ITT: What are you working on right now?

[MugwumpHasNoLiver]

I've spent the last few days working on a new story about Courtemanche and Sickle Cell, my two oldest characters from what will soon be my first completed novel (previous novel-length work were segments of this current work that could more or less stand-alone in their original disjointed form). Essentially, it's a spy novel that takes place either in some kind of dystopian future or entirely through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic about a manhunt for a man calling himself CHARON, who seems to exist entirety in the realm of rumor. What is he? A godlike hacker? A renegade android planning a revolution? Some other cyberpunk cliche? Nobody seems to know.

I've been writing about them almost exclusively for the past few months because by finally finishing this first novel I hope to both close a chapter in my life and perform a sort of hysterectomy on my soul. There is a dead person living inside of me. I need him out of my body so that I can move on to a happier, more productive life. I've been re-experiencing on and off depression again and been plagued by a bout of oddly sporadic panic attacks. Lately it's been apparent to me that the only way I could be myself was by being other people. (Writing that book about Ingrid Black, for example, was an absolute joy for the most part, because I got to try so many different new voices every chapter.) I am becoming another person entirely and ascending into the body I've always wanted. Though, in excavating this psychic terratoma, I've come to realize that despite all of my perfectly valid reasons for self-loathing, there are things about myself that I never want to alter.

I've not been speaking about this project because the material is so personal that I've frequently made myself sick and sometimes even close to tears. In light of certain revelations, though, I've been writing a section I feel comfortable sharing prematurely.

It's completely absurd. Courtemanche and Sickle Cell find a girl who has spontaneously transformed into a pear and after she begs for death, the two decide how they should go about killing her. I started by writing words that held no particular significance until there were enough words for there to be something significant. It accidentally became a mediation on capital punishment, torture, abortion, assisted suicide; and it does not deal with these subjects with the intelligence, subtlety or tact that they deserve. It's a tastelessly opaque nightmare that will no doubt confuse and enrage and I love it. I'm a kid who likes to point and laugh at gross things and if I ever get bored of that, it's only because I became a monotonous parody of myself who started doing them in a boring way.

I'm not sure if I even want to tie it back to the episodic spy narrative in any kind of meaningful way. I'd be really easy, too. It'd only need to throw around a few words like "interrogation" or"informant", but I rather like it being a complete non-sequitur.

[Defectron]

So yeah after some issues with the orignal artist i was collaborating with, I'm redoing parasite galaxy with someone new. That's right its time for the rebuild of parasite galaxy

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/692/parasitegalaxypage04o.jpg/][/URL]

Uploaded with [URL=http://imageshack.us]ImageShack.us[/URL]

[Aiko Heiwa]

I'm writing a book! It's completely shit and a total ripoff of Doctor Who, but it's giving me something to do.

[chee]

This thing

[MugwumpHasNoLiver]

It's okay, I guess. Not as good as anything by Johnny Spaceboots. Have you read that guy? He's a genius. No doubt he'll be remembered as the voice that spoke to our generation.

[child of Lilith]

^Johnny Spaceboots is a true American original.
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So your low post count of late is because of the work you've been doing on your novel and not because of a growing indifference towards EGF? That's good to know, I'd been thinking you were going to run off and leave us forever, Muggs.

Also good luck with your novel. Hope it brings you everything you want it to and more.

[Bomby von Bombsville]

One of my old friends from the dorms, who has been rapping for a few years now, got a record deal back in his home country of Kuwait. As I may have mentioned a few times in the past, I've been making beats for a good decade now. So... let's try and get a couple of my beats placed on an actual release! I have a decent backlog of 100+ beats (mostly ones that I'm proud of) sitting around that hasn't been used by anyone since I stopped working with the quasi-mediocre rappers I used to record back in high school, so once he gets back to the US, he'll be getting first choice from the vault.

But seriously, check out his track "Jihad" off his most recent mixtape, defending his Islamic faith with great passion.[/promoting my friends]

[Sharaz Destler]

I've got a blog started. Come visit me at http://www.themillenniummuseum.blogspot.com.

The MillenniuM MuseuM: Celebrating the Year 2000...13 Years Late.

[CorporalChaos]

Working on some blog posts. Writing a story to my satisfaction is hard for me, and I'm on the verge of giving up. I'll at least keep the writing practice up, though, and I'll just pontificate about books instead.

