I’ve maintained a schedule for most of that year, with posts every day and Netflix every Friday. I want to move the thing forward to its next logical step, but that requires time and energy. Most of the last couple weeks, I haven’t had the time. Today? I just don’t have the energy.
I’m taking a break here, guys. Not a long one, not more than a couple days. Just stepping away from pushing myself to hit these deadlines as much as I have. I’m not quitting, and I still have big plans for the new year, I just need to throttle back a bit for the next, say, 48 hours or so.
So, no ICFN this week. New fiction tomorrow will be available in the post at first, and I’ll update the Free Fiction page when my moritorium on blogging ends.
I hope everybody has a safe & happy New Year celebration, and I’ll see you on the other side.
It seems simple at first. You’re a boy made of meat, and you’re in love with Bandage Girl. The good news is, Bandage Girl loves you too. The bad news is, Dr. Fetus hates everybody and YOU especially, so he beats you up and kidnaps Bandage Girl. Your quest to rescue her is a side-scrolling platforming affair. And despite the slick digital controls and polished graphics, it’s devastatingly old-school.
I say ‘old-school’ because side-scrolling platforming has been around since the old console wars. Mario did it on the NES, Sonic did it on the Genesis. And it’s a type of game that does something that is somewhat missing from open world games, first-person shooters and MMOs: its challenges are static and structured. As Chris Plante writes in his Escapist article ‘Hard-Earned Victories,’ when you manage to complete a level, that completion is a reward in and of itself. Which ties into the ‘devastating’ part of my description.
Watch TotalBiscuit’s Wipe-A-Thon 3000 to see just how blood-curdlingly frustrating this game can be. Plante describes this as the game ‘pushing back’ against our efforts to beat it. It doesn’t guide us with arrows, objectives, waypoints or NPCs. It presents us with the challenge, sits back and watches us try to overcome it. And when the player does pull it off, after “lots of trial and even more error”, he or she feels like a million bucks, like a superstar. The boss levels seem especially geared for this.
Now, I’ve only beaten the first chapter and its boss, but I can say with confidence that if this trend keeps up, I’m going to end up with more raised heart rates, cramped fingers and victorious cries that earn me funny looks from my wife. The combination of the established challenges, an incoming death machine driven by a maladjusted genius fetus in a jar and the kickass soundtrack pushed me to overcome the scenario. I refused to give up. I took breaks, shook out cramps, grabbed some water. And when the Li’l Slugger finally exploded, I cheered.
Super Meat Boy took me to a very interesting and unexpected place.
It tapped a reservoir of resolve that, in my everyday life, often goes untapped. I don’t often see my daily challenges as that immediate, that insurmountable. But in this case, I did, and I took each of my failures in stride (and trust me, there were a LOT of failures) only to shake them off and try again. I learned from every mincing, grew more determined with every red splatter. Why do I not do this more often? Am I not challenged enough? Did I specifically grab this on Steam during the sale for a bargain-basement $3 instead of waiting to get Microsoft points because I knew using the keyboard would increase the challenge?
I’m not entirely sure what the answers are, but I do know that facing down a new year with a finished manuscript, a renewed resolve to improve my situation and new ideas for projects to undertake, I’m going to need to come back to that place Super Meat Boy unlocks more often. I probably won’t be adding an X-Box game pad adapter to my PC any time soon, because in addition to needing that money elsewhere, I feel slightly more accomplished pulling off mind-blowing maneuvers with the keyboard.
I really can’t call this a review, since I haven’t played the entire game through, and it will be some time before I collect enough bandages and A+ ratings to render a ‘professional’ verdict. I can, however, offer this recommendation:
Super Meat Boy is available on Steam, XBLA and will soon be available on the Wii. Get it. You won’t be disappointed, but as TB says, “You may break yourself.”
The best way for me to avoid feeling the doldrums of both the season and my situation are to stay busy. I throw myself into my writing during the commute and immerse myself in games and other media while I’m home. Yes, I’m an awful procrastinator when it comes to chores because of this. No, I don’t see it changing any time soon. As Dave Barry puts it, “I’ll mature when I’m dead.”
Citizen in the Wilds is closer and closer to completion. Sooner or later, you as a writer have to draw a line in the sand and say “This is where I stop. This is where I shop it out. This is where I dress up the draft, put on my best makeup and hit the street corner.” Otherwise you’ll be revising and editing until you’re 85 and mumbling into your porridge about protagonist motivations and plot twists. So by the end of the year… Saturday… the fourth (and final?) draft will be done, and I’ll be sending it to agents and test readers alike.
(Yeah, that’s a plug, let me know if you want to be a test reader for the final product.)
This means that Free Fiction might go without an update on the 1st, though I have entertained the idea of putting just the first chapter of Citizen out as a PDF for your reading pleasure. The only other idea I’ve managed to maintain is related to Magic: the Gathering and unless I manage to sell it to Wizards of the Coast, it’d be fan fiction. And I don’t want to waste your time with fan fiction if I can avoid it.
The other other self-imposed deadline toward which I’m hurtling is for the video version of IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! featuring The Emperor’s New Groove. Hopefully this evening I can test a different solution for clip capture. If it doesn’t work I may have to resort to a slideshow style presentation, which strikes me as boring. Still, it would be better than nothing. We’ll see how the next pair of evenings fall together.
I am definitely taking New Year’s Eve off.
…Which means I should probably write those posts in advance if I can.
No D&D this week, so I’ll save the next Nentir Vale post for next Tuesday. That way it’ll be fresh in everybody’s mind.
My Christmas bonus from the dayjob this year came in the form of a gift card for the Melting Pot. I’d never been to a fondue restaurant before, but to my knowledge it was something like hibachi in presentation. It ended up being an evening where both the missus and I tried new things and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
Our evening began with the drive out to The Shops at Valley Square. We ended up needing something resembling a reservation, a factor that didn’t occur to me until we’d left the apartment, of course. We put ourselves in for an 8:30 table (we’d arrived just after 6:30) and killed time at the Border’s and Yankee Candle located nearby. We both want to go back to Valley Square, some time when it’s not bitterly howlingly freeze-your-extremities-off cold outside.
While I’m thinking of it, Valley Square owners, have you ever thought of going the AstroDome route? A big, collapsable dome you could raise over the shops and heat? It’d make winter shopping much more palatable. Then again, it might make markup unacceptable to the shops. Hmm.
Anyway. Melting Pot.
Know going into the place that you’re getting a four-course meal. And two of the courses, cheese and chocolate, are quite filling. Thankfully, they’re spaced far enough apart that you can have room for both, and the manner of the ‘main’ course makes you pace yourself. But I’m jumping ahead a bit.
All of the tables at the Melting Pot that we saw are booths, with a hot plate situated in the middle of the table. On this plate is the fondue pot itself, and each place has a set of fondue forks, standard forks and knives. Our server, CJ, very personably got to know us and walked us through what was going to happen. She’s a vegetarian and dating a picky eater so she understood my wife’s predicaments with the food selection. However, we settled on a few things and got the experience started.
First Course: Cheese
We’d chosen the swiss cheese blend. CJ took a little white wine, a spoonful of garlic, a heaping helping of shredded swiss, a sprinkling of nutmeg, a touch of Kirschwasser and a squirt from a lemon. We were provided with a large bowl of bread bits, some veggies and a cup of sliced apples. The result was absolutely delicious. The cheese took on a bit more bite as we worked through it, which we attributed to the wine. Eating fondue cheese with apples was also odd, as the heat of the cheese was immediately cut by the chilled apple while the sweet thick taste of the swiss felt interrupted by the sour Granny Smith flavor. We ended up asking for more bread. We took turns with one of our favorite Scott Pilgrim lines: “Bread makes you FAT??”
Second Course: Salad
Every dish and selection at the Melting Pot is “moddable.” You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want. My wife’s Caesar salad was served naked at her request, though she seemed to fear getting stabbed on the Senate steps for eating a Caesar salad without Caesar dressing. I assured her that wouldn’t happen. My salad was a house salad with house dressing, which was a tangy mango affair drizzled over a club salad that was unfortunately missing bacon. It doesn’t come with bacon, mind you – it just would have been better with bacon. Mmm. Bacon.
Third Course: Mains
There was some debate over this course. You see, the food for the mains is served unprepared. You get to cook it yourself in the pot. The pot is a collective broth everyone at the table uses to cook their meals. As I didn’t want to offend my wife’s palate, I both told her she could cook hers first and let her decide what broth we’d use. We went with the Mojo Style, a Caribbean-style blend that smelled like the sort of jerked fare available at MusikFest or a similar outdoor event. It was an interesting style, and I found myself liking it.
My wife tried some new things on her vegetarian platter. She sampled the artichoke heart and the marinated tofu, liking the latter but not a fan of the former. I relieved her of her portabella mushrooms. I chose the Pacific Rim, a selection including Teriyaki-marinated sirloin, white shrimp, marinated pork tenderloin, breast of duck (which CJ described as duck a l’orange), breast of chicken and potstickers. I don’t think I’d ever had duck before that night, and it was… well, not great. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t really taste all that different from other poultry. I may change things up the next time I go, subbing the duck for portabella and maybe the pork for more sirloin. My wife may skip this course entirely, opting for an ala carte salad. Possibly more bread.
Fourth Course: Chocolate
There were a lot of choices here, and they all had appeal. There’s an option to create your own chocolate fondue with a mix of chocolates (white, milk and dark) and a selection of liquers such as Bailey’s, Cointreau, Grand Marnier and Chambord. I liked the idea of a chocolate-orange fondue using milk or dark chocolate and Grand Marnier, but we opted for the Cookies ‘n’ Cream Marshmellow Dream, with milk instead of dark chocolate in defence to my wife’s tastes as well as marshmellow cream. CJ flambéed the dessert, swirled the contents of the pot and added Oreo cookie crumbs. For dipping we had strawberries, bananas, cheesecake, Rice Krispies treats, marshmellows dusted in graham cracker and chocolate, pound cake and brownies.
It was every bit as delicious as it sounds.
Final Verdict
Not only was the Melting Pot some great food and fantastic service, it was a lot of fun. I can imagine the fun factor goes up exponentially with more people, but the setting was intimate enough that we had a fantastic evening.
My sister gave me this lovely gift for Christmas. I’ve always wanted a scale Firelord following me around, serving as my personal cook fire and immolating nearby critters. I don’t know if he actually does the latter part yet. We’ll see.
So am I the only one who feels like this snow storm we got on the east coast of the US came out of nowhere? It could be because I’ve chosen to pay less and less attention the mainstream news media in this country, and the BBC doesn’t often mention little things like snowfall unless it’s a major event. I did a bit of running around this weekend, though, and might have missed the pertinent feed.
Either way, it’s on the ground now. And in my house, in point of fact. There are two tiny snow drifts just inside our back door. I’ve informed our excellent landlady of this and I’m sure it will be resolved soon. I wouldn’t have minded if we hadn’t once again run out of heating oil.
However, we got the oil delivered today and after some shenanigans, the missus and I got the heater restarted. So despite not being at the office, it’s been an eventful day.
