I now have a (at the moment rather spartan) Smashwords profile. What is Smashwords? Allow me to quote:
Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers. We offer multi-format, DRM-free ebooks, ready for immediate sampling and purchase, and readable on any e-reading device.
Much like the fellow in this Quarter to Three thread, I am planning on submitting some of my short stories (and ultimately bundling them into a collection at some point), some for free, some for a very modest cost, all in an effort to get my writing out there. I’ve imposed a deadline of one week (!) to get the first two stories out — both are already written, they just need to be fine-tuned and formatted. One will be gratis, the other likely to sell for the princely sum of 99 cents.
I shall report back with my success or lack thereof in due time.
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud
Temp: 18ºC
Wind: light breeze
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:17/km
Total distance to date: 837 km
What better way to celebrate the nation’s birthday than with a stinking long run?
As expected, it was pretty quiet when I got to China Creek late in the afternoon. It had been cloudy for much of the day but was clearing up as I got to the park and most of the run was done under the sun, though it was not warm enough to be a bother.
My initial km was a whopping six seconds shorter than my previous run, which surprised me as I didn’t feel I was that far off my pace. However, I felt good and kept my pace consistent. In the end the consistency paid off as I ended up beating my previous best of 5:19/km by two seconds (three on my iPod but the cursed Nike+ site rounded up, as usual). As you can see by the chart below it wasn’t until the halfway point that I caught up to Tuesday’s pace but then I did a better job of maintaining my pace. I stopped at 10K despite feeling good because my right shin had been feeling tender (hence the two day layoff since the last run) and I didn’t want to push it. Both legs held up fine, though.
Joan congratulated me incorrectly for my farthest run yet. Oh, Joan, you silly but well-meaning person!
Nothing unusual at the park today, which is kind of a change of pace.
Chart (blue indicates the run was done clockwise):
I recently added another link to my small collection of, uh, links. This one is for my Fitocracy profile. Fitocracy is an exercise-tracking site that combines the social aspects of Facebook with the level-up mechanics of a video game. It even has quests. For a geek that works out (yes, I know…) this is a heady combination. I am part of the Quarter to Three group there and as of this writing am level 7. This doesn’t give me a nifty title as I had hoped for but I look forward to level 8 all the same. Only 22 points to go…
This is one of those ‘may be embarrassing to look back a year later’ posts.
Today I began the second draft of my novel, The Ferry. It was written as part of National Novel Writing Month in November 2009 and you can see the play-by-play on its fevered creation in this thread on the Quarter to the Three forums. In 21 days I wrote a complete short novel — 50,810 words in total. It had started out as a short story back in 1993 that outgrew its short story status before eventually being abandoned. Over the years I revisited it, trying to get it steaming along again, one time even switching it from its first person narrative to third person but I could never figure out where to go with it and so it remained unfinished.
The ‘just for fun’ approach of NaNoWriMo took the pressure off, as I briefly recount in this blog post written the day after completing it.
The second draft will probably take a good deal longer to finish but I am relieved and happy to have gone through the experience.
Ho ho!
And so tonight, after a number of false starts, I begin the second draft. My marginal goal is to have the second draft done before NaNoWriMo 2011 begins. That gives me four months. I vow to update on this come October 31st!
Distance: 11.04 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 17-18ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 772
Average pace: 5:19/km
Total distance to date: 827 km
Tonight I felt like Goldilocks. With the temperature a comfy 18ºC, a light breeze from the east and the cooling of the night air, conditions were just right for today’s run. My biggest worry was getting conked by a baseball by one of the two games in progress. Fortunately none of the balls turned into noggin homing missiles.
Obligatory odd thing on the run: An old white lab was strolling and sitting about for most of my run and until the very end I never saw the owner. In fact, I’m still not sure the person I saw the dog with at the end was the owner. In any case, toward the end of the run the dog decided to lay down square in the middle of the path. From a distance he looked like a large white rock that had been dropped into place. On my first lap past him I hooked right. He stirred slightly. On the second lap I hooked left and he stirred not at all. Dogs are weird.
The other thing that stood out tonight was the large number of runners. There were half a dozen out at once and more than that over the length of my run. Nearly all were running counter-clockwise, so I felt a bit like someone driving down the right side of the road in England. No collisions to report, though I do roll my foot over an exposed root once as I dodged a fellow jogger.
The run itself went very well. I had a good start and a much better pace than the last run and felt no discomfort. Toward the end my second wind had kicked in nicely and I opted to do what I have never done before and go for that extra km. I finished with 11.04 km on the run and an average pace of 5:19/km — my best pace ever for a 10K. I am pleased. So was Joan, who, instead of giving me congrats for yet another phantom 500K completed, instead accurately acknowledged my farthest run to date. Thanks, Joan!
