Today

Saw "Howl's Moving Castle" today, in a theater bootleg DVD by way of Taiwan. No subtitles, thought I was able to follow most of the plot, until the end, when it diverged from the book. The first half hour was almost spot on the original text, with a gorgeous, gorgeous "Hal and young Sophie flying together" scene. Calcifer (the fire elemental) ruled, as is to be expected.

The overall verdict: It's Miyazaki, so it is good. He's really beginning to show his age, and that's a good thing. I think that half of this movie was about growing old, and half of the movie was his own lovesong to animation and a deconstruction of animation as artifice. There are some amazing scenes which were clearly done just to watch things move.

On the whole, I would put it in the middle of his movies. It isn't a Totoro or Nausicaa, but it is easily better than Porco Rosso. When I see it and can understand it, perhaps I'll have a better judgement.

Other than that, work in building my library continues, my mother got the first proofs for her book (exciting!) and I had a lovely dinner with Marc and Akemi.

( Probably TMI... )

Origin of Geek Social Issues

I wrote a response to the now-famous Five Geek Social Fallacies article, and thought it was worth posting.

( Behind a cut, that is... )

The last christmas present

So my mother bought me a (very nice) pair of Uggs for Christmas. My feet being the malformed monstrosities that they are, they didn't fit. We have been back and forth about this for a long time, and I finally got my nicely-fitting, size ten, small boot Uggs today (in earth brown.) Now, my feet are entirely encased in soft, new wool. Mmmm...

Also, I noticed that there are a lot of new people reading this journal. Apropos of that, a brief guide:

1) I almost never lock posts. Most locked posts are locked for copywrite purposes.
2) Apropos of that, I have two writing filters. One of them is simply in this journal -- just ask to be put on it. One of them is a seperate journal at garetsinger. If you want to read that one, which is all one novel, just friend that journal. I haven't updated it in a while, but that should change shortly, once I get a good backlog.
3) I talk about gaming and game design a lot. I should have a filter for that, but I don't, because almost everyone who reads this is a game geek (I apologize to the one who isn't.)

A Proposal for an Elite WoW Action Squad

So I just got World of Warcraft, which is cool, because I really need more ways to waste my time.

And, while, I'm mostly likely going to make a character to play with my friends (both sets of friends... on both servers that they hang out on), I have another plan which I hope will occupy most of my attention.

The idea is to make a group that is reasonably cohesive, in game, have cool names, do some actual character portrayal (I'll talk about how this differs from role-play in a bit) and generally provide some cool color for the game and make people who run across us think "wow, that group was cool!"

Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, ( behind a cut: )

Choices, Decision Paralysis, and Story Recipes

A short essay.

( Warning: This is about gaming )