Your nerd percentage

40.476190476190474% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?

I find myself a bit chastened. This test was actually pretty hard. For most of the questions, I had no idea what book/movie/show they were even referencing. Post your scores and let me know how your nerdness compares to mine.

Haven't done this in a while

but it's time for some linkage:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/animator

An internet saavy friend of mine sent this over. It's a great little movie of a flash creation taking over a flash animator's workspace. And when I say flash, I mean, you know, Flash.

http://gameknot.com/

Gameknot is a great chess site and has consumed many hours of my work day. It's free, unless you want to upgrade to a special metal-based membership. Games are very easy to set up, especially if you like the low stress of only having to make one move every 7 days. I prefer the longer ones so if I forget to log in over a weekend I don't end up timing out. It's a fun diversion, with a lot of features including rankings, guilds (teams I think actually), game database of millions of possible moves, openings database and personal messaging. My username is jinglehopper, send me a challenge.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/movies.html

World of Warcraft's first expansion comes out a week from today, January, 16th, 2007. If you're not excited about the Burning Crusade, then you're no friend of mine. Go to the link above to download the opening cinematic (I recommend the flash viewer unless you want to wait hours for the bittorrent) which will play when you first boot up the game after waiting in line for 9 hours at your local Best Buy or Nerd Store. If that doesn't get your nerd juices flowing, then, sir, you never had a nerd heart.

http://worldofwar.net/

The WOW community is ramping up for the new content so I thought I'd give a little shoutout to the fansites I check the most. Worldofwar.net has been around forever. It actually grew out of a Warcraft III site I used to check and is part of the LoadedInc network or something. The site is a great resource for the latest news about World of Warcraft, highlighting quotes from Blizzard or other fansites. The Admins are from Britain so they pay attention to both the EU and North American servers. In addition to news, they have a great database of guides and info about the game that I have checked countless times. The profession FAQs are especially useful.

http://www.wowhead.com/

http://www.thottbot.com/

These sites offer similar functionality. In the game, there are thousands(millions?) of different items. Some are junk and can be sold off, but most have some sort of purpose whether for a quest or for crafting purposes. Thott has been around since early beta in 2004, and has proved invaluable to me and everyone else who is trying to figure out where crap like Breath of Wind drops. The quest database and commenting system is indispensable. In typical outsourcing web 2.0 style, if the information you need isn't gleaned from thott's bot, chances are a fellow player has already given you the info in the comments. Wowhead is fairly new and offers a more streamlined interfacethan thott, although it doesn't have the years of user comments support that thott does. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, most of the comments are informative due to heavy administration. They weed out the "leetz hunter weapon!" crap that you sometimes must wade through on Thottbot. Wowhead also has extensive Burning Crusade info mined from the Beta including new recipes, spells, talents and items.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Main_Page

Just what you expect, it's a wiki of all Wow related material. It has great articles on nearly every facet of the game but I sometimes like to just read through the lore pieces. Sometimes you really just want to know the story behind Detheroc, dreadlord of the Burning Legion.

http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.wowinterface.com/

http://ui.worldofwar.net/

These sites are all concerned with customizing the interface of WOW. The original look of the game is great but there is just something tantalizing about being the complete master of my gaming experience. Using these mods, written by wow players and amateur programmers, I can go from this, to this,

The difference is huge (in a French pixie voice from Pulp Fiction.)

Holidaytime

I like it. Last weekend was fun with my family and this weekend is fun with the inlaws (so far). I got bombed last night with my father-in-law drinking chilled Grey Goose. That's always a good sign.

So my new job starts on Tuesday. I'm a quiver with anticipation as I think it will give me the oppurtunity to post more here and write more often. My old job, as bad this sounds, was taking up too much of my time. The whole point of having a day job in front of a computer, IMHO, is so that I can work on the things I really care about while earning money from the man. The new job will be able to that much more efficiently. At least I hope so. It's hard to determine that during the interview process.

Interviewer- Do you have any questions for me?

Me- Um, will I be able to jerk off on the internet?

Interviewer- Yes. I do it all the time.

Me- Sold!

What else are blogs for?

I officially quit my job three minutes ago. I was nervous and anxious all day because I knew I would have to tell my bosses I was out the door on January First like so many New Year's Resolutions. It is liberating. The copier doesn't work you say? Fuck you. You need some staples? Buy your own, bitch. The next two weeks are going to be awesome...

