once when this happened, I wrote two stories: one that went off in a silly direction and another one that played out more straightforward, because straightforward had been what I had originally envisioned.  Sometimes I will just keep writing even if the story isn’t going in the direction I want it to, just to see what comes out of it.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

No matter how much you plan, you really never know where a story will go until you actually start writing it, because as crazy as it sounds, stories write themselves.

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Books, COMICS, CREATIVE, JUST SAYING, Manga, RANDOMIZER9.COM, STEAMPUNK, WHATS GOING ON, WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT, WORDS, Writing

Short Steampunk Subjects

Positively steamy!

I like things that are short.  Quite a few of my favorite types of media are short: theatrical cartoons, Three Stooges shorts, Aesop’s fables, and Isaac Asimov’s short stories, to name a few.  Curiously enough, my own writing consists mainly of short stories.

I initially kept my short stories to just one side of a page out of sheer habit, but as I write more I am finding myself becoming more comfortable with going beyond that self-imposed arbitrary limit.  Curiously enough, my very first short story came in at 12 pages, which I felt was way too long, so there’s that, too.

There’s just something about quickly getting to the point.  Sure, a one-page story doesn’t leave much room for character development, but it also means that a message can be delivered effectively without getting lost in the rest of the story.  It also leaves armchair psychologists with little room to to find deeper meaning in between the lines.

It may also explain why I enjoy comic books.  In addition to enjoying the exploits of Superman, the Green Lantern Corps and Mega Man each month, I have also taken a liking to the various Steampunk titles currently being printed by Antarctic Press.  In addition to artwork relating to the book’s theme featuring comely lasses, each one has also featured two or three short comic stories featuring the works of Rod Espinosa, Fred Perry, and other creators.

I really enjoy those short comics.  I read them, have a quick laugh or smile, and move on to other things.  But unlike the one-issue comic stories I discussed previously, which are ‘fire and forget,’ those short comics (especially Perry’s) have me wondering about just what happened before and after the story.  How did that Bad Guy end up as a pony?  Who ended up winning the Fairyland Steampocalypse? Just why did Dr. Frankensteam create her Monster?

I also wonder if I am being given glimpses of a bigger tale that has been untold, or are these the scattered pages of a work that is not yet done even in the creator’s mind?  Or perhaps, like myself, all they want to do is make a quick joke or point and move on without having to write a whole book.  I can certainly relate to that!

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FURRY, ORIGINAL-GAMER.COM, RANDOMIZER9.COM, TECH, Videogames, WHATS GOING ON

An Editor’s Tail

You MUST play this game.

I am the Editor/Voice Guy of Original-Gamer.com and I all but handed in my resignation two weeks ago.  I had become burned out having spent the last two years and change reviewing games, editing and writing articles about games, voicing over videos about games, going to game-related events, and actually having to PLAY a bunch of games.  Video games had become work, and I had become sick of them to the point where even the Wii U announcement during E3 had failed to excite me.  What little joy I could muster from videogames came from playing 3DS titles.  Mighty Switch Force and Final Fantasy Theatrhythm were two recent titles that I had actually enjoyed.

I wanted videogames to be fun again, and so I told OG that I was done.  That was it. Game Over.  No mas.  Bueno, bye.  I would wrap up the games that were currently on my plate and be completely done with the site.  I reconsidered it over the San Japan weekend and decided that I would stick around, but would no longer review games.  This is part of a greater desire to cut back on ‘side projects’ so that I could concentrate on my writing.

I was happy to be getting a break from videogames.  I only had one or two more to finish before clearing my plate of everything that I ‘had’ to play and then I could get back to playing games that I wanted to play.  One evening while chatting, OG mentioned Dust: An Elysian Tail (or simply Dust).  He said that he was enjoying it and that I probably would like it, too.

At first, I wasn’t sure that he was being serious.  OG and I know each other well enough to mess with each other and I thought he was being all “you’ll like it because ITS FURRY LIKE YOU HURR HURR.”  But no, he said: “it is pretty damn good, and it looks amazing,” which is pretty high praise, especially coming from him.  I read up on the game, got excited, went to Ye Olde Electronics Store for a Microsoft-moon-money card and downloaded it the next day.  I was curious to see if it was really as good as he had made it out to be.

It was.  My socks were completely knocked off.  I cannot remember the last time I have been blown away by a game like this, but I should mention that yeah, I have missed out on a lot of excellent games these past two years.  Nearly every moment of Dust has been a joy to play so far: I have been laughing at the dialogue, gritting my teeth as I fight my way through enemies, marveling at the game’s beautiful world as I explore it and enjoying the story.

I think Dust has restored some of my faith in gaming.  Its not that I’ve been playing nothing but bad games as part of my role at Original-Gamer.  Far from it,. I have played games that were fun and that earned high scores for being fun, but they haven’t crossed that line from ‘this is fun’ to ‘this is AMAZING’ the way that Dust has.

Except for being (as far as I know) one of the few mainstream ‘furry’ games to emphasize its story, Dust really isn’t anything new.    It is a 2D hack-and-slash ‘Metroid-vania’ game with RPG elements.  That said, everything in Dust that I have seen so far has been executed very well: the art, animation and music combine to make a beautiful game to see and hear, the voiceovers have been very well done, the gameplay makes me feel like the mighty warrior that Dust is supposed to be, and the story is starting to suck me in.

At a time when everything seems to be recycled, rehashed or rebooted, it makes me feel good to know that a game can still come out of nowhere and move me the way Dust has.  I haven’t finished it yet, but from what I have played so far, I can only hope that Dust ends up being only the first of many Elysian tales that I get to enjoy.

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