Sikeh Kim Rai wasn't meant to be this important, you know. He wasn't even meant to exist. The Khemri weren't even meant to exist. Sikeh Kim Mei and Sikeh Kim Tel definitely shouldn't be struggling for the kind of attention they want.

By which I mean I have 2,005 more words of White Razor, taking me up to 5,077 words in total.

I think this makes me awesome.

We'd Be: productivity tengu!
Patriot Gravity is playing: Jenova for Classical Piano. Rather cool.

(SCENE: The Phelan's kitchen, in their rather nice apartment in Switzerland. It's more a nook out of the sitting room, but a sizeable nook with nice separation. LYNN, PATRICK's and SIOBHAN's esteemed mother, is standing at the electric stove, preparing lamb chilindron, an extremely tasty Spanish dish that the Phelans have never eaten before. PATRICK is in the sitting room proper, sitting down, rereading Wolves of the Calla, and brooding. SIOBHAN is in the kitchen, in a small rockable crib, also brooding. ROUALYN is in the study doing something to his computer, or perhaps summoning demons, no one really knows.)

SIOBHAN:
Oh dearest mother!
Milk does not flow to my mouth.
My scream shall ring forth.

LYNN: Alack! Alas! Truly I cannot see to my haiku-spouting daughter and cook lamb chilindron at the same time! Malevolent stars hunt me! Patrick, most beloved son, would you take over, if only for the browning of the lamb?

PATRICK: Yeah, all right.

(LYNN picks up SIOBHAN and goes into the sitting room to feed her.)

PATRICK: (soliloquy) I really didn't intend to do any cooking tonight. I can't say why I didn't want to... I just didn't. It was a thing. But this - this looks surprisingly good. Working with red capsicum is always a favourite of mine, and I haven't used lamb since I burnt the rogan josh in Canada. Well, lamb. It's time for revenge. Brown the lamb, she says? I'll do the whole damn thing!

(PATRICK browns the lamb, takes the pot off the stove, and puts the lamb into a bowl, as the instructions tell him. He then cuts onion, garlic, and red capsicum, putting each onto their respective plates to await adding to the casserole.)

PATRICK: That was faster than I suspected. I guess I'm just getting better at this.

(PATRICK returns the pot to the stove, waits for it to heat up, and then dumps in the onions. He looks to the cookbook to see how long before he adds the garlic, and then the capsicum.)

PATRICK: So, let it cook for four minutes, then add the garlic for two, then add the capsicum, toma... tomatoes and chilies?

(Music: Nobuo Uematsu, "Only A Plank Between One And Perdition".)

PATRICK: In six minutes?

(In dead fury, PATRICK leaps from his position by the cookbook, throws the fridge open, grabs out tomatoes and chilies, and becomes a whirling dervish of chopping. Somehow, he manages to add the garlic and everything else on time, and leans against the fridge, sighing. Music ends.)

NARRATOR: Patrick had once again evaded the fate of a horrible meal. And some might say it was a fate he well deserved for not reading the recipe through before he started cooking. Some might say he should be forgiven, because it was not his meal to start with, and he only came in halfway through.

PATRICK: (muttering, almost interrupting NARRATOR) That was close.

NARRATOR: And some might not.

(Lights go down, just too short a period of time for the audience to start applauding. Come back up on a scene with food on the table, and PATRICK, ROUALYN, and LYNN sitting at fully served places. SIOBHAN is in her rocking crib by LYNN's chair.)

ROUALYN:
Well, matey, buddy-boy, my favourite son,
I'm glad to once again see what you've done.
You've made a meal with skill and style and grace,
A testament to cooking and the human race.

LYNN: Indeed, this dish is itself like a hymn, a prayer of gastronomic delight!

PATRICK: (aside) Would they still say this, if they knew?

SIOBHAN:
Oh dearest mother!
Think not to finish dinner,
For I've filled my pants.

(Curtain, followed by curtain call, standing ovation, and cheers from the gathered crowd. The actor playing PATRICK goes on to superstardom, is worshipped by the populace, torn down by the tabloids, and finally found dead in a heated spa, having massively overdosed on heroin.)

We'd Be: hubristic
Patriot Gravity is playing: Mazedude and Nobuo Uematsu - "Perdition Hardcore"

I HATE EVERYTHING.

That was really more for Baco's benefit. See that link up there? That takes you to what I've got - 3,073 words - of White Razor. Well, it takes you to the splash page, but I considered those three quotes carefully before I wrote them, so you should probably check them out. I'd also advise you to look at the temporary summary on the Avarr page, but it's kinda short, so I'll say it here. "And then it ALL BLEW UP".