I've been kind of splitting my attention between a book review of Liminal States and a trope that seems to crop up occasionally in sci-fi that I'm calling "The Pit of Lovecraft" for the time being. Think of The Mist or A Colder War and you'll probably get the idea. I'm describing the concept in a little more detail and writing a bit about the cultural background that allows it to be a recurrent fictional theme. I think it stems back to the idea of the horror of losing living space combined with the ability of modern to unravel ecosystems at the drop of a hat. Should be done with that in a day or two.

[Dream]

So... Today i started looking a bit more into the forum-making thing. Specifically, checked a bit of the phpbb site and forums. The hosting company i've been looking into, i'm pretty sure they support phpbb3 and -as far as i know- all the other things it requires.

I've been thinking a bit about it and made some mental inventory, and i realized that i could start the forums tomorrow or this week if i so desired. There's nothing stopping me from that. But i won't. I still have to look into some other things.

Which also leads me to another problem i've been having, when i was looking into the phpbb site, i noticed i got very overwhelmed and out-burned at all the informations, things i needed to read and consider. Almost intimated, even. But i suppose that's normal for a big endeavor such as that. I think the best thing i can do is just look at it one problem at a time, and/or just look into the basics i need to start the forums, and then learn as i admin. Would the latter be a good idea, i wonder?

[child of Lilith]

I'd say getting a firm grasp on what you need to know is the better option. No point in opening the forum if you don't know how to control it yet.

[NemZ]

I'm working with a small crew of guys to make a megaman 8bit-style fangame. I'll be doing the stage graphics and helping with the sprites. If you'd like to join the contest to design one of the robot masters, check it out HERE.

[Mr. Tines]

I think the best thing i can do is just look at it one problem at a time, and/or just look into the basics i need to start the forums, and then learn as i admin. Would the latter be a good idea, i wonder?

You could run up a test system locally -- use VMWare Player or VirtualBox to set up a small Linux VM and then install phpBB on that, and get used to what the forum looks like from the admin side before there's anything out on the public internet. Even the task of adding a new sub-forum is not straightforward in phpBB2 -- some bits are obvious, but don't do all you'd expect them to (like needing to explicitly allow mods to moderate each forum using a different part of the admin panel from the forum creation). Getting used to what you need to do with some test users (plain members, mods, and admins) would be a good thing to do before going live.

One of the most customized areas on these forums is the sign-up process, which attempts to cut down the number of spam registrations; and while we're down from the several-a-day rate which we got with unpatched phpBB to one every few weeks, it's still something that needs constant administrative vigilance.

[MugwumpHasNoLiver]

So your low post count of late is because of the work you've been doing on your novel and not because of a growing indifference towards EGF?

Your optimism is charming, but I'm afraid that it's more complicated than that. My writing had for the past few months lost the cathartic power that first drew me to it in adolescence. For the first time in my life, the act of writing had stopped being a release from depression and started, ironically enough, to become the source. The way I'd been living my life over the past few years had been essentially to distance myself from the triggers that rendered me helpless and in essence bury myself alive. I had, without really noticing it, become a neurotic terrified of even the inevitability of conflict. After a shift in perception and re-alignment of priorities, the documentation of my recent excavation felt very much like tearing the scabs off wounds that had sealed over years ago and I was reminded of things about myself that are still uncomfortably prevalent. The result of this was an initial renewal in feelings of powerlessness that, though they've now receded, resulted in a temporary blindness by contempt and revulsion.

I'd come to EGF, read shit, get bummed out, then feel too hopeless to even pummel out a quick absurdly sarcastic reply. EGF seemed to me such a misasmic bog that contributing even mockery would drag me deeper into its dark recesses.

I don't mind it now, though. I realized some time ago that while Evangelion remained a viscerally emotional work, its narrative mysteries and more puzzle-like aspects are now glossed to a mirror sheen. The Discussion board is like a museum tour I've been on a dozen times and can recite by heart, Chit-Chat's a stand-up routine that never has any new jokes and I don't see much point in discussing Rebuild in any meaningful capacity until we have a complete work to dissect (the diligent translation work by a few beloved friends aside, the recent conjecture over hearsay has been groan-inducing.) I still come here because there are people I adore, even though 90% of them I mostly talk to over the IRC and Skype.

Also good luck with your novel. Hope it brings you everything you want it to and more.

Thanks. It means a lot to me.

I've been kind of splitting my attention between a book review of Liminal States and a trope that seems to crop up occasionally in sci-fi that I'm calling "The Pit of Lovecraft" for the time being. Think of The Mist or A Colder War and you'll probably get the idea. I'm describing the concept in a little more detail and writing a bit about the cultural background that allows it to be a recurrent fictional theme.