Of course, I'm just going from one corporate chump job to another but at least I'm doing it of my own free will. These a-holes were the first to hire me into this white slavery, and for that I thank them, but it's time I moved on from the lowest rung.

For posterity's sake, I am reprinting my resignation letter here. Ps. None of the names were changed to protect anyone. These are actually the fuckheads I work for.

Bob Jingle
*** Bedford Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Charles Fuckstick
The Bear and the Bull
Internal Audit Department
*** Park Ave
New York, NY 10022

December 19^th, 2006

To Mr. Charles Fuckstick:

Please accept this letter as formal resignation of my position as administrative assistant with The Bear and the Bull's Internal Audit Department.

Friday, December 29^th, will be my last day of employment with the company.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to work with such a magnificent organization of enlightened, supportive, and creative individuals. It is sad to leave, but you are all flaming ass-mongerers. Fuck you, I'm out.

Sincerely,



Bob Jingle
Administrative Assistant

cc

Marvin Poopmaster
Bob Jewtard
Marshall McLuhan
Brent "I Touch Girls" Hamfist

They Actually Are Giants!

On Saturday, I saw a band perform that has not forgotten that rock can be fun. Too much of our modern musical landscape is a dreary melancholic mess. There's really only so much that can be said about love unrequited or being cheated on.

They Might Be Giants have a few songs about that shit (I think), but most of their subjects are obscure references to 19th century presidents, Belgian painters or the classification of species.

I'll write more on the show later but for now, look at this monkey:

MLB.com

The other day, my friend forwarded a job listing to me for MLB.com. Basically, they are looking for beat writers for each of the 30 MLB teams. While I would love to cover the Sox, I don't really want to move to Boston any time soon.

Anyway, here's what I wrote to apply to be a writer here in NY.

Dear MLB.com,

I love baseball. I grew up a Red Sox fan in the embroiled border state of Connecticut where half my peers remember 1986 with ectasy, the other half with despair. My family would take annual trips to Fenway, mostly at my insistence since neither of my forebears were very much into sports. I remember the feeling of the old Fenway, before the boxes and the Monster seats, with reverance and I still keep a special place in the cockle of my heart for anyone named Duey, or Marty, or Spike.

More recently, living in New York for the past six years has kept me on the front lines of the greatest rivalry in sports. I follow each game and hot stove rumor with the glee of a kid waiting for Christmas morning. And while I get to go to Fenway less often than I'd like, I have embraced the Mets as the lesser of the NY evil empires. Pedro's defection only made my affection for the Amazin's grow, despite Boston Dirt Dogs feeble cries for all Red Sox Nation to damn him. And now that the 20 year Anniversary season is past, it's time to let bygones get the hell out of dodge and start writing for MLB.com covering the Mets.

I've been a writer all my life. I've written videogame articles under deadlines for The Escapist Magazine and Next Generation, but nothing is as tight a deadline as performing stand up comedy here in New York as I have for the past 2 years. If you don't have material before you go on, you're screwed.

I'm excited to meet with you to discuss my credentials. Contact me via my cell, 917.***.****, or email me at ****@*****.***. Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

Bob Jingle

That job is mine!!!!!

How I learned to stop worrying and love open mics.

Open mics are always fun.

That statement is completely false. Sometimes.

Confused? Me too. But that's what being a standup comic in NY is all about.

When I first started performing, I tried to go to at least one open mic a week. My standup buddy, who I will call Joni, because that's her real name, was very good about forcing me bully up. We'd go to places like the Village Lantern or the Comedy Cellar, get our names on a list and do our schtick. It was great getting stage time, with a real microphone in hand on a real stage in a real comedy club. There was also the chance to interact with others of my ilk.

But that was also the major drawback. The only people in the audience at open mics were other comics. And they are a notoriously jealous bunch. They don't laugh. At least most of the ones who were in the audience when I did my set didn't laugh. But I knew my jokes were at least a little funny, because I would do them in front of paying crowds at Caroline's or whatever and people would die. It got really frustrating. There was one especially awful night where I went last at a open mic at the Village Lantern and bombed riotously (I remember I had a whole bunch of subway jokes that should have KILLED), then met Joni at Joe's around the corner to do another open mic. I went on at midnight and bombed spectacularly again, with what I thought were my "good" jokes. All five of the dudes left in the club at that point just stared at me, blankly. They offered no support, other than their drunken, silent presence, which, frankly, didn't help me think I was very funny. Then after walking uptown fifteen blocks to the L train, only to find that it had shut down at midnight, I proceeded to shoot myself through the face. And then walk home over the Williamsburg Bridge. I got home at 2:37am, a bleeding, sobbing mess.