I've also finished Everybody Else's Girl on the site, which is much more deserving of the post title than White Razor. I mean, which of these situations is more likely to say "we are the lucky ones": "I work with you and respect you and incidentally, I love you" or "I hate you, I'm opposed to you, I have to kill you to save my ideals, stop making me love you!" Though I suppose the latter could be ironic.

More of my productivity tengu tomorrow, one hopes. And no, Laun, I'm not going to neglect Gameverse.

(EDIT: Also, all movies should feature the director making electric guitar noises on the soundtrack. Movies created before the invention of the electric guitar are the only ones that have excuses. Every movie except Blood Brothers, I'm looking at you here...)

We'd Be: productivity tenguuuuuuu
Patriot Gravity is playing: Bif Naked - "The Lucky Ones"

So. Er. I suppose I'm not getting any younger, and you know, I may well be carried away by assassination or some odd illness any moment. And that led me to let Baco convince me to start doing what I've wanted to do for some time now, id est, write White Razor.

White Razor. Shudder.

Some backstory here. Over the years I've been writing fantasy, certain elements have popped up again and again, certain race concepts, certain themes. Certain names, for that matter - a Kan-Balakir in one story becomes a Kanbalkiru in the next. Yes, I overuse Ks. I'm almost sorry. I started to note similarities - and, for that matter, parts in which the story seemed incomplete. "So, what, the lumengram are the most important things in the world? What else is there?" "So, what, the grukians are the most important things in the world? What else is there?" "So, what, Kadrin Heroes run around and fight evil? What evil?"

In hindsight, the solution was obvious. I grabbed everything I'd ever done in the fantasy genre, threw it into a blender, and tamped it down hard, and what came out was the epic fantasy world Avarr. And I do mean everything I'd ever done. When I was about twelve, I came up with the lithgan, who were nightmarish scheming grey alien creatures with names like Malevolence. A much subtler brand of lithgan, more conspiratorial, have turned up in Avarr, hanging around on their little island and telling themselves that they rule the world, or at least they will. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I played a brief RPG with friends featuring elite desert warriors who saved the world, and promptly forgot about them. They've split into Kadrin Hero School and the Khemri apocalypse cult. Sixteen or seventeen, I wrote a race of caveman munchkins for a comedy RPG called Munchkin Wars. Well, plus dignity, there go the grukians. The Dark Deity was hanging around for some time in all sorts of forms. Vorloth's been around since I needed a villain for the comedic Adventures of Cyril and Mavis. And I've been calling kingdoms and empires and landmasses (and violent futuristic gangs) Armagio for nearly as long as I can remember.

The point of Avarr was always this one story: an apocalyptic battle, people who'd rather survive than die versus people with perfectly good reasons to end the world. An exploration, hopefully, of character, in which individual people/characters are almost more important than the story, and who would hopefully attract flocks of people who liked and understood them. Hell, originally it was also going to be a parody of console RPGs. But it was always there, in some form or another, just waiting. And now, apparently, that rough beast's time has come around at last, and it slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Yeah. It took me eight years, at least, to put all this together, and it's probably going to take me at least two more to write it.

This isn't intimidating at all.

I fully intend to have 3,000 words by tonight. Just so you know. I may well post them, too, just so that people can see what I'm going on with.

We'd Be: ambitious
Patriot Gravity is playing: and /more/ than ambitious

See, this is why I should never talk to people. They make me do things. Things like new wallpaper and an opuscule based on the old wallpaper.

Go Go Cactus Man!, 1024 x 768
All Along The Watchtower, 972 words

We'd Be: productive
Patriot Gravity is playing: Yoko Kanno and Jimi Hendrix - "Go Go The Watchtower!"

All the cool kids are doing it.

( I Don't Understand, Dave. )

And the last hit on the last page I can currently view: final fantasy VIII. Thank you, search hit - you may be implying that I'm hidebound and you take that back right now, but your simple wisdom is a comfort.

We'd Be: dubiously honoured
Patriot Gravity is playing: Sonic Mayhem - "March of the Stroggs"

(There are quite a few links in this post. They might be difficult to see, though. Hover your mouse over sections that seem important and, hey, you never know!)

Photoshop is really a lot of fun. It puts a great deal of image editing power into the hands of people like me who have no idea what they're doing, and of course that's appealing. I tend to go in spurts of Photoshopping - I'll download a bunch of images for one image, and then from that, I'll decide I need to do a lot more with it. Witness my werepope, after which I created my "the pope..." icon and a few other random images, including one of the pope being menaced by a Malboro.

Recently, Baco mentioned that all of us were required to quote a certain Bob The Angry Flower cartoon every time Odin appeared onscreen. And that was really all it took.

All I wanted to do was make an image of said quote. Which I did. But then I had all kinds of Odin images lying around - and one or two of Gilgamesh - and I had to keep working. Hence, my political campaign. (And an answer to it from the other side.)

But that just wasn't enough. I wanted something else. I wanted something more.

I wanted a mediocre desktop wallpaper with absolute horrible ghosting around Gilgamesh's jawline and inappropriate Bob Dylan/Jimi Hendrix lyrics.

two riders were approaching..., 1024 x 768
two riders were approaching..., 1280 x 1024

I feel better. For now. Just wait, sooner or later I'll stumble onto a cache of Silent Hill 2 images and then there'll be Pyramid Head and James Sunderland and Angela Orosco all over the place.

We'd Be: zan! tetsu! ken!
Patriot Gravity is playing: Jimi Hendrix - "All Along The Watchtower"

If I'm going to transpose my fingers, you know, I transpose them one key to the right. It's almost always completely by accident. Well, it's always completely by accident. And it's often my left hand.

The result of this is that I'll type in to web browsers' address bars "eee.li.." And then realise what I'm doing and rearrange my hands.

It's kind of funny, really. It gives me the image of an apoplectic websurfer, waving his arms around and screaming at all the slow servers and pornographic pop-ups and unsolicited e-mails that promise unsavoury pharmaceuticals in the world. "EEE! EEE! EEE, INTERNET! EEE!"

Like Lunch at the Gotham Café, only with the Internet. And really, doesn't the Internet make everything better?

We'd Be: eee! eee! EEE!
Patriot Gravity is playing: Garbage - "Untouchable"

This computer's start page for Internet Explorer is, oddly enough, Netscape Home. I couldn't tell you why. Probably for the news. And speaking of the news, it's that I want to gripe about today. (Well, also the so-fancy-but-not-actually-in-any-way-helpful navigation. I would rather have a text-only webpage, people.)

See, the first thing I saw when I logged in just then was this:

College Degrees That Pay for Themselves
Don't waste tuition. These degrees that have the highest return on investment.

REACTIONS IN ORDER:
1: Yeah. 'Cause that's absolutely why you should be choosing your degree, and if you choose something that, you know, you think would give you a happy and fulfilling life, you're wasting tuition.
2: "These are the degrees that have", or "these degrees have". Honestly.
3: rocks fall everyone dies

It bothers me - I mean, it really bothers me - that this "news story" is aimed at people just entering college. It's aimed at 16-20 year olds. It's telling 16-20 year olds to put everything aside for money, when 16-20 year olds should be filthy hippies and Commie bastards! I mean, I may not agree with the oft-quoted memoranda - that no one originally said, it's a cobbled-together mutant quote - "If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If a man is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain." But my God, if we can't trust the college students to be crazed radicals, who can we trust? And we need those crazed radicals, you know.

I guess I'll finish up with "I'm ideologically opposed to the Young Liberals*" and leave political debate to transnomad from now on.

In sister updates, the sight of me seems to calm her when she's crying, and she seems less likely to cry if she can see me. Which is cool.

* Capital L Liberals. The Liberals are the conservative party in Australia, opposed to Labour.

We'd Be: ideological, in a sense
Patriot Gravity is playing: Fatboy Slim - "How Could They Hear Us"

Universe, why do you hate my Sarah McLachlan CD?

First the case went missing: Baco said she's found it somewhere that I know we looked. Then the CD disappeared for a while, and we finally found it on a desk that I know I looked through. But now? Now, the universe has said that enough's enough, and when I looked through my CDs in an attempt to listen to Fear, I noticed a crack - not a scratch but a crack - from the spindle-centre nearly all the way to the rim. Must have happened in transit.

So, no Sarah McLachlan for me. Which is a pity, as I really wanted to listen to Fear. I've still got it stuck in my head. If anyone can send me an MP3 - which would be legal, thank you RIAA, as I have bought the CD and it has broken you bastard universe - I'm easily accessible on AIM as KadrinHeroSchool.

letedwend - This is Rob, of "Three Conversations with Robbie" fame. And at the moment, he's using it to showcase his current novel, Operation Shrubbery. Read it. He's a good writer, and certainly better than he thinks he is.

The subject line is from William Ernest Henley's "Invictus", which is famous at the moment mainly for being the final statement of the Unabomber. Don't let its dark history fool you, though: it's an excellent poem, and I think one of my favourites. (Of course, one of the others is William Blake's "The Poison Tree", and as my mother said, "You are a dark child, aren't you?")

We'd Be: PERSECUTED
Patriot Gravity is playing: ...the song is, I think, called "The Queen and the Soldier"