It was a very lovely article. I do hope you link it in here at some time in the near future.

[Dream]

You could run up a test system locally -- use VMWare Player or VirtualBox to set up a small Linux VM and then install phpBB on that, and get used to what the forum looks like from the admin side before there's anything out on the public internet. Even the task of adding a new sub-forum is not straightforward in phpBB2 -- some bits are obvious, but don't do all you'd expect them to (like needing to explicitly allow mods to moderate each forum using a different part of the admin panel from the forum creation). Getting used to what you need to do with some test users (plain members, mods, and admins) would be a good thing to do before going live.

One of the most customized areas on these forums is the sign-up process, which attempts to cut down the number of spam registrations; and while we're down from the several-a-day rate which we got with unpatched phpBB to one every few weeks, it's still something that needs constant administrative vigilance.

I would be using phpBB3 instead of 2, though. Although i'm not sure if with the Linux VM you mean also trying phpBB off-line or something like that? And yeah, i've heard that spam tends to be/can end up being a big problems in forums, so it's one of the things i've started looking into a bit. I'm certainly going to add customizations to take care of that and other things. Considering that, i think that trying out and getting a sense for all the admin tools and testing before opening the forum online would indeed be a good idea. Thanks for the advice.

[pwhodges]

If you have a free choice, have you considered SMF rather than phpBB? Also free, and nearly as popular.

As for spam, I have achieved similar low levels (about 8 weeks between successive successful spam registrations, against about four attempts an hour) by using: (a) two "human" questions, using the facility built in to SMF (the questions are: "What is Marten Reed's first name"* and "2 + two = "), and (b) a database lookup at the site [url]http://www.stopforumspam.com/[/url], inplemented using an SMF mod called Stop Spammer (presumably there is a similar interface to the database for phpBB). Each of these alone cuts spam registrations down to a couple a week, and the combination is as good as it gets. There's also a captcha (the built-in one, set to the level below the hardest), but I don't think that does much; the spammers have databases of the images for most common captchas.


* This may tell you that the site concerned is [url]http://forums.questionablecontent.net/[/url]

[CorporalChaos]

It was a very lovely article. I do hope you link it in here at some time in the near future.

Here's a direct link to the article, the link to my blog is in the sig.

[Mr. Tines]

Although i'm not sure if with the Linux VM you mean also trying phpBB off-line or something like that?

Yes -- a virtual machine (VM) is a whole-computer emulation, so at the expense of a few GB of disk space, you effectively have a stand-alone system you can play with (and break) without harming your normal environment; then you can run that without exposing it to the outside world while you find your way around the controls.

[MugwumpHasNoLiver]

Last night, when I finished the rough draft of the story I mentioned starting the other day, I was in despair. I had thought that plumbing the depths of my creative Id was a fruitless exercise that could never again result in anything other than disjointed nonsense that, although following the logic of a dream, could never capture the atmosphere. (Dawn was coming fast and I wanted so bad to be done with the farce I'd brought upon myself that when I felt nature calling, I took my typewriter into the bathroom and banged out the last two pages on the crapper. It shows.)

Tonight, having started the radical rewriting process that comes with typing up my manuscript in Word, I am once again awash in joy. With a touch of horror, I remembered that this could no longer be the creative free for all where I connect unrelated narratives with bits of string; that I needed a tight, controlled plot that only seemed to dip in an out of unrelated nightmares, but was atmospherically consistent and narratively tightly-wound.

I was surprised when I sat down and tried to make a story about two ostensible teenaged spies executing a human-sized living pear somehow make sense and everything came about in a calm and rational way. When I handled the absurdity of the situation in an almost procedural manner (instead of making it the butt of a sarcastic joke, which is my default approach to everything) the whole affair only seemed far more bizarre.

Part of the temporary low in the creative process was that the scene veered far away from the ending I'd originally conceived into an incompetent body-horror, cannibalistic ninja fight set in Chinese restaurant (by this point I was completely on auto-pilot.) I plan to rework the borderline-racist ending I'd shat out into something more akin to a recursive family drama and imbue a bad joke with a sense of mystery and discovery and all that other fun shit that makes people want to turn pages instead of reel in horror.

I'm having fun by having less fun. Afraid there's a bit of creative guilt here, but that's the kind of pressure that turns coal into diamonds.

[child of Lilith]

Sounds like you're on your way to reclaiming what writing used to mean to you, Muggs. A very good thing indeed.