Chart (blue indicates the run was done clockwise):
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sunny, hazy cloud
Temp: 20ºC
Wind: breezy
Calories burned: 701
Average pace: 5:27/km
Total distance to date: 816 km
It seemed like half the people at the park today had soccer balls and many of them went shooting off in random directions, like the Whitecaps desperately trying to tie yet another game. Fortunately I was never in any real danger of getting bopped — this time. The oddest use of a soccer ball was probably on the slide in the playground area. The slide is enclosed in a tube and a young father was tossing the ball up the tube so it could shoot out the top. His son would then attempt to catch it below. A couple of kids later tried a variation on this where one kid sat inside the top of the tube. This did not work so well. It worked even less well when the other boy, wearing a ribcage t-shirt, started tossing handfuls of gravel up the tube instead of the soccer ball.
Kids are weird.
Speaking of weird, I saw one of the weirder things at the park. A large group were apparently filing some thing that involved copious numbers of beachballs being jettisoned down the large hill at the west end of the park (this was also the site of last summer’s waterslide) while running down dressed as wizards or possibly monks. They had big beards so I’m thinking wizards. Or possibly Moses and his clones. Several people were also wearing clown wigs. One rode down in a toy car and later observed that the driver-side door had opened, as if it was some kind of rule violation. I never did get exactly what the whole thing was about. A jogger ahead of me came closest to getting caught as they all barreled down the hill.
As for the run itself, I had decided to take it slow and steady due to my right ankle feeling a little tender after the last run. The good news is the ankle came through fine. My left knee complained a little but it, too, is fine now. The baqd news is I had my worst 10K time since resuming them. I started out well and then had a 5-second drop off by the 3rd km. I had another 4-second drop off at the 6 km mark and these combined to give me a mediocre pace of 5:27/km. Still, it was sunny for most of the run and I had that mini-furnace thing going for a good portion of it, so the time isn’t awful. And Joan spotted me another bonus 500 km. Thanks, Joan!
Chart (blue indicates the run was done clockwise):
SPOILERS AHOY! If you do not want to read spoilers, skip this review in its entirely and just read the last paragraph where I sum up whether the movie was poop or worth seeing.
Super 8 is one of those movies that gets worse the more you think about it. That makes sense, because it’s a monster movie and as such it’s not meant to stand up to the intense scrutiny of some fancypants film critic. I don’t even have fancypants, though, and I still had some problems with it.
First, I don’t think it’s a bad movie, but it is disjointed. It feels like a couple of different stories have been stitched together, some of which would have been better off not being in there at all.
In an example of the film’s problems with tone, it starts darkly, with a post-funeral gathering for the mother of the main protagonist, a teen boy named Joe. A man is bum-rushed out of the boy’s house by the town deputy — the boy’s father. It is later revealed that the man is the one who missed his shift at the factory and Joe’s mother went in to cover and got squished dead in some sort of horrible industrial accident. The man’s daughter later serves as the proto-love interest of Joe.
None of this is relevant to the main plot and could have been removed in its entirety. I am guessing it was put in to add depth to the characters or something. It’s a monster movie. You don’t need depth. You need monsters.
The film then lightens up considerably as it settles on the four boys and girl shooting their homemade zombie movie. As Super 8 is set in 1979, their little production is done on, well, a Super 8 camera. The scenes of them putting the movie together are charming and the interaction among the kids — arguing, blurting out non-sequiturs and acting weird in little ways — feels authentic or at least authentic enough for the purposes of a monster movie.
While the kids are filming late at night outside a rail station, an approaching train collides with a truck, resulting in a spectacularly over the top wreck that launches the central plot of the movie as something big and clearly not good lumbers out of an overturned box car and disappears into the dark. When I say the train wreck is over the top, I am not employing hyperbole. Either J.J. Abrams really likes train crashes or he wasn’t confident enough to simply have the boxcars derail and the monster slink out unseen. Imagine a train getting hit by a tactical nuke and you have some idea of what the wreck was like. Okay, now I’m engaging in a little hyperbole. But only a little!
The military enters into the film in short order and Super 8 is one of those ‘military bad’ movies, so we find out the escaped monster has been previously examined, prodded and tortured by the men in uniform. So the monster — which later goes on to capture and eat several townspeople while also destroying half the place in order to get its spaceship working again — is meant to be at least somewhat sympathetic, like King Kong. Except Abrams doesn’t really pull it off so it’s a bit of a muddled mess instead. It doesn’t help that the monster itself is one of those colorless gray generic CGI things. It projects absolutely nothing — not anger, not empathy, nothing. Even at the end when it reveals human-like eyes, they feel dead, unseeing. It has a ‘psychic connection’ to its victims but it feels like a tacked-on device to explain why Joe is not immediately gulped down when the monster snatches him up in its lair. In fact, it’s unclear why the monster even chases after the puny kids when it’s clear it can stomp them like bugs with little effort and it’s actually trying to get its spaceship ready. Again, Abrams throws a lot of stuff together but the glue is missing.
