Countdown until Stuff!

       I return to a precarious existence on August 27. Back to work. I've bought a bunch of masks and I already have a plastic shield installed at work to protect me from the kids and the kids from me. The pandemic is very much real but as long as the kids are able to come to the library I will be there to receive them. Of course, if/when things change I might get laid off again. I hope not, of course, but we shall see.

      I attended an impromptu bluegrass concert a couple of evenings ago. It's not my cup of Earl Grey but I enjoyed the performance all the same. A couple of my neighbours are in a bluegrass band and the rest of the band was over on their patio to play. Enjoyable evening. Besides that, I am sending my semi-immortal orc Mez into battle against the Imperials in Skyrim (she's semi-immortal because I like God Mode), and I'm always having fun with the Reardon clan in TS3. 

      I'm using the Story Progression mod and it's kind of annoying when sims I'm not playing get married. The whole neighbourhood's exploded into hyphens. There's probably a way to change that. Once I really get annoyed I guess I'll get off my prodigious rear and look into it. Anyway, that's what's going on with me. I am also reading a book about the Spanish Civil War. Nothing much else for me.

BYE.

In Praise of Stuff

      One of the biggest reasons I've been absent from this blog is that I spent way too much time this summer and even last summer watching a Brit named Applemask. He's a lovely cynic from Cornwall with his eye on public information films and advertising. He has a channel on Vimeo with an excellent program called the Hard Sell. I think I've learned more about the United Kingdom thanks to Applemask than I ever expected to learn. I've also struggled my way through a bottle of Irn-Bru, learned that Monster Munch pickled onion flavour is nasty, and fallen in love with the country of Wales because of this dude.
      He also has a Patreon, which he has linked in many of his videos. If you want to see what the world was like in the 80s and 90s (assuming you were too young to see these adverts the first time around), be sure to check him out.

      I guess I should post some Sims stuff here too.

Some dudes

Same dudes?






That is all for now.

On the Literary Front #4

The Muse has been slumbering for some time, but with all this talk of NaNoWriMo I've been hearing, I've been thinking of giving the Muse a hard kick in the rear. I've been busy with work, reading, and gaming, and the wanting to write has faded somewhat. After a decade of near-constant writing, I guess it was time to take a break. It isn't that I have nothing to say, but that what I want to say has changed somehow. Apologies if that doesn't make sense. Maybe it's just that I've needed to get settled in my new digs and exult in my freedom before I bow to the Muse. This is something I need to examine further, which I will do in my personal diary. In the meantime, I have two projects I could be working on, but one of these two has become less interesting to me, while the other one has too many things indistinct to me. The main character is not at all visible to me, and I need to make him visible in my mind's eye before I can go and flesh out his world.
I've been reading Cornelia Funke, and her work is magnificient! So much detail and so well-fleshed out are her works. Makes anything I've written seem so stripped down and barren. Fleshing everything out and then cutting back the far is the better way to do things. One problem I have with that is how long to make the chapters. I guess once a scene has climaxed, move on to the next scene. Does that make any sense? And then there's the matter of where to start the story and where to end it. That is one of the hardest parts of writing a story, and I applaud Funke deeply. I also applaud her translator, for I don't understand German. Anyway, I need lessons in creating and fleshing out a world for my protagonist and his fellows.
I need lessons in many other things... especially where getting my Muse stirred up to the point where my fingers are on fire with the desire to write (or type, in this case). Blogging and writing in my journal has taken off some of the edge, maybe, which suggests I may need to drop blogging for a while. Hard to say. Well, that's about all for me. BYE.