Raise Your Neighborhood Insurance Rates

It's the return of the...rambling, disconnected post. Oh, freeform blogging, how I've missed you.

Because I can. Chocolate Rain 8-bit style:

I cringe at the grade school homophobia on display. But I would love to play that game.

Got my grade from my math class. As expected, an A. Which means since I was on the border between an A and an A+, I must not have done all that well on my final – to find out, I'd have to find the time to head to campus and pick it up from th professor so, you know, hope it enjoys gathering dust in a filedrawer or something – but I still scored in the 90s somewhere. It's that one disastrous test where I slipped to an 80% that's dragging me down, really. But, oh well. I promised myself that if I aced the class, I'd get myself a little reward. Because, you know, positive feedback loop and all. So, today, I went out and picked up a pre-order for GW:EN. It's something I've been meaning to talk about for a while now and I'll hopefully find the time to put my thoughts down soon. In short, I'm trying to keep an open mind, but I've yet to be impressed. In fact, I've mostly been repulsed.

But, hey, I'm an addict and it's only $10 bucks. I mostly got it to take part in the preview weekend as the other preorder junk appears to be just that (Figures. The GW:NF pre-order came with a free character slot. The only one I didn't manage to get turns out to have the bonus that I actually would have wanted. Ah well.). But since this expansion doesn't feature any new professions or any compelling reason to start a new character, and all progress from the preview weekend is carried over on release, that means I can get a bit of a headstart with my characters. Instead of creating a new account to test out the new professions and spare my overburdened slots from having to absorb a new character, that is. Best part, I can see if I can stomach the new game without having to drop the full retail price on the full expansion – if I don't like it then I'm out the cost of a pre-order and if I do, well, I'm probably not going to pick it up any time soon but it'll be sitting there until I get back to it. I figure that I'd pay ten bucks to go see a movie, so I don't mind paying that much for a solid weekend of entertainment.

Okay, the script. My concern right now is length. Celtx (Which is a great, free, scriptwriting program, I've found. Firefox has spoiled me about a few of its features, especially with regards to tabs – my biggest complaint is how difficult it is to navigate the tabs in Celtx, as opposed to Firefox which I use constantly – but it's definitely a big help when writing a script.) says that my plan calls for just over 100 individual scenes, if we're going by the headers. The reason? My undying love for interstitial cuts. I just love scenes that start in one location and transition to another, for whatever reason, and that tends to pad the number of scene headers out. But my own outlines say that, excluding all the psuedo-headers (Like, say, “ACT II.”) I've sprinkled through the script to help me quickly navigate through it, I'm calling for over 50 discrete, individual scenes.

Say each one takes a mere three minutes – and I figure that at least a few will take far more – that's a movie that will last over 150 minutes, or two and a half hours. That's a tad on the long side, innit? Still, cutting down on the running time I'll leave for future revisions (If, of course, I ever get around to them.). But, honestly, I can't at the moment figure out what to cut. There's a lot of moving parts in the script and each one, I feel, is necessary for the journey my characters undertake. I'm hoping I can hold it under three hours, but we'll see.

Work on revamping the site is proceeding slowly but surely, by the way – for instance, today I discovered that my color scheme is horrible for quoted text. Mostly some behind the scenes stuff. I hope to be done with all that by the end of next week or so.