The movie steers toward an increasingly uneven conclusion. The town is put under military evacuation. The kids escape and return. The army rolls in tanks and soldiers that seem to be shooting all over the place. There’s only one monster, guys. Shoot at the monster, not every building you see. Or lamp post or whatever. Apparently the best plan of attack when trying to bring down a monster is “shoot in every direction”. The kids are able to run through this literal warzone unscathed and unnoticed.
A scene in the monster’s lair below the town’s water tower (a location whose importance is telegraphed early on) is meant to be suspenseful but hews so closely to horror movie tropes that it comes off as merely by-the-numbers. The worst bit is probably the pyromaniac boy’s lighter refusing to light until just in the nick of time! I rolled my eyes. For real!
Proving that it wasn’t just a Star Trek thing, Abrams employs plenty of lens flare in Super 8 and it is never less than distracting, particularly when there is no apparent source for it. I have theorized that all of Abrams’ movies take place in an alternative universe where light is magic and can appear spontaneously.
The 1979 setting is handled well for the most part and I didn’t notice any anachronisms. Abrams does bonk you over the head with the retro setting a few times, though, most notably in a scene at a gas station where the young clerk marvels over a Walkman. “Yeah, it’s this cool portable music device called a SONY WALKMAN. Haha, it’s like being in the future, except it’s only 1979!”
The end, with the monster (alien, really) spaceship lifting up into the sky, plays like an awkward homage to ET. But ET was cute and tender and lovable and Super 8’s alien is ugly, eats people and trashes the place. It’s less an “Aw, he’s going back home” scene and more of a “I’m glad that sucker is gone” thing, though the silent reaction of the townfolk watching suggests more the former. I can’t help but think Super 8’s sequel (What would they call it? Betamax?) would start with an alien armada arriving to take revenge on Earth.
Despite everything I’ve written, I did enjoy the movie. The scenes with the kids are charming, especially when they’re making their little zombie movie. In fact, that probably would have been a better movie than the main plot of Super 8. As monster movies go, Super 8 comes off as watchable but disjointed, with awkward shifts of tone, unnecessary subplots and an ending that sputters out. I give it a thumb sideways, slightly up if there’s a strong breeze blowing.
Distance: 5.08 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 15-18ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 355
Average pace: 5:15/km
Total distance to date: 806 km
A brisk start today (4:59 for the first km) but I began to lag slightly as a cramp in my stomach persisted through the initial 3 km of the run. I decided to stop the run at 5K rather than have a slower-than-satisfactory 10K. The run was otherwise unremarkable.
Chart (blue indicates the run was done clockwise):
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 18-20ºC
Wind: none
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:21/km
Total distance to date: 801 km
After an extra day off, I tackled my first run of the week on the first official day of summer. In a strange turn of events, the weather was actually summer-like! In fact, it was the hottest day of the year to date and so I avoided the glare of Mr. Sun by running around 8 p.m. in the evening. It was still 20ºC and cooled to a still balmy 18ºC by the end of the run.
The park was abuzz with activity, with one ball game ended, another in progress, a soccer scrim midfield, people playing badminton, smoking pot and walking their wiener dogs (which is not to say everyone was doing all of these things, though that would have been most interesting to see).
I tried to pace myself a bit slower to start, hoping to have more juice for the second half of the run and it worked! My first km came in at 5:00/km instead of the zany-fast 4:53 of the previous run and yet my overall pace came in three seconds faster, at 5:21/km — my second fastest 10K to date. My knee didn’t bother me at all and I maintained good form and pace — my back did not start to ache, I did not find the final two km a horrible slog. By the end the air was starting to cool and my biggest issue — a very parched mouth — was alleviated somewhat.
Overall, a very good run.
Chart (blue indicates the run was done clockwise):
I’ve now watched a good portion of Cars and I still can’t get past the concept. I can accept talking fish, rats, ants and toys but for some reason talking cars stretch credibility too much. Maybe because the talking animals and toys still exist in a human world, whereas the cars exist in a bizarro world where they stand in place of humans. It begs obvious questions like ‘Where do baby cars come from?”
I have been known to mock the occasional misspelling. I can’t explain why I do this. I recall vaguely from years ago that I read somewhere that spelling is not related to intelligence and can vouch for knowing people who are smart but fairly terrible at spelling. Much as I can’t explain why I might mock a misspelling, I likewise offer no insight as to why I generally do not have to look up a word in order to spell it correctly.
I am, however, ready to blame the Internet for making the general level of literacy (and spelling) that much worse. It’s a convenient scapegoat and it comes with lots of circumstantial evidence, like The Best Obnoxious Responses to Misspellings on Facebook. It’s quite possible every entry on the site is faked but they ring true.
This is almost like a comedy routine (warning: salty language):
Me, I don’t fuss over the occasional typo. I might raise an eyebrow when I see ‘rediculous’, I may open my mouth as if to say something after spotting a your/you’re slip. I pretty much pass right over its/it’s since that one just underscores how arbitrary and strange English is, anyway. But I do offer one warning:
