Even more ...

Go to this: http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/. An issue of The Onion from 2056 that is making me laugh outloud in my cubicle. A couple of headlines:

• We Need A 4th Law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife
• Tips For A Successful Marraige: As tempting as it may be to use time travel to resolve marital arguments, the approach is not recommended, as it tends to alter the history of mankind in spectacular and unforeseeable ways.
• Tokyo Quells Dance Dance Revolution
• What Do You Think? A Female Dolphin President?

The Onion has always been funny but this one is fucking hilarious.

More links

One of my "Go to" websites for the last few years has been Civfanatics.com. It's been a great resource of Civilization related news and mods with a vibrant forum community. It was really cool to check back there last week and see this. I got linked on civfanatics.

Some people complain about inlaws but not me. My brother in law has been a blog presence for a while now and I thought I'd give him a shout-out here. He had a Star Wars party recently where they watched episodes I - VI all in one day. That's a marathon. I wasn't able to attend but maybe it's for the best. My growing hatred of Lucas and general disappointment in the prequels would have probably put a damper on the event. Why do I have to ruin everything? Anyway, it looked like a lot of fun.

My first byline

http://www.next-gen.biz/ Click on the Civ 4 profile.

On the front page, no less. I don't know how long it will be there. They say they update it twice a day but they haven't been that regular. The site just went live on Monday. This link should last a lot longer. I'll try to keep up as long as possible.

Hopefully, the modding article will go up soon. And I hope I get paid sometime in the next six month as well.

Typical for me to look on the downside, but that's just where I've been for the past few weeks. I've already expounded about my depression. I just wanted my faithful readers to know that although seeing one's name in print may make another person feel somewhat proud, I am not that thrilled. I am, in fact, an asshat.

I Hate Star Wars Now

I'm in the process of composing a treatise on what went wrong with Star Wars. It's taking a while, more because I haven't found the time to write ten pages. Let it be known that I am thinking about it and will drop the bomb at some point, maybe this week.

For now, be satisfied with little web gem: http://yirmumah.net/vader/

I think that sums it up. You should hear some audio on that page, it doesn't seem to work with Firefox so try it in explorer.

Hmm...

Once again, its seems I am not alone.

This article interviews a couple of people who live in Williamsburg. While they are morons, all of them, I can't help but feel that their general feelings of malaise and unhappiness are similar to my own. Incidentally, I found this link by googling for "Dungeons and dragons players in new york city."

And my friend, Wil Wheaton, talks about being spread too thin in his various projects. He even references one of my favorite REM songs. If I'm not mistaken, I chose Driver 8 as one of my many nicknames for my senior blurb in the yearbook. See, I'm just like Wesley.

Last night I made a list of all the projects that I am variously involved in, whether personally or collaboratively. For lack of anything else to write about, I'm going to paste the list here.

Projects currently in development:

Idea Stage:

Getting home from School (teem comedy movie)
Fantasy Triliogy of books
Brooklyn Movie (about how I feel right now)
Jesus Christ Superstar movie set in NYC

Partial 1st drafts:

Road Trip movie (Brad and Mark in VW bus)
Erin Short film
Complete Works (apocalypse play)

Completed 1st draft:

Creation Play
This Place
Gogol (with ian)

Completed but still being work on:

The Barista (producing)
Work (movie script)

Ongoing:

Standup comedy

That's 13 fucking things, people. And none of them are in the completely polished stage. Not one of them is something that I would feel 100% happy handing to someone who would ultimately decide if I am good or not based on that one project. That's too much stuff. I need to start concentrating on one thing and finishing it. That's kind of hard though when I can't talk to anybody about my writing. I had conversation with both Mephistopholes and Ian about that. Hopefully, they will now be more of a sounding board for me. Even if they tell me I suck, it would get me talking about the movie/play/book and get me excited to write more. And if you two bastards want to help (the only two people who read this) that would be awesome too.

And then we could give each other blowjobs.

Yes, I know...

I have been lax with posting lately. I was working very hard on those articles for Next generation last week, spending two or three hours a day on them while trying to pretend that I was working at my real job. That was time usually spent blogging being spent on potentially money-earning writing. So you can sue me for that $250 I may or may not receive from that crazy online magazine.

Writing the articles was extremely enjoyable. I don't know, maybe I'm a journalist. The Civ 4 one was pretty easy, the base of it was written in a couple of hours. I left holes in it where I thought I would insert quotes and I contacted Soren Johnson, the lead designer on Civ 4. It took a week or so but I finally got my questions answered, which was really cool to see. I wish I could post the article here but I don't own it anymore (heh, rules). I will link it though as soon as it goes live, which the editor said was June 20th. He had his fingers crossed so I'll believe when I see it.

The modding article was a little bit harder. I had to capture the entire history of modding in less than 800 words, which is difficult when you are as verbose as I am. Most of my time was spent coming up with more concise ways to say something. It was a real exercise in cutting unimportant words or paragraphs. I threw away topic sentences, concluding sentences and anything that was repeated. I eventually turned in an article that was 870 words, knowing that they would edit it down to whatever they wanted anyway.

And you know what? I don't think anything prepared me better for writing these articles than blogging. Doing this blog thing totally honed my skills of getting ideas across with the written word. I've concentrated on writing scripts and such for the last few years, it was good to write prose again. And as Mephistopholes told me last night, maybe I should go back to writing stories. I think she's trying to tell me that the various plays, movies, and standup comedy I've written aren't very good. Thanks, honey.

This leads me to my story of last night. I went to two open mics. I sucked. Awful. I didn't write anything new until right before the first one (at the Village Lantern) and it was stupid. I tried to tell jokes about the goddamn subway voice guy. It didn't go over at all. Maybe it's because I was reading from a notepad, or maybe it's because I'm a god damned idiot. Then I go to this other one and it was a sausagefest. Tons of guy's guys. Gangbangers and tit jokes were abound. My friend, Superjew, was the only girl there and she was constantly harassed for having a huge rack. I can berate these assholes all I want, but the truth is, they are all funnier than me. They may be chauvinist pricks, but they made me laugh. I go up there and bomb from the first thing that exits my mouth. "Any Yankees fans in the house?" Silence. A room of ten to twenty guys and none of them are Yankees fans? Or did they just not like me? I think it was the latter. I stumbled through my material, not even bothering to try anything new for fear of being murdered. I get off as soon as the light goes on. Fucking discouraging.

Ian (i don't know why I'm linking him, he hasn't blogged in a while) was there, he wanted to see what these open mics were all about. He got an earful of comedy. And he didn't fail to give me pointers on my totally nonrepresentative set. Thanks for the constructive criticism, Savblog, but seriously, I just wanted to shoot myself rather than be told that I put my hand in pocket. I KNOW I PUT MY FUCKING HAND IN MY POCKET ON STAGE. I do it real fucking life, why wouldn't I do it onstage? It's who the fuck I am. But I digress all over your face.

I feeling pretty dejected. I was arguing with Mephistopholes yeasterday, too. She got it in her head to tell me to quit smoking after I told her that I hadn't smoked in like 10 days. She kept saying how unhealthy it was. No shit, i never heard that before. So I told her to stop talking about it. Don't jinx it. Don't tell me to not do something that I haven't done in 10 days. Don't blow the streak. Don't talk about it. I don't want to quit because she's yelling at me to stop, you know? But did she listen? No. She kept bitching. So I hung up on her. Twice.

There I was, a failure. Walking to the L train to go home and talk to my wife who hates me right now. All i wanted to do was go to sleep and never wake up. Just one little subway ride away. But guess what? The fucking L train isn't running past midnight this week. What time is it when I get there? 12:15am. Great. I didn't want to spend the last 15 bucks I had on a cab. And I was feeling like a huge piece of shit.

So I decided to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge. It took me about 90 minutes to walk from 6th ave. and 14th street to my house. It was a hot night, still over 80 at midnight. Plus I had a jacket on from doing comedy, which was promptly taken off after it got soaked through. Overall, the walk was nice. I had gone to the gym earlier so I was already sore in the legs. It really started to burn once I got to the middle of the bridge. I had only walked over the bridge once before, during the blackout. Back then, Mephistopholes and I walked on the car traffic lanes with hundreds of other people walking home. This time, it was the foot path which hovers over the car traffic.

Whatever. I thought that if I did something crazy, it would clear my brain of doubts and low self-esteem. It didn't. I thought I would get some crazy inspiration and write an awesome stand up act in the middle of the bridge. I didn't. I thought Mephistopholes would be more forgiving when I got home. She wasn't.

I have no confidence in myself. I immediately think everything I do is awful and will be criticized by my peers. The only supportive thing my wife has told me is to write more stories, which of course I interpret as meaning that I'm not good at all this other stuff I do. I am a hack. A talentless fuck with delusions of grandeur. And not even walking across the bridge will make me feel any better.

I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya'...

Been using the spare time at work to write the aforementioned articles. If I have to choose between writing something here, or the potentially lucrative journalist career, I'd have to choose the latter. But seeing as I can't seem to write a sentence with running it to death, I seriously doubt that I will get anything for my time. Hooray. No seriously, I get really long-winded in the articles and it's hard to figure out what to cut. I'm anticipating the editor being like, dumb it down you english majoring twat.

Some tidbits:

• I went away for the weekend. I went back to Montauk, where I spent last September, with Mephistopholes. We had a great time staying at a Bed and breakfast run by this crazy old Jewish woman. She let us use her bikes and we rode all around town, checking out the beach, the marina and the Lighthouse at The End. It was a well-needed break from the City.
• Comedy show tonight at Gotham. I'm devatatingly ill-prepared. I just wrote about half my set on my lunch break and I have yet to practice it or even say it out loud. I hope I don't suck too hard.
• I have to take a shit.

That's it for now. Hopefully, I'll be able to write more next week.