There was also the time issue. Open mics are a huge timesink. Even if you sign up ahead of time via email or whatever, you have no idea when you'll be able to go on. So you show up at 8, get on the list, and sometimes you're stuck there until 10 or 11 before you get your fucking 4 minutes. This can be a good thing, if the comics are good. It's possible they may even inspire a few jokes of your own. I laugh more than the average comic at other people's stuff. But more often than not, the sad morons who go up at these things are just trying to work out their personal problems, more than actually being funny. The time spent wading through amateur ventriloquists, lonely alcoholics and wannabe fratboys can be considerable. And with my serious World of Warcraft addiction, I don't have tons of time to waste.

So I stopped going. To open mics. I didn't feel like they really helped that much anyway. I decided to concentrate on doing bigger bringer shows every once in a while. This meant I was performing less, but the shows alway meant something.

Then last Monday, after my well documented bout of depression, I decided to go the Underground Lounge near Columbia, otherwise known as way too fucking far. I drank a shitload of coffee, wrote same new material about daylight savings time (HILARIOUS!) and drove up there.

I loved it. I felt like I was back in the swing again. Even my wife, Mephistopholes, she was like, "You go to one open mic and suddenly you're all happy again." I don't know if it was the fact that I was writing new material, or that I got to perform it and it wasn't awful, or that I felt like I was part of a scene, the sad comic scene. The other thing was that I wasn't nervous. In my comedy youth, I would get so frightfully nervous getting up in front of people, even open miccers, that I would shake or stutter on stage. But I memorized all my new jokes in an hour and didn't care if I got them right or not.

It was a great feeling.

I went back last night and I plan on doing more.

Coming out

The cover story for the November issue of Wired is about the New Atheism. One of the authors it profiles is Richard Dawkins, a biologist from Oxford. He not only believes there is no God, he believes that faith in such a deity, as well as passing this faith to one's forebears, is an inherently evil act. While I kind of share the article writer's view that this sentiment is just as extremist as the fundamentalist extremists (I don't believe you can fight fire with fire in this case,) Dawkins shits out one soundbite that struck a chord with me:

I think [atheists] are in the same position as the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes.

Dawkins does have a point. People are often scared to say they are atheists, or considering atheism, because they don't want to potentially offend believers. My wife and my father have both said to me separately that I shouldn't make jokes about religion on stage. And I've noticed that people do get uncomfortable when I mock religion, even if they theyselves don't believe in it. It's effectively taboo to talk about belief in nothing. Why is that?

Consider this my outing. Now I'm off to go wax my butt and get a facial.

Inability to rationalize

I think the thing with depression is that it quickly becomes uncontrollable. Everyone feels depressed at some point in their lives, even so-called happy people. You fail a test, you get yelled at by your superior, it rains on your wedding (or a black fly in your... nvm), shit happens. And people feel sad. But then you get better. Something cheers you up. Or you forget about what bothered you.

But what I'm feeling is different. I feel anxious or nervous for no real reason. I can try to figure it out, as most of what that post was trying to do. I'm definitely not happy with what I've done with my life, that's for sure. But someone else could look at my position and say, what the fuck? This guy's got nothing to be depressed about. I have a somewhat loving wife, a decent paying job, a good group of friends and a family who's mostly healthy. That's all true. And I know that, on some level, my life is probably pretty great. I try to tell myself that when I start to feel like shit. And while that used to work when I was younger, the power to rationalize away these feelings has dwindled to nil.

That's my problem.

Of course, today, I feel fine.

The Wonders of Web 2.0

There's now a website which can solve all your mental health problems of doubt and depression.

MOODGym

Joy. Consider me cured.

It's a little dorky and British and a tad bit too survey-based for my tastes, but it's interesting. The basic premise is that unhappy people interpret events and feelings with a negative bias and happy people interpret them with a neutral or positive bias. Which makes sense, I guess.

The weird thing with me is that I think I used to be pretty firmly in category B. Things didn't bother me, and, if something really bad did happen, I always seemed to think it was unchangeable so there was no point in worrying about it. I took criticisms well, or at least I ignored them, and that seemed to be ok. I was also genuinely happy with other people and was able to forge a strong group of friends.

What changed? I do not know.

Let's talk about feelings

I pretty much battle self-doubt, guilt and depression on a daily basis.

I can't pinpoint when it started happening. I don't think there was a specific event, although I could point at my production company dissolving 2 years ago as a big one. But then there's chicken and egg shit there. Did it all fall apart because of my self-doubt, guilt and depression or did those feelings appear because of its demise? Whatever.

The fact remains that I am 28 years old and I have accomplished nearly nothing since graduating from college. I've had a few bright spots here and there. I did this, I got this, I am one of these. But overall, I consider myself a failure. I didn't think 6 years out that I'd be in a nowhere job, pushing paper around in an industry that I care nothing about. I mean, I hate the business world. Wait, that's not true, I don't hate it. I just have no interest whatsoever. People meantion stocks, bonds, derivatives, risk management, confirmations, audit reports and I have no idea what they are saying. It's like they open their mouths and huge logs of shit come out. These words enter my consciousness and leave in the same instant. I don't care. I don't know what they mean and I don't really care to find out. I walk the halls at my job and my eyes just glaze over with salty tears of boredom. I care about so many other things. I love to read about history and fantasy and maps and geography and science and computers and countless other things. I spend copious amounts of time staring at wikipedia and reading random articles about self-fellatio and the battle of Iwo Jima. But if it has to do with money that isn't mine, I do not care one iota. I have more interest in taking a shit, tying my shoes and the mechanics of a paper cut.

Maybe that's part of the problem. My job is unfulfilling. But that was the point, wasn't it? To have a good-paying job I don't care about so that I could pursue my other various unprofitable interests. I thought working here would finance my dreams. And maybe it does to a certain point. But I find I'm actually doing less art than I was before. I'm writing more maybe, but I feel I haven't produced anything. I don't know. I'm trying to get a new job where I can breathe easier amongst more creative people. Like publishing or even advertising. Anything. That should help.

But that's not what I think about when I feel guilt, self-doubt and depression. All I think about is how everything I do sucks. I can't write anything which people even pretend to like. How can I be a writer if everything I write sucks? But is that just my perception? I wrote something for this magazine, and when it was posted this week, I found that the last couple of paragraphs were almost completely rewritten. Is it because they didn't agree with my viewpoint and wanted to edit it up some to be in more in line with their position? Or is it just the fact that I suck? I'm leaning towards the suckage.

But that's also my mind trying to rationalize what I feel. When I feel self-doubt, guilt and depression, it doesn't make any rational sense. I have no idea why I'm feeling what I'm feeling. My chest tightens up. Anxiety bubbles. I feel like I'm missing a deadline. A meeting that somebody called which I completely forgot about. I feel it sitting at my desk. I sometimes feel it walking to the bathroom. There's no reason for it. Which scares me even more.

I never felt this way when I was younger. I was cocky, confident and a blast to be around. Now I'm moody, mean, and unfunny. I have trouble coming up with smalltalk. I constantly think that I'm boring other people, or am just annoying. Maybe I was an asshole all along. And I'm just now becoming aware of it.

You want to hear something funny? I'm even doubting this crappy fucking post right now. I think about my audience of nil, and wonder if this diatribe will bore the non-existent people who aren't reading this blog. This crap is getting out of hand.

What do I do? Do I get drugs? Do I talk to a doctor? What? That depresses me even more. That I need to self-medicate because I can't cope. We all self-medicate I guess. I drink, I smoke. And when I do I feel moderately better. Or at least I forget my self-doubt, guilt and depressions for however long the drug lasts. Is that what Paxil does? Prozac? Should I go on Lithium, just for kicks?

Or should I just get off my ass and accomplish something?

Things I notice

With digital cable, the name of the show you just flipped to is displayed on the bottom of your screen. I love this feature and find I can't live without it when I go to the backwards country of crappy analog cable like Afghanistan or Topeka.

But the display only has so much text available before it gets an elipse. Usually, this doesn't matter. It's only when I flip to that new show from CBS that things get a little weird and the display reads:

The New Adventures of Old Christ...

Someone please do a photoshop mockup of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss hanging on a cross. Please, for the love of Old Christ, make it happen.

This library thing

I like it.

Jack Bauer attempts to get a haircut in 24 minutes

Do you take walk-ins?

I don't have a lot of time so I'll make this quick. I'm federal agent Jack Bauer. I have to attend a wedding which takes place in less than 47 minutes. My wife has forced me here to get a haircut before that happens. I need you to cut my hair as fast as you can or my wife will be humiliated in front of hundreds of people.

Shut up lady, I don't care if you were in line in front of me. This is a matter of national security. The wedding is in a church twenty minutes from here. That leaves us exactly 24 minutes for you to clean up around the ears and take a little bit off the top. Can you do that? Please. I don't know what else to do. Thank you.

Just take a quarter inch off the top. Fine. Good. Why are you using the scissors? Just use the god damn buzzer thingy, we don't have a lot of time! I'm sorry for yelling. I'm just under a lot of pressure right now.

Quiet ma'am! Don't distract her! You can talk about your damn cat when this is all over. We have to focus on one thing. Me getting a haircut. That's the only thing that's important right now.

Square or round? What kind of question is that? It's 1:34. We're running out of time!

I don't want to hurt you, but I need you to do exactly as I say. Now just take the razor out of the astringent and shave the back of my head. No, I don't need any shaving cream. Just do it!

Now, take off this smock and step away, slowly. No, I don't want to wash out the cut hair, my suit is blond. It will blend in.

How much do I owe you? What? 20 dollars for just a trim? That's ridiculous. Here, take it. It's just one of the many sacrifices I make on a daily basis. No, keep it. That's yours.

We did it. The problem is neutralized. My wife is appeased. Thank you for all your hard work today. We couldn't have stopped this disaster without the contributions from each and every one of you. Thank you.

Jack steps out and the hair salon blows up.

I am on drugs

I got a bunionectomy on Wednesday. Yeah. I'm a 70 year old woman. I know.

I'd love to say that I've got all kinds of wonderful pain-killers coursing through my thickened veins, but it's not really true. At first, all I had was some tylenol with trace amounts of codeine. But that crap didn't really cut the mustard. Now all I've got is crappy industrial strength ibuprofen. What the fuck happened? I thought when you got surgery you got crazy drugs like vicodine and morphine drips. What is this world coming to when the only prescription I get is for More Cowbell? Bullshit.

Why Macs Suck

Nothing more to say really. Watch it and feel the pain.

Newegg

Just in case anyone had about 5 benjamins to lay down on their favorite blogger, here is my wish list for upgrading my home-built box.

Newegg.com Public Wishlist

I've become obsessed with tweaking out my computer. It's one of the joys I have of being a computer user (the others being WOW and naked ladies.) I can upgrade and mod my hardware components and user-interface at will. Right now, I have a pretty sweet setup at home, with a large 20-inch flatscreen and a smaller 15'' tilted 90 degrees so that it's portrait-oreinted. I should take a picture and post it.

My current specs: (This is from memory, so things may be wrong or incomplete. I could edit them when I get home but that would kind of defeat the purpose of wasting time at work.)

Mobo: Biostar m7viw
CPU: Athlon (1.9 mhz, don't know model)
Ram: 1 gb (2 x 512mb) crucial pc 133 sdram
Video: Nvidia 6800
Audio: Creative x-fi platinum
Scanner: Canoscan L something
Printer: Canon cheap jobber
Storage: 2 x 120gb harddrives
Keyboard: Logitech g15 gaming keyboard
Main display: Samsung 204b
2nd display: Panasonic (it's a tv actually)

This config was mostly built in the summer of 2004 by my brother on a beach. I had been having problems with my previous build spontaneously restarting, sometimes after only 5 minutes. It was getting really annoying, especially since I found myself saving games incessantly to avoid losing my progress. Anyway, after months of me complaining to him, my brother devised a master plan. We were going ot meet our sister camping in CT that weekend and he would bring down a box and I would bring my old system with my hard drives (and all my docs.)

We met at the beach, and he plugged together 3 UPS systems for a total of 15 mins of power. He was able to manually install my hard drive and get it all working before the time limit. I took my box home and was immensely happy that I could play Morrowind and only be worried about the Assassin's Guild. The era of spontaneous restarts were over.

But here it is 2006. I added the video card and the audio card and the dual monitors, and while the machine still runs great, it has started to chug a bit. I did a clean install of windows a month ago, hoping that would help. It didn't really. So I think it's time to upgrade.

I wanted to get better, bigger RAM, hoping that would be the easiest fix. But my mobo is so old that it only supports RAM up to pc266, which is hard to find cheap because noone really makes it anymore. So I have to upgrade my mobo if I want decent ram. And I would need a new CPU because the newer motherboards doesn't support my old one. Complicated, I know, but that's the life of a hacker. I'm always living on the edge of a knife! I'm a rebel Dotty, a loner.

With these 3 components, priced under $500, I can make my system as saavy as one from Alienware or some other high-priced piece of plastic.

Try doing that with a mac, sucka!

Sorry, had to get in the obligatory zang in there.

Game over

The 2006 Red Sox are dead. Long live the king.

This series in Boston can't be called the Boston Massacre. That name already describes a similar series in 1978 where the Yanks swept a four game series to take the lead in the AL East. But it's still apt here in 2006. The MFY already had a 1.5 game lead going into Boston on Friday, they leave today with a 6.5 lead after taking five games in four days and outscoring the Red Sox 49-26.

Those bastards from the Bronx dominated the Sox in every way. They came from behind, they scored at will, they held our bats quiet when it mattered. In the battle of the fens, our red-stockinged braves were killed by gunpowder and smallpox blankets by an overpowering enemy. All we can do is wave sticks and rattles on their way out of town and hope the conquistadors never come back.

In some small way, though, this series has had a normalizing effect for me. Being a Red Sox fan since I was a kid has meant constant pain. 1986 was a great example, but also the early 90s and being swept by the Athletics in the playoffs to our current 2nd banana status in the AL East. 2004 was an anomaly. Red Sox fans were able to feel happy and proud for a time. While this was an amazing feeling, deep down I always thought there was something wrong. The ecstasy of winning a championship was not a feeling I associated with my team.

So this series, this Last Stand, has torn down the statue of the World Series. 2004 is officially over. And so is this season.

Wait til next year...

Absolutely nothing!

So it's all about this cooze who's a regular fuck-machine.

Actually, no, it ending up being about a robot named Robbie. The first Robot ever created which held sentient life. But nobody wanted him around, they said he was an abomination. So the Cybodyne Corp. made Roberta the Robot and married the two robots on national television. They even made a baby robot, Bobbie the Baby Bot, but he malfunctioned like a retarded baby. Cybodyne never did figure out why he never worked right. Years pass and Robbie has had enough of being married. So he files for divorce and the controversy starts all up again. The whole movie is told through one of those bad tabloid TV shows like Geraldo or Dateline.

That's it.

I turned it in a while ago on a Saturday. That whole day was crazy. I knew I had to send this movie script in by midnight. But I wanted to visit my friend in New Haven and go on her friend's boat. So after working on the script in the morning (and leveling up my gnome mage Brandley for a few hours) I needed to get on the road. Driving on I-95 was fun, I was jotting down lines on my pad with one hand while driving with the other. I think I had the last five pages worked out, but I needed to type it up. I got to New Haven and brought my laptop along with me.

We ended up in Branford, on this marina. There were a bunch of dudes I didn't know, a 20 ft motor boat and 3 coolers full of beer. I drank a few, then it was time to board the vessel. My friend put the computer in a garbage bag, so it wouldn't get wet. All the guys knew I had a mission, so they weren't too put out when I immediately went down below (it was a big boat) and started typing. The boat was going really fast, bouncing and trouncing me all over the cabin. But I did it. I finished it up on the boat in Long Island Sound. I was so seasick by the end, I was sweating and about to blow chunks. I ripped off my clothes, threw on my shorts and jumped in the cold ocean. Luckily the boat had stopped.

We drank more beer and watched more people do watersports (not pissing.) I ended up doing the final editing back at my friend's house and sent off the final script at 11:47pm.

I wouldn't have done it any other way.

What am I doing?

What do sci-fi and divorce have in common?

If you answered absolutely nothing (Huh! Good god y'all!), you'd be right. Or to be completely accurate, you'd have been right before you read this post.

On a whim, this past week I entered the Screenwriter's Challenge brought to you by the same folks that run the Midnight Movie madness I mentioned last November. The contest is similar to those, except instead of making a whole movie, you have one week to write a short screenplay. As I am a self-confessed writer, this contests appeals to me because I don't have to do any of that bloody producing work. I can just concentrate on writing the best thing that I can.

The trick of course is to write something that fits the genre and subject given to you before the deadline. And that's right, you've guessed it, the combo I've drawn is sci-fi and divorce. Two ideas which rarely if ever go together.

I've got a few ideas rambling around my brain. They are currently in the marinating phase. I don't know if any of them will taste any good but they need to be served by Saturday at midnight.

And no, I don't plan on putting that awful metaphor